Tales from the Captain’s Table (38 page)

By some miracle of restraint, I held my tongue. “You know I don’t want to do this, Father,” I said quietly. Where she was sitting in the corner working on a headdress, Sekaya’s eyes grew enormous at my words and at the calm manner in which they were spoken. “However, you are my father, and I will do as you say.”

The words almost stuck in my throat, but I got them out. There was no way I was going to talk my father out of this, not after the spectacle I had made of myself last night, and by not arguing with him I would likely buy more time to myself to study.

I closed the door behind me and took off running, but not before I heard my father say, “Well! That was easier than I thought.”

Fear at the thought of losing the sweet fruit of Starfleet that was almost in my grasp gave my feet speed. I’m sure I must have set a record running the two miles between my father’s hut and the place where the Starfleet people were housed. In a typically contrary manner, I said a prayer to the Sky Spirits I didn’t believe in that I would find T’Piran or Captain Sulu alone.

I was gasping for breath by the time I arrived and I caught a glimpse of T’Piran walking down the trail that led away from the Starfleet quarters to the river. Gulping air, I ran after her. She eyed me curiously.

“You are in a hurry, Chakotay,” she said. “What is it?”

“Commander,” I gasped, “I need…to take the test…in less than two weeks. And…know the results too….”

That eyebrow reached for the sky again. And again, I marveled at her cool beauty.

“That does not give us much time.”

Us. She said us. It was then that I realized that for whatever reason, T’Piran was as anxious as I that I get into Starfleet. Briefly, I wondered why, then let it go. It didn’t matter why. The point was, she was.

“No,” I managed, still breathing heavily.

“I am going to the river to meditate,” she said. “You will accompany me.”

I’m sure my face fell. Meditate? If I wanted to meditate I could do it by myself, or under the guidance of the shaman. At my look, T’Piran said, “I know you do not consider yourself to be as spiritual as the other members of your tribe.”

She had me there, and I nodded.

“You should respect that aspect of your heritage,” she said. “It is not incompatible with a Starfleet career. We Vulcans are highly spiritual and have many intricate rituals.”

“Really?” I never would have guessed it.

“Logic and ritual are not opposed. Such meditation and ceremony open pathways in the brain that are otherwise not easily accessible.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

She stopped and faced me squarely. She was almost as tall as I was and, like Captain Sulu, had a gaze that seemed to bore into my very soul.

“The captain and I are interested in your success, Chakotay. We both feel you would make an excellent officer. You do not have the luxury of a great deal of study time, so I will teach you how to make the most of what you do have. The meditation techniques you will learn will enable you to focus and absorb information more quickly.”

“That would be great,” I said, never meaning any words more. Who would have thought an old tradition from my own homeworld would help me to escape it?

If Captain Sulu was my sponsor, then T’Piran was my drill sergeant. On leave, she ignored her own interests to teach me how to meditate. She timed my runs and helped me devise an obstacle course to make sure I would pass the physical exams. Living the highly active life I did, I had an edge over more coddled cadets, though, and she quickly realized that I would do fine in that area. She graded my essay with a ruthless eye and then one day, she and Sulu had a surprise for me.

They let me come aboard the
Mandela.

Like a child in a dream, I wandered with them from the bridge to engineering to the mess hall to stellar cartography. It was almost more than I could take in. At one point, as I stood gazing down at the blue and green orb that was my homeworld, Sulu stepped beside me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Are you all right, Chakotay?” she asked quietly. We were alone in stellar cartography.

“Yes, Captain,” I replied, but my voice, thick with tears, gave me away, I’m certain. I cleared my throat. “You have no idea how amazing this is to me.”
Or how I long to be a part of it,
I thought, but did not say.

She looked at me penetratingly. I thought a tricorder couldn’t have done a more thorough analysis.

“I’ve sent messages to your hut,” she said. My blood ran cold. “I want to talk to your father about the exam and what it will mean for you, but he hasn’t answered. Sekaya promised she’d give him the messages.”

Bless you, Sekaya,
I thought.

“You and your father do not always get along well,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. My face grew hot.

