Therizine – Chapter 1
He watched her pull silky underthings out of her dresser drawer. "Carol, why won't you let me-"
"No, Jim." She turned and regarded him with that icy cold stare of hers that meant she had made up her mind. "I told you already. I'd rather go alone." Pink panties went rolled up into the sleeves of her jacket in the suitcase.
"I just thought-"
"Will you please just let me finish packing! I'm late already. The shuttle leaves in thirty minutes and I still have to get dressed." Jim crossed over the antique Persian rug to slip his hands around her waist from behind. "That does it!" She pushed him away with her voice and her body language. "I'm never going to get finished if you don't leave me alone!" She was getting angry and the chill of it reached into his soul. Jim backed away and suddenly the warmth and intimacy of their bedroom turned into a palette of gray. He returned to his spot on the side of the bed and watched her fold her suits into neat little packages. The turned mahogany bedpost felt cool and smooth under his hand. It matched his mood now-cold and hard and smooth.
The fire burning low gave everything in the room a false golden glow. It even turned Carol's icy blondness to mellow gold. He knew it was only superficial. She was slipping further away from him into a world where everything was burning down to ashes.
It hadn't always been this way. There was a time-was it only two years ago?- when they had managed to grasp and hold onto a depth of loving that Jim would have thought impossible for their older years. He believed they had come to truly understand one another. Watching Carol organize her life to fit into three travel bags had brought the cold reality of their present into focus. It was more of a running away from Jim and all of the past that he represented than traveling to a seminar on molecular restructuring at the genetic level. She could use all the seminars she wanted as an excuse, but he knew the truth of it, and it tasted bitter. If he could forget some of the pain of seeing David lying face down with a Klingon dagger sticking out of his back, then why couldn't she? After all, she was never haunted with memories of that moment. She never saw him in death. Her last memories of him were full of life.
"Jim!" He looked up at her from the depths of his thoughts. "I said, I'll be back in about three weeks. If I can get a faster connecting shuttle I will. I left all of the information on where I'll be on the hall table. Don't forget to water the plants, will you?"
There didn't seem to be anything he could say to stop her. She was leaving and that was that. How ironic. Captain James T. Kirk, the great hero of the galaxy, couldn't get his lady friend to let him come along. He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
"Have a good trip, Carol. I'll see you when you get back." He touched her lightly and kissed her on the cheek, as she brushed past. "Good-bye, Jim."
She turned to pick up her bags. He wouldn't walk her to the door. It seemed to be something she didn't want. She paused in the hallway and looked back. Jim stood and watched her walk away, and felt an inner door close between them. She kept going, until her saw her turn the corner at the head of the stairs. He heard her steps where the loose board creaked, and then the front door close. The only other sound came from the fire as it hissed and spit at him from across the room.
Jim pushed the antique lace curtains aside and watched Carol step into a dark sedan. They were sparing no expense for this trip. The University had sent a private air car with a human driver. It must be a privately funded seminar, Jim thought absently.
The world outside Carol's brownstone turned lavender and pink as the sun slid behind the trees in the park across the street. Jim watched couples walk along below, holding hands. Period street lamps, made to look like old fashioned gas lamps, came on and were answered by lights blinking through the windows of the neighbor's apartments. Jim stood in the gathering dusk, watching the stars. There was a time when that sight would have moved him, but now he felt only emptiness and a numbing of his senses. It was as if he were falling asleep with his eyes open.
It was only when the sky was fully black and the fire had burned down to faded coals that he left the window and opened the closet. He dragged out his own large suitcase and tossed it open on the bed, no longer being careful of Carol's hundred-year-old rose damask quilt that had belonged to her great-grandmother. Suddenly he wanted nothing to do with things from the past. He grabbed clothes from his dresser, not paying much attention to what he was packing. He had the spaces all filled when he realized all he really wanted was essentials, leaving most of his familiar things behind. He took a smaller travel bag from a top shelf and grabbed a pair of well-worn boots. He opened the bag and threw in a few personal care items along with a few pairs of jeans that he loved to wear but Carol hated seeing him in. Two soft flannel shirts and a few other items and he was done.
It was only after he stood in the doorway looking back at the open, filled suitcase on Carol's bed that he had a thought of how this would look to her when she came home. He started to go over to the bed to put things away and then changed his mind. He slung the brown leather carryall over his shoulder and walked to the hall table. The keypads he left in their usual place. He checked the door leading to the back garden and turned off the lights, programming the house computer to turn them back on automatically at 5:00 p.m. every evening. Then he locked the front door and pulled it closed, not pausing to look back. The night air refreshed him and made him glad he remembered to wear his old jacket. It was going to be a cool night, and he had a long walk to the nearest shuttle stop, three blocks down and eight blocks over on the other side of the park. The exercise felt good. It had been a long time since he had felt this much freedom and Carol wasn't here to insist on a private taxi instead of the public shuttle.
