The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [99]
Wes had been back on Earth for less than a solar year before his mother told him she was returning to space. Planetbound duty had not agreed with her, and word from Picard had filtered back that Enterprise’s post of chief medical officer was hers to take. He should have been happy for her. Seeing things through the eyes of a man, he knew now that the offer meant so much more to Beverly than just a better posting; it also offered a rapprochement with Jean-Luc. But on some level, despite all the growing up he had done in the past two years, Wesley was still a boy in many ways. He couldn’t see past a fear that she was abandoning him, and to go back to Enterprise with her, to be forced to see Jake and Annette and the others all over again, it was more than he could take. He packed the Telecaster and what little he had, and on the same day Beverly Crusher boarded a starship for the Kavis Alpha sector, Wes was on a tramp freighter lighting for Risa.
“You know all this part,” he said ruefully. “Risa, Lya Station Alpha, Rakon, and Kappa Depot.”
Mika smiled slightly. “If you’d have stayed on the main colonial circuit, you would have been discovered.”
“I didn’t want that,” Wes admitted. “I wanted to be rootless. I was sick of expectations.” Her husband’s fingers tightened around her hand. “You know how that feels.”
She nodded. “I do.” That was what had brought them together, that first time on Kappa, some shared experience. Mika’s path, if one stripped the surface from it, had followed a similar road to Wesley’s. Born into the family of ranking tribal elders, she too had gone through life with a raft of demands placed upon her head, of things she was to do and to say. Dutifully, Liso had bowed to the burden, but not Mika. Mika had fled, as soon as she was able, caught starry-eyed by a freighter captain who frequented the Dorvan system, a man by the name of Okona. He had turned out to be a mistake, but her ventures had not. In wandering, Mika gained an insight into the worlds beyond theirs that none of her kindred had, and when she met Wesley, somehow she had known that it was time to return.
He smiled and stroked her cheek, reading the memory in her face. “That was the best and worst day of my life.” The smile fractured.
She remembered. His guitar, his precious Telecaster, had been stolen. Mika had come across him, dejected and sorrowful that the last unbroken link he had to his past was gone. Together they searched fruitlessly for it. Instead, the two of them found like souls in each other and something deep and powerful between them. He had asked her to marry him shortly thereafter, and Mika’s joy when she said yes told her that no other choice she had made in her life was as right as this one.
“I saw him again that day,” Wes said distantly. “Before I met you. I’d gone back to the landing field, looking to see if someone had seen anyone with my guitar. I was on the way back…”
Her eyes narrowed. “The alien from the Enterprise? The…Traveler?”
He nodded. “He didn’t look any different. It was like no time had passed.”
“Wesley Crusher.”
He turned toward the sound of the voice and the humanoid was there, on the side of the rough-hewn Kappan street, resting against a shuttered storefront. “You,” Wes replied, “I know you. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
He blinked. “I’m trying to find my guitar…” His words sounded ineffectual and weak. He was a child with a misplaced toy.
“You know that you have already lost it,” said the alien. “These actions you are performing serve only to fix a frame of reference for this event, so that you might justify the loss to yourself.”
Wesley’s lip curled. “And here I was about to ask you to help me find it.” He resumed walking along the battered thermoconcrete roadway and the tall man fell in step with him. Evening was drawing in over the port town. In a couple of hours it would be twilight, lit in cold hues by the far distant blue companion star high on the