“How did you know that?”

She smiled a little. “I can recognize the signs. It might interest you to know that I didn’t even know my father for the first six years of my life, until my mother died. When he came to get me, to raise me, I resented the hell out of him. The word ‘hate’ comes to mind.”

I couldn’t believe she was speaking so frankly. I’d done my research on her, once I had access to information—Demora Sulu was the daughter of the famous Hikaru Sulu. To hear that even a famous father and daughter had problems was both unsettling and reassuring.

“I don’t hate my father,” I said, and as the words left my lips, I knew they were true.

“Good,” she said. “Then you don’t have as far to go as I did. I eventually did come around, learning to grudgingly respect, then like, then love him. This tension between child and parent is nothing unique to you, Chakotay, though I know it must feel as though it is. I once told a good friend of mine a bit of wisdom that I think I’ll share with you. You have two families, the one you were born into, and the one you choose every day of your life.” She looked at me with those eyes that seemed to see everything. “And it looks to me like you will need to leave your homeworld to find that second family.”

“Will I find them?” I winced at the need behind the words.

She smiled that wonderful smile and said, “I’m certain you will.” Again she squeezed my shoulder. “Come on. You haven’t seen the holodeck yet. I think that’s going make your eyes fall right out of your head.”

I took the test in time.

I passed with flying colors.

The trip to Earth was a disaster, except for one thing: I told my father everything, and though he was disappointed and saddened, he accepted it.

Well, I told him almost everything.

When we returned, my father insisted on meeting Captain Sulu. “I want to meet the man who is going to be sponsoring my son,” he said.

My gut clenched. I was still technically a minor. He could still forbid me to go, and Starfleet would never accept a student against a parent’s wishes. “He—he’s awfully busy,” I stammered. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“If he wasn’t too busy to take such an active interest in you,” Kolopak countered, “then he’s not going to be too busy to talk to me for five minutes.”

There was nothing I could do, once my father was set on a path. I followed miserably, wondering what would be the best course of action—confess now and prepare him, or wait and see how it all played out. I decided on the former.

“Father, there’s something you need to know about Captain Sulu,” I said.

But it was too late. Captain Demora Sulu herself was in conversation with Anthwara, and looked up as we approached. She smiled, and as always, the years dropped off her face as she did so.

“Chakotay,” she said. “Good to see you. How was your trip?”

“Educational,” I said. I took a deep breath. “This is my father, Kolopak. Father—this is Captain Demora Sulu.”

My father’s jaw dropped and he gasped, just as I had when I first realized who this elderly Oriental woman was. “Captain Sulu?” he stammered.

Sulu walked forward and extended a hand. “A pleasure to meet you, sir. Your son is a very gifted young man. I haven’t seen entrance exam scores that high in some time, and he had so little opportunity to prepare. He’ll make a fine cadet and an excellent officer, I’m certain of it.”

I waited for the fallout. I waited for my father to explode, to tell everyone how I had lied to him, that women couldn’t possibly be captains, that he had never known about this, that I was a poor excuse for a son and—

“Thank you, Captain. Chakotay certainly is a bright boy. And inventive.” He shot me a meaningful look. “I am not as familiar as perhaps I ought to be with what he will be involved with once…once he leaves home. Perhaps we could meet and discuss it?”

“I’d be delighted to. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Anthwara has something he wants to show me.” She smiled at both of us, gave me a wink, and strode off with a bounce in her step that belied her years.

“Thank you, Father,” I said, deeply moved.

“You passed, you know, Chakotay.”

Confused, I said, “Yes, I know. My scores were—”

“Not just an exam. You passed the initiation into manhood.” I was still baffled, and he smiled sadly. “Except…you chose another tribe and their rite of passage. I called you a boy on Earth; I was incorrect. Your passion in following this path is not that of an awestruck rebel, but of a man who sees his future.”

“Father….” I had no words.

“I still have hope that once you have thoroughly investigated this life, you will hear the call of your homeworld,” he said. He didn’t live to see it, but in a way, I did. “In the meantime, I think I will have to tell Sekaya she can go study with the shaman after all. A woman captain.” He shook his head as we walked home.

