The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [58]
“I do not approve,” said Miral firmly. She was feasting on her daughter’s kill, licking her fingers. B’Elanna smothered a smile.
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Was that the reason you chose the human?”
“No,” B’Elanna replied. She wasn’t angry. Her mother’s fierce, practically rib-crushing embrace had bled most of the anger from her. “I chose him because I fell in love with him. He is intelligent, and brave, and attractive, and funny.”
“Bah,” snorted Miral, opening her mouth and exposing sharp teeth as she took another bite. “Humor is too prized among humans. Better to be courageous and have honor.”
[172] “He does.” B’Elanna wasn’t arguing, she was simply stating a fact. Her coolness did not go unnoticed by Miral, who paused in her chewing.
“I thought you unchanged, ’Lanna,” she said. “A little while ago. But you have proved me wrong. You do not rise to the bait as once you did.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” B’Elanna replied. “I still get very angry much too easily. And,” she admitted, “sometimes for the wrong reasons.”
“You are young yet,” her mother said. “It has taken me all my life to learn such lessons, and I am not sure I have learned them fully myself.”
B’Elanna hesitated. She had told Miral all about Tom and her namesake. But there was so much more to tell. She had been gone so long, and so much had happened to her.
And of course, there was the Barge of the Dead.
“Mother ... Commander Logt told me you had a vision while I was gone.”
Despite her evident hunger—Miral was thinner and more sinewy than B’Elanna had ever seen her—the older woman stopped eating.
“It was powerful,” she said, softly. “The more so because of how close to death I was.”
“What?” B’Elanna cried. “You were sick? They never told me that.”
Miral chuckled. “Of course not. To tell you of my weakness would steal my honor. I was very sick indeed, my little one. I was halfway between the worlds, at the very least.”
Slowly, in soft, hushed tones, Miral Torres began to speak of her vision. B’Elanna hung on every word, [173] hardly daring to breathe lest she miss something. So much of B’Elanna’s own memory of her vision had faded, as such things did, but there was enough for her to realize that somehow, despite all logic, she and Miral had shared the same vision.
When Miral had finished, B’Elanna spoke. She told of finding the ancient bat’leth, of not being able to separate what was real from what wasn’t, and the support her captain and her husband had given her on this potentially deadly trip to make peace with her mother and herself.
“I was so afraid that you had died, and that this was the only way I could get to say good-bye,” B’Elanna finished, knowing her voice was thick. “And then when I came back and Father told me you’d died on the Challenge, I thought it was true.”
Gently, Miral laid a hand on her daughter’s knee. “If it were true, that I had died while you were gone, I would have gone straight to Sto-Vo-Kor. Your courage in the vision lifted my dishonor—if, indeed, there was any real dishonor to be lifted. Perhaps that, too, was only in my mind.”
She turned and cupped B’Elanna’s face in two hands. “Child ... you are your own person, but I need to know: Are you Klingon?”
B’Elanna opened her mouth to answer, but there were no words. Was she Klingon? Was she human? Was she a harmonious blending of the strengths of two great peoples, or was she a mongrel, a mistake? She thought of how intensely she wanted to “spare” little Miral her Klingon traits—her heritage. It had been Tom’s love of that part of her, too, that had helped her [174] see that she would have been making an enormous mistake.
She had sensed that this Challenge was scouring her, searing her, stripping away all that did not serve her innermost self. But what did that leave?
Who did that leave?
“I—I don’t know yet, Mother. I just don’t know.”
She thought she saw disappointment in Miral’s face, but her mother managed a smile. “There is time yet for you to know. Having a child of your own will force you to look