Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  “A little rough. I’d be a liar if I said otherwise,” Tom answered. “I’m learning to get by on less sleep than I thought was possible.”

  “Every first-termer says that. But things usually begin to settle down after a few months. As you get into the routine.”

  “Do you know what my father wants with me?” he probed. A summons from Admiral Owen Paris was something to make even seasoned veterans quail, and his son frankly felt no different.

  Klenman’s smile broadened. “No idea,” she lied. And at that point the door to his father’s office opened and Admiral Paris appeared, smiling just like his aide. “Good morning, Cadet,” he intoned with false formality, “come in, please.”

  Tom followed him into the office, which was, as always, festooned with pictures of him and his sisters. Seeing that array always made Tom feel vaguely uncomfortable, and he wondered what others thought when they scanned the desk full of family portraits. That Owen Paris was a proud father, a devoted family man?

  Now his father was shaking his hand, his eyes squinting in a smile, cheeks quivering slightly as he pumped Tom’s arm. “I wanted to be the first to congratulate you,” he said. “I made Patton withhold the announcement until I had a chance to talk to you.”

  Even Tom couldn’t deny there was unabashed pride in his father’s voice. He’d heard that tone all his life, as long as he could remember, and didn’t doubt that his father had expressed pride in the way Tom rolled over in his crib.

  “I couldn’t be happier about this, Tom. You and Charlie Day are two of only six first-termers to be named to the Parrises Squares team.”

  Okay, thought Tom, this is it. Take it slow, no need to rush. Take a breath. Smile.

  “Thank you, sir,” he heard himself saying, his voice echoing in his ears as though he were listening to someone else entirely. “But . . .”

  His voice caught in his throat, and he hated himself for revealing his nervousness. He coughed, hoping that might somehow explain the crack in his voice. “Actually, I’m not sure I’ll be accepting a place on the team.”

  His father stared at him. A long moment passed, and then the admiral said, merely, “I see.”

  “It’s a huge commitment, for one thing. Everybody knows Coach Patton makes you eat, sleep, and breathe the sport. I think I’d rather concentrate on my studies this year.” There—that sounded perfectly reasonable.

  Admiral Paris scrutinized his son, a gaze Tom knew well. He held his father’s eye levelly, trying not to succumb to the impulse to keep talking. That’s what his father did: intimidated people into giving themselves away with that unrelenting stare of his. Finally the admiral spoke, and Tom felt a small twinge of triumph that he hadn’t yielded first.

  “You’re required to participate in a sport. If not Parrises Squares, what will it be?”

  Well, his father knew how to cut to the point. Just as well, it had to come out some time. Tom inhaled.

  “I’m going out for a new sport. Well, an old one, actually, but the Academy’s never competed. Downhill skiing.”

  Tom admired his father’s self-control. Not a twinge, not a blink indicated his attitude about this statement. He just kept his neutral gaze bearing down. “Skiing. Didn’t realize you had any interest. Never even mentioned it.”

  Tom knew his father was upset. He always spoke in that terse, clipped way, dropping the subjects of sentences, when something had gotten to him.

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. The chance to be on the Academy’s first team ever, kind of help build it from the ground up—it appeals to me.”

  “You’ve never even been on skis.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. Quite a few times, when Mom took us on vacations to Lake Tahoe.” A small pause, and then Tom couldn’t resist adding, “You were never able to make it. Too busy.”

  His father’s eyes took on a flat look. “I see. And you’re pretty good, are you?”

  Tom shrugged. “Not as good as I’ll be with more practice. We’re transporting to the Andes this weekend to start the regimen.”

  “Is there a young woman involved?”

  Tom desperately wanted to smile at this—as though this insane decision could only be motivated by his attraction to a female—but he employed his own self-control and remained stoic. “No, sir. That is, there are women, as well as men, who are joining the team, but there’s no one I’m especially interested in.”

  “I see,” his father repeated.

