Caretaker (10 page)

Janeway lifted both hands to politely refuse the offering. “No, thank you. My name is Kathryn Janeway, captain of the Federation Starship Voyager—” “Just make yourself right at home.” Still smiling, the old woman pushed the glass into the hands of one of the silent engineers, then wiped her fingers on the bib of her apron. “The neighbors should be here any minute.” Something seemed to catch her attention behind them, and her smile widened. “Why, here they are now.”

A swarm of chattering people swept over them without warning, pushing between crewmen, clasping hands, kissing cheeks. It felt like some sort of ludicrous family reunion where none of the members really knew each other. Paris found himself pinned between Kim and a young woman in blue-and-white calico with hair the color of coal. “We’re glad you dropped by,” she told them with a shy smile. But the eyes she demurely averted seemed to imply she was anything but shy. Kim flushed but said nothing, and Paris felt himself return the girl’s smile with a kind of stupid uncertainty that had nothing to do with pleasure.

“Now we can get started,” the old woman announced with a clap of her hands. “You’re all invited to the welcoming bee!”

A bent, gap-toothed old man with nothing but a wisp of frail white hair cackled and picked up a banjo. “Let’s have a little music!”

Propping one foot up on the wooden steps, the old man stomped out a four-beat with his heel, then launched in with the banjo until it sang like a living thing. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Janeway and Kim, Paris watched the country folk dance and clap and laugh without feeling any urge to join in their festivities.

Well, he thought, with a cynical wryness that had passed for his sense of humor over the last year, it looks like we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Janeway paced to the corner of the long porch and back, decided she didn’t like the nervousness that it might imply to whoever was no doubt watching, and sat instead on the wide porch steps with her hands wound together into a single fist between her knees. Out on the impossibly perfect lawn, their “hosts” had spread a patchwork quilt of colored blankets. Now they wandered placidly among the crew with bowls and platters of food balanced on their hands, inviting everyone to join them as if they were all old friends. Janeway had already instructed everyone to eat nothing, drink nothing, even though Kim still insisted that the tricorder said everything was a hologram and couldn’t hurt them.

Maybe so. But she didn’t intend to take any chances.

Paris reappeared from around the back of the big red-and-green barn, jogging easily through the milling picnickers. In that fleeting moment of waiting—that necessary downtime between noticing Paris headed her way and standing for his actual arrival—Janeway almost forgot that he wasn’t just any other crewman, assigned to Voyager from just any other ship. It was the absence of his smart-assed smile, she decided. All of a sudden, he was doing and thinking and being just like any other responsible adult, and it wasn’t something Janeway had expected ever to see out of him.

You know what your problem is, Mr. Paris? she thought as he slowed to let Kim match his stride and approach the captain with him. You aren’t quite ready to trust you can make the right decisions, so you lash out at everybody who insists you work without a net. Like Starfleet, his father, Janeway.

She had to admit, Paris had behaved admirably on the bridge after the initial accident, when what needed doing was obvious and immediate.

He’d seen to Stadi, reported his findings, kept his mouth shut, and kept out of the way. Likewise, the reassurance of following Janeway’s straightforward commands right now seemed to calm him somehow—as though he was confident he could accomplish what she expected of him, and he was eager to prove that to her as well as to himself. She realized with a wry smile that labeling Paris as rebellious had been the biggest mistake Starfleet had made in his official record. He wasn’t rebellious, he was unsure, and they’d cut him loose and made him an officer too soon. If they’d held him around as a noncom for just another two years, he probably wouldn’t be here right now.

Which means none of us would be here right now. Janeway shook the thought away with an irritable sigh and pushed to her feet.

No sense dwelling on any of the might-have-beens now. Just like Paris, she was going to have to make do with the way things were now, and not worry about how they could have been avoided “if only.”

Paris and Kim joined her at the foot of the stairs, pulling together into a close circle so their voices wouldn’t carry.

“The crew’s scattered around this farm, Captain,” Paris reported, “but they’re all accounted for.”

That was something, at least. Janeway nodded and glanced around to take a quick count of who was in sight. “Move around,” she told Paris and Kim. “Scan the area. See if you can find anything that might be a holographic projector.”

