Tales from the Captain’s Table (28 page)

“I understand,” I said, taking note that although Rosenzweig had helped Hana, he also seemed to resent having to lend such assistance. Of course, the founding of the settlement possessed something of an antisocial aspect, as did the layout of the place, which contained no real communal areas. I could not imagine living in such an environment, though I had no difficulty at all believing that Hana did so.

“May I see her?” I asked. I wanted to take care of Hana, get her moved to an appropriate facility if necessary, and get back to Starbase Magellan and the
Enterprise
as quickly as possible.

Rosenzweig—I realized that he hadn’t offered his given name—pointed toward the door past the fireplace. I padded over to it and pushed it fully open. Even before I saw Hana, I heard her labored breathing. I walked into the room, which was small and almost completely filled by a large four-poster bed, its uprights reaching nearly all the way to the low ceiling. Amid heaps of pillows and linens, Hana’s form was almost lost. She lay on her back, propped up against the headboard, her eyes closed. The bedclothes pulled up to her chin seemed barely to rise with her respiration. She looked even slighter than I remembered her.

I turned and gestured to Rosenzweig, who stood in the doorway. I pointed him back to the main room, then followed him, quietly closing the door behind me. “Has a doctor seen her?”

“There are no doctors on Sentik, Captain Sulu,” he said, employing my rank for the first time, obviously recognizing my insignia. “I’m sure you noticed from your shuttle that there aren’t many modern conveniences here. That includes physicians.”

“But people must get sick or injured,” I said. “Surely you must have a means of dealing with such inevitabilities.”

“People do get sick or hurt, and mostly their families take care of them as best they can,” Rosenzweig said. “Only a handful of people here are completely alone. As for medical personnel, there are two individuals who each have some training as a medic. Both visited Ms. Shimizu several times during the last ten days and did what they could for her.”

“Do they know what’s wrong with her?” I asked, hoping to get an idea of what I could do for Hana.

“What’s wrong with her?” Rosenzweig echoed, clearly surprised by my question. “Nothing, really. She’s just had a hard life, and she’s old.”

Hana was one hundred fifteen, I knew—past middle age, to be sure, but not necessarily so old that she should be reaching the end of her years. In my own life, I’d known people who’d lived robustly into their one hundred forties and fifties. Still, not everybody experienced the same things in life, nor did every person age in the same way. I asked, “Did the medics provide a prognosis? Did they say whether she would recover from her fall?”

“She might recover from the fall, but she won’t recover from her age,” Rosenzweig said. “She’s dying.”

I thanked Rosenzweig for everything he’d done, and he quickly left, evidently anxious to return to his own house and family. Once he’d gone, I pulled a chair from around the table in the main room and brought it in beside Hana’s bed. In the quiet broken only by her ragged respiration, I studied her face as she slept. She looked like an apparition of the woman I’d last seen more than twenty years before. Her pale flesh had grown looser with time, particularly around her neck, and the complex of wrinkles suffusing her features had expanded and deepened. No vestige of color remained in her hair; even her eyebrows had faded to white. Her slight form seemed smaller and more frail. Even in repose, she appeared old and worn down, as though no longer capable of drinking in the everyday elixir of sleep.

As I waited for Hana to wake, I peered around her room. It contained no adornments: no artwork, no photographs, no possessions pushed into a corner or set upon a shelf, no mementos of any kind. A window in the back wall looked out on a stand of trees, and two large chests—one at the foot of the bed and one below the window—probably contained Hana’s clothes, but other than that, the room was bare. I found the lack of personal items discomfiting, though perhaps not entirely surprising.

I wondered how receptive Hana would be to my help. That she had managed on her own for more than two decades in that demanding environment demonstrated her independence and vitality during that period. But if what Rosenzweig had told me was true, then that time had come to an end. On the journey to Sentik from Starbase Magellan, I’d researched assisted-care facilities, but I’d needed to know Hana’s condition and her feelings about the situation before I could decide which would be best for her.

“Demora.” At first, I couldn’t even tell whether Hana had spoken, or whether perhaps I’d just heard a gust of wind or a tree branch brushing against the outside of the cabin. I looked at her and saw her eyes still closed, but then I realized that her breathing no longer came in rasps. At the same time, her lips moved, and she spoke again, louder this time. “Why are you here?” The words did not sound as though they had been offered as a challenge, but neither did they seem particularly welcoming.

“Hana,” I said, and elected to sidestep her question for the moment. “How did you know it was me?” Maybe she’d heard my voice when I’d been talking with Rosenzweig, but I really thought she’d been asleep at the time.

“Your perfume,” she said simply, her eyes still closed.

I felt my brow knit. I liked wearing fragrances, and while I never did so on duty, I’d brought some with me on the shuttle. When I’d woken earlier, still en route to Sentik, I’d checked the autopilot and verified my location, then washed up and dabbed on some perfume. But that didn’t explain how Hana had recognized me…unless—

“Was I wearing this same fragrance when I saw you at—” I stopped, about to make reference to Great-Aunt Nori’s funeral. “When I last saw you?” I finished. I’d been using a couple of particular scents for a long time, even since my teens, but that Hana would recall one from almost a quarter of a century ago seemed remarkable. I certainly couldn’t remember what perfume I’d worn all those years before.

“Yes, you were wearing that fragrance,” Hana said. She opened her eyes and looked toward me. Her slow, deliberate movements contributed to her air of fragility, as if the mere act of turning her head required both great effort and great care. Still, her gaze did not waver as it fell upon me. “Why are you here?” she asked again. “It must not be a coincidence that you’ve come at this time.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “Mister Rosenzweig sent a message that you weren’t well to Starfleet Command, and they contacted me.” I hesitated, and then added, “I came as quickly as possible.”

