Pathways - Jeri Taylor [18]
He frequently found himself on the receiving end of that sting.
“Let me see if I understand you,” she said musingly. “You kept making your bed the way you wanted to, rather than the way Starfleet says you should, but it’s your dorm officer’s fault for putting you on report.”
“You don’t understand at all. The bed looked perfectly fine, just as neat as regulations called for. Most people couldn’t tell the difference. And my room was spotless.”
“I should hope so. You don’t even have a roommate to contribute to the mess.” It was true. One of the few fortunate things that had happened at the Academy was that he had not been assigned a roommate, and occupied two-person quarters in solitary splendor. Chakotay, who valued his privacy, couldn’t have been happier.
Today, he and Sveta were sprawled in a window seat of one of the Academy’s study rooms, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Just a day before, sunlight had danced on the water and aficionados of the old and pervasive sport of sailing had taken advantage of the inviting weather, careening around the bay in small craft with brightly colored sails. They had looked to Chakotay like dozens of vivid birds, skimming and dipping among the waves.
Today, the weather that he would learn was far more characteristic of the area had arrived: the skies sagged darkly, and a cocoon of fog obscured the vast Golden Gate Bridge, which still spanned the bay. The day looked as bleak as he felt. Being put on report was not a good way to begin his Starfleet education, and could damage his prospects for a command track, all because of arbitrary and overly exacting rules.
Sveta didn’t seem to understand this, and frankly he was getting frustrated trying to explain it to her. She just kept staring at him with those gray-white eyes, implacable, refusing even to try to comprehend his side of it.
Like right now, over the matter of making beds. Chakotay frankly thought it was a waste of time to do it at all—why make a bed when one is going to get right back in it a few hours later? He’d never made a bed as he was growing up, and his parents had never suggested he should. They understood which things were important and which weren’t.
It wasn’t as though he were refusing to do this pointless task. He understood that Starfleet had rules and he was willing to abide by them.
But weren’t there reasonable rules—and those that were completely ludicrous? Starfleet seemed a slave to the latter, and surely there was a point at which one just didn’t let oneself be manipulated by slavish adherence to ridiculous policies.
“What’s so important about a mitered corner, anyway?” he continued, still irked by the dorm officer’s insistence on conformity.
“A mitered corner,” Sveta replied, “is a technique that’s hundreds of years old—”
“And I suppose that makes it instantly superior,” interrupted Chakotay, but she ignored him.
“It’s what Starfleet has chosen as the way we’re to make beds. That’s the only thing that matters.”
“Why is it the only thing? Doesn’t common sense enter into it? If my bed looks just as neat as the next one, why isn’t my method as good as Starfleet’s?”
For a brief instant, he thought he saw her lips tug in amusement, but it might have been a trick of the light. He hoped so: he disliked the thought of being an object of scorn by this perverse woman.
“Were you indulged a great deal as a child?” she asked now, changing the subject, a tactic he’d observed in her before. He wasn’t about to play into it.
“What does that have to do with what we’re discussing?” he queried.
“You behave very much like someone used to getting his own way.”
Irritation bubbled into aggravation. Sveta had a way of picking at a point, like someone worrying a scab until it began to bleed. “I had a very disciplined upbringing,” he stated, and recognized the hint