Sekaya was thrilled when Father spoke to her, and she said it erased all fourteen of the favors I owed her. I asked her how she calculated fourteen—I knew I owed her at least three more for “forgetting” to deliver Sulu’s messages to Father, but I had no clue about the rest—but that’s another story.

Blue Water Boy’s worry that things would change, and some things not for the better, came true. Once I left, I never saw him again. By the time I had made sufficient peace with myself to return home, he was dead, as was my father, slain resisting the Cardassians, and T’Piran, killed when her ship’s warp core breached. My little sister had matured into a grown woman. But I had no hint then of the dark tone the future of my world would take. I had the innocence and ignorance of youth, and I left everything I had ever known without a backward glance in order to involve myself in the most passionate love affair of my life…Starfleet.

C
aptain David Gold of the
U.S.S. da Vinci
knew that the best way to attract unwanted attention at a bar was to sit at a table neither eating nor drinking. Gold had half-expected Cap, the bartender at the Captain’s Table, to ask him to stop taking up space. Then he realized that Cap was probably aware that on this day Gold could neither eat nor drink before sundown and in any case, he figured Cap could take one fasting customer in stride. The Captain’s Table was always as big or as small as it needed to be at any particular moment—which was one of its charms.

Until he had opened the door to his temporary shore quarters on Magatha IV and found himself walking into the Captain’s Table, it had looked like Gold, the only Jewish member of his crew, would be spending Yom Kippur alone. The Starfleet Corps of Engineers contingent of the
da Vinci
had stayed in orbit to repair the ship’s life-support system, and the rest of his crew was occupied by what meager entertainments the sparsely populated planet had to offer.

His original plan had been to spend the High Holy Days on Earth in his wife Rachel’s synagogue with as many of his children and grandchildren as could make it there, followed when it was all over by a sumptous meal prepared by Rachel in their house in the Bronx. But the problem with the ship had forced them into orbit around the nearest available planet, with no chance of getting home in time. Given that, the Captain’s Table was an acceptable, if unexpected, second option.

While Cap seemed to have no problem with his neither eating nor drinking, a couple of the other patrons of the bar did, specifically those who had, over the course of the many hours he’d been there, offered to buy Gold a drink and had been politely rebuffed by the captain. They had grown increasingly curious as to his reasons for refusing, especially a Boundarian captain whose round, beach-ball-like body quivered with insult when Gold turned down his offer.

“Too good to drink with the likes of us?” the Boundarian asked. Gold knew this species. Despite their comical appearance and their voices, which hit high squeaky notes as they issued forth from a valve on the top of their heads, they took matters of honor and insult as seriously as any Klingon—perhaps more so. A quick explanation was in order.

“Not at all,” Gold replied, “and as soon as it’s sundown, I’ll not only drink with you, I’ll buy the drinks myself.” The Boundarian seemed mollified, but curious, so Gold continued. “Among my people, this day is called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day we think back over the previous year and consider all our actions, so we can atone for those that were, uh, less than honorable, according to our code of laws. To aid ourselves in focusing, we take neither food nor drink during that day.”

“Interesting,” the Boundarian said, “and honorable. I had no idea that humans lived by such codes.”

“Not all humans follow the same codes,” Gold said, “which is one of the things that some find confusing about us. Nevertheless, once a year, from sundown to sundown, those who follow my path must take neither food nor drink.”

Gold’s explanation had drawn the attention of an Olexan and a Telspong, the first from yet another warrior culture, one often at odds with the Boundarians, the second from a culture known for its gentle consideration of all sides of each issue.

“How old is this tradition?” the Telspong asked.

Gold shifted a bit in his seat to face the Telspong. “Ceremonies of atonement go back six thousand to ten thousand years, dating back to before my people had acquired a written language.”

