Chapter Text
"Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!" And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, "You may rest a little, now."
Alice looked round her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!"
"Of course it is," said the Queen, "What would you have it?"
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
"I'd rather not try, please!" said Alice....."
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Lewis Carroll.
I would rather not be in the Delta Quadrant.
Oh, it's a fascinating place; under other circumstances, in some other situation, I would love to explore its boundaries; ferret out the secrets of every star, wander through the market places, and forums, and bazaars, through the streets and by-ways of its many worlds. After all:
"We are explorers."
I've said that enough times. It's cold comfort; an attempt to hold on to the life I once had, the role I was familiar with. I once explored for no reason but joy in curiosity satisfied, in the relative safety of the Alpha Quadrant. Now I explore of necessity, with no safety to be found in over seventy light years range.
The explorations seem to turn inward as often as outward now. The challenges are endless, the demand for change constant; and there aren't many guide-posts. The reliable things aren't so reliable anymore, and I have to look for new solutions to problems I had thought long since answered beyond question or debate. I suppose, in a way, it's as great a test of my own commitment to discovery as I could ever face, but I can't say I wouldn't often prefer to have been able decline the test. Oh, well. Even cold comfort is still comfort, of a sort.
We are explorers.
***
I returned to the story circle five weeks after my first entrance. It was a hard wait, and I would have gone sooner if I hadn't needed to claim a sliver of revenge. It was bad enough that I'd frozen like a rabbit in the glare of a hand light at the simple use of my own name. I'd thought I'd been prepared for the shock of decompression, for entering the circle as just me. Somehow I'd never thought about the question of names, or how I'd react when the man who's served beside me for all these months looked me in the eye and addressed me as "Kathryn". The humiliation of finding myself behaving like a sour spinster who's just been goosed by a drunk, and for so little reason, was hard to brush off. Chakotay's too much the humorist not to have seen the humor in it. A grown woman undone by the use of her own name, in an informal setting, that she knew was an informal setting... I haven't felt like such a jackass in years. And then I'd managed to make a mess of my attempt to pull his leg in return... and given him yet another reason to laugh... and another reason for annoyance. I could have gotten past that. Not easily, mind you, but I was working on it. The circle still called, and I wanted to go back.
But then he had to come to my door and noodge me. I mean really... "Maybe when you come to the circle I'll tell the story of why I kept the name 'Joseph' "And all the while with that damned "butter wouldn't melt in my mouth" innocence, wide-eyed as a thirteen year old altar boy. I sat out the next four weeks in the face of Tuvok's escalating efforts to lure me back, knowing that if it was a pain in the neck for me it was probably no less a pain for Chakotay... and served him right. The man is a menace, and much too aware of his own charm. A simple "Come on back...we'll still be there when you're ready" and I would have been there like a shot. All I'd really been doing that evening was what I'd been doing most evenings in the four weeks since I'd talked with Paris: reading over every text on methods of command I could find in the computer's data banks. That night it had been "Command Seen Side Wise: A Treatise on Alternative Approaches to Leadership" by Commodore Nyota Uhura, rtrd.. She's become a favorite of mine, and not just because I remember her from my days at the Academy, when she stalked the campus like an aging lioness, her gray hair a halo around a face so striking it made us young women think yearningly that, if we could look like that at her age, we'd sell our souls. The texts she wrote, and her memoirs, have a delighted, irreverent tone; full of odd, unexpected insights into leadership that may, God willing, help me find an antidote to over twenty years of following in the footsteps of the likes of Tom Paris' father.
But as much as I'm enjoying Uhura, and as embarrassed as I was over my own stupidity, when I heard Chakotay's and Tuvok's voices out in the corridor that evening, muffled but still identifiable through the sound proofing, I was ready to set my padd aside. I stalled mainly because of the tag end of fluster left from the week before and a worried uncertainty as to whether, having botched the thing entirely, I was so much wanted there as someone they couldn't politely leave out now that I'd made my entrance.
And then the "Red Napoleon" had to get clever, and try to push my buttons.
So I waited it out in my quarters, getting by on the friendly, if challenging, company of Mzee Nyota.
