Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [6]
With Deanna Troi’s departure, Beverly had been hoping to find a new morning workout partner and was glad to see that her need for a partner dovetailed nicely with Miranda’s desire to regain her body shape. “Aoki wasn’t this bad,” she had said. “After she was born, I snapped right back to my old weight, but the twins were a trifle more demanding.”
Beverly’s leotard was green and silver; Miranda had gone for all black with a bright red sash around the waist. On one end of the sash was a stylized seagull with an odd-shaped wooden stick in its mouth—a baseball bat, Miranda had explained. The symbol was the logo of the Port Shangri-La Seagulls, a team in the Cestus Baseball League for which Miranda’s sister Olwyn was the starting shortstop.
As Beverly bent over her left leg and grabbed her left foot, Miranda grabbed the doctor’s silk sash and used it to anchor Beverly and pull her farther down. “How’s Aoki handling things?” Beverly asked as she stretched her groin muscles as far as they would go, then stretched them some more.
“According to Vicenzo, she’s now decided the whole thing’s a jolly game and that she’ll win some sort of prize if she takes good care of the twins.” Miranda smiled wryly, even as Beverly straightened and bent toward her right leg. “It can’t last, but Vicenzo intends to enjoy it while he can.”
“Wise man, your husband.”
“Mm. Part of me wishes I was there to help him—and be with the twins, they’re so beautiful—but I could hardly pass this opportunity up, could I?”
Nodding acknowledgment, Beverly leaned forward, Miranda leaning back and pulling on the sash. She hadn’t yet met Vicenzo Farrenga, but it seemed Miranda was happy with him. She remembered back on the EnterpriseD, Miranda had a succession of bad relationships, so when she’d settled down with a linguistics professor at Bacco University back home, Beverly had been thrilled.
Miranda continued, “Second officer of the Enterprise is the position of a lifetime. That wasn’t going to come along twice.”
“Probably not, no,” Beverly said through sharp breaths as she stretched downward.
Then Beverly straightened, and Miranda let go of the sash. They shifted their feet so that now Beverly’s heels pushed on Miranda’s ankles. “You were lucky,” Miranda said between short breaths as she tried to reach her right foot. “When you were raising Wes, they allowed families on ships.”
“They still do, to some extent,” Beverly said. While the Enterprise-E did not accommodate the familial needs of large numbers of its complement the way the EnterpriseD did, families weren’t completely forbidden, either. This was in keeping with Starfleet policy in the wake of the arrival of the Borg and later the Dominion. While there were decided advantages to not separating officers and crew from their families for extended periods, there were concomitant disadvantages to having children and civilians on a starship that faced dangers both predictable and unexpected on what seemed like a weekly basis.
Still, exceptions were made. Beverly’s departed head nurse had raised her son Noah on the Enterprise-E—and alone, after her husband died in the Dominion War. The eight-year-old Noah was now with Alyssa on Titan.
Straightening, Miranda said, “Yes, but I can’t ask Vicenzo to come here, can I? What would he do? The ship has a linguist, and Vicenzo’s specialty is ancient languages, not contemporary ones.” She went to her left. “Besides, I don’t fancy having my children on a starship. I don’t think I could bear to have Aoki or the twins go through what poor Jeremy Aster did.”
That caused Beverly to shudder. Previously, Miranda had been a sensor officer reporting to Data, and it was during one of the D’s missions that Marla Aster died in an accident on an away mission, leaving her young son, who was with her on the ship, orphaned.
“They’d still go through it if you…” Beverly hesitated,