  A faint and ineffable sensation of something he couldn’t identify began to glow in Tom. His father was flummoxed. He was repeating himself with nonphrases because he didn’t know how to contend with this unexpected rebellion.

  Admiral Paris rose and walked to the wall of pictures on his wall—the one with the lineage of Starfleet Parises, the veritable nobility of the Federation. He stared briefly at one of them, then turned to face his son. “Well, your mother will be disappointed. She was your biggest fan at the Institute, and I know she was looking forward to cheering you on at the Academy.”

  Liar, thought Tom. You’re the one who’s disappointed, and you can’t even admit it. “I’ll talk to Mom,” he said. “She’ll understand.”

  “Of course. She cares about your happiness. No matter what it costs her. As you mature, maybe you’ll develop that kind of compassion.”

  “I’m sure I will, sir,” said Tom. He wasn’t impervious to the idea that his mother might be disappointed by his choice, but he also felt sure she would be just as proud of his downhill racing as she would be of his playing left flank. His father was just using every ploy he could come up with to affect his decision. The warm feeling, still unidentified, glowed brighter in Tom.

  “I’ll just ask you to think carefully before making a final decision. It’s a tremendous honor to be on the P.S. team as a first-termer. You don’t want to discard that offer lightly.”

  It would have been easy to acquiesce to this simple request. But the small flame that burned in Tom was inextinguishable. “I’ve thought very carefully, sir,” he said with what he hoped was quiet dignity. “My decision is made.”

  A heavy silence for a moment, and finally Admiral Paris said, “Then I’ll respect it.”

  The flame burst into a veritable conflagration. Tom couldn’t quite understand the feeling: he had clearly disappointed his father, whose opinion of him had determined most of the course of his life, and he had fully expected to leave this meeting wretched with conflicted emotions.

  Instead, he felt a palpable triumph, a sense of victory. As he exited his father’s office and waved a cheerful good-bye to Commander Klenman, he suddenly identified this new and giddy feeling: it was power.

  • • •

  The ancient sports of downhill and slalom racing had lost popularity somewhere in the late twenty-first century, some time after traditional skis had been abandoned and bareshoe skiing was the accepted norm. But even then, the sport had been almost entirely supplanted by snowboards and racing was losing favor to increasingly acrobatic aerial skiing. And of course, hoverboards made them all seem quaint and old-fashioned.

  But a few diehards in Europe and Scandinavia kept the older ways, skating on the long slats that seemed so eccentric to many, passing down the skill to their children, who passed it down, so the sport was maintained in various pockets of the world.

  Tom’s mother was the one who first introduced her children to what was then considered an archaic activity, but of her two daughters and one son, only Tom showed any interest in it. He was ten when he first slid down a gentle slope at a resort near Lake Tahoe, under the guidance of Henri Islicker, a patient gentleman from Switzerland who was trying to reintroduce the sport to Americans, one child at a time. Islicker was a grandfatherly man with a great shock of white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard, and brilliant blue eyes. Tom liked him instantly, sensing a patience and lack of judgment in the old man that made him unafraid to risk embarrassment by attempting this unusual sport.

 
There were scant few children who cared to try this unaccustomed activity, with its awkward skis and ungainly poles. But when Tom first stepped into the boots, he felt instantly confident, sure that this was something he could do, and would enjoy.

  That first run was down a slope that declined no more than five or six degrees, but to young Tom, it was thrilling. The caress of the cold breeze on his face, the white of the snow and the deep green of the pine trees etched against an unclouded winter blue sky, the scent of conifers—all these sensations combined to create a euphoric effect in the young boy.

  Within a day Islicker had taken him onto the more difficult slopes and watched admiringly as Tom carved turns as though he’d been skiing for years. It was, Islicker told him, a natural talent that could never be taught, simply enhanced.

  By the end of that week they were on the most advanced of the slopes, skiing powder where no one had been before them, Islicker being careful to instruct Tom about the danger of avalanches, what conditions to look out for and how to avoid them. Tom absorbed all this, and kept up with the courtly old gentleman turn for turn.

