Flashback - Diane Carey [7]
Chakotay looked to the upper deck to make sure Kim wasn't too badly bruised, then turned back to Janeway and added, "I hope Tuvok's all right."
"I'll pass that along to him. Keep me posted. And somebody pick up Mr. Kim."
"It was a chaotic experience, but my chief impression was one of... desperation. I was holding a young girl by the hand . . . trying to prevent her
from falling into a precipice. I was unable to keep my grip . . . and she fell to her death."
Vulcan or not, Tuvok was still struggling.
He looked better now than Kes had described him when he staggered through the entrance to sickbay. The image wasn't very comforting as Kes told it, and Janeway believed her. Kes was gentle and sensitive, but she was accurate, too. Working with a holographic doctor all the time, she pretty much had to be.
Janeway stood beside Tuvok's bio-bed. Kes stood beside her. On the other side, the Doctor was running a medical tricorder along Tuvok's body and looking one hell of a lot more human than any computer-generated quick-fixer should look.
On the bed, Tuvok looked well enough, but only well enough. Few others might have noticed, but Janeway picked up on the tension he was working to bury, and though he often didn't meet the eyes of others unless he was making a report or an accusation, he now looked up at her and clung to her steady gaze as if it were a lifeline.
"And there is more." He struggled on. "I had an emotio nal response. Anxiety . . . fear ... an almost irrational anger at myself for letting her fall."
"How do you feel now?" Janeway asked him.
He frowned unhappily. "It is a ... distasteful but rapidly diminishing image."
"When did that happen to you?" Kes asked, probably not realizing how very stressful this turn of events really was for Tuvok.
She was a mild-voiced girl who, despite growing
old at warp speed, seemed never to change in her spritelike innocence. She even looked like a sprite, with puffy platinum hair and elfin ears. Add wings, and she could be a Flower Fairy.
"You said you were a young man," Kes continued, trying to help, "kneeling on a precipice. Did that ever happen to you?"
"It never happened," Tuvok answered, his brow furrowing with troubled thoughts. "The girl was unfamiliar . . . and I have never been in that situation." He paused to think, for the first time taking his eyes off Janeway and staring forward as if looking for something. "It was me as a child . . . and it did seem like a memory. But I do not recall such an incident."
He was frustrated, Janeway knew. The complexities of the mind weren't supposed to be a mystery to Vulcans, and when a dark cubbyhole opens up, it could be as disconcerting as recurring dreams to a human. Anxiety and fear were bad enough to those who were used to them. For a Vulcan, they were a vicious and punitive assault from within.
Janeway couldn't help but wonder about the little girl. Someone, somewhere, sometime had died. A child who never had a chance at the kind of life she herself sometimes bemoaned, and suddenly she didn't feel so very unlucky merely to be seventy years from home.
She wanted to put out her hand again to calm him, let him know she understood at least what he felt, if not why, but the Doctor completed his scan and lowered the tricorder.
"Well," the Doctor said, looking at Tuvok, "it was definitely a traumatic episode. Your heart rate accelerated to three hundred beats per minute, your adrenaline levels rose by one hundred thirteen percent, and . . . your neuroelectrical readings nearly jumped off the scale." The Doctor paused, then looked up from his tricorder. "If you were human, I'd say you had a severe panic attack."
"I am not human," Tuvok pointed out priggishly, with that sting of typical deprecation that Vulcans seemed to