At the end of four weeks I decided I'd held out long enough. I really did want to hear that story, and dignity wasn't one of the more important attributes recommended by the authors I'd been reading. Uhura had plenty to say in favor of it... but more to say in favor of empathy, and humor, and connection. "Dignity is no use when it isolates. James Kirk was often no more than a laughing madman. But he was a loved and trusted madman, and a passionate leader who gave his all, and that's worth a hundred sober icebergs, silent and immured in their command demeanor. Better to fail in dignity, and succeed in the hearts of your crew. Dignity will not stand by you, in the end. A ship of loyal crewmen will, so long as they know and love who they follow." So I set my dignity aside, and even my green and my beads, for all I love them, and went to the circle.
Understand: I knew there would be a sting in the tail of the story. I'd watched him as he told the first part that day in my ready room, and I'd listened to his voice. I'd seen the anger there, heard it twist and bite into his words. I wasn't going in blind, any more than I went into the circle blind the first time. But like the first time, I was ambushed; caught off-guard by the anger and hurt that tore free. I said afterwards that I knew he hadn't intended to provoke a confrontation. It was hard to say; hard to find anything to say that night. I don't think he saw what I saw, for all we were both there. But I had to say something. He'd bled for us, had led his old crew to bleed for us, and as frightened as I was, I wanted to find some way to let him know that I'd listened, and that I wasn't going to turn and rip at him. I've done that enough times before, and for less reason.
I'm not as good as I'd like at relationships. I'm good at numbers, and logic, at sudden leaps of scientific intuition; I'm good at regulations and order; but I'm not really good at people. Oh, I won't say I'm terrible. I've been working at it too many years to be terrible. But it's harder for me than for some. Part of it is not always knowing how to hold a balance between the role of the Captaincy and the role of "just Kathryn". The dignity thing again. "Kathryn" can be a terrible romp. I've often felt the Captain shouldn't be.
Part of it is the separation that comes from being too bright, too interested in the wrong things to really quite connect with most of the people in the world. That's one of the things I love about that hellspark, B'Elanna. If I start talking about the superselection sectors in a Hilbert space she knows what I mean, and doesn't get that glazed look most folks do, even in Star Fleet. But with most people I have to work a bit, where others seem to step in easily with open revelations and easy conversations. And sometimes, when I'm angry, or too emotional, it all goes sour. I rip out with a comment I never should have made; or worse, freeze up like an iceberg, not knowing what to say. I usually try to pass that off as reserve.
With Chakotay it's twice as hard. He isn't the easiest man in the world to know how to reach. He seems to hover between a calm professional demeanor; tough, frustrated anger; and a relaxed intimacy that throws me off-center. I never know if I'm talking to a Star Fleet officer, a Maquis Captain, or a friend. I don't always know which one I want to be talking to either. The officer is easiest. That's what I usually choose. It's safer for both of us. But even then, sometimes I get it wrong.
That night, trying to find a way to reach him that wouldn't rake through pain already too close to the surface, I missed.
He was standing at the side of the room, wrapping his pipe, and his stance...
There's a way people stand when they're hurting. It's like they have a sunburn — an all-over burn, bad enough that their skin blisters, bad enough that the air feels like fire and ice, and their clothes are torture. They stand like they wish they could pull themselves six inches away from everything.
Chakotay stood like that, with the room in a rip-tide around him.
It was frightening.
I looked around, and could see my crew, the Fleet crew, trying to step in, to give some comfort; saw the Maquis reach out, some accepting what my people offered, some pulling into their own group, not wanting to take from people they blamed for the pain they'd suffered. And around the edges I could see Fleet and Maquis both, the ones with the fewest contacts across the groups, hovering against the walls and exchanging the first wary, hostile glances.
And Chakotay wrapping his pipe.
He hadn't meant to start a confrontation. That night, he hadn't... not in the sense I meant, or he meant. But looking around the room, I could only pray that the circle would do the job he'd intended.
He'd prayed, and passed the pipe with an intensity you couldn't miss. The gold chain had slithered from his hand and pooled, and I'd known a little where it would take us, as damning in its way as thirty pieces of silver. His tale had paced its way from the Wallowa valley, and the Nez Perce's flight towards Canada; to the bitter confusion of an Academy cadet, trying to understand his own identity in a world that sees Vulcans and Klingons with more clarity and perception than it sees a son of the people who once owned the land the Academy is built on, who owned all the Americas, North, South, and Central. From there it thundered on to the agony of the Cardassian Demilitarized Zone.
