Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [53]
And in the end, what had brought those feelings rushing back like a river in full flood? A child’s toy. A simple Tellati child’s toy.
But it was exactly the color of sunset in a place Guinan had never really visited—at least not in the sense one usually visited places. She knew that didn’t make sense, but the entire experience was still such a confusion to her, defying her attempts to attach words to it.
It had happened when she was on a ship called the Lakul—one of two ungainly transport vessels crawling through the vault of space, each one packed to the bulkheads with her people. But it wasn’t by choice that any of them had come that way.
They were refugees, the last of their kind, stripped of everything and everyone they had held dear by a half-living blight called the Borg.
For months, Guinan and the remnants of her once-numerous species had gone from vessel to vessel, all the while mourning their planet, their loved ones, and the lives they had left behind. Their destination? A world called Earth at the heart of the Federation.
Guinan had been on Earth before, hundreds of years earlier. But since her last visit, the place had changed quite a bit—or so she had heard. It was no longer a world of soot-belching chimneys and hard-grinding engines. It had become a calmer and gentler world, regaining much of its pristine splendor.
The El-Aurians—Guinan’s people—had been told they could build new lives there on Earth. And they clung fiercely to that hope, for it was all they had left.
Then they ran into the Nexus—a twisting, blindingbright ribbon of anomalous energies floating imperiously through otherwise empty space.
How she wished they had taken some other route, or traveled at a different speed, and thereby avoided even seeing the thing. But Fate placed it directly in their path.
At first, their captain hadn’t thought much of the phenomenon. He considered it a curiosity, nothing more. But he changed his mind when the Lakul began to shear toward it, caught in its wildly powerful gravimetric distortion field.
Their sister ship, the Robert Fox, tried to assist the Lakul. But in extending that assistance, she was snared by the phenomenon as well.
When the Lakul’s captain realized what kind of straits they were in, he sent out a distress call. Later, they would find out that it was received by the Enterprise, an Excelsior-class starship just out of space dock, not far from Earth.
But after a while, neither Guinan nor her fellow refugees were concerned with the possibility of being rescued. In fact, it was the furthest thing from their minds.
Because by then, the Nexus had claimed them.
Guinan couldn’t have said how long she was in that odd, timeless place. Just a few hours, apparently, judging by the timing of the distress call and the Enterprise’s arrival. But it seemed like a lot more—and also, a lot less.
Then again, how does one measure bliss? How does one quantify complete and utter peace?
Guinan’s family was there, or at least she thought it was—and her friends were there as well. All the people she thought she had lost forever to the metal appendages of the Borg…they had miraculously been returned to her.
Even Jevi.
The daughter who, of all Guinan’s daughters, was most like her. The child she had borne when all the others were grown and gone.
Jevi was there in the Nexus, in all her beauty and innocence, in all her brilliance and simplicity. She was there for Guinan to see and hold and hear and smell, every bit as sweet and solid and full of giggles as the day the Borg had taken her.
Guinan knew in her heart that Jevi wasn’t real. She couldn’t be. But Guinan didn’t care in the least. She was home again. She was free from sadness and stuggle. She was a mother, loved and loving, cradling her baby in her arms.
And she never, ever wanted to leave.
In time, however, the Enterprise arrived. Her captain saw that both the Lakul and her sister ship were gradually coming apart, savaged by the terrible forces exerted by the Nexus.
Tragically,