No Limits

by Peter David

  “The truth: about how I’m always left.”

  “And he didn’t offer to help, wasn’t worried?”

  Morgan gave a bleak laugh. “Oh, I think he’s worried all right, especially after I showed him how serious I am. How real this is.”

  A cold fist bunched in Pointer’s chest. Oh, no, God, please, not again. “Morgan, did you…?”

  “Try again?” Morgan pivoted on her heels so she was facing him now. “Yes, I did.”

  Pointer’s gaze skittered over her arms and throat, but he didn’t see any marks. Hypos, or maybe she tried to bash her head against the wall or window, like she did here. Pointer didn’t put anything past Morgan, and now his mind was busy working over his available options. She had been suicidal. She’d tried once that he’d documented, twice by her admission. Maybe he could convince a judge, get her committed to a hospital….

  “What did you do, Morgan?”

  Morgan drilled him with a look. “This,” she said, and pulled a hand phaser from her pocket.

  Pointer’s breath died in his throat, and for the first time in his life, he felt real, personal fear. Oh, my God, she’s going to kill us both. “Morgan,” he said, his voice almost a wheeze. “Morgan, put down the phaser.”

  “No,” she said, and then in one fluid movement, she turned the phaser to her chest.

  “Morgan!” Pointer shouted, breaking out of his paralysis. He launched himself from his chair, diving for the phaser. “Morgan, stop!”

  “See you in a bit,” said Morgan, and fired.

  He hit her—not soon enough. There was a high sizzle-crackle of phaser fire, a brilliant flash, and then their bodies collided. Pointer felt them crashing against the far wall, and the impact knocked the wind from his lungs with a grunt. For a brief instant, his vision blackened, and he had to work to remember how to breathe. Finally, his burning lungs pulled in a breath, then another.

  “Morgan.” Pointer coughed, clambered to all fours, sucking in air like a winded horse. “Morgan.”

  Morgan lay, unmoving, on her right side. Her black hair fanned over the floor, hiding her face.

  Oh, God. Pointer crawled to Morgan’s limp form. The stench of ozone and charred meat hit his nostrils. He saw that she must have died instantly; the fingers of her right hand clutched the phaser in a cadaveric spasm, and when he rolled her over, he saw that her lips peeled back from her teeth in a rictus smile of death. A black flower of burned fabric had blossomed over her left breast.

  “Oh, God,” he gasped, his stomach bottoming out. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

  Somehow, he was on his feet, staggering back to his desk. Have to call in an EMT crew by transporter—his thoughts clattered around his skull, like a stack of plates knocked askew. He was shaking so badly, he miskeyed the emergency frequency. He cursed. My fault, he thought, forcing his fingers to cooperate. This is all my fault.

  And then Morgan moaned.

  Pointer froze, his index finger poised over his companel. His jaw fell open, but no sound came.

  Morgan moaned again. Then she moved.

  Pointer’s eyes bulged. He watched in stunned disbelief as Morgan Primus twitched and moaned and came to life a millimeter at a time, like a discarded marionette whose strings have been repaired.

  She propped herself up on her arms, and then slid her body up the wall until she rested with her back against it. Her chest convulsed as she dragged in a ragged breath; the black, burned fabric rose over her left breast bloomed, contracted. With a sluggish gesture, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and took one tottering step.

  Pointer couldn’t help it. He screamed in horror.

  “You see?” Morgan was panting, but she managed a slow, sad smile. “Now you think I’m a monster, too.”

  Now…

  “Mother!” Robin screams. She’s flailing, but Morgan has her by both wrists now. “Mother, please, no!”

  “I’m sorry, Ches.” Tears stream over Morgan’s cheeks, and she’s desperate to get the hypo and put Robin to sleep, but the hypo’s just out of reach and she can’t risk letting Robin go. “Trust me, please, baby, just a little longer, just a few more minutes, and then we’ll both be at peace.”

  “Mom.” Robin’s eyes bug and she stares at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. “Mom, please, what’s wrong, why are you doing this, I don’t want to die…”

  Yes, I’m a monster. There’s no comfort in the thought, just a grim certitude. Morgan’s got an iron grip around her daughter’s wrists with one hand and now she pats the deck until she feels the cool metal of the hypo. Better this way.

