The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [24]
“You know, Mother,” she said aloud, just to hear her own voice, “we could have had a nice, traditional reunion in some pleasant café over a cup of coffee.”
The soft, seemingly endless patter of rain was her only answer.
Even had her mother not decided to play this potentially deadly game of hide-and-seek with her only offspring, Torres knew that Miral wouldn’t be caught dead [70] in a pleasant café. No, if they weren’t here in this miserable wet wilderness, they’d be knocking back mugs of bloodwine and singing loud, grating Klingon songs. Maybe this was better.
She didn’t want to admit it, but a part of her—a very small part—was enjoying this. B’Elanna had always thrived on pushing her own limits. She dove on every engineering challenge with gusto that would have pleased Kahless himself. She couldn’t count the hours she had lain awake in bed, in recent years with Tom snoring softly beside her, staring at the ceiling while her mind chewed on one problem or another. Her desire to excel, to make a difference, had driven her all her life. But Torres had never really thought about it too much.
Except now, she had a lot of time on her hands with often nothing to do but think. And she wasn’t necessarily happy with what she saw floating to the top of her consciousness.
Why had she been so driven? It was easy to lay the blame on her parents, but that was not really the whole story. Her mother had pushed B’Elanna into Klingon culture with too much enthusiasm and too little preparation for it. Everything she had done had been done full tilt, with lots of yelling and broad gestures. Her quiet father had not been able to compete. B’Elanna still hadn’t had a chance to talk to him, to ask him, as one adult to another, what had really transpired between him and Miral. That had been one of the things she had wanted to do, but she hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected her mother to throw still one more impossible challenge at her half-human [71] daughter, hadn’t expected to be sitting naked but for a dead animal skin alone in the wilderness while cold rain sluiced down—
Torres wiped at a face that was wet with more than raindrops.
This was no game. This was no stint in a monastery, or lecture, or four-hour excursion to sit, bored to death, at a performance of Klingon opera. This was very real, was very deadly, and Miral had done this for a reason.
Torres reviewed her time on the Barge of the Dead. Even now, her heart sped up at the recollection. What a terrifying experience that had been. All her repressed memories of Klingon myth and legend had shot to the surface, with sharp teeth, sharp weapons, and sharp, painful memories of failure and disappointments.
She’d done what she’d needed to, in the misty realm of whatever it had been—spirit, shared dreaming, subconscious. And beyond all the logic with which the very pragmatic B’Elanna Torres understood, somehow Miral had known about it.
“But that wasn’t enough for you, Mother, was it?” she said, again speaking aloud. “I couldn’t just save you in the spirit world, I had to come here and do it all over again in the material world. How many times do I have to prove myself worthy to you?”
And the answer came almost like a physical blow inside her skull: Until you believe it yourself.
She laughed, shakily, more unsettled than amused by the forceful revelation. “Well,” she said, “that could take forever.”
But even as she said it, she knew it had better not. It had been fine to be the sullen rebel, the wild child, [72] when it was only herself who stood to lose. But things had changed. Now, there were others. Her mother, stubbornly ensconced in the wilderness until Torres came to find her. Her father, who so clearly wanted to make things right again, if he could. And her own, immediate family: Tom, whom she loved more than she hated herself, and her beautiful, perfect daughter,