Pathways - Jeri Taylor [27]
It was at this time that Chakotay was transferred to the Gage, and posted to defend Federation space in Sector 21749. It was at this time that he learned everything he needed to know about warfare.
He fought Cardassians in space; he fought them on land; he fought them, on more than one occasion, hand-to-hand. He knew moments of terror and of triumph, of bitter cruelty and noble sacrifice. He saw friends die and he saw friends kill. He learned that one can take a life as dispassionately as one can blow one’s nose, even if one is, on some more fundamental level, forever changed because of it. He had become inextricably linked to his ancient past: he had become a warrior.
That realization brought him neither joy nor sorrow. Somewhere in the course of the nearly four years he spent in warfare, he lost the capacity to feel much of anything at all. He was unaware of this at first, as it was a gradual process of self-protection, an incremental slide into indifference. When at last he realized he had lost the ability to experience any strong emotion, he was relieved, and didn’t miss the days of intense feeling. In this way, he could survive.
When, at last, there was a cessation of hostilities—not an end to war, in that war had never been declared—he was given an extended leave and he returned, for the first time in years, to his homeworld. He found it remarkably changed. Everything was smaller than he remembered— was that postage-stamp meadow really the vast playing field of his youth?—and the people astonishingly unsophisticated. His childhood friends were stolid adults with children of their own, and he found himself barely able to find a common ground for conversation. The boys he had romped with in the forests had become stodgy and colorless, younger versions of his father and every other member of the tribe he had ever known. He wondered how any of them would fare against the Cardassians.
There were any number of celebrations to mark his return, but Chakotay felt disengaged from the festivities. Music did not cheer him, food and drink were tasteless, and the companionship of his friends and family seemed shallow and unimportant. He found them all naive, oblivious of the situation in the worlds around them, caught up in their own concerns, their own lives, their own minuscule problems.
One night he wandered away from a party in his honor and went to sit alone in the fields, looking up at the two crescent moons hanging low in the sky. He was thinking of nothing in particular, but simply had to remove himself from the endless, banal conversations that punctuated the celebration. A footfall behind him made him flinch and he leapt to his feet.
It was his father. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’m fine.”
Kolopak gazed up at their twin moons reflectively. “The sisters are dancing tonight,” he intoned. This was the phrase used when the two moons were in proximity, the smaller one seeming to dance in conjunction with the larger. “Good things happen when they prance together.”
It was an innocent statement, a variation of which Chakotay had heard a thousand times as he grew up, but tonight, for whatever reason, it struck him as intolerably ignorant. The position of the two moons was entirely predictable, charted by astronomers, their orbits entirely a matter of gravitational dynamics. He felt a peculiar fury rise in him.
“Why do you say things like that?” he challenged, and heard his voice, harsh and dark, slice through the night. His father stared at him, stunned at the intensity of the question. But Kolopak, as always, tried to respond harmoniously.
“It’s just part of the lore of our people,” he began,