All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [24]
“It happened again,” he told them.
Beverly’s brow creased. “A time shift?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
She held up a hand. “Don’t move,” she told him— and disappeared. A moment later, she came back with a medical tricorder and used it to scan Picard’s head.
“What happened?” inquired Riker.
The captain sighed. “It’s still a little vague… but I can remember more of it this time. I think the more often I shift between time periods, the more memory I retain.” He stopped to gather his thoughts. “First, I was in what appeared to be the future… years from now. Then I was in the past again … right before our first mission.”
Having finished her scan, Beverly read the results. Her eyes narrowed at something she saw there. “What is it?” asked the first officer.
The doctor shook her head in disbelief. “I scanned his temporal lobe—and compared it with what I found just a few minutes ago. There’s a thirteen percent increase in neurotransmitter activity in his hippocampus.” She looked directly at Picard. “Within a matter of minutes, you accumulated over two days’ worth of memories.”
“Two days?” repeated Riker. “But that’s…”
“Impossible?” Picard suggested. He nodded. “Unless
you’ve spent a lot of time somewhere else between ticks
of the clock.”
He smiled grimly. Finally, they had some proof of what he was experiencing. He wasn’t crazy—he was actually traveling through time.
CHAPTER 9
The habak was a rectangular room in a high tower, which served the Indians of Darvon V as a ceremonial chamber. The only way to enter it was via a wooden ladder that came through a hole in the floor. Another ladder led through a hole in the ceiling, which opened the place to the long, pale rays of the sun.
There was also a firepit. Though it hadn’t been used for several days, it still gave off a thick, acrid smell of burrled wood.
Wesley Crusher had spent the morning studying the sacred hangings that decorated the walls of the habak. He had studied them before; he would study them many more times before his journey—or this part of it—was done.
And the funny thing was, as many times as he scrutinized the woven wall hangings and the colorful symbols that populated them, he never grew bored. There always seemed to be some level of meaning he hadn’t contern-plated yet… some subtle, new wisdom to be discovered in them. “Wesley?”
The young man turned and saw that the Traveler had joined him in the chamber. Wes hadn’t seen him enter, but that was nothing unusual. The Traveler didn’t come and go as normal people did.
More and more as time went on, neither did Wesley himself. As he practiced translating himself into other planes of existence, he was gradually eliminating the need to walk anywhere… or, in this case, to climb a ladder.
Of course, most of the time, he walked and climbed anyway. It just felt better. And a part of him hoped that it always would.
“Yes, Traveler?” he replied.
The being from Tau Ceti eyed him with an intensity that surprised him. “Do you not sense it?” he asked.
Sense… it? Wesley shook his head. “No… I don’t. What is it I’m supposed to sense?”
Rather than answer out loud, the Traveler moved to one of the wall hangings and pointed. The young man followed his teacher’s finger to a picture of something bright and multicolored—something Wesley couldn’t readily identify. What’s more, he was reasonably certain that the image hadn’t been there before.
Opening his mind to it, he wove himself into the picture’s reality—inspecting it not only on this plane, but on several others. He was intrigued to see how pervasive it was, how it seemed to transcend every layer of existence he touched. Then, urged by an instinct he couldn’t name or pretend to understand, he turned to another image near it. This one was more easily recognizable. It was the Enterprise. But like the burst of color, he found, it existed on more than one plane.
Suddenly, Wesley got it. When he turned back to the Traveler,