  The cabin fills with a sudden blistering burst of golden light so intense it seems liquid. Robin gasps, blinks against the glare. Then the shuttle’s polarizing filters snap into place, but Morgan knows. They’ve shot out from behind Mercury’s shadow, and if she looked now, she’d see the sun, burning brighter than the fires of hell.

  Soon, Morgan thinks, soon, and then I can rest and love can’t hurt me anymore.

  And maybe her face changes, because Robin stops struggling. They are so close Morgan sees Robin’s eyes jerk back and forth as if her daughter’s trying to peer into Morgan’s soul.

  “Mother,” Robin whispers, and Morgan sees love and something close to compassion brimming in her daughter’s eyes. “Oh, my poor mother. Mom, I love you, and nothing you’ve done is so terrible that I’ll stop loving you for a single instant, ever, and you can’t make me hate you or wish I’d never been born, you can’t ma…”

  A hiss, and Robin stiffens, chokes. Her eyes roll back into her skull, and she sags.

  “Oh, baby,” says Morgan, catching her daughter in her arms. The empty hypo falls from her limp fingers. She eases her daughter back into the pilot’s chair. “Oh, Ches.”

  Pointer’s voice, in her head: In the end, love is all we have.

  “Oh, my poor little girl.” Morgan keys in her final commands. “My love has to be enough.”

  “Is that what you came for?” asks Ellen. She is naked and so beautiful that it hurts Pointer to look. She nods at the phaser. “Did you come to kill me?”

  Pointer stares, stupidly, at the weapon. He remembers standing there, listening to the soft shush of Morgan’s shoes as she walked to the door of his office, the click of the latch catching as she left. And then he’d come out of his stupor and dashed after her, but when he yanked open the door, he’d seen only the quizzical face of the investigator, and no Morgan. Pointer had stammered out an excuse, ducked back into his office, with its heavy, oily odor of cooked meat and charcoal, and slid the phaser into his pocket. Then he’d invited the investigator in, and if the man noticed the stink, he didn’t let on. And then Pointer had seen the tape, and his shock turned to fury and rage.

  “Yes,” Pointer says, looking into Ellen’s eyes. “No. I…don’t know. Yes, I came to kill us both. And him.”

  Her face is calm. “There is no him, Kevin. There was, but I…I couldn’t go through with it, and I sent him away.”

  “And these?” With his bad hand, Pointer gestures at the hypospray, the drugs. The razor. Droplets of his blood patter onto the night table.

  “Oh, Kevin, you’ve hurt yourself.”

  “No,” says Pointer. “I mean, yes, but…Ellen, my God, I love you, only there’s so much pain, and I can’t stand it anymore. It has to end, somehow, and only we have the power to heal each other, don’t you see?”

  “No.” Ellen moves to the bed and tweezes the sheet free. She wraps it around herself before sitting on the edge of the bed. “I don’t. I can’t.”

  Pointer’s left thumb throbs with every wild beat of his heart. “I don’t accept that,” he says, and he feels like he’s coming awake from a long and continuous bad dream. “Ellen, I love you enough to…to kill you. Die with you. And that’s crazy.” He gives a bleak laugh. “It’s the great paradox. I keep the secrets, and you hold the key to my life, because if you die, Ellen, I’ll die with you. Maybe not my body, but I will die anyway, a piece at a
time. God, Ellen,” and now Pointer can feel the hot sting of tears behind his eyes. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Reasons that aren’t reasons, I guess.” Ellen shakes her head. Her head’s bowed, and her brown hair hangs in wet strands, like waterlogged rope. Her restless fingers pick at the sheet, working and twisting. “I feel…black. Dying seems the only way. I thought it would be better…for you. Me. I just wouldn’t have to think anymore, and if I can’t think, then I won’t hurt. In time, you’d forget, move on.”

  “No,” says Pointer. He moves from the chair; the phaser slips, unnoticed, to the floor. He kneels before his wife. “I’d be stuck in time, at this moment, forever, wondering what I could have done differently. You’d be gone, Ellen, but you’d always be in my heart and soul, a wound that would never heal. Please.” Tears leak from the corners of his eyes. “Please, let me help and…Ellen, help…I need…please, please help me.”