Behind him had come the other Maquis, angry to the point of bursting with tales untold outside their own little family.
He'd tried to make it a communion. But in his own pain and passion, he'd done something he hadn't planned, or desired. I don't think he saw it; I think he was too swept up in his own pain and memories. But I'd seen it: seen the glances pass from Maquis to Maquis. I'd seen them stand together in unity, Maquis again for the first time since I'd crammed them into Star Fleet red-and-black, or blue-and-black, or gold-and-black.
They took up that identity like a lit brand; like the Crusaders' Red Crossed shields and banners.
And the Fleet crew sat there, with no choice but to accept a blame they knew they hadn't earned; the blame for not making things right in a world they no more understood or controlled than the Maquis who had suffered; no choice but to accept responsibility, and reach out in compassion as best they could...or pull back, angry at the burden they couldn't accept, couldn't escape, couldn't ignore. Some reached out. Some pulled away.
It's a bitter thing to carry a blame you haven't earned; that's yours through no failure beside the inability to accomplish every task of the thousands of conflicting tasks life presents you with. But whatever angers I was afraid would flare, I was sure he'd intended the circle as a joining of our people. And I didn't know how to tell him that, in spite of fear, I had listened, and cared. Trying, and failing; seeing the annoyance close his face, I tried again, teasing a little, using his "Chief Joseph" to tell him I saw what he'd attempted... and was met with a "Kate" that was as harsh as a reprimand, and a look so sour it made me think of a man who, given a crate of lemons, wonders angrily if he has enough sugar in his cupboard to make lemonade... and doubts it very much.
At that point I gave up. I'm not so stupid I can't see the writing on the wall; know when I'm so far from finding the right words, or the person I'm talking to is so deaf to the words behind the words, that to do more will only be to dig myself a deeper pit. I added a word or two of "Well, thanks anyway", threw in a "Goodnight, Commander" for good measure, and fled to my quarters. Once there I sent Murphy the Great and Powerful a spare, dry, scientist's curse that he had to help me make a mare's nest of an honest attempt to cross the barriers between myself and my first officer. And then I prayed to any gods or powers that might be listening, if gods and powers there are, that the tumult I felt striding towards us never arrived, and that Chakotay's circle would stand intact in the face of all that anger.
I didn't sleep well that night.
The next day passed quietly, and I began to hope that, whether through prayer, or Chakotay's desire for unity, or just plain Irish luck, we'd avoided the storm. First shift went by without a ripple. As second shift went by I read in my quarters, relieved that I didn't have to deal with social unrest, or even with the unsettling intimacy of the circle. It was just as I was getting ready for bed, wrapped in a terry robe and ready for a late shower, that the first shoe dropped. My door chimed. Without even knowing who was there, or what they were there about, my stomach sank. I wrapped the robe tighter around me, and tied off the sash.
"Who's there?"
"It's me, Kes."
"In..."
The door sighed open, and she came in, moving slowly, the bulging natal pouch on her shoulders like an over-loaded knapsack. Ocampans lost the draw when it comes to reproductive arrangements... and Kes has had worse luck than most Ocampans. Talaxian and Ocampan biology doesn't mix well or easily. She looked pale, and drawn out. She hadn't gotten pregnant easily. The whole story is long, and the science alone is enough to have provided her and the doctor with material to fill several treatises, but the short form is that, in the end, she'd had to essentially manufacture a child, and then undergo a lot of misery to make sure her body didn't then reject it. It had worked, but at a hell of a physical cost. She wanted the child, and suffered the pain and the discomfort willingly. But still she looked haggard, and I often wondered watching her if the result could possibly be worth the cost she had paid, and was still paying. I waved her quickly to a chair, and she sank down with a sigh, sitting well forward to leave room for the fullness on her back.
"Thank you, Captain."
"You're more than welcome, Kes. Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea?"
She smiled. "No. No caffeine, remember? I have enough problems without getting wound up on that sort of thing, anyway."
"Of course. I'm sorry. I forgot. Juice?"
"No, nothing. All I'd have to do is get up in ten minutes and use your bathroom if I did...and I'd rather sit. I thought I had sympathy for pregnant women before... but now I can't imagine how people stand it so well. My back hurts, my neck hurts, my feet hurt. I spend more time in the bathroom than anywhere else these days... and I feel like a soap bubble that's about to burst."