The space shuttle terminal was crowded with weekend travelers. Jim waited in line behind a large woman and her two boys, both redheads. The smallest one kept staring at Jim with wide blue eyes. The line moved slowly, as others crowded around them, jockeying for the best position at the luggage counter. Jim checked the credit balance on his ID card and bought an open-ended ticket. He took his bag with him and looked around for a place to wait out his departure time. There were no empty seats, so he wandered over to a vacant glass wall further down the tarmac.
Red and blue running lights on the nearest landing pad made a geometric design in the blackness outside the glass. It reminded Jim of the Christmas lights his grandmother used decorate her farmhouse in Iowa, even when his contemporaries considered such quaint customs hopelessly pedestrian. He smiled to himself remembering the traditions she tried to keep alive in the family, of home baked cookies and hot chocolate and making ornaments for her Christmas tree.
The noisy terminal faded away and the shuttles standing ready to lift off, with their attendant service vehicles like swarming beetles, blurred into the background. Jim closed his eyes and leaned his forehead on the glass. It felt cool against his skin. He was feeling the strain of the last few months of his failing relationship with Carol. The most frustrating part of it was that he didn't seem to know how to stop the slow cooling of their intimacy. It was more than just the normal settling in of a relationship, it was more like a valve had opened and the passion had begun to leak out, one drop at a time. Was it simply that she was bored with him? Now that he was retired and accessible, had that taken the edge off their love affair? Was it because he was almost always gone, light years away, living with risk as a part of his life, that had been the real motivator for their passion? They had gotten along so well, the last few years before his retirement. The truth was that he was never really there, and their time together was always so brief; a week or maybe two, or a few days of shore leave grabbed whenever he could get them.
He opened his eyes and looked around. Some of the crowd had thinned out. It was late and he had been forced to take the last shuttle scheduled for departure that night, the only one left that made a rendezvous with the freighter Agamemnon. He was just sitting down when he heard the call for his shuttle, Number 12 on Launch Pad 3, for the outer moon orbit.
As he expected, the shuttle was rather empty. He took a seat at the back, passing two blue-skinned Andorrans speaking together in their wispy voices. The only other non-human aboard was a Vulcan, sitting by himself. He settled back and tried to analyze his feelings.
Images of Carol in happier times brought his emotions to the surface, taking some of the grayness out of his mind. Am I making too much of this? Do we just need some time apart? Carol, is it really all about David or is there something else? He closed his eyes and willed his emotions to calm, making a conscious effort to slow his breathing, trying to ease the pain in the pit of his stomach. The techniques he had learned from Spock over the years, and now he wished earnestly that he could talk to his Vulcan friend again, who was so good at analysis. But Spock was working with Sarek now, and light years away on some diplomatic mission. He knew he would have to probe the depth of his emotional schism with Carol on his own, something he couldn't do while wandering alone through Carol's brownstone, boring himself. He needed a change of routine, and his instincts led him into space. With several light years of maneuvering room, he could come to grips with what he wanted, and better communicate it to Carol.
I should call her…I should let her know where I am…
The intercom announced their approach tothe Agamemnon.
.
His cabin on board the freighter was small and sparsely furnished, as expected. He stowed his bag in an overhead bin and sat down on the bunk. A ceiling light cast strong shadows. He looked out of the small porthole at the arc of the Earth below him, glowing in its splendid shades of blue and white. The arc became a large disk, and then a smaller one, and then fell away slowly. The freighter's engines droned loudly, so different from the smooth vibrations of the Enterprise's impulse engines. Through the deck plates he could feel their thrumming, traveling up through his feet and into his bones. It was familiar and different, reminding him of something he thought he had put behind him. His own ship with tremendous power at his command and the responsibility and freedom within limits to use it, was something Carol could never understand.
As they moved around to align themselves for travel in the cargo lanes, Jim saw Starfleet Command's Space Dock swing into view. The very image of it speeded up his pulse. No starships were approaching, and the dock moved slowly into the distance. Jim watched it with longing until it was only a tiny point of light, lost among the stars.
The central dining area on board the freighter was a noisy, crowded place, too small for the number of passengers and crew that had signed on for the voyage to Antares. Jim qued up for his serving of what looked like chicken. He ate quickly and left to go in search of the exercise room that he had read was aboard on a crew bulletin board. He found an empty locker and changed into a pair of disposable exercise shorts that he picked up from a shelf in the locker room.
The exercise equipment was adequate, but not the state-of-the-art preprogrammed resistance marvels that were part of the Enterprise's gymnasium. He was using an old-fashioned treadmill machine when a tall, golden skinned Ruselan female entered and began pinning her russet-colored hair up into an elaborate braid. He glanced at her casually, making an effort not to stare. She began her workout with stretching exercises, revealing a grace and power that Jim found hard to ignore. Eventually he finished his own workout and left, feeling restless. He wandered through the corridors of the freighter, looking into every control room and cargo bay that he could get into without a security pass. Eventually he found his way to the bridge.