Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [24]
Wu nodded. “And?”
“And,” Jiterica continued, “I saw that his aim left something to be desired. Though his objective was to hit the center of his target, he occasionally missed.”
The commander waited for the ensign to go on. But she didn’t. She just sat there.
It was only after they had stared at each other in silence for several long seconds that the commander realized something: Jiterica had come to the end of her story.
“Really,” said Wu, trying her best to seem enthusiastic.
“Yes,” Jiterica replied.
“Any...other observations?” Wu asked hopefully.
With an effort, the Nizhrak extracted a handful from memory. However, none of them was any more entertaining than the first one. In fact, a couple were actually less so.
“How about that,” said Wu.
Jiterica’s eyes seemed to narrow. For a moment, the second officer had the feeling that her companion was onto her—that Jiterica had realized how uninteresting her stories were and how hard Wu was working to make it seem otherwise.
Then the ensign said, “You should eat, Commander. Otherwise, you’ll be hungry when you start your next shift.”
Wu was getting hungry—and she had a not-so-inexplicable desire to stretch her legs. “I’ll tell you what,” she told her companion. “You wait here and I’ll be back in a moment or two.”
“Agreed,” said Jiterica.
As the commander got up and headed for the replicator slot, she considered the size of the gap she was trying to bridge in inviting the Nizhrak to dinner. Too large, perhaps.
But she wasn’t about to give up. If there was a way to relate to Jiterica, a way to make her feel more at home here on the Stargazer, Wu was going to find it.
And she was going to do it before she claimed her post on the Crazy Horse.
Chapter Eight
AS JITERICA MADE HER WAY down the corridor, most of her attention was focused on coaxing her containment suit forward in a rhythm that accommodated ambulation.
She gave the rest of it to Commander Wu, who was walking alongside her. “Yes,” she said, answering the question the second officer had just asked her, in a way calculated to spare Wu’s feelings. “I did find our dinner a worthwhile experience.”
“Good,” Wu returned. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
But Jiterica didn’t think that the human was quite as eager as her comment indicated. In fact, she was reasonably certain of it.
“Yes,” Jiterica agreed, trying to be polite.
Truthfully, she hadn’t been optimistic about the idea of a dinner exercise in the first place. However, she had gone along with it, partly to please the commander and partly to see if it might actually have a beneficial effect.
But from the moment Jiterica saw the chair in which she would be sitting, she suspected that she had made a mistake. And when she caught the look on Wu’s face and realized how uninteresting the commander found her stories, she was sure of it.
She had been foolish to imagine that she could ever relate to humanoids the way they related to each other. Even species as divergent as Pandrilites and Gnalish might find a common ground here on the Stargazer, but not a being compelled to wear a containment suit merely to get around.
“See you later,” said Wu.
“Yes,” Jiterica responded. “Later.”
The second officer’s intentions had been good ones. The Nizhrak had no doubt of that. But they could never become friends.
Jiterica was gratified by the knowledge that she was making a contribution as a member of the crew. To expect anything more than that was simply unrealistic.
She watched Wu vanish around a bend in the corridor and recalled what real companionship had been like—how easy it had been, how effortless. Perhaps someday she would know such companionship again.
But not here, Jiterica thought. Not on the Stargazer.
Nikolas found the person he was looking for in the ship’s gymnasium. As if she would have been anywhere else, he mused as he walked into the high-ceilinged chamber.
Idun was working out on the parallel bars, swinging her