A quizzical expression crossed Hana’s face, and it was obvious why. Despite being grandmother and granddaughter, we’d had virtually no relationship at any time in our lives, and were really more strangers than family. And although I knew that some vague sense of kinship had motivated me to travel to Sentik IV, I was also aware that what drove me was more intellectual than emotional; I understood the concept of family rather than feeling the joys of such a connection.

Still, the fact remained that I’d gone to Hana, and even though I hadn’t adequately explained the reasons why—either to her or to myself—she did not ask again. Instead, she shifted her attention to the reality of my visit, and to its implications for her. “Have you spoken to the medics here?” she asked.

“No, not yet,” I said. “Mister Rosenzweig told me briefly about their conclusions, but I thought I’d seek them out once you and I had spoken.”

“You may consult them if you like,” Hana said, “but there’s really no need. I’m simply old, and my health is poor. I’m going to die before long, and there’s nothing to be done about that.” She didn’t sound angry, or fearful, or as though she suffered any of the emotions I would have expected a person to feel when they believed themselves near the end of their days.

Hana closed her eyes and straightened her head on the pillow. “I’m afraid that your trip has been in vain,” she said.

Even though Rosenzweig had already said much the same thing, Hana’s words should have moved me, should have elicited my sympathies, but they didn’t. Hana’s remoteness, her stoicism, rendered impotent any feelings prompted by her situation. Speaking as impassively as she had, I said, “I think I can help. Someone can see to your needs, and that you’re kept as comfortable as possible.”

Hana said nothing for a few minutes, and I thought that perhaps she had dozed off. But then she said, almost in a whisper, “Do
you
intend to stay here with me?” Her inflection told me that she thought the notion of me looking after her completely absurd.

“I thought I could take you to an assisted-care facility,” I said.

A small, sharp sound emerged from Hana, and it took a second for me to realize that it had been a laugh. “Talk to the medics,” she said. “They’ll tell you that any trip off-planet would likely kill me. Even a journey in stasis would probably be too much for this ancient body of mine to survive.”

“I will talk to them,” I said. I felt totally disconnected from Hana, her closed eyes an apt metaphor for the walls separating us.

“It doesn’t matter,” Hana said. “Even if I could travel, I wouldn’t. This place—” She opened her eyes as the bedclothes at her side moved, and she struggled to pull her arm free of the blanket. When she had, she waved her hand weakly about, clearly intending to take in the whole of her house and land. “This place is my home. It’s been my home for twenty-four years. I won’t leave.”

I wanted to ask Hana what kind of a home that would be for her in her infirmity. Although the small population of Sentik could have provided a tightly woven community, I doubted that it actually did, or would—an estimation bolstered by my interaction with Rosenzweig. Also, according to my research, the founding of the settlement had been conceived as a flight not only from technology, but from society as well. Rosenzweig had made it clear that whatever he had done for Hana during the past couple of weeks had been an aberration, and that he would not continue such efforts. I suspected that no one who lived there would be willing to provide Hana the care she would need.

“You can’t will away the fact that you need help, and it doesn’t seem like you’ll get much from the people who live here.” I said to her. “According to Mister Rosenzweig, you don’t even have much food. I saw your crops…they need to be harvested, and many have died. If you choose to remain here on your own, how do you expect to survive?”

“That’s very simple,” Hana said, and she turned her head to look at me again, the gaze of her dark eyes locking with mine. “I’m not going to survive.”

Sulu shifted in her chair, using the movement to cover her glance around the tavern. Strolt continued to observe her, she saw. She’d brought him to this point in her tale, where Hana had needed help and Sulu herself had been in a position to give it, just as Zeeren Tek Lom-A needed help right now that Strolt was in a position to give.

Here, she knew, the story needed to turn.

The decisions she would soon reveal she’d made with respect to Hana could send the wrong message to Strolt, in effect validating the choice he’d made to forsake the delicate balance of power between the Federation and the Tzenkethi Coalition in order to help his mate. But those decisions Sulu had made would provide only the context of what she wanted to convey to Strolt, and not the substance of her moral claim.

For that, she would need to describe the events that had motivated her during her time on Sentik. The mission to Devron II remained classified, and so she would not be able to reveal its details: the location; the identities of the seven-member Starfleet team, which had included Captain Harriman and “Iron Mike” Paris; and the reason for the mission—namely, the Romulans’ attempt to infiltrate the Neutral Zone and establish a covert base there. But even without divulging such specifics, she felt confident that she could still give an account of what had occurred, and especially of what had been sacrificed.

As Sulu charted the story in her mind, she absently reached forward and plucked her wineglass from atop the table. She slid her middle and ring fingers around the stem and raised the glass to her lips, pausing briefly to note the wine’s intense violet-red color, and to sample its strong bouquet of aniseed. She sipped it, and recognized at once the Argelian vintage, so similar to an Earth Tempranillo. It was one of her favorites, and one she’d never encountered anywhere but on Argelius.

Sulu peered over toward the bar, to where the bartender had retreated. When their eyes met, he lifted his glass, part toast, part encouragement that she continue with her story, she thought. Curious, but with no time to dwell on the odd circumstances surrounding this tavern or its host, she set the glass down and returned to Sentik IV.

Feeling as though I needed some air, I opened the front door of Hana’s cabin and walked out into the dreary day. She and I hadn’t said much more to each other after she’d made it clear that she would be staying there—that she would be
dying
there—no matter what I said or thought. I hadn’t asked about her time on Sentik, and she hadn’t asked about mine in Starfleet. Nor had she mentioned her son, my father. Walking alone between Hana’s cabin and her dying crops, and figuratively between the needs of her failing life and a quick return to my own existence, I wished that I could speak with my father, seek his opinion on what I should do, draw on his strength, wisdom, and experience. But that was impossible.