The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [103]
“It may have to be,” said Wes grimly.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Wesley Crusher.”
Wes turned to see Lakanta staring at him with a fixed, rigid gaze. A chill ran down his spine; something in his friend’s manner rang a wrong note with him. The man seemed different somehow, as if the intelligence behind those sleepy eyes had suddenly altered. “Lakanta, we have to do something,” he began, the night air around him abruptly still.
“Yes, you do,” said the other man.
Crusher realized that they were surrounded by silence. No one was speaking, there were no sounds of distant chirping insects, no gentle wind through the streets. He turned to see Mika, his mother, the others, all of them statues frozen in a moment of glassy, solidified time. “What…? What’s happening?”
Lakanta’s face hazed and shifted like slow smoke. The man he had known for years re-formed into a familiar alien aspect of pale, silvery skin. “Wesley,” said the Traveler, “hello again.”
“Where’s Lakanta?” Wes growled. “What have you done?”
“Lakanta is still here,” said the alien, tapping his chest. “He has always been an aspect of me. Just like the owner of the store on Telegraph Hill, the captain on that freighter for Risa, the Ferengi who stole your guitar.” He gestured at the others. “I haven’t done this, Wesley. You have. You’ve come to this place, to this point of choice, and something inside you knows that it will be the most vital one of your life.” The Traveler glanced around, taking in the township. “What you do and say here will lead these people down a path to dissolution or destruction.” He smiled slightly. “The one called Otakay, he was correct. Your choices are all illfated.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. But he did. There was a pressure in his mind, like a strange double image. Another set of memories flashed through him, of events from the life of a very different Wesley Crusher. A gray uniform, a girl who changed shape, incredible sights at the edge of the galaxy, a father figure, choices made, and a vision quest…
The alien was nodding. “You see it now. You understand why I followed you through this life, from the moment we first met aboard the Enterprise. I’ve been the steward of you, Wesley Crusher. Waiting for you to come to this moment, to understand the greatness inside you.”
“I’m not great,” Wes insisted. “I’m just a man. A musician, a husband. I’m nothing special.”
The Traveler chuckled. “Humans. You have such potential, and yet you shackle yourselves with doubts.” He nodded to Mika. “All these events are the skein of one possible time line, the evolution of a future from a moment in your past when you dreamed of leading an ‘ordinary life’…A life where you were not someone with a destiny, where you were just a commonplace man.”
Anger flared inside him. “You played games with my life? What gives you the right?”
“I did nothing but watch,” said the alien. “You did this, Wesley. You felt the burden of your gift so strongly that it threatened to break you. For one moment, more than anything, you dreamed of living a life without such a responsibility. And so you have.” He held out his hand. “Are you ready to go back?”
The frustration crackled through him, and Wes felt his hands contracting into fists. The decision he had made in that divergent moment was hard and dark there in his thoughts. “Why?” he shouted. “Why should I be forced to make that choice?” Full of undirected fury, he advanced on the alien. “Why can’t I choose to live a life that doesn’t have such great importance?” He shot a look at Mika and his heart ached. “Why can’t I live in…in ordinary days?”
“My friend,” said the Traveler, his words heavy with an infinite, solemn sadness, “I have lived for a very long time and I have learned a single, simple truth; there are no ordinary lives. Everyone has a path, and each person’s journey affects the motion of the universe around him or her. The smallest of events ripple out to change things on a cosmic scale. This is life.