“Ah,” the Telspong said, “then you are still waiting to see how it works out. I wish you luck, and would suggest that—”

What the Telspong was going to suggest was drowned out by the sound of the bar door swinging open violently enough to slam into the adjoining wall. As a radiant figure stepped through, Gold found himself automatically reaching for his phaser. The Boundarian, meanwhile, looked like he was about to take out what Gold knew was a compressed-air stun weapon, and out of the corner of his eye Gold noted Cap reaching under the bar for heaven only knew what weapon he kept there.

“Hey, there,” Cap said pleasantly, “what can we do for you?”

The figure stepped forward. Closer up, Gold saw that he—the figure looked male—was humanoid in shape, with a crown of horns sticking out of his head, empty holes where Earth humans had nostrils, and weblike ears that were pointed forward in what Gold could only guess was anger. His species was hard to place; he looked like a number of different races kluged together.

The figure was clothed—or perhaps, Gold thought, a better description would be “cloaked”—in a flowing uniform that seemed to be made from a generated light pattern. At first Gold could place neither the creature’s time frame nor the uniform, but there was something about the latter—something familiar—that led him to venture a guess.

“Starfleet?” Gold asked the figure. “But from the future?”

“Starfleet, yes,” the figure said, “but from the present. You, however, are from the far past. Perhaps two or three hundred…” The figured stopped. “I know where I am,” he said.

“Excellent,” the Telspong said, “but may I ask in what sense? Personal location is subject to mental variables, spatial ones, even points of view. Could you elaborate on…”

“I’m in the Captain’s Table,” the figure said.

“Right the first time,” Cap said from behind the bar. “What brings you here?”

The figure glanced around. As he did so, Gold followed his gaze around the bar.

“I am looking for Captain Mak Dav Al,” the figure said. “He found his way to my
skreee
, and has
terwelled
me once again. This time for the last time.”

“I’m sorry,” Gold said, “he found his way to your what now, and did what?”

The figure regarded Gold intently. “I do not believe,” he said, “that the concept of either has been developed as of your time, and it would take far too long to explain, and perhaps violate Starfleet regulations covering time-space contamination. Trust me when I say it is a vile crime in my time, and that Mak Dav Al must be made to pay for it.”

To one side of him, Gold saw the Telspong writing down “skreee” and “terwell” on a tiny personal padd.

“So you are on a mission of vengeance, and your trail led you here,” the Boundarian squeaked. “Excellent. How may we assist you?”

The figure moved to an empty chair at Gold’s table and sat down heavily, clearly exhausted. “I am not sure. My quarry ran down an alley with many doors, and I was pulling them open one by one when I found myself looking into this place. Why I am here now I do not know.”

“Sometimes,” Cap said from behind the bar, “you wind up here ’cause here’s where you need to be.”

“Interesting,” the Telspong said, and added more notes to his padd.

“That,” the figure said, “is highly unlikely.”

“And you say that because?” the Telspong asked, his fingers ready over his padd.

“Because I can see,” the figure said, “that my quarry is not within this establishment, so once I catch my breath, I will have to pursue him elsewhere.”

“Is that really what you want to do?” Gold asked evenly, his eyes looking right into those of the figure in front of him. “Vengeance is a dish best served cold, they say, and like any other cold dish, it can fail to warm your heart.”

“A somewhat tortured turn of phrase,” the Telspong said as he joined the two others at the table, “but worth writing down anyway.” Both Gold and the figure across from him ignored the Telspong.

“Look,” Gold began, then stopped. “Do you have a name? Hard to talk to a man without knowing his name.”

“Mak Dav Al.”

Gold was taken aback for a moment. “I thought that was the name of the man you’re after?”

“It is,” Al said. “My problem with him relates to a method of resolving personal identity conflicts that you do not as yet practice.”

“Fascinating,” the Telspong said, tapping once again at his padd.

“Okay, Al,” Gold said, “I have a story to tell you. I owe Cap one anyway. It’s not about someone who had his
skreee terwelled
, or at least I don’t think it is, because I don’t know what that means, but it is about a man who had been offended in a way that gave him at least as much right to seek vengeance as you seem to have. It’s about a friend of mine. Call him…Abraham Silver. Abe. Great guy. This story starts quite a while back, when he was on his first shore leave from a Starfleet vessel, and…”

From behind Gold, the Boundarian suddenly squeaked, “Is this a tale of betrayal and death and revenge?”