  Burying his face in her lap, he weeps, out loud, in a way he hasn’t since he was a boy.

  Tuesday: October 15, 2363

  Hands in his pockets, Pointer stood at his office window, looking out at the institute’s grounds. The days were getting shorter; here it was only a little before six, and already the shadows of the trees were like long black fingers inked on the grass. Fall was close, and the ginkgo’s leaves had turned bright yellow, the setting sun making them glow like tiny gold fans. Up in Maine, they’d had their first frost, and this had driven away the tourists. But that was good, because it gave him and Ellen plenty of privacy, and time and space to heal.

  Pointer rubbed the first finger and thumb of his left hand together, an unconscious gesture. He felt the slight raised ridge of scar left from the straight razor. He could have had the scar removed, but he hadn’t.

  There can’t be love without pain, he thought, and it’s good to remember that, under the pain, the love’s always there.

  He was startled out of his reverie by the chime of his outer door. A patient? Now? The only patient he’d ever had who came after hours on a Tuesday…

  “Morgan,” he whispered. After that horrible afternoon, Morgan had never returned. He thought that she hadn’t died; she’d proven that her body wouldn’t let her. But still he’d wondered if she’d found some way, and that made the guilt almost too much to bear. And to think that he’d once wished Ellen to simply vanish. Now he knew that not knowing was an endless torture that condemned the living to a single moment in time.

  Alice, in the mirror. But now, if she was back…

  Taking the distance to his outer door in two long strides, he pushed open the door. “Mo…”

  A young woman—no more than eighteen, Pointer guessed—looked up. She had rich, chestnut brown hair that was tucked up in a bun, and she wore a uniform that Pointer recognized as one of those worn by Starfleet cadets. But what caught Pointer’s interest was her eyes: so deep brown, they were almost black.

  “Are you Dr. Pointer?” she asked. She stood, and Pointer saw that she clutched a slim brass holotube in her hands.

  Pointer nodded. “Yes. But my office hours are over for the day. If you’d like an appointment, I’d be happy to…”

  “I don’t know what I want.” A tentative smile flickered on and off the woman’s lips, and for an instant, Pointer saw a ghost of someone else lurking just behind the woman’s eyes. “That is…well, I’ve been putting this off and…oh, hell,” she sighed. “I probably sound crazy.”

  Pointer thought it best not to observe that most of his patients did, and he understood. He’d gone a little crazy himself. “How can I help?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled herself straighter. “Look, I’ve been dithering about this for a couple of months, but I just can’t put it off anymore. My mother’s shuttle crashed in the Atlantic right after Labor Day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” she said, without irony. “We’d had a really good day, just before. I remember the boardwalk and the beach. Only she and I had a big fight; I don’t remember exactly what it was about. For some reason, my memory’s kind of fuzzy. The doctors said it’s probably post-traumatic, like I’m blocking it out. Anyway, Mom said in her message, the one she left, that she was sorry, but she had to see relatives. Only they found her shuttle in the Atlantic, off the coast of New Jersey. No body, so it’s been kind of hard to reach closure, you know? But it’s like she knew something was going to happen, because the next day, I got this.” She held up the holotube. “Turns out she’d made it the night before.”

  “May I see?”

  “Sure,” she said, handing him the tube.

  Pointer held the cylinder to his right eye, his thumb flicking the tiny projector to life. There was an imperceptible hum, and the tube vibrated beneath his fingers, and a fractal image glowed then coalesced. In the next instant, Pointer went rigid with shock.

  The face and the figure of the holographic portrait belonged to Morgan Primus.

  I’m Alice, in the mirror. Stunned, Pointer watched as the tiny portrait pirouetted upon its invisible axis. The way she turned after she broke the glass and I saw that there was nothing, no cut, no bruise. Because she always heals, and she’s always left.

  The girl was speaking again. “In her message, she said that when I was ready, I should come talk to you. That maybe,” her voice faltered, and he heard the pain, “you could he…help me get…get past this.”

  Pointer flicked off the holotube. Morgan’s image fizzled and the tube went black.

