Pathways - Jeri Taylor [105]
Instead, he felt a palpable triumph, a sense of victory. As he exited his father’s office and waved a cheerful good-bye to Commander Klenman, he suddenly identified this new and giddy feeling: it was power.
• • •
The ancient sports of downhill and slalom racing had lost popularity somewhere in the late twenty-first century, some time after traditional skis had been abandoned and bareshoe skiing was the accepted norm. But even then, the sport had been almost entirely supplanted by snowboards and racing was losing favor to increasingly acrobatic aerial skiing. And of course, hoverboards made them all seem quaint and old-fashioned.
But a few diehards in Europe and Scandinavia kept the older ways, skating on the long slats that seemed so eccentric to many, passing down the skill to their children, who passed it down, so the sport was maintained in various pockets of the world.
Tom’s mother was the one who first introduced her children to what was then considered an archaic activity, but of her two daughters and one son, only Tom showed any interest in it. He was ten when he first slid down a gentle slope at a resort near Lake Tahoe, under the guidance of Henri Islicker, a patient gentleman from Switzerland who was trying to reintroduce the sport to Americans, one child at a time. Islicker was a grandfatherly man with a great shock of white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard, and brilliant blue eyes. Tom liked him instantly, sensing a patience and lack of judgment in the old man that made him unafraid to risk embarrassment by attempting this unusual sport.
There were scant few children who cared to try this unaccustomed activity, with its awkward skis and ungainly poles. But when Tom first stepped into the boots, he felt instantly confident, sure that this was something he could do, and would enjoy.
That first run was down a slope that declined no more than five or six degrees, but to young Tom, it was thrilling. The caress of the cold breeze on his face, the white of the snow and the deep green of the pine trees etched against an unclouded winter blue sky, the scent of conifers—all these sensations combined to create a euphoric effect in the young boy.
Within a day Islicker had taken him onto the more difficult slopes and watched admiringly as Tom carved turns as though he’d been skiing for years. It was, Islicker told him, a natural talent that could never be taught, simply enhanced.
By the end of that week they were on the most advanced of the slopes, skiing powder where no one had been before them, Islicker being careful to instruct Tom about the danger of avalanches, what conditions to look out for and how to avoid them. Tom absorbed all this, and kept up with the courtly old gentleman turn for turn.
His mother brought him back seven more times over the course of the next eight years, and those few occasions were his only experience on skis. Each time they had returned to Portola Valley, he had wanted to tell his father what he’d been doing, but some instinct told him that his father wouldn’t think much of this strange old sport, and so he kept quiet. He focused instead on Parrises Squares, which his father supported with passion.
Now, his clandestine experiment with skiing had provided the instrument of his first challenge to his father, though Tom didn’t think of it this way in the beginning. Only later, after the incident in the Vega system, did he trace back the events and begin to understand why joining the ski team had been such a heady experience for him. He was playing out a drama as ancient as Oedipus.
The Academy ski team was a motley group at first, consisting of six men and four women, all of whom were human (off-worlders generally thought the sport truly bizarre), only one of whom was more competent than Tom. That was Odile Launay, a young woman from Beziers, in southern France, whose father had been one of those European ski enthusiasts trying to revive the sport. Odile had grown up on the slopes of the Pyrenees, and was as graceful a racer as Tom had ever seen.