The Best of All Possible Worlds by L. R. Bowen
Star Trek: Voyager is copyright by Paramount Pictures, Inc. No infringement is intended. Story is copyright by L.R. Bowen, LRBowen@aol.com. Do not sell or print for sale without the express written permission of the author, and do not circulate without the author's name and this disclaimer attached. Permission is granted to circulate free of charge in electronic form. Please do not archive without contacting the author.

Written for Now Voyager, the Kate Mulgrew fan club newsletter, in the hiatus between the third and fourth seasons. We'd just had a run of good episodes and were feeling guarded optimism about the show. Oh well.

The Best of All Possible Worlds
by L.R. Bowen
LRBowen@aol.com
1997
L.R. Bowen's Voyager fanfic and artwork


"What are you laughing about?"

"Bad guys," Chakotay replied, and kept chuckling. Janeway reached for her umbrella-topped drink and took a sip. She couldn't read his expression, since he had his lounge chair pulled ahead of hers and his face turned up to the tropical sun—the holographic tropical sun.

"Mmm. Care to share the joke?"

"I was just thinking about how many different outcomes that "Insurrection Alpha" scenario could have had."

"Yes, one could program it to do nearly anything. Tuvok said Tom had been working on a version in which I had all the Maquis shot."

Chakotay let out a snort. "That would have been just as out of character for you as mutiny would be for me. No one else seemed to find that as implausible as I did."

"Everyone knows first officers have it in for their captains. It's a tradition in every service." They both laughed.

"But really, no one tried to explore some of the most realistic alternatives." His hands were laced over his wild print shirt, his eyes were closed. His voice was animated but quiet, as if he were on the comfortable cusp between imagination and sleep, just the edge of dreaming. "I can spin all kinds of plots from the basic beginning..."

"Of a Maquis mutiny?"

"No. The beginning. All of us flung out here together and having to get along...our loyalties realigning. Our priorities turning into different paths. The whole courses of our lives transforming in one instant."

"I don't know about that. I've felt I was keeping the same course...even if it was among different stars."

"I changed course. Or maybe not...I've always aimed at some goal my whole life, but my idea of how to get there changes. The goal's the same." He hitched himself up and turned to look at her, dark eyes twinkling. "It may look different at different times, but it's the same."

Janeway smiled at him. "So how would you have written it? From the beginning?"

Chakotay smiled back, but his eyes left hers. "Don't know if I should second-guess the past. Fictional scenarios are one thing, but life... Given the characters involved, perhaps some things would always go the same way." He glanced up briefly, as if to make it a question, and she shrugged. "If a person pushes too hard, tries to force change against character... may get only resistance. Sometimes just waiting to see how things turn out is the best alternative."

"That's fine if you have the time. I'm not as patient as you are, I think."

"Not when you really want something, no." He twisted his mouth and looked for his own drink. "I'm getting a little too warm out here. Want to go back in the shade?"

"Mmm...I'm too relaxed to move." She closed her eyes. "We could change the scene."

"True. What would you like?"

"Whatever. Not too breezy, though."

She heard him tapping his glass in thought. "Computer, run program Chakotay Delta Four. Keep the furniture," he added as an afterthought, with a blinding grin when she opened one eye and shot a look at him. "I don't want to dump the captain on the ground, do I?" The scene trembled and wavered, then resolved into a tree-lined riverbank. Their lounge chairs were halfway up the slope, well under the shade of the trees.

"Not bad."

"Thought you might like it." He seemed to be waiting for some additional comment, poised on the edge of his lounge chair and gently swirling the ice in his glass. His wild print shirt looked out of place now.

"Oh...it's New Earth."

"Yes."

"I didn't think you'd done any holo-recording there."

"I didn't think I'd need to, when I was there. It's reconstructed from still photos, with some imagination." The river flowed quietly by, clear and deep over stones in this spot, carrying a few stray leaves from the trees.

"It's lovely. That was a...nice place. I was always grateful we weren't marooned in a howling desert, or some such. Though the scenery was a distraction at first when I was trying to work."

"I just let it distract me." He was smiling off into the distance. "That wouldn't have been such a bad way to live the rest of our lives."

Janeway slowly shook her head. "I like it better here. More alternatives."

A long slow silence, in which she watched the river's flow. Chakotay's voice broke in on the beginning of sleep, just as her lids grew heavy.

"Kathryn..."

"Hmm?"

"What alternatives do you see in front of you? Which ones do you want to explore?"

"Realistic ones?"

"How do you know whether an alternative is realistic unless you explore it first?"

Janeway pursed her lips. "My own judgment. I don't want to go off half-cocked in some wild direction."

"Maybe it's not as wild as it looks at first glance." He pulled in his cheeks for a moment "It could be the kind of course change that steers you where you wanted to go in the first place. Assuming you wanted to go there."

"Too hazy for me. I need something concrete."

"Like this?" He gestured to the illusion of landscape.

"This is real enough for my purposes. I don't demand much of a holo-scene. Pretty to look at, and a pleasant temperature, and no unwelcome surprises."

