The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [161]
And then he smiled.
“Don’t smirk at me, Will Riker.”
Deanna Troi threw a pillow at her fiance, which he allowed to hit him. He then picked it up from the floor and rushed headlong at her, pushing them both onto the bed. He leaned over her, pinning her to the mattress. “Is this what our marriage is going to be like? You throwing things at me, and me dodging them?”
“You didn’t dodge that one.”
“I let it hit me.”
“Of course you did.”
Riker stared into her brown eyes. He could have easily got lost in them, but just as he was losing his focus, Deanna’s eyes narrowed. “You’re serious about this?” he asked more in dismay than seeking information.
“Absolutely. I want us to write our own vows.”
Riker got off of her and sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong with the traditional ones? I like tradition.”
“Typical military man.”
“I’d like to think I’m anything but typical.”
Deanna draped herself over Will’s shoulders, breathing into his neck. “That’s certainly true. But my mother once shared her memories of her wedding ceremony with me, and my parents wrote their own vows. I always thought it was romantic.”
Will sighed. “But Deanna, you, better than most women in the universe, know exactly how I feel about you.”
“You’re right, I do. I feel how much you love me every time I see you. It just pours out of you.” Since they had gotten back together, they had reestablished the slight mental connection they had once shared. They were again truly imzadi. On rare occasions they could even pick up a stray thought or two. But the emotional bond, that was strong as could be. And it had become so effortless that they no longer knew how much of it was intuition and how much was their empathic connection. “But our wedding, it’s when we stand in front of our friends, our family, and the entire universe and declare our love for each other. Declare. We can’t just say”—she lowered her voice, dropping her jaw into her chest, to do her best impression of her husband-to-be—” ‘Hey, you know how I feel.’ “
Riker cocked his head and smirked. “Was that supposed to be me?”
“Do I need more facial hair?”
“I don’t think I’d ever say that.”
“Will, when you live among a race of telepaths, the things you choose to say are as important as…no, more important than the things you think.”
“I’m not really a man of words, Deanna, I’m more a man of action.”
She leaned over him and kissed him. “Fine, then show me.”
Riker closed the tricorder, saving his message. He strode into the main chamber, where Beverly was standing at a podium computer, buried in the displays in front of her. “How’s it going?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
She shook her head. “Not well. Several hundred years separate these Fabrini from the ones on Yonada. Their language evolved a bit over that time. The universal translator and I can make out a lot of words but not all of them. Maybe if I were aboard the Enterprise …It’s got a larger database of linguistic algorithms. And I’m having particular issues with certain nouns.”
“Such as?”
“There are words like ‘cavity’ and ‘vein’ that translate fairly easily because of context. But there are other words, like ‘ventricle’ and ‘hypothalamus,’ that are more just designations. We use centuries-old Latin to name a lot of these things, so there’s no telling what the Fabrini used.” Beverly looked at Riker, trying to gauge what effect her words were having on him. “I’d hate to be someone a couple of thousand years in our future trying to translate our medical databases.”
Riker stared at his tricorder, remembering the problems he had just had trying to record a final message, then placed it on the table. “Words are nothing but trouble. I’m done with them.”
“I wish I had something more for you to do, Will, but working on this database is fairly arcane at this point. I don’t know how much you could really help me.”
“I’m not looking