  His mother brought him back seven more times over the course of the next eight years, and those few occasions were his only experience on skis. Each time they had returned to Portola Valley, he had wanted to tell his father what he’d been doing, but some instinct told him that his father wouldn’t think much of this strange old sport, and so he kept quiet. He focused instead on Parrises Squares, which his father supported with passion.

  Now, his clandestine experiment with skiing had provided the instrument of his first challenge to his father, though Tom didn’t think of it this way in the beginning. Only later, after the incident in the Vega system, did he trace back the events and begin to understand why joining the ski team had been such a heady experience for him. He was playing out a drama as ancient as Oedipus.

  The Academy ski team was a motley group at first, consisting of six men and four women, all of whom were human (off-worlders generally thought the sport truly bizarre), only one of whom was more competent than Tom. That was Odile Launay, a young woman from Beziers, in southern France, whose father had been one of those European ski enthusiasts trying to revive the sport. Odile had grown up on the slopes of the Pyrenees, and was as graceful a racer as Tom had ever seen.

  She also had the most amazing green eyes, two large emeralds set in an oval face as milky white as a pearl, offset by a cloud of hair that was somewhere between blond and red, and which Odile referred to, laughing, as “jaune commes les fraises,” or strawberry blond.

  Tom was determined to develop no feelings for her other than the camaraderie of fellow team members. He could admire her skiing, respect her determination on the slopes, and enjoy her thoughtful analysis of their practice runs.

  But he would not think about those eyes, or about the full pink lips which she would bite from time to time when she was concentrating, kittenish white teeth making a dark pink indentation which sometimes stayed on her mouth for minutes.

  He would not even notice things like that.

  “You could cut tenths of a second off your time if you would only work on your prejumping,” she would observe, with that delectable accent that Tom could have listened to all day. “You are so stubborn, Tommy. Pourquoi?”

  “Maybe I need a strong woman to show me the error of my ways.” He grinned, and was gratified when she didn’t look away, but rather lowered her lashes slightly, so that she seemed to be peering up at him through a fringe. He felt his legs become uncertain.

  “You are saying that you want me to coach you?” she inquired innocently.

  He sighed. How would he last for a year keeping his distance from this delightful person? “Yes, dearest Odile, I would love for you to coach me—in skiing, in French, in life and love and all good things.”

  She eyed him with bemusement, her adorable nose wrinkling slightly, tender mouth pursed. “You can take nothing seriously, Tom. How will we succeed if you have no commitment to the skiing?”

  “I am committed, I swear I am. More than you could ever imagine.”

  And he tried to keep his concentration on the sport, but as he followed Odile down the practice runs of Andermatt or Chamonix or Whistler or Crackenback, her lithe body in the formfitting ski suit made his pulse quicken.

  I need, he thought, les douches froides.

  The fledgling ski team didn’t particularly distinguish itself that first year, but it didn’t embarrass itself, either. The women fared best, placing third in four of their meets and almost taking second in one. Odile actually had the fastest time in several of her runs.

  Four of the men focused on slalom, while Tom and a gentle but powerful Finn, Brunolf Katajavuori, were the downhillers. Tom and Bruno had a friendly but ardent competition, each pushing the other to the limit, topping and retopping each other with neither one gaining the clear edge.

  Bruno was a tall, big-boned man with sand-colored hair, pale brown eyes, and a fair complexion with permanently ruddy cheeks. His thighs were the size of small tree trunks, giving him plenty of muscle strength to steer turns confidently at high speed.

  “How’d you get legs like that, Bruno?” Tom asked enviously. “You could kick holes through titanium with those things.”

  “You were raised soft,” joshed Bruno. “We lived in the mountains, and my parents made us ski to school every day. It wasn’t so bad going, because it was downhill. But it was miserable climbing back.” He whacked his hand on his massive thigh. “It did great things for the legs, though.”