I grinned, a bit wryly. "Don't look at me for comment. I never wanted one enough to put up with it myself... and certainly not enough to put up with all you have. So tell me, why are you here? Somehow I doubt you came to talk small talk about pregnancy with me."
Her face sobered, and one hand slid up to the curving bulge behind her neck, as though she were comforting the unborn child. "There's trouble. I thought you should know. There was talk in the mess hall this evening... and the Maquis and the Fleet crewmembers seem to be splitting up, taking sides. It's worse than I remember it being even at the beginning, when I first came aboard. People are really angry. The Maquis seem to have decided they've had enough of Star Fleet, and Star Fleet rules, and they aren't happy with their status; how you're running the ship. Nothing new, but it's as though it's all come to a head. And the Star Fleet officers are furious. The Maquis seem to be baiting them, and they're biting back. Neelix and I had to talk Bill Knowlton and Mummad Falid out of a fight... and I'm not sure they won't have it out later anyway." Her eyes met mine. "I'm frightened. Neelix is more frightened. He's seen this sort of thing before. He's talking about loading us onto his ship, and leaving... he's afraid if this really flares up one of us will get hurt; him, or me, or the baby. I've told him I have to stay at least till I've delivered — there's just no way we can manage that without the holodoctor to help. I think that's stopped him for now. But he's scared to death. I'm not sure I blame him."
"Isn't all this a bit premature? The circle was only yesterday. If we give it a few days, maybe things will cool off."
She shrugged. I can't say she looked any too confidant. "Maybe. But there's an ugly feeling. I'm almost afraid to drop my mind shields. Every time I relax I seem to get hit with someone's anger, or pain, or guilt."
I looked at her. Her face was gray, her eyes tired and worried. She's aged, and that night for the first time I saw her not as a girl, but as a woman... a tired, frightened, weary woman.
"Damn." I paced over to the replicator, and called up a cup of coffee, then stalked back to the sofa and settled back, wishing I were anywhere but where I was. We sat silent for a while, me sipping my coffee, and wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now, Kes watching me with worried patience. After a few minutes she stirred in her chair, restlessly trying to find a position that was comfortable. Her eyes met mine.
"He didn't mean it to turn out like this, you know."
I didn't need her to tell me who "he" was.
It bothers me when people defend him to me. I feel like the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland, or the Red Queen in Looking Glass; an "Off-with-his-head" termagant with nothing better to do than torment the wide-eyed, innocent little first officer. As though there's nothing I'd rather do than beam him out into space and "forget" to reassemble the particles afterwards. I sipped my coffee, and tried to rein in my irritation.
"Kes, I know he didn't mean this to happen. That doesn't change the fact that if things are as bad as you think he's handed me a hell of a situation to deal with."
She nodded, sadly. "But he didn't want this. If you talk to him..."
"I intend to." I heard my voice turn on the words, angry and terse. No wonder his friends thought I wanted to reduce him to sub-atomic particles. "I'm sorry, Kes. That didn't come out right. Please, forgive me. I'm tired, and worried, and I'd hoped this would never happen. I've managed to keep this a Star Fleet ship for two years now, and it looks like it may all be about to fall apart. And I don't know what to do to undo the trouble."
She looked at me, her face a placid mystery. "Maybe that's the problem, Captain. Maybe it isn't something to undo."
I didn't know what to say. I just stared at her.
She stroked the curve on her shoulders again. "One of the things I had to accept before I could make this little one, was that there were some things I could change... and some things I could only adapt to. You said you'd managed to keep this a Star Fleet ship, but it isn't true. It never was a Star Fleet ship... not since you came here. It's only pretended to be one. Maybe it's time you accepted that you can't change that, and adapt instead."
"No matter what you heard last night the Maquis are by no means all saints and martyrs, Kes. You wouldn't have liked it much on a Maquis ship. I don't think you know what 'adapting' to the Maquis means."
She hoisted herself cautiously out of the chair, and carefully found her balance. Suddenly she smiled, and the youth and mischief I hadn't seen since she came in was there again.
"No. I suppose I don't. But neither do you. None of us will till it happens, will we?"
"Kes..."
"Think about it. They may not be what you'd have chosen, but they're still your people, and they're not going away. Is it so much harder to accept a few Maquis than it is to accept Neelix and me? You don't make us pretend we're Star Fleet..."
