All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [4]
And he did. But he resolved to look in on the captain as soon as his own tour was over. With any luck, this incident would turn out to be nothing… but one never knew.
CHAPTER
3
Picard stared into the wispy vapors coming up from his tea. So far, he hadn’t touched the stuff—and not because it wasn’t to his liking. After all, Earl Grey was his favorite blend.
He was simply too distracted to think much about drinking anything. He had too much else on his mind.
“It was,” he blurted, “as though I had physically left the ship and gone to another time and place. I was in the past …. “
He shook his head. Why couldn’t he get a better handle on what had happened? It seemed to be on the brink of his consciousness, teasing him… but when he ,reached for it, it slipped away.
Deanna sat on the other side of the smooth, dark coffee table that her mother had given her as a gift. The counselor’s incredulity was visible only in the slightest wrinkling of the skin above the bridge of her nose. Outside of that, she seemed completely nonjudgmental. “Can you describe where you were?” she asked. “What it looked like?”
The captain sighed as the scent of the tea teased his nostrils. “It’s all so difficult to nail down,” he told her. “Like the details of a nightmare after you’ve woken up.”
“What can you remember?” the Betazoid prodded carefully.
Picard concentrated. “It was years ago… before I took command of the Enterprise. I was talking with someone… I don’t remember who. It was dark outside ….”
The half-formed image lingered before his mind’s eye. His head hurt with the effort of trying to refine it, to understand it. “But then…” he began. “Yes?” said Deanna.
He struggled with it. “Then everything changed. I wasn’t in the past any longer. I was an old man, in the future. I was doing something… something outside.” He cursed softly. “What was it?”
Abruptly, he realized that his fingers were moving, as if of their own accord. They were rubbing together. But why? For what purpose?
Then the image was gone. “Sorry,” he told the counselor, bowing his head. “I just can’t remember.”
Deanna smiled cornpassionately. “It’s all right,” she assured him. And then, as gently as she could manage: “Captain … have you considered the possibility that this was just a dream?”
Picard looked up. “No. It was more than a dream,” he said, with a certainty that took him by surprise. “The smells and the sounds… the way things felt to the touch… they escape me now, but at the time it was all very real.”
The Betazoid accepted the statement with equanimity. “How long did you stay in each of these time periods?” she inquired, apparently taking a different ú tack. “Did it seem like minutes… hours?”
The captain thought about it. “I’m not sure,” he concluded after a moment. “At first… at first there was a moment of confusion, of disorientation. I wasn’t sure where I was. But that passed …. “He frowned. “And then I felt perfectly natural… as though I belonged in that time.” He grunted. “But I can’t remember now how long I stayed there.”
It was all so frustrating. The counselor sensed it, too, because she didn’t press him any further.
“I know,” he told her. “This doesn’t make much sense. It’s a set of feelings more than a distinct mem-ory.”
“It’s all right,” said Deanna. “Maybe it would be easier to try identifying specific symbols. Can you remember anything you saw… anything at all? An object, a building, perhaps… ?”
He took a breath, let it out. “No,” he answered finally. “Nothing.”
Finally, feeling that he’d run up against a wall, Picard focused again on his tea. It was no longer producing any vapors. Obviously, he had let it sit too long.
The counselor had noticed as well, it seemed. “Here,” she said, reaching across the table. “Let me have your cup. I’ll get you some more.”
“Thank you,” he said. Picking up the smooth, ceramic cup and its matching saucer, he extended them to her…
… and took hold of the rough-skinned grapevine. Suddenly, Picard had the strangest feeling that he had been reaching for something else.
For a moment, he felt