To Storm Heaven - Esther Friesner [47]
“No, it isn’t.” Her regarded her speculatively. “You think the Ashkaarians have some kind of psionic powers, then?” Troi pursed her lips. “I am not sure. It was there, but it was so faint, I might be wrong.” “We both might be. Maybe it’s nothing more than two very strong personalities at work, nothing psionic behind it at all. You know, my mother used to tell me about an uncle of hers. He liked to tell her long, pointless stories about his hunting trips. He told the same ones over and over and over again and somehow she always found herself sitting there and listening.
She said that when she knew he was coming to visit, she’d make up a dozen plausible excuses to let her escape. Once she even fixed it so one of her friends would call to rescue her with some phony emergency, but it never worked. He’d start up the stories, she’d try one of her excuses, he’d listen to her politely, he’d even tell her that he understood how it was with young people and it was fine with him if she went/But she didn’t go~ Not once. Not even when her friend made the fake emergency call to help her out. She actually heard herself telling the friend one of the excuses she’d prepared to use on her uncle. Then she went right back, sat down, and listened to him tell the one about the possum that got away for, oh, maybe the fifty-third time.” Riker wore a look of grudging admiration for the great-uncle he’d never known. “Now that’s what I call a strong personality.” “What is a possum?” Lelys asked. The Orakisan had joined them in the course of Riker’s story.
He looked at her without answering. He knew that there was no sense in putting off the bad news he had to tell her, though he wished with all his heart there were. No, not putting it off, he corrected himself.
Changing it. Turning back the clock, giving her brother a little more time if that wouM do any good, in the long run.
“Ambassador Lelys, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Chapter Eight
THE PEACE OF THE ASHKAARIAN NIGHT was torn by the jagged sound of a woman’s grief-stricken scream. The door of the inn flew open and a horde of people poured out, eyes wide, to hear the heartbroken wail.
“Dead! Dead! Oh no, it can’t be, please, no/” “Dead?” Ambassador Lelys repeated softly. She stared at Commander Riker, tears trickling from her eyes, her word the echo of the unknown woman whose wild cries had roused the whole inn.
“I’m sorry.” It’was all he could say, all that anyone could ever say at such a time, and never enough. “If there’s anything we can—” She turned her back on him, pressing her hands together. “Not now. Not—” The anonymous Ashkaarian woman howled her grief into the night again, and Ambassador Lelys seized hold of the sound as a desperately needed diversion from her own sorrow.
“Listen! Do you hear that cry? We had better go and see what it means.” She started after the surging crowd, in a daze of sorrow, as if Riker had never told her that her brother was dead.
“Wait.” Counsellor Troi laid restraining hands on her, drawing her back. “Go inside. Whatever is happening now, you are in no state to get involved.” “Let me go.” The ambassador shook her head stubbornly. “I am all right. I will mourn my brother afterward.” She broke away from Troi and raced after the people. Troi and Riker exchanged a look and followed her.
The woman whose screams had brought all the inn and most of the village out into the streets of Kare’al stood bathed in icy moonlight, her face turned to the sky. In her arms she held a blanket-wrapped bundle.
A corner of the blanket fell away to reveal a thin face, pale in death.
Troi drew in a sharp breath. “Shomia.” Beside her, Ambassador Lelys was shaking her head again, rapidly, like a dog trying to get dry. “The girlm Impossible. We just saw her less than an hour ago, alive, well, running—” The innkeeper himself approached the sobbing mother of the dead child. “What happened?” He touched the woman’s shoulder carefully, as if a heavier touch would shatter her