  For the final meet of the season the team transported to Wengen, in the Jungfrau district of the Swiss Alps. It was the site of the legendary downhill course known as the Lauberhorn, which Tom and Bruno would ski in competition with seven other schools from around the world. It was just over forty-six hundred meters long, with a drop of slightly more than a thousand meters. This gave it a vertical gradient which averaged about twenty-seven percent, or fifteen degrees. However, there were sections with a gradient of almost ninety percent, or forty-two degrees. This was like skiing straight down.

  The day of the competition dawned gray and raw, with an icy wind that snapped nastily at exposed skin. Tom didn’t like skiing in these conditions, but he accepted the fact that if you chose a winter sport you’d better be prepared for winter weather.

  Things hadn’t improved by the time he and Bruno transported to the top of the run. Even in his polytherm suit, Tom felt the cold, and he knew his muscles were tightening in response. He kept flexing and stamping on the ground to keep himself as limber as possible. He glanced over at Bruno, who didn’t seem affected by the weather.

  “Don’t you even feel the cold?” Tom inquired.

  “This isn’t cold,” Bruno replied mildly. “When the mucus in your eyeballs freezes—that’s cold.”

  Four racers, from Austria, Peru, Canada, and Switzerland, preceded Tom down the course, with the Austrian clocking the best time at 2:21:63. This was well short of the world record of 2:20:04, which had been set over three hundred years ago when downhill racing was still a wildly popular sport.

  Tom’s best time on this run was 2:22:87. He’d have to ski a personal best—by well over a second—in order to overtake the leader.

  He crouched at the top of the run, within the starting hut, muscles tensed, determined to rise to this occasion. The cold faded away, as did any sense that other people occupied the space. For the seconds before the starter’s chime, Tom was alone on the mountaintop.

  Then he was off, springing forward, driving to accelerate right from the top, then bending into a low egg position, shoes parallel, knees and feet apart, hands tucked together in front of his body in an effort to provide as little aerodynamic resistance as possible. He felt the adrenaline surge he always got at the top of a run.

  Direction flags denoted the course boundary, red on the left, green on the right. But Tom knew the course by heart. He could stay tucked for nearly five hundred meters on a plunge
that averaged a sixteen-degree incline and pick up good speed before he hit the first gates. Those would commence shortly after the first steep plunge of forty-one degrees, when speed had approached maximum.

  It was one of those days when he felt at one with the whole experience: he was no longer aware of the cold or the wind, he saw no distractions in his peripheral vision. Skis and poles seemed natural extensions of his own body, and were controlled effortlessly. He felt fluid, jointless.

  And yet he felt powerful, too. His legs were strong, as strong as Bruno’s, tireless, ready for whatever challenges lay ahead.

  He approached the first of the “bumps” that would propel him airborne briefly. He wanted to spend as little time in the air as possible, as the line of travel while airborne is longer and eats up valuable tenths of seconds. He anticipated the jump carefully, knowing he had to time the prejump exactly: too soon and he might land before he had cleared the bump; too late and he would be thrown higher in the air than if he hadn’t jumped.

  Just before he reached the lip of the slope edge, he drew his knees up beneath his body, lifting his shoes off the snow and clearing the edge at the lowest possible height. Then immediately, he stretched out his legs to get his feet back on the snow, flexing forward and downward to absorb the shock and acceleration.

  Part of his mind said a silent “merci” to Odile for making him work on this maneuver, for he lost almost no time in the air. Almost immediately, he saw the first of the gates.

  Control gates were set to limit average speed, and were marked with orange flags. They had to be at least eight meters wide, and he had to pass through them with both feet. The gates forced a skier into a series of turns, slowing him and forcing him to come out of the egg position in order to have better balance and quicker reactions on the turns.

  Initiating turns at high speeds was easier than at slow speeds, because a racer’s higher kinetic energy supplied a lot of the turning force. But steering those turns was much more difficult, and that’s where the legs came into play. Muscle strength was essential to counteract centrifugal force produced by the turn and hold an accurate line.