Picard sensed something unsaid in the other man’s manner and studied him. “You want to ask me something.”
Bryant nodded. “Answer me honestly. Do you think we should leave that thing shut away from the galaxy for good?”
“I think we’ll know when we are ready for it,” he replied.
“Let’s hope so.” The other captain straightened, becoming formal. “Good sailing, sir.”
“And to you, sir,” said Picard, with a nod.
Bryant’s holographic avatar shimmered and vanished, leaving the Enterprise’s captain alone in the cabin. He looked again to the window and saw the Newton change course and peel off from the formation, turning to head away toward the nearest starbase.
He let himself get lost in the view for a time; and then after a long moment, Picard tapped an intercom panel and sent a message to his wife.
* * *
René knelt down in the grass, and with the exacting care that only a two-year-old boy could muster, he cupped the seed head of a dandelion in his small hands and blew gently on it. The feathery seeds flowed into the air and he burst out laughing, as if it were the most amazing thing he had ever seen.
Watching his son from nearby, Picard shared a smile with Beverly, and he reached into the picnic hamper for a bottle of white wine and the corkscrew.
“This was a nice surprise,” said Beverly. “I was going to cook dinner tonight. . . .”
“Let the replicator do the work this once,” Picard replied, opening the bottle. He poured a measure of wine, sampled it, and pronounced it good, and then attended to his wife, filling her glass. “I wanted a change from eating in our quarters.”
She eyed him, and he knew she was reading him as easily as any telepath might. “But why here?” Beverly gestured at the curved walls of the Enterprise’s arboretum, the gardens of plants set around the support stanchions of the starship’s hull, and the tall, wide windows looking out into the depths of space. “There are so many parks we could have visited in the holodeck’s memory banks, from dozens of worlds. Earth, Andor, Pacifica . . .”
He frowned briefly. “I wanted something real,” he explained, putting his hand on the ground, feeling the texture of the blades of grass against his skin. “I’ve grown tired of illusions.”
Beverly moved closer to him and set down her wineglass. “Tell me,” she said, without preamble, her hand touching his face.
Tell you what? He almost said the words out loud, the automatic rebuff coming to him without conscious thought; but it would have been foolish to pretend that he had nothing to say to her. She was his wife and his friend and she knew him better than anyone.
“You read me like a book,” he said quietly.
“Only if you want me to,” she replied.
Picard let out a slow breath. “Kolb. My thoughts keep returning to him, to what he did . . . and his reasons for doing it.”
Beverly instinctively glanced toward René, who was now investigating an ant crawling over his fingers. “He lost so much,” she said. Beverly had read the same report that Picard had given to Bryant, and she knew about the conversation the two men had shared inside the nexus.
“I can’t help but wonder what I would have done in his place.” He looked out at the stars. “Would I have made the same choices under the same circumstances? I want to say no . . . but that feels like a lie.”
“We give all for those we love,” she said. Picard turned back, and Beverly met his gaze. “Jean-Luc, what did you see in there? The report was vague . . . deliberately so. Was it different from the family you saw the first time?”
“Very,” he admitted. “Before, the wife and the children, my nephew, the home at Christmas . . . it was unreal, a true fantasy. It was the synthesis of dreams and half-remembered stories.”
“But this time?”
“This time it was you.” He took her hand and nodded toward René. “And him. And Wes, Will and Deanna and Tasha, Worf, Data, Geordi, and everyone we call friend, all well and content. Older, wiser, but still here with us.”
Beverly hesitated. “It sounds . . . perfect.”
He held the moment, unable to find the words, and then suddenly Picard felt a laugh break free from his lips, a peal of good humor straight from the heart. It was infectious; his wife grinned and his son echoed him. “No,” he told her, “it wasn’t really perfect at all.” A sudden and certain moment of clarity came to him, the insight so sharp it almost took his breath away. “The dream didn’t take, and now I know why.”
“Tell me,” said Beverly. “I want to hear you say it.”
“The dream I saw,” he said, reaching up to brush a stray thread of terracotta-red hair from her face, “it was no better than the reality I actually have.” Picard leaned in and kissed her. She was alive and real and this . . . this moment was perfect.
“Did Papa go away?” René was walking toward them, a thoughtful look on his young face. He pointed at the stars out beyond the windows.
“I did,” said Picard, welcoming his son into an embrace. “For a little while. But I’ll always come back.”
This is where I’m supposed to be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to David Mack, Christopher L. Bennett, David R. George III, Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, Larry Nemecek, Rick Sternbach, Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Debbie Mirek for their works of fiction and reference; my most patient editor, Margaret Clark; and with much love to my own dream girl, Mandy Mills.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Swallow is a New York Times bestselling author and BAFTA nominee. He is proud to be the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series, creating the original story concepts for the Star Trek Voyager episodes “One” and “Memorial”; his other Star Trek writing includes the Scribe award winner Day of the Vipers, Cast No Shadow, Synthesis, the Myriad Universes novella Seeds of Dissent, the short stories “The Slow Knife,” “The Black Flag,” “Ordinary Days,” and “Closure” for the anthologies Seven Deadly Sins, Shards and Shadows, The Sky’s the Limit, and Distant Shores, scripting the videogame Star Trek Invasion, and over 400 articles in thirteen different Star Trek magazines around the world.
As well as a nonfiction book (Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher), James also wrote the Sundowners series of original steampunk westerns, Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, and novels in the worlds of Doctor Who (Peacemaker), Warhammer 40,000 (Fear to Tread, Hammer & Anvil, Nemesis, Black Tide, Red Fury, The Flight of the Eisenstein, Faith & Fire, Deus Encarmine, and Deus Sanguinius), Stargate (Halcyon, Relativity, Nightfall, and Air), and 2000AD (Eclipse, Whiteout, and Blood Relative). His other credits feature scripts for videogames and audio dramas, including Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7, and Space 1889.
James Swallow lives in London, and is currently at work on his next book.
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ISBN 978-1-4516-9661-5
Star Trek: The Next Generation - 115 - The Stuff of Dreams Page 10
