Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [19]
Guinan had followed Picard and his people into a cave beneath the city, in search of his Commander Data’s head—a rather long and complex story in itself. But as events unfolded, each more curious than the other, she cracked her skull against a rocky outcropping and was knocked unconscious.
It was then that Picard’s Devidian adversary fled the cavern through a glowing portal—actually a conduit through time. Unaware of her injury, the team from the Enterprise gathered to follow the Devidian through.
Guinan remembered their eagerness, the hard, determined looks in their eyes. And their voices, stretched taut with urgency, as they echoed in the eerie confines of the cave.
But she was bleeding profusely. Without help, she would probably have died in that place.
Luckily for her, Picard was more perceptive than his comrades. As he prepared to follow them through the portal, he caught a glimpse of Guinan and realized how badly she was hurt.
So instead of vanishing along with his officers, he remained there in the cave with her. He knew he might be giving up any chance of returning to his proper time, but it didn’t matter. Her survival was more important to him.
When Guinan woke, she saw Picard sitting there beside her. He had bandaged her head with a strip of cloth and stopped the bleeding, effectively saving her life.
While she managed to stay conscious, she expressed surprise that he had stayed to help her. After all, he had stranded himself in the process, cut himself off from everything and everyone he had ever known.
Guinan remembered exactly how he had answered her, word for word. She could hear it now, precisely as she had heard it then: “I can’t very well let anything happen to you. You’re far too important to me.”
And he had smiled as he said it.
Then, as Guinan began to lapse into darkness again, she had asked Picard if the two of them were destined to become friends. And he had said of their relationship in that distant future, “It goes beyond friendship.”
But she would have to wait nearly five hundred years to learn any more than that. And when the time came that she was finally enlightened, she would be confronted with the real irony—the real twist in the weft of their relationship.
Because when Guinan came to understand what Picard meant, when she finally came to appreciate the depth of their friendship, it would be her turn to wax cryptic.
And for good reason.
After all, Time could be as volatile as a mugato, and as treacherous as a Rigelian ring serpent. It wasn’t a thing to be tampered with or taken lightly.
Or rejected, she thought with a pang of loss.
If Guinan revealed too soon what had happened in that cave beneath San Francisco, she would throw everything off for Picard. She would warp the portion of his life that he had yet to make for himself—the joys and the tragedies and the triumphs he had yet to experience, all of which would conspire to make him the man she had known.
And would know again, if all went as it should.
It wasn’t just a matter of withholding the details of their first meeting from him. Guinan couldn’t even tell him that such a meeting had taken place. She had to keep it all a secret, no matter how much it had meant to her at the time, no matter how critical it had been to her survival.
Simply put, Picard couldn’t be allowed a glimpse of his future. Because if he knew too much about it, that future might not come to pass.
And after what he had done for her back in the nineteenth century, he deserved to have the future of prestige and accomplishment that he would earn for himself.
It’s funny, Guinan thought. Until she saw Picard sit down at that bar, she hadn’t wanted anything—but now she did. Suddenly, she had a goal in life, something she needed to do.
It didn’t entirely lift her out of the malaise in which she had been languishing day after day, bereft of joy for so long she couldn’t bear to think about it. She had her doubts that anything would