“Have some fresh corn on the cob.”

She jerked a look over her shoulder, startled by the nearness of the old woman’s voice. Absurd as it was to expect she’d hear a hologram coming, Janeway still didn’t like the thought of being so vulnerable around any group of people whose species she wasn’t even sure of. She pushed Kim and Paris away from her, waving them on their way, and turned to place herself in front of the old woman as if that could prevent the hologram from following the younger officers if it wanted to. Old habits died hard.

“Can you tell me why we’re here?” she asked, ignoring the proffered plate of corn.

The old woman cocked her head, her incongruous smile never fading. “We don’t mean you any harm—sorry if we’ve put you out.

Just put your feet up and get comfortable while you wait.”

She lifted the steaming plate toward Janeway again, and the captain gently pushed it aside, trying to keep frustration out of her frowning.

“Wait for what?”

“Isn’t anyone hungry?” the old woman called to no one in particular.

She stepped around Janeway and held up her plate in gay exhibition.

“Come now, make yourselves at home. Sorry to put you out …”

Apparently, the program—or whatever—wasn’t equipped to deal well with direct questions. Janeway slipped her tricorder from her belt to scan the woman’s departure. Nothing new, but nothing useful, either. She closed the device up with a sigh.

Bounding out of the crowd, its silky coat floating around it like a cloud with every leap, a big puff of a dog galloped across the yard to bumble to its haunches in front of Janeway. She wasn’t sure what engaged her more—the gray-and-gold coat and laughing eyes that reminded her so much of Bear, or the sloppy wet ball the dog dropped on her feet. A sudden throb of homesickness caught her by surprise. The thought of never seeing Bear, or Mark, or Earth again lay inside her heart like a lump of black glass, and reminded her with stinging force that this dog, this place, these people, weren’t even real. Unlike the ones she’d left seventy thousand light-years behind her.

Picking up the soggy ball, she threw it toward a spot of open lawn without bothering to watch where it landed. The dog barked once with excitement, then tore off happily after its toy.

Janeway turned her back on it, choosing instead to keep her heart and mind on her own people while she considered.

The dog barreled past them in a thunder of legs and hair and tail, nearly tripping Paris as it skidded frantically in front of him in pursuit of nothing particular that he could see. He watched it tumble to a stop a dozen meters beyond him, grinning stupidly at him through a face full of hair as it dropped a leather ball so wet and sloppy that it didn’t even bounce. Paris could almost smell the pungent carnivore aroma of its breath all the way from here.

Why bother? he wondered as he looked at all the details incorporated into the shady animal’s movements, smells, and sounds. Even the individual hairs inside its ears stirred as though feathered by a holographically suggested breeze. Alien holographic equipment must be delimited just like the human-built kind—held back by the sheer volume of data required to construct even the simplest simulation. Why bother expending the memory and processing capability needed to generate such fine detail in a noncommunicative element that could just as easily have been left out of the simulation altogether with no one being the wiser?

The dog popped a single excited bark, then snatched up its ball and bolted off again. Paris shook his head after it. The whole point of calling them aliens, he reminded himself, is so we don’t keep trying to understand and judge them by strictly human standards. If that wasn’t true of aliens from the opposite end of the Milky Way, then who else could it apply to? He pulled his tricorder off his belt and hurried after Kim as the younger man rounded the corner of the house just ahead of him.

Kim wasn’t the only one waiting for Paris on the other side.

“The root cellar’s right over there,” the girl volunteered with a smile. She pointed toward what looked like a slanted box made of two wooden doors on the ground a few meters away.

Kim immediately aimed his tricorder in the direction she indicated.

“What’s down there?” It occurred to Paris that Kim’s naivete was amazing.

“Potatoes … onions …” The girl linked her arm through Paris’s and snuggled close to tip her head against his shoulder.

“But it’s real private …”

I’ll just bet it is. After all, it could be anything the hologram programmer decided it would be. The girl smiled up at him, real as life, and Paris had to admit that the spurt of hormones leaping through his system in response to her attentions felt equally heady and real.

