The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [98]
The smile drew short. “For the moment, I would suppose not.”
He took a breath. “Look, if you want something from me, spit it out. Otherwise, could you go away? I like my privacy!”
“I will,” replied the alien, moving back to the hatch. “I was looking for something in you, Wesley Crusher, but I can see it is not there.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The dark, deep eyes met his, and Wes felt a sudden sense of impossible, unknowable distance. “For all species, how we meet a challenge defines what we are and what we will become. But if we refuse it, that too is a choice, the price of which is never fully apparent at the moment in question.”
“I don’t understand,” Wes replied.
The alien climbed down through the hatch. “No,” he said, with sadness in his words, “you do not.”
The youth watched the strange humanoid go and a chill passed through him. Wesley felt a peculiar sense of loss in the pit of his stomach, but when he searched inside for something to define it, it melted away, leaving nothing.
He was approaching seventeen when his mother announced that they were going home. Starfleet Medical offered her a posting in the San Francisco campus on Earth and she accepted. Things had become awkward for Beverly Crusher aboard Enterprise ever since the incident between Jake and Wesley, and in the aftermath as her son had become a self-made pariah among the youth community aboard ship, the doctor’s relationship with Captain Picard had become stiff and professional to the point of brittleness. On his last night aboard Enterprise, Wes happened into an impromptu gathering taking place in one of the arboretums. Watching from a distance, he saw Jake Kurland dancing with Annette, the girl laughing as Jake made a show of his new cadet-gray bridge duty uniform.
Crusher crossed paths with Lieutenant La Forge. The engineer’s easy and open manner had lessened in recent weeks, ever since the destruction of his android friend Data during a disastrous away mission on Vagra II. The mechanoid’s remains would be accompanying the Crushers on the ship that would take them back to Earth.
“Hey, Wesley.” La Forge nodded. “I didn’t think I’d see you here.”
“I’m not stopping,” he explained. “I’m just…taking a last look around.”
Geordi was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry things never worked out for you and your mom here.”
“I’m not,” Wes replied, and found he meant it. “Out here there’s no room to breathe, Lieutenant. Out here it’s all about being on the edge every second of every day, and if you make one mistake it can wind up ending you…” He trailed off, feeling a pang of guilt at reminding La Forge of his loss. “I don’t fit that,” he continued. “I just want an ordinary life.”
“Yeah,” said Geordi. “Well, good luck.”
Eric was coming over, a questioning look on his face, but Wesley was already leaving.
A week later they were orbiting Earth and Enterprise was just a memory.
In a store off a side street on Telegraph Hill, Wes bought a battered reproduction of an old electric guitar and found something that could, for a little while at least, take his mind off things. The Telecaster was at least a hundred years old, modeled on an original instrument from the middle of the twentieth century. He picked up the ability to read music as easily as a plant drew in sunlight, and in the residential block where he lived, Crusher would sit on the balcony in warmer days and write music in his head, composing strings that bled out all the angry and the sad inside him. He played in coffee shops; he made, if you could call it that, something of a minor name on San Francisco’s scene. People who came to see him left with their emotions stirred; the slight, moody teenager played with muted brilliance. He made the Telecaster sing. There were some girls and some good times, but mostly he was drifting, drifting with the music.
He didn’t see his mother much. They couldn’t stay in one another’s company for long before conflicts and disappointments rose up and bred the same arguments, time after time. That they loved each other was never in doubt,