Pathways - Jeri Taylor [112]
Transfixed as always by the experience, he almost didn’t hear the small groan from Odile. He glanced over and found her looking pale, her fingers clutching the edge of the seat, eyes filmy as she drew ragged breaths.
“Put your head between your legs,” he ordered, and she complied instantly. She sat like that, head down so the blood would flow toward it, for several moments. Then, gingerly, tentatively, she lifted herself upright again, but was careful not to look out the windows.
“I didn’t realize . . .” she said, still shaky. “You said dis-orienting. It’s more than that.”
“I guess I don’t remember how it was the first time. It’s all in what the eyes are telling the brain.”
“My brain was talking to my eyes . . . telling them not to look. But by then, it was too late.”
“You’ll get used to it. After a while, it’s almost narcotic.”
Gradually, she lifted her eyes again to the windows, where the stars now looked like luminous streaks of light. “Now it’s all right,” she murmured. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“It’s just the moment of going to warp that creates the sensation. For me it’s almost . . . holy.”
She looked at him pensively. He’d never shared a revelation so personal with anyone, and he found himself apprehensive. Would she laugh at him?
“I can understand why” was her reply, and Tom felt an enormous surge of gratitude.
They flew like that for a long time, not speaking, basking in the hauntingly beautiful sight of the stars streaking around them.
The week they taught Charlie Day to ski was the same week Tom decided to defy his father once more. This time, had the admiral asked him if a young woman were involved, he would have had to admit yes, there most definitely was, but his father didn’t ask the question and Tom never volunteered the information.
It all happened at Lake Tahoe, where Tom, Odile, and Bruno had gone over the New Year’s holiday to get some ski time in and to celebrate the passing of the old year. It was a ritual Tom had always found satisfying, the bidding farewell to the year past and the greeting of the new one. It was a time that seemed fraught with possibility, with hope and potential. He was invariably cheered by the prospect of the chronograph hitting twenty-four hundred hours and then beginning to count the first minute of the new year.
Starfleet Academy had acquired a building in the mountains surrounding the lake, and had turned it into a dormitory, largely for use by the ski team, which had grown in just two years to twenty-six people. Tom, Bruno, and Odile had planned to spend the whole New Year’s break there, and Charlie was added to the mix when Tom found that his family would be off-world for a month.
Tom had been visiting the crystal blue lake in the Sierras since he was a small child, and it held a special place in his heart. It was surely one of nature’s miracles, a vast basin atop a mountain range, breathtakingly spectacular whether viewed from the air or the ground. From lakeside, one saw 484 square kilometers of the purest blue water, ringed with majestic, rugged mountains. A forest of green clung to those mountain slopes, and the confluence of color—blue, green, white, slate—was powerful.
Nearby was another, equally pristine lake, smaller, which would forever remain linked with the tragic fate of the family that gave it its name: Donner. Even now, five hundred years later, the tale of the pioneers who had suffered so cruelly the ravages of nature and of each other had the ability to tantalize the imagination. There was still a shrine to the intrepid wagon train of long ago: a huge boulder had served as a cabin wall for one family, the Breens, and a plaque there commemorated their travails during the bitter winter of 1846.
Tom was the only one of the group who knew of that ancient catastrophe. To Odile and Bruno it was an obscure event in the history of another country; Charlie was more interested in science than in minutiae of the past. Tom was pleased, as they stood by the huge boulder, that they