Flashback - Diane Carey [63]
"Miss Earhart," he proclaimed quietly.
"But we left her on that planet," Janeway recalled, whispering-as if that really mattered. "The planet where we found the other people who'd been taken from Earth in 1937. She decided to stay!"
Tuvok puzzled briefly, then suggested, "Perhaps this is a memory, or phantom memory, from before we left that planet, Captain. This is what I feared."
"What?"
"An apparently advanced degradation of my mental processes. My mind can no longer distinguish between my own memories and yours, or even what happened and what did not. Since between the two of us, you were the one most affected by Miss Earhart's rediscovery, I believe we are in your mind, Captain."
"My mind . . . but, Tuvok, this memory isn't real. This never happened. I never ordered Torres to train her. Amelia Earhart never attempted to learn the helm duties of Voyager."
He looked at her, and for the first time during this venture into the quilted land of thought, attention shifted from him to her.
"Perhaps you believe that she should have," he said.
Janeway watched Torres and Amelia Earhart arguing for a moment, and allowed herself to quit thinking about the complexities of a mind-meld, the condition of Tuvok's deteriorating mind, and the trouble they were in.
Instead, she let herself remember that strange time when a handful of people from 1937 on Earth
were discovered held in cryostasis on a planet way over in the Delta Quadrant. How ironic it had been to have the myths of alien abduction actually proven at the same time as the mystery of Earhart's vanishing was solved.
"Yes," she thought aloud. "I've often felt bad about leaving her behind. I had a chance to urge Amelia Earhart to go into space with us, maybe see some of what she had pioneered for women-for everybody . . . and instead I never even tried to talk her into coming along. I've wondered why somebody with enough adventurous spirit to buck the decorum of her own time would choose to stay on some planet instead of soaring out into more adventure."
Tuvok apparently accepted that as-well, logical. "This could very well be your mind trying to satisfy those frustrations."
"Or guilts," Janeway pointed out. She understood emotion better than he did, and she knew darned well what was driving this phantom memory.
The mind-meld was losing its grip, shifting from his memories to hers, and not even real ones. How would they even know for sure if they were in or out of the meld?
"Well," she bridged, "what do you suggest?"
"Since your mind seems to be in control, you will have to be the one to bring us out of the meld."
She looked at him. "How?"
"Concentrate. Think about sickbay and getting back to it."
"Getting back to it?" She held her hand toward
the turbolift door across the engineering bay. "We could walk right over to it here and now. How would we know we were really there?"
"Captain . . ." Tuvok wavered, annoyed by the simplicity of her questions, yet he seemed not to have any answers. "Close your eyes and blot out what you see. Think about the Doctor, sickbay, Kes, and our immediate problems. I can give you no more specific directions. A mind-meld does not possess a nav chart."
"All right, all right. I'll try."
Despite engulfing doubts, she closed her eyes.
After a few moments of aggravation, she opened them again, only to find herself still looking at Amelia Earhart and B'Elanna Torres arguing over the warp graph.
"I can't do it," she said to Tuvok. "I don't know how." She looked up at him. "Now what?"
Glancing at the two other women, then back to her, he seemed genuinely confused. "Perhaps . . . play the scenario through. Once your mind releases its latent frustrations, the meld may automatically relax."
As if given permission to concentrate on the thing she was really interested in, Janeway let herself think about the woman sitting at the graph and a wish that was only now beginning to resurface.
Strange-she thought