  He looked down at Morgan’s daughter. “What’s your name?”

  “Well, my mom used to call me Ches, after the cat in Wonderland.” And then she tried a wobbly smile, and this nearly broke Pointer’s heart because Morgan had been right: Her Ches’s smile was so very sweet. “But my name’s Robin. Robin Lefler.”

  Not Primus. The significance of the name Morgan had chosen—the first, the only—wasn’t lost on him.

  “I’m so glad to meet you, Robin,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Robin smeared a tear from her cheek. “You’re a psychiatrist.” When Pointer nodded, she continued, “And my mother saw you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what she…?”

  But Pointer was already shaking his head. Psychiatrists are the keepers of secrets. “No, I’m so sorry,” he said, gently, and meant it. “I’m not trying to be cruel, but your mother had her life, and you have yours, Robin. You have your whole life, and I’d like to hear about it.”

  He held the door open for her. “Please, come in, and let’s talk, and let’s see what comes up.”

  SOLETA

  Revelations

  Keith R.A. DeCandido

  After graduating Starfleet Academy alongside fellow future Excalibur crewmates Zak Kebron and Mark McHenry, Soleta was assigned to the U.S.S. Aldrin, accompanied by fellow graduates Worf and Tania Tobias. “Revelations” takes place about a year into that posting.

  Keith R.A. DeCandido

  In a review of his two-book Star Trek series The Brave and the Bold, Cinescape referred to Keith R.A. DeCandido as “the second coming of Peter David,” which adds a touch of irony to his involvement in this anthology (not to mention prompting Peter to fob off tuition responsibilities for his children onto Keith in his introduction to this volume). Keith’s other Trek work includes the novels Diplomatic Implausibility, Demons of Air and Darkness, and The Art of the Impossible; short stories in What Lay Beyond, Prophecy and Change, and the upcoming Tales of the Dominion War; the comic book miniseries Perchance to Dream; and several eBooks for the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series. Keith is also the author of the upcoming Star Trek: I.K.S. Gorkon novels, a series focusing entirely on Klingons, and has written fiction in the universes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Farscape, and many more, with his first original novel, Dragon Precinct, due in 2004. Keith, who lives in New York City with fellow author Terri Osborne and two silly cats, is now off to write more Trek fiction, having just learne
d how much college tuitions have gone up since he graduated in 1990. Find out too much about Keith at his Web site at DeCandido.net.

  Stardate 39022.5

  “Mind if I ask you a question, Ensign?”

  Soleta looked up from her tricorder, turned to the security guard, and said, “I believe you just have.”

  The guard, a broad-shouldered human named Chan Pak, had a flat face, with features that seemed to have been intended for a head a quarter of the size of his actual cranium, resulting in wide cheeks and a massive jaw.

  He laughed at the Vulcan woman’s response to his query, a piercing sound that made Soleta’s ears hurt. “Y’know, they warned me about you.”

  Why is it that humans always feel the need to credit a nebulous “they” for so much? “Of what did this warning consist, Mr. Pak?”

  “They say that you Vulcans are all pedantic.”

  Soleta finished her scan. “Do they?”

  “You don’t agree?”

  Closing her tricorder, Soleta said, “I have met many Vulcans who were not especially pedantic.”

  Again, Pak laughed. Soleta felt constrained to move back a few decimeters to avoid further wear and tear on her eardrums. “Fair enough. Anyhow, I wanted to ask about that pin in your hair.”

  “Feel free.”

  Soleta knew that it would save time and trouble if she simply went ahead and explained the pin, but she decided, in a fit of something like pique, to live up to the guard’s characterization of her species.

  A third braying laugh. Until encountering non-Vulcans at Starfleet Academy, Soleta, as a Vulcan, had never comprehended why any language would need more than one word for “laugh.” Now, though, she understood. Chan Pak’s particular version of the action was best classified as a “guffaw.”

  “Fine. Ensign, what is the significance of that pin in your hair?”

  Her hand unconsciously moved to the pin that secured her thick, long black hair. “It belonged to my mother. She passed it on to me when I left for Starfleet Academy. The symbol is the cornerstone of Vulcan philosophy.”