I thought about trying to pass Neelix off as Fleet. It wasn't a pretty thought. Neelix couldn't be Star Fleet if his life depended on it. But the Maquis...
"It isn't the same thing, Kes."
"No? I suppose you know best. You're the Captain. But think about it anyway. Now, I have to get some rest if I'm going to be any use at all tomorrow. Goodnight, Captain."
After she left, I sat fretting over the whole situation.
"One law for all men." That's what Star Fleet was. It's why I'd insisted all along that Voyager be a Star Fleet ship. No exceptions, no favoritism. Not for my people, not for his. One law. And if it was my law, it had been Chakotay's law too, a law he'd accepted once. It was a good answer. The Federation had given our worlds a unity, and an ethic unsurpassed in the history of our people. The Prime Directive, the Vulcan concept of the IDIC. To me Star Fleet had always seemed an expression of the best of that. The best of the best. And since we had been stranded here the ways of the Fleet; the regulations, the ranks, the rules, the uniforms, had all came together to supply a discipline and an equality that held our people together, when we could have been nothing more than a motley collection of warring splinter groups. Fleet, Maquis, Deltan Natives. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Bajoran Orthodox. Instead of bickering little subgroups, each fighting to get our way, we were one group... a Star Fleet group. The crew of Voyager. Now, thanks to Chakotay's story circle, it looked like that unity was dissolving, and I was damned if I liked it. But the cat was out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle, and I couldn't see any way to put it back.
Kes had said I wouldn't know what giving in and adapting would mean. But I had a sick sense that I did know what it would mean.
If I let go, let change come, I could see the possibilities careening out of control. Maquis insisting on their own identity; insisting that, if they weren't Star Fleet, they didn't have to live under Star Fleet law. And if I gave in on that, then the Fleet personnel would feel betrayed, wanting the same freedoms; and I couldn't afford that. It's easy to forget that a ship is an artificial environment. It takes hundreds of careful, coordinated actions to keep it running, to keep it a healthy place to live, to keep it strong, and able to defend itself, fast and able to move. Someone had to be minding the store, living up to the demands, submitting to the disciplines. If not the Fleet people, then who? And there was always a worse possibility beyond the immediate one of discontent and unrest.
Mutiny.
It is a simple truth. We can't survive without the Maquis. They can't survive without us. But if either side becomes too unhappy with the situation they may mutiny, throwing both Chakotay and me aside, killing all hope either of us had of return or even survival for our people. The end of all hope.
I was afraid. I've been afraid of that possibility for a long time, but that night it ate into me like never before.
I don't like to lose control. I never have. Control is sometimes the only thing that stands between life and death, and that's more true now than ever. But the only way I could see to take back control, now that stability was breaking down, would be to resort to force... and lose the very things I most cherished about the world I'd lost, and the world I'd tried to create here. Betray the standards I had struggled to uphold.. and betray the trust of my crew. Including, goddamn it, the man who'd sown the wind, all unintended, and raised up a whirlwind for our harvest.
As angry as he's made me on occasion, as often as I've wished I could find a way to contain him in the neat confines of his rank and role... as often as I've wished I could have had a more conventional first, who never threatened the security of the familiar truths and patterns I know and love, he's a good man. I like him. In a strange way, I trust him, and always have. I never would have made him first officer if I didn't, no matter how expedient the answer had been politically. Only a fool puts a true enemy, a criminal, in the position of second d in command. There's too much power there, too much room to take control, break your leader's power. It would have been better to have left him and his people behind, or killed them, or locked them in the brig and struggled on without their help, undermanned and desperate though we would have been, than to trust Voyager to him if he weren't a man I could respect. At the least, I could have held to the fact that I was in the position of greater strength, with my ship, my command, with the greater force of crew; and from that strength offered him a lower position, and placed Tuvok in the second chair. He would have had little choice but to give way on that, so long as he and his people were well treated.
I hadn't taken that route, because I'd seen a better one. When I'd had to hunt Chakotay, I'd had to study him. What I'd found I could admire. He'd had to make some hard choices. They were choices the Federation couldn't afford to condone. But he'd chosen the only path open to him that left him clean in his own eyes... and I valued that. I still do.
I just wish he'd stop presenting me, by accident or intent, with choices that leave me feeling less honorable.
It was a long while before I slept. It was beginning to look like a trend.