The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [95]
She suddenly halted, her hand on the body of the device. Was there any point to doing this now? If they were going to be forced to leave Dorvan V, it mattered nothing how many readings she took and figures she gathered. Her hand slipped to the manual control pad and she shifted the telescope around. The autosensor quickly found the ship in high orbit and displayed the image of it on a monitor. Mika made out a bright white oval and a cluster of tubes and smooth forms beneath it, gleaming dully like carved animal bone.
“Never thought I’d see that again.” Wesley’s voice issued out of the darkness, startling her. He stepped out of the house to her side. “Come in. It’s cold out here.” Her husband reached toward the power switch for the monitor.
“It won’t go away that easily,” she said quietly. “Everyone is afraid, Wes. And they look to me because—”
“Because of your husband?” He sighed. “Go ahead and tell them there’s nothing I can do to make this unhappen. I’m not Starfleet and I never was.”
Mika embraced him. “But you wanted to be. Once.”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Don’t lie to me,” she replied firmly. “You know you can’t. You can’t hide anything from me, Wesley Crusher.”
He smiled ruefully. “That’s right. That’s why I love you so much.” The smile faded almost as soon as it had formed. “It was all so far away from me. I wanted it like that. And now…now it’s all come back, it’s found me again. That ship…that life…”
“Your mother?”
A slow nod. “Yes.”
Gently, Mika tilted his face down to meet hers. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why it hurts you so much.”
And so he did.
On the transport ship from Earth to Deneb IV, he watched the other kids playing together. They were younger than him, sure, but he still felt a little jealous. They had a freedom, a kind of randomness about them that was outside his experience, and Wesley found himself wondering what it would be like to be like them. As he sat with his padd and thumbed through books he didn’t want to read anymore, he realized that he was missing something. It took the duration of the trip for him to form it in his mind. Back home, his life had been a landscape of adults. The friends of his mother, his teachers, librarians, neighbors. Rarely did he meet children of his own age, and even then he found it hard to connect with them. They played elaborate games full of shifting rules, social conflict, and noise. Wesley liked to talk but they didn’t want to listen. The things that earned him attention and praise from adults gathered derision and disinterest from his peers. His intelligence didn’t count there; he stayed on the outside, pressed against a membrane of schoolyard laws he didn’t understand. He was fifteen and he had no friends.
But all those boys and girls were gone. On the ship, no one but his mother knew who Wesley Crusher was. He came to understand that he had an opportunity to change the map of his life, to reinvent himself. On Earth, all the adults had talked around him of the great futures he would live—as a doctor following in his mother’s footsteps, perhaps a mathematician or an explorer like his Starfleet father—but now he rejected them all. The pressure of being different, of such expectation, weighed on his young shoulders. He wanted to make that go away. Suddenly, the novelty of being ordinary seemed like the greatest challenge of them all.
At Farpoint Station he slipped his mother’s watchful eye and fell in with another youth, the child of a botanist due to ship out with Enterprise just like the Crushers. The boy was named Eric, and he had already made friends with Jake and Annette in the Deneban marketplace. Wesley put his books aside and stood among them, fighting down his need to impress, just listening, just surfing on the edges of their new and easy comradeship. He let himself go slack, be lazy, and it was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Wesley