Pathways - Jeri Taylor [9]
“Commander,” said Harry after they’d eaten and stretched out on the ground, weary after the events of the last two days. “How’d you get along with Commander Nimembeh?”
“Get along with him? Fine, I guess. I only had him during prep squad, before my freshman year started. He was tough, but everyone respected him.”
Harry looked a little sheepish. “I had quite an experience with him,” he said. “It wasn’t a lot of fun.”
“No one would ever call Nimembeh fun,” agreed Chakotay. A silence fell on them, but Harry seemed to be pondering something. After a few moments, he turned again to Chakotay.
“Sir . . . if I’m prying or anything, you don’t have to answer. But how was it . . . that you quit Starfleet, and joined the Maquis? I mean, to go through the Academy, and be a Starfleet officer . . . and then to give it all up—well, I just wondered how that happened.”
Chakotay drew a breath. It was something he had spent a great deal of time contemplating, and he wasn’t entirely sure he had an easy answer. “To tell you that, I’d practically have to tell you the story of my life.”
“If you’re willing to tell it, I’d sure like to hear it.”
Chakotay looked around at his group. Several people were listening to the conversation, and seemed intrigued by the prospect of learning more about their first officer. It occurred to him that this might be as good a way as any to pass some time. “All right. If anybody gets bored you can go to sleep. I won’t be offended.”
He paused a moment to think how to start, and looked up at the night sky, dotted with stars. Suddenly an image shot into his mind, one he hadn’t thought about for some twenty years, and he knew that was the beginning of his tale. “When I was fifteen, my father and I took a trip together, and it was a turning point in my life.”
CHAPTER
2
“THERE WASN’T YET ONE PERSON, ANIMAL, BIRD, FISH, TREE, rock, canyon, forest. Only the sky was there, only the sea alone was lying under all the sky. Nothing stirs.
“Whatever might be is simply not there. But in the Otherworld, the Hero Twins are preparing to destroy the power of Seven-Macaw, so that their father, the Maize God, can be reborn.”
Chakotay’s mind drifted as he listened to the sonorous tones of his father’s voice. They were lying on their backs atop a grassy hill in Central America, on the planet Earth, where his ancestors had evolved. The sky was an ebony blanket salted with stars that shone so brilliantly they seemed able to burn holes in his eyes. But the sight held no majesty for Chakotay. He would rather have been anywhere else.
“The Hero Twins knocked Seven-Macaw from the crocodile tree where he was perched, and then they put their father’s head back upon his dead body so that he was reborn. Three gods, the paddlers, bore him in a sky canoe, concealed beneath the carapace of a turtle, to the place where the dawn of life was conceived.
“And then the First Father emerged through the cracked turtle shell, resurrected. All this happened at a place called lying-down-sky, before the First Father lifted the crocodile tree on high, pushing the sky upward and centering it.”
Chakotay shifted restlessly. He’d heard this tale many times before, from the time he was a small boy. He remembered being intrigued by it at first, but now, at fifteen, he was beyond such nonsense. He failed to understand his father’s excitement at this strange ritual, looking up at the sky and retelling the story of creation.
But his father’s exhilaration was palpable. It had begun to build as soon as he had decided on this quest, this return with