Gold smiled. “In its way.”

“Excellent,” the Boundarian squeaked, as he half-climbed, half-bounced into the one remaining seat at Gold’s table. “My apologies for the interruption. Please go on.”

Captain Gold continued.

The problem began when Abe was an ensign on the
Gettysburg
. He’d been out of Starfleet Academy for only about six months when the ship pulled into Cathius IX for shore leave. For one reason or another, Abe’s assignments tended to run more toward cleaning out Jefferies tubes than exploring strange new worlds, and the poor guy hadn’t been off the ship the entire time. Shore leave on Cathius IX, a world known for its exotic charm, sounded very good to him. He’d come to the ship straight from Earth, you see, and had never even been on a planet outside his own star system before.

So there Abe was, young and handsome, ready to take on a whole new world. Problem was, Cathius IX saw Abe coming a light-year off. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Soon he found himself in a little out-of-the-way establishment ordering drinks for a scantily dressed, raven-haired young woman who seemed to imply that their evening would culminate in a trip back to her place.

First, though, she wanted to have some fun. There was gambling in the back of the place, some Carthian game that Abe had never played and didn’t really understand, but the young woman was more than helpful at suggesting where and how to place his chips, and soon his red chips were replaced with blue ones, then gray, then black. When his stack of black chips had reached—oh, a goodly number, and Abe was beginning to sober up a bit, he decided it was time to cash in his chips and take the woman to somewhere more private.

His first clue that something was wrong was when he tried to tip the Gallamite gamemaster with a chip and got a nasty look in return. The manager, a Katcherian, then stepped over, counted up his chips, and demanded a number of credits larger than all the credits Abe had saved up over the last six months.

Red chips, they explained to him, represented positive numbers, as did blue chips and gray chips. But black chips were negative numbers, representing money owed to the house. When Abe looked around for the young woman to verify this, she had vanished. It was just Abe, the gamemaster, the store manager, and a hired Mausetite goon.

Abe realized he had just been conned, and conned good, and he was young enough to resent it greatly and take a stand for truth, justice, and so on. Rather than negotiate a sum that he could afford—the standard operating procedure in these circumstances—he refused flat out to pay a single credit, and turned to head for the door. He hadn’t gotten four steps before he was struck from behind by the leg of a chair or some equivalently solid, clublike object.

Now, remember, Abe was young and strong and trained in combat at Starfleet Academy. And what’s more, he couldn’t take a hint, so of course he responded with anger and violence. He turned back to his attackers and, using the skills he had been taught, engaged them in hand-to-hand combat.

“Excellent!” the Boundarian squeaked, “a glorious battle fought against a dishonorable foe, with right making might and a noble hero overcoming…”

“…hand-to-hand combat,” Gold continued, ignoring the Boundarian, “which was a mistake. Though Abe had youth and strength on his side, the others had actually been in a fight or two, which Abe, outside of training, had not. Oh, he held his own for a while, but eventually his foes got the upper hand, and he was beaten, first badly, then unconscious, then finally to death. It was only then that his luck began to change.”

“He died?” the Telspong said, shocked. “And
then
his luck changed?”

“He returned as a spirit,” the Olexan guessed, “and proceeded after those who had wronged him?”

“He failed?” the Boundarian said. “Not a very inspiring story.”

“Your point is?” Al asked.

“My point is coming,” Gold replied to Al, “whether the story is inspiring I will leave to you to decide when it’s finished, and yes, his luck changed after he died. Moments after he breathed what would have been his last, the automatic shore-leave recall activated and Abe was beamed back to the
Gettysburg
. When the transporter chief saw the condition he was in, he beamed him straight to sickbay and the doctor there was able to revive him.”

“Ah,” the Telspong said. “Did he report any life-after-death experiences?”

“Brilliant plan!” the Olexan said. “Coming back to life would catch his enemies entirely unaware.”

“Worse, much worse, than a simple failure,” the Boundarian said, “compounding a dishonorable death by returning to life is…obscene.”