Broken Bow - Diane Carey [1]
Starship ...
For a few minutes he and his dad were silent as Jonathan put touches of the darker gray on the featureless white nacelles. He saw his dad’s hand twitch, itching to take the brush away and do this himself, but Jonathan leaned closer, signaling that he was determined to be careful and get it right. This was one of those things parents were just croaking to do themselves, but knew they’d be bad kid-raisers if they didn’t let their kid try. So Jonathan was ahead. He was almost ten, and he had parents figured out.
“When’s it gonna be ready to fly?” he asked his father.
“Let the paint dry first.”
“No, I mean your ship.”
Dad shrugged, but his eyes gleamed. “Not for a while ... it hasn’t even been built yet.”
“How big will it be?”
“Pretty big.”
Jonathan immediately began weighing comparisons in his head. As big as a Starfleet troop transport? As big as the Universe Planetarium?
“Bigger than Ambassador Pointy’s ship?”
Dad opened the can of blue paint and Jonathan dipped the brush.
“His name is Soval,” Dad said, “and he’s been very helpful, and I’ve told you not to call him that. Get the leading edge of the nacelle.”
Nacelles ... the magic of faster-than-light drive! Zephram Cochrane’s big discovery would take men to the stars—us, on our own, without any help from pointers. We had it before they found us, so we could take credit for getting ourselves into space. That was fair. We were coming, and they would have to live with it.
“Billy Cook said we’d be flying at warp five by now if the Vulcans hadn’t kept things from us,” he dared.
He knew he was venturing into sensitive territory now, but an explorer had to gamble.
“They have their reasons,” Dad said, holding back. Then more slipped out. “God knows what they are. ...”
Jonathan lowered the paintbrush so fast that the stick hit the edge of the table and spat a blue decoration on the ship’s stand. He turned sharply, bluntly. “What? What reasons? You always say that! You always say, ‘They must have some good reason,’ but you never tell me what. I’m ten, and it’s time!”
Dad tried not to laugh, then chuckled anyway, and bobbed his brows. “You’re nine.”
“Nine and three-quarters! If I’m old enough to ask, then I’m old enough to get told something, and not just, ‘Well, it’s mysterious.’ Why won’t they help? We would help them! I would help!”
Dad’s smile faded to something else. He leaned forward, hunched his shoulders, and gazed directly, in a way that made Jonathan feel important.
Then, all at once, Dad started talking—but really talking, really saying something, as if he had started speaking to another grown-up all of a sudden.
“I haven’t been very fair to you, have I?” he considered. “Treating you the way the Vulcans treat humans ... the way they’ve treated me. ... I’ve been assuming that I’d be the one to decide when you were ready to know things, assuming you don’t have anything to offer because you’re ... you’re ...”
Jonathan flared his arms and spat the word. “Primitive?”
The interruption got just the reaction he wanted. Dad smiled, rolled his eyes, flushed pink in the face, and got embarrassed. For an instant, Jonathan felt as if he looked a lot like his dad—the sun-dipped brown hair, the same brown eyes, pretty good smile that crinkled his eyes, friendly face, not enough of a tan. And the same flicker behind the gaze, like maybe they were both smarter than the next guy about certain things, even if the next guy was each other.
“Primitive ...” Henry Archer murmured. It was a mocking word, one the Vulcans used a lot, till it was more like a joke.
The sadness in Dad’s face, though—it hurt them both. Jonathan shrugged a little, not knowing what to say, but his feelings were hurt. His dad had done everything a human could do to prove that we were ready for space, just as good as the Vulcans or whatever slimers were out there, and still the pointers wouldn’t teach the important stuff, like they thought we were just puppies in clothes who couldn’t learn. They knew how to swim, but wouldn’t teach us. They wanted humans