Pathways - Jeri Taylor [171]
“Regret accomplishes nothing.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But some of us can’t turn off our feelings on command.”
Tuvok was silent once more, and Neelix felt they had exhausted the moment. Feeling no better than he had when he started the conversation, he returned to the shelter and lay down. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could at least dream about her.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep when he heard her voice. In fact, when it was all over, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever woken up. But, sleeping or waking, he heard her. It seemed to him that his eyes opened to the darkness of the shelter, saw the slumbering forms of his crewmates, and then stared into blackness for a long time.
But that might have been a dream.
If so, it was a dream unlike any he’d ever had. The sound of Kes’s voice in his mind was palpable, and he had to resist the urge to answer her out loud. He lay quietly, letting happen whatever was happening, feeling borne along on a series of images like a toy boat bobbing on the waves of a fast-rushing stream.
He saw, in his mind’s eye, the underground city of the Ocampa, that wondrous creation he had visited just after he’d met Kes. It seemed that he were flying through the city, dazzled by the immensity and beauty of the buildings that stretched for many kilometers throughout the deep caverns of the planet.
And all the while, her voice in his mind . . . soothing, mellifluous . . . he couldn’t really hear words, couldn’t assign them meaning, but somehow the voice was communicating to him nonetheless.
His flight came to an end in the great Assembly of the Ocampa, where he stared down at a small child, long blond hair trailing down her back, staring up at an Ocampan man who looked, if anything, beleaguered.
Kes.
CHAPTER
12
“WHY?”
Kes was staring up at her father, feet spread, fists planted firmly on hips, small mouth pursed in determination. She’d asked a question and so far she hadn’t received a satisfactory answer, and she wasn’t going to move an inch until she did.
Her father gazed back at her, his face a mixture of bafflement, frustration, and adoration. Kes didn’t identify them as such, for she was too young yet to comprehend the complex network of emotions that can exist at once in people. She was less than halfway through her growth cycle, a period of time that she would later come to identify in human terms as nine months, and still focused on herself: her needs, her perceptions, her questions.
“Kes,” her father began in a tone of voice that was becoming familiar to her, “you have to accept the fact that there simply aren’t answers to every question.”
“Why?” Somehow everything Benaren said led to a new question, and more often than not, it was “why?”
Her father drew a breath, looking around for someone who might rescue him. They were standing in the courtyard of the Assembly, the soaring, magnificent structure built for them by the Caretaker so many generations before, which was the focal point of Ocampan life. Here daily rations were dispensed; entertainment was provided; social groups gathered. It was always full, but there was never a sense of congestion. The rhythms of Ocampan life were leisurely, ordered. No one rushed, no one pushed or shoved, no one exerted any more energy than was absolutely necessary.
That sense of enervation was one of the first things Kes had questioned, as her own restless spirit began to manifest itself. “Why does everyone sit around so much?” she had queried, on one of her early visits to the Assembly. “They just do,” replied her father, and was duly introduced to Kes’s relentless tenacity.
“That’s not a reason,” she stated with conviction, looking at her father with full expectation that a more satisfying answer would be forthcoming.
It was not. Every attempt he made to answer her in a convincing way was met with another question.
“This is our way of life, Kes. This is how people behave.”
“How did it get to be our way of life? Who said