Flashback - Diane Carey [68]
/ can sense you. I know you're here, in our minds. You can't have us. You've had your life. It's our turn now to make the choices. The child is dead. Life has to move forward. You can't have mine or his. Get off my ship.
Her hand was too sweaty. She lay on her stomach at the edge of the precipice, looking down at the child as the little girl screamed, "Kathryn, help me! Don't let go!"
But with a sick slurp, the tiny hand slipped through her fingers. Drenched in horror and inadequacy, young Kate watched the child spill away from her. She couldn't hold on! She hadn't been able to hold on, and now the child would die a ghastly death. How could she live with this? How could she live after today?
"Program a fifty-kilodyne burst. . . five-second duration. On my mark . . . now."
He was so young-only a child. Even a Vulcan child is still a child. He couldn't hold on to the little girl's hand much longer.
"Tuvok! Help me-don't let go!"
The sun was so bright, unforgiving-
He has to let go. You have to let go too. You can't hold on to him anymore. I won't let you. Better we fall than serve as hosts to foreign organisms. We weren't
built that way. We're individuals. We're strongest when we're independent. Your time is over. Get out. Get out!
It was the twentieth century. She knew, because the little boy was wearing an American Little League outfit and on the ground a radio was blaring the news of an Apollo mission. The boy clung desperately to his little sister's hand as she dangled over the cliff, on the grassy edge of the mountain. Below them, the Shenandoah valley was a cushion of green that would pleasantly kill Karen Lee if he couldn't hold on! He had to hold on to her! He couldn't be the one-
Then his hand cramped. Karen Lee's face broke into shock as she slipped away from him, and fell.
The Masai adults were nowhere nearby and couldn't possibly help him pull Nuta back over the top of the cliff. The bright African dawn pierced his eyes as he tried to look for help, but there was no help. The adults were all working with the herds, driving them away from this cliff where already two calves had been lost. Nuta had come too close, and the edge had chipped away. Now she dangled from his hand, and he couldn't hold on much longer-
"Tukala! Don't let me fall!"
The gods were angry. They demanded a sacrifice, and Chang Li was going to have to make it. He didn't want to-his little sister was so very little yet, and she was his responsibility. Why had he agreed to show her the Summit?
Now she dangled from his shuddering hand, a
thousand feet from the rocky bottom, over the edge where the monks threw their dead goats. She was so small, so frightened. He dug his dirty fingernails into her wrist, but he couldn't hold on ...
Jacob shook off the terror and ran to the precipice where he had just seen Elishua vanish from his sight. Behind him, his sheep bleated stupidly, not even realizing that a child was in such precarious danger. Was she gone? Had she fallen?
He skidded onto his belly on the edge of the precipice, scratching his muslin tunic. The knot of his rope belt bit into his belly. "Elishua!"
He slammed his arm over the edge and found her arm-she was clinging somehow to the roots and rocks.
"lacob!" Her voice was so high, so thin!
Panic rushed through the boy. He couldn't hold on. Her fingers were slipping . . .
Get out.
Rameses, pharaoh of Egypt and the Empire, and he did not possess the strength with which to pull one child back over the hungering cliffside. What would the people say? It would become known that the daughter of his sister was allowed to plunge over the side to her death, allowed to die at the hand of a pharaoh-god who possessed no power with which to levitate her back up. Would the people begin to question his powers? His divinity?
He would have to invent a story about gods in the form of wind-
"Rameses! Don't let me fall!"
Muk reached over the edge, barely catching Titi's arm.