Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
AS HE FED the holodeck computer all the information he had collected, First Officer William Riker found himself smiling—grinning, in fact, like a little kid.
And why not? He had been waiting a long time for this. It had been nearly a full week since the idea popped into his head, and half his mind had been busy working out the details while the other half saw him through the routine functions of a starship second-in-command.
Of course, in a larger sense, it had been more than a week. He’d been waiting all his life for this moment.
Or at least since his seventh summer, when he’d taken that spill off Execution Rock and fractured his collarbone in three places. He still remembered all those summer days spent propped up among pillows, imprisoned in his parents’ house while his friends swam in the river or hiked up into the highlands.
At first he’d been full of bitterness and resentment. After all, he was Kyle Riker’s son. He had to be the best at everything, the leader—even at the tender age of six.
Thank God for his mother. She had taken advantage of that sedentary time to instill a love for the quieter pursuits in the son who was so quickly growing away from her.
First there was the music—all kinds, but mostly her beloved jazz, for her father had been a trombone player in a place called New Orleans. Will liked the happy music best, particularly during the endless rainy afternoons when it seemed there had never been and never would be any color in the world but gray.
Then there were the cooking lessons. What an absurdity—a six-year-old learning to cook! But the payoff was the privilege of eating whatever they had concocted, and his mother had a knack for making even the humblest dish taste wickedly delicious. Perhaps the most amazing moment in his life, even through the present day, was when he realized he could make ratatouille as good as hers.
Finally there were the books. At the beginning he had thought it kind of strange—who ever heard of reading books? There were tapes and such if you wanted to be entertained or—heaven forfend—learn something. The pictures came up on a monitor along with a voice that provided the narration. Simple. Easy.
In books there were no pictures. Most of the time, anyway. You had to come up with the images on your own, and that was a lot like work.
Still, he took to reading. It tickled his imagination, like the music. Like the cooking lessons, he had to put something into it to get something out.
And like both those things, the books gave him a window into his mother. He could see something incredible in her, something young and fresh and beautiful, every time she read out loud to him, and again when he read out loud to her.
Especially when they opened that certain book—the one that had given him the idea to do what he was doing now. It wasn’t the kind of book he would have expected her to have, or the kind of subject he’d have expected her to take an interest in. But then, his mother had not been easy to predict.
Now he was glad that he had broken his clavicle that summer. Immeasurably glad, because it gave him that much more to remember her by.
Not for the first time he wondered if in some way she had known that she would pass early from this life. Maybe that was why it had been so important to her to give him these gifts. These parting gifts.
Riker sighed, gently putting the memories away like the prized possessions they were. All but one.
Tapping in the final instructions, the first officer waited for confirmation that the holodeck computer had enough data to go on. A second or two later it indicated that it did.
Tingling with anticipation, he pressed the space on the keyboard marked Activate.
Beyond the closed composite-alloy doors, his fancy was working itself into a reality. Omnidirectional holo diodes were coming to life; electromagnetic fields were taking on form and substance and texture.
He felt the magic beckoning, took a step toward it. The doors to the holodeck parted, revealing the fruits of his attention to detail.
Perfect. It was perfect—just as