Bajor still did not feel like home to Kasidy, but she suddenly thought she could see a time when it would.
55
Vaughn awoke to the sound of fire.
Earlier, after he had sighted the complex surrounding the source of the pulse, he had descended the hill and walked the final kilometers to the outer walls of the buildings. The veil of night had dropped by then, and considering his exhaustion, he had decided to make camp and get some sleep. He would make his push into the buildings once he had rested and regained some of his strength.
Before laying out his bedroll, Vaughn had paced along the outside of the complex, searching for a way in. He had not needed to search long. The first door he had come to had been not only unlocked, but wide open. Beneath the light of his beacon, the yawning entryway—like so many things on this planet—had projected an air of abandonment.
Now, where he was camped, a hundred or so meters away from the complex, the crackle of flames reached his ears, not from the buildings, but from nearby. He floated slowly up out of sleep at first, until the incongruity of the sound brought him fully awake. In the instant before he opened his eyes, he perceived the flittering light on his closed lids, and felt inconsistent waves of heat breathing across his face.
Recalling that his phaser had been lost, Vaughn did not move as he opened his eyes, wanting to assay the situation before betraying that he was no longer asleep. The small fire grew from within a circular bed of stones, he saw, a couple of meters in front of him. Vaughn waited a moment, looking and listening for anything that might help orient him to whatever new circumstances he now faced. He remembered clearly his mission to stop the pulse, his location on this planet, what he had been through today—
Through the flames, movement caught his eye, just on the other side of the stone circle. Unable to tell what had caused it, he listened for any other sounds beside those of the fire. The movement came again.
“And that’s Rigel,” a voice said, the seemingly ordinary nature of the words and tone striking in the current context. Vaughn sat up on his bedroll and peered over the flames. A woman sat there, her knees pulled up against her chest, her head back as she gazed at the stars. She had dark hair that fell to the middle of her back, a bit wild despite being tied just below her neck. She looked to be in her thirties—and even younger when the wavering firelight sent an orange-yellow glow across her features—although Vaughn knew that she was older than that. He stared at her, and she looked away from the heavens and over at him. “Do you remember what you learned about Rigel, Elias?” she asked.
Vaughn recited the star’s mass, absolute magnitude, and spectral type before he even realized that he had spoken.
“That’s right,” the woman said, offering him an encouraging half-smile. “It’s also one of the most populated systems in the quadrant. Do you know how many planets orbit Rigel?”
This time, Vaughn did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the ersatz nature of the woman, of the fire, of the moment. He envisioned the clouds whirling down and reconstructing this scene, manufacturing everything before him out of the dust of this lonely world. This isn’t Berengaria VII,he told himself, any more than this woman is my mother.
But somehow it did not matter. Vaughn had lived much of his life in control, but today he had been unable to elude the sentiments of his past. More must be happening here, he believed, than just the re-creation of incidents from his life; he had become too sympatheticto feelings of loss and abandonment. Even now, as he attempted to reason his way through this, the moment that had been remade around him pulled at his heart.
Vaughn opened his eyes and said, “Twelve,” identifying the number of planets in the Rigel system. He peered around, trying to see more of his surroundings, but the illumination of the fire did not penetrate very far into the darkness. It doesn’t matter,Vaughn thought again. This isn’t the planet where I was raised. This isn’t my mother.
Except that she looked and sounded so much like her. “That’s right, twelve,” she said, and there was that half-smile of hers again. Vaughn smiled back. He loved these times. His mother spent so much time out in the wilderness with her work, but only occasionally did they do this, heading out to sit by a fire and stare up at the stars.
Vaughn raised his eyes and peered up at the brilliant pinpoints of light that dotted the night. He wondered only briefly how the sea of clouds could have reproduced such an effect, when in reality it perpetually separated the surface of this abandoned world from the rest of the universe. He found Rigel, and shrugged off the fact that the star should not have even been visible from the Gamma Quadrant. He looked back over at his mother, and his heart filled with his love for her. They’d been so close. Genuine or not, he felt grateful for this time, an unexpected gift.
“Elias, I need to talk with you about something.”
Oh no,he thought, feeling a terrible jolt, as though he had fallen in frigid water. No. Not this night. Of all nights, not this one.And he told her that: “No, Ma. I don’t want to talk. I just want to look at the stars with you.”
“Elias—”
“No.” Vaughn threw off his blanket and stood up. “Tell me tomorrow,” he said, knowing that, in so many ways, there would be no tomorrow.
The flames, beginning to sputter now, lighted her eyes. She sat with her hands clasped in front of her shins, hugging her knees. She regarded him with an expression of love and compassion, and he thought that she would allow him the reprieve for which he had asked. Then she said, “I have Burkhardt’s disease.”
Vaughn said nothing. He had a sudden urge to throw himself on the fire, and thought, That’s new.He did not remember wanting to immolate himself as a boy. The past had come alive for him, but with the burden of the subsequent years also alive in his mind and heart, this moment had actually worsened.
“Ma, please don’t,” he pleaded.
“I was diagnosed this week,” she said softly, the expression on her face one of empathy. She seemed concerned less with the content of her words than with their effect on Vaughn. “It’s a progressive—”
“No,” Vaughn yelled, feeling like a boy trying to make something true by wishing it so. “No,” he said again, unwilling not only to accept the reality of this moment now, but to have accepted it all those years ago. He turned and walked into the darkness, beyond the reach of the firelight.
“Elias,” he heard his mother call after him. He did not answer. He kept walking, allowing the empty blackness of this place to close around him. “Elias,” she called again, but he did not hear her follow. He could not remember—he had never been able to remember—exactly what had happened when she had first told him this. Had he bolted like this? Had she come after him?
Now he walked on, the sensation of moving in the consuming darkness strange and unsettling. His mother did not call again, and no footsteps approached behind him. She had obviously decided to leave him alone.
Just as she left me all those years ago,he thought. Alone.
Vaughn stumbled and fell forward. His hands scraped against the ground as he went down. He lay like that for a long time, prone, palms flat against the ground, elbows up at his sides. Finally, he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the sky.
There were no stars. He could not even see the clouds for the lack of light. What he did see in his mind was his mother’s face, called up from memories not just minutes old, but decades.