Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [54]
But the Lakul was a little sturdier—or maybe just a little luckier. She wouldn’t yield to the Nexus until forty-seven of her passengers had been beamed from her buckling decks to the safety of the Enterprise’s sickbay.
The starship herself suffered only one casualty—a retired Starfleet captain named Kirk, who was only supposed to have been a guest on the vessel. He perished helping the Enterprise free herself from the phenomenon.
Guinan was one of the forty-seven El-Aurians who came through the ordeal alive—twice a survivor. But at first, when she was milling about in the Enterprise’s sickbay, she wished that hadn’t been the case.
That’s how much it hurt to have the joy and contentment of the Nexus ripped from her without warning. That’s how much it tore her up to lose Jevi and the others a second time.
When she left that junction of infinite possibilities, it felt as if she had abandoned a part of herself. And in her grief, she couldn’t help feeling that it was by far the best part.
The Enterprise took Guinan the rest of the way to Earth, but she wasn’t aware of the voyage. She was too disoriented, too much in shock.
The other El-Aurians were the same way. They wandered from place to place without purpose, babbling about colors no one had ever heard of and the sound of time—or so Guinan was told in years to come.
Eventually, with the help of Federation counselors on Earth, she and all the other survivors of the Lakul regained their equilibrium. They became capable of functioning and fending for themselves again.
It wasn’t easy. For years, Guinan barely spoke, barely raised her eyes to look into someone else’s.
But little by little, she reclaimed herself. She redis-covered the points of contact between herself and the real world. With patience and slow, painstaking effort, she rebuilt the Guinan she had known.
The hardest part was accepting that she would never again feel what she had felt in the Nexus, that she would never again know that unmitigated joy and contentment.
But somehow she did it. She moved on.
Then, a little less than a year ago, Guinan had felt the Nexus’s siren call again. The phenomenon was passing through the Alpha Quadrant on its thirty-nine-year loop, tugging on the invisible bonds in which it had bound her.
She could see it from the observation ports of a half-dozen different hulks—a majestic ribbon of fiery energies, undulating through space less than three thousand kilometers from Oblivion. It was almost as if it had known where to find her.
The sight of it reopened all her wounds, reminding her of the terrible depth and breadth of her loss. And she was tempted—so terribly tempted—by the joy she had known in the Nexus’s embrace.
The effort to resist its lure left Guinan weak, withdrawn, dispirited—hardly any better off than when the Enterprise had rescued her. And when the Nexus went away again, taking that sweet, undefinable portion of her with it, her outlook didn’t improve.
If anything, it got worse.
Once again, Guinan had a hard, steep road ahead of her. But this time, she didn’t have any Federation counselors to give her a hand. All she had was herself, and the few good friends she had made in Oblivion.
They tried to bring her out of her malaise, Dahlen and the others…they tried as hard as she could ever have expected of them.
But she couldn’t feel. She couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of feeling. All she could do was move from day to day and darkness to darkness, surviving but not really living—not anymore, not the way she used to before the Nexus laid its claim to her.
And that was the state Guinan had been in when Picard sat down next to her at the bar—without even knowing who she was, as if Fate herself had taken a hand again.
And he had done for her what no one else could, because he was different from anyone else. He was the man from the future. He was the man from