Pathways - Jeri Taylor [77]
She awoke in a huge bed, her mother sitting by her side pressing a cool damp cloth to her forehead. B’Elanna’s head throbbed and her throat ached strangely. In her mouth, she tasted the acid aftertaste of vomitus—she had thrown up. Had she done that in front of everyone? It was too embarrassing to contemplate.
“Feeling better?” her mother asked gently. “I should have realized your stomach might not adapt so quickly to Klingon food. Something didn’t sit right with you.”
B’Elanna knew it was more than food that didn’t sit right with her, and she couldn’t hold it back—she had to know if living here was even a remote possibility.
“Is this our true home?” she blurted out. “Are we going to stay here? Have we left Nessik forever?”
Prabsa looked at her curiously. “Why ever would you ask such questions?”
“K’Karn said we should live here. That I should begin my training as a warrior. Is that going to happen?”
An unusual expression came over her mother’s face, both amused and serious at the same time. B’Elanna had no idea what it meant. “No, it isn’t,” Prabsa said, and B’Elanna’s relief was so overwhelming she had trouble concentrating on anything that followed.
“Nessik is our home. I have my laboratory there, and it’s important to me. I love my family, but I decided long ago that my place wasn’t here, on the homeworld. And I still feel that way.” There was a small pause, and then she continued. “If you’d like to consider living here, I’d understand. You might be happier among family.”
“No, I don’t want to stay here. I want to go back.”
Prabsa studied her daughter for a long moment, then simply nodded and dipped the cloth into cool water once more, wringing it out and placing it on B’Elanna’s forehead. “Puq Doy’,” she murmured, “such a tired little girl.” It was a moment of uncommon closeness between them, and B’Elanna felt the dark question unfold in her mind like a black flower. Now was the time to ask it, now, when her mother seemed forthcoming, yielding: Why did my father go away?
She trembled on the edge of that shadowy abyss, wanting to ask but afraid of the answer, and so remained silent, listening as her mother hummed a plaintive tune, cooling her face with the pleasantly damp cloth, and finally she fell asleep for a long dark time during which she did not dream, or if she did she retained no memory of it.
Acceptance by the young people of Nessik, when it came, arrived in a manner wholly unexpected, in the summer she turned fourteen. She had become aware that adolescence hadn’t been kind to some of her human peers, many of whom became ungainly and silly. Some put on weight and others were reed-thin; a few had erupted with dreadful pustules on their faces until a series of medical treatments could return the clarity of their complexions. Behavior changed, too, in strange, unpredictable ways that seemed to leave the air around them charged with an untapped energy.
B’Elanna was unafflicted by these changes. She did not develop pimples, though she developed breasts, and her body was lithe and supple as a result of the swimming she did every day in the huge lake near their colony. It was in, or on, the water that she was happiest. She was a strong swimmer and her redundant lungs gave her the capacity to stay under water for incredibly (to humans) long periods of time, and she enjoyed the wonder it produced in the other children. She also loved to sail, and had a small racing sloop that she