Kim sighed and turned a shoulder to them both. “Paris, she’s only a hologram.”

He shrugged, ignoring the blush he felt creeping into his cheeks.

“No reason to be rude.” It was hard not to return a smile so sunny.

Considering how much detail the aliens had invested in something as trivial to the scenario as a dog, Paris couldn’t help wondering if they’d been just as meticulous with every aspect of their creations.

Kim’s little bark of surprise distracted Paris from his musings.

He pulled his attention away with a certain effort. “What?”

“Sporocystian life signs …” Kim thumbed through a series of readings on his tricorder, sweeping the area until he finally slowed to point at the sagging barn near the back of the property. “What’s in the barn?” he asked the girl as he started forward.

“Nothing.” She skipped after Kim with a bit more urgency than Paris had expected. “Just a big old pile of hay.” He felt her fingers tighten on his arm, but whether to hurry him alongside her or to try to stop him from following, Paris couldn’t tell.

“C’mon …” she cajoled. “Let’s go see the duck pond.”

Why bother? The duck pond wouldn’t be any more real than the barn, or the dog, or the girl. Kim’s readings were probably the most tangible thing around at the moment. Suddenly, her touch and voice didn’t gift Paris with quite the same thrill. He disengaged his arm from her grip, and moved up alongside Kim to distract himself with the blips and flashes racing across the ensign’s tricorder screen.

“There’s nothin’ in there,” the girl called from behind them.

“It’s just a dark, smelly barn.”

But a barn that smelled more like ozone than animals, and whose wide-open door seemed to suck down light like a ravening black hole.

Even as Paris watched, the lines of the building hardened and pulled in on themselves, sharpening the image into a knot of menace that only hid inside the shape of a barn. The levels on Kim’s equipment shot skyward.

“You want some deviled eggs?”

Paris stepped inside the cavernous building without answering her.

It felt colder in here, somehow, and as dark as a grave despite the long slats of sunlight filtering between the boards of the walls.

Something fractal and dusty lurked in a huge mound near the center of the structure, suspending a glitter of mist in the shadow-striped air above it. Hay, Paris realized with an odd little laugh. And the farm girl was right—it didn’t smell very good.

He felt Kim move unconsciously closer, and Paris squinted at the ensign’s tricorder as the girl tugged at his sleeve from behind.

“See? Nothin’ but hay.”

Paris said nothing. Beside him, Kim lifted the tricorder and cocked his head with a frown.

“There’s a life-form here,” the ensign reported after a moment.

“Just one.”

Paris spared a glance for the “life-form” behind them. “Where?”

Kim turned slowly, his eyes locked on the readout as he swept the small sensor unit across the farm girl, the hay mound, the walls.

“It’s everywhere,” he said quietly. The tricorder sang as he aimed it beyond the pile of hay. “I’m also reading some kind of matrix-processing device. It may be the holographic generator—Paris!”

Kim spun, dragging on Paris’s arm as he waved the tricorder toward the barn’s rear wall. “Humanoid life signs!

Over here!”

A bolt of lightning seemed to explode through the building, smashing back the shadows. Paris ducked away from the flash, shielding his eyes with the crook of his arm, and felt Kim stumble back against him. On the tail of the blaze, a presence as heavy as thunderclouds swelled into being in front of them.

Paris pushed Kim behind him, and squinted up at the farm girl as she materialized in their path, eyes aflame. “I’m not ready for you yet,” she announced in an old man’s gravelly baritone.

The dog’s vicious snarl underscored her words, filling the darkness behind them. Paris heard Kim’s yelp of surprise as he whirled to face the dog, and he slapped at his comm badge before his conscious mind had even pieced all the images together.

“Paris to Janeway—!”

He didn’t feel the blow that sent him flying—only heard the explosion of pain inside his skull when the farm girl’s fist made contact, and saw the wave of darkness that crashed up to meet him as he fell.

She tapped her comm badge in response to the abortive shout.

“Janeway here.” Dancers and picnickers crowded around her, clapping in time to the banjo man’s tangy playing. She turned her back on them, trying to grab some minimal quiet in the midst of all this artificial revelry. “Paris?”