He tugged on an ear, looked a little acid. "No will of its own. And it will wait patiently for you, no matter how long it takes you to come back. Always the same. Reset the program and start over."

"Real life can't be put on hold, no. There are always too many things calling for attention at once...look too long in one direction, and something else slips out of sight. Before you really knew it was there. I know I can't deal equally with everything that comes along. I have to pick and choose, and some things are inevitably...excluded." Janeway knew what his expression would be like, so she kept her eyes on the passing river. "I don't claim that I've made every choice without error. But the smallest decisions can snowball...sometimes what seemed inconsequential at the time, something I could revisit and correct, turns out to be written in stone by the passage of time."

"Time writes everything in stone, doesn't it?"

"A Starfleet officer should know better than that." They laughed together again. "There's always a loophole of some kind. Dimensional anomalies, parallel universes, slingshot effects, wormholes to the past...if we worked at it, we might eventually be able to undo our entire lives. Come at ourselves from every angle until we thought we had it right. The best of all possible worlds."

"That was supposed to be the one we lived in, no matter how terrible it was."

"Dr. Pangloss wasn't a Starfleet officer."

"You really would like to do that? Redo your life until it was perfect?" Chakotay was frowning faintly.

"There are things I wish had never happened, certainly. My father's death...my fiancé died in the same accident. I'd change that in an instant, if I could."

He still looked grave, then raised a brow. "Be married?"

"Well...to tell the truth, I don't know that I'd be a captain if I'd married. Those don't always go together."

"But sometimes."

"Sometimes. Not with him, I don't think. But I suppose I did want to be...with someone. Permanently. I don't know if I let that goal slip away. Maybe it looks different out here."

"Would you have chosen not to come to the Delta Quadrant?"

"Of course. For the sake of all the crew, I wish we were still at home. Don't you?"

"For the crew, perhaps. For myself...well, I don't want to say that coming here was the best thing that could have happened to me, out of all the possibilities—but going back to do it over has never occurred to me. It did happen, and we're here, and I think it's better to deal with that as it exists. Not try endlessly to change conditions, but work with them. Accept some things as given in order to devote energy to others." He finished his drink and set it down. "At least, that's how I make my choices. I leave some things aside just as you have to do. But I confess that I don't worry all that much about the road not taken. Until that...scenario came along, that is."

"It bothered you." Janeway sat up straight. "You didn't tell me that. I thought you were laughing with the rest of us."

"I was. Then I saw myself as the bad guy...recruiting turncoats, slinking melodramatically around the bridge while practically twirling my mustache, denouncing all moral scruples just to get home faster...involved with a woman who was even worse. Just enough truth in it to sting. OK, there's something I'd like to do over differently. Not to fall—well, until I found out who she was, I wouldn't have said that. It didn't work out between us, and she hated me for it...but it's not a bad thing to try for, no matter how hard you fall on your face if you fail." He had a hand rubbing his chin, his face mostly concealed. "I wouldn't want to go into everything knowing I had an out. That if it didn't work, I could press the reset button. I want to live my life with a feeling of commitment."

"So do I." She was almost whispering. "My commitments are very deep ones." Their eyes met.

"I know they are," Chakotay said, as quietly as she had spoken. "I know...you want to be careful."

"I...if I could see into the future, somehow...know if we will ever get home. I think about how we'll be received by Starfleet, people who know nothing about our community. How something happened between us that made mutiny so unthinkable that even Tuvok discarded the idea unfinished. Who could ever have predicted that, the day I set out from Deep Space Nine to find a Maquis captain and his ship?"

"I never would have. I could have run probability analyses and simulations for years, and I wouldn't have come up with our present situation in a lifetime. Sitting on the holodeck with...my friend, drinking out of a glass with an umbrella in it. It's surprising as hell when I think about it. But I think I like surprises."

Janeway grimaced. "Not I. I want hints, at least."

"I think I've been giving hints." He dimpled alarmingly.

"Yes, you have. What, you want thanks for it?"

"I'll predict the future, if you like. But you are the one who has to make it come true."

"Can't I run a simulation first?"

"No. Go for broke. Punch your way through."

"Even if someone else gets bruised?"

"I'll take my lumps. I think it's worth the risk."

"Sometimes more than one goes down with the ship. Innocent bystanders. Passengers and crew."

"You're a better navigator than that, Captain. I know I've misplaced faith before, but I'm not doing that now." He smiled, and she bowed her head to acknowledge it, and to hide her eyes. A very long moment of silence, a pause that hung suspended, a motionlessness that she wanted to last forever.

"Can I freeze the program at this point?" she asked. "And get back to it later when I've had time to think about it?"

Chakotay took a deep breath. "Hasn't it been running long enough yet?"

"Remember, if you push too hard..."

"I'm patient. But I think you must be more patient than I am, after all."

"All things come to he who waits."

"In a perfect world."

"That is the one we live in, right?"

"The only one I have handy," he replied. "Except when I'm dreaming."

They settled back into their lounge chairs.

"It's rather warm here," said Janeway. "I might take a nap." And laughed.

"I might too," said Chakotay.


END