Note: Translations of French phrases are included in the glossary at the end of the chapter. The English translation is in italics, with any necessary commentary in plain text after it. For clarity, this story employs only the American-style quotation marks, as are in standard use by Starfleet, rather than the French guillemets (…).
Chapter III: Cherry Blossoms
Julian always dithered over what to wear when he went to the ballet. His three changes of civilian clothes were neither particularly inspiring, nor especially up-to-date. He didn't have any real formalwear, apart from his Academy dress uniform — which always made him feel overdressed and foolish, as if he were putting on airs above his station. The grim thought visited him now that he was putting on airs above his station any time he wore a uniform at all. He had no right to be here, however hard he had worked to earn his place: he was barred by law from the service.
But here he was, regardless, standing in the middle of his quarters in the Medical Academy barracks, staring into his closet and flailing over a question he'd asked himself a dozen times before, even though he knew the answer. What did a promising young cadet wear to his partner's showcase recital at the prestigious and historic Palais Garnier, when all the civilians would be decked out in their elegant suits and evening gowns and a rainbow of multicultural finery? His Starfleet uniform, of course. Even the durable one issued for routine wear carried with it a legacy of service, dedication, and pride that was more than good enough for any environment, however splendid.
If he'd been headed to a major performance or a headlining premiere, Julian might have reached for the dress uniform instead. But this was an exhibition, not nearly as formal. There would be school groups in attendance, and people who didn't ordinarily patronize the ballet because they didn't enjoy sitting through three-hour performances with multiple intermissions. There would most likely be other Starfleet personnel present, if not cadets then active-duty officers, and at least some of them would probably be in uniform. Julian wouldn't look out of place, and even Palis's pretentious and exceedingly traditional parents could not possibly object. Docteur Delon might believe Julian would waste his talents in Starfleet, but there was no denying the prestige of studying at the Medical Academy. It was the most competitive and coveted medical school in the Federation, and Julian Bashir was at the top of his class.
His mind made up, Julian took out the most pristine of his four duty uniforms, and laid it out on the bed. It settled the question of undergarments, too, which would have been a consideration today as they weren't when he took an evening's liberty in San Francisco. After all, when he did that, no one was going to see what he had on under his civvies, were they? But he'd be spending the night in Paris. It was a pleasant thought, and Julian dug out his standard-issue singlet, trunks and socks. Palis liked the clean lines of Starfleet undergarments, so she said. In any case, they never stayed on him for long once the jumpsuit came off.
He dressed with more than his usual considerable care, then lingered a little longer than normal in front of the mirror, combing his hair out of its sleep-tousled curls. He'd actually managed to get some rest last night, at least until 0300 when he'd awakened abruptly out of a nightmare of glittering, many-coloured lights and strange sounds and solemn alien doctors who ignored his pleas for his mother. At least he hadn't had to scream his way out of the dream. He hadn't had to do that in a year, maybe longer. He was always at his best when he was busy and engaged by his work. It was easier to keep his mind from slipping into awkward areas. His last visit home had made that harder, and the most recent spate of screaming nightmares had followed that. Now this business in Belgium…
Julian shook off the thought. He focused on cleaning his teeth, then tested out his smile in the looking-glass. He didn't feel the first one, but the second came more readily and by the third he was genuinely grinning. He was going to Paris. He would spend the whole night with Palis. He had a full twenty-four hour pass: he could spend almost all of it with her. Or watching her on stage, which was almost as marvellous. It was with a far lighter step that he left his quarters this morning, and he strode swiftly to the turbolift.
He wasn't due in Paris for another forty minutes, which left plenty of time for breakfast. But Julian wasn't quite prepared to face the prospect of eating in any of the campus mess halls again. They'd be less crowded on a Saturday morning, but they wouldn't be empty. And everyone was sure to be talking about exactly the same thing they'd discussed yesterday: the colonists from Moab IV, and what an outrage it was to allow genetically enhanced humans to live on Earth, to work and study and contribute as if they were Federation citizens. As if their membership in the human race shouldn't be forfeit because of decisions made by others before they were born. Or before they were capable of making such choices for themselves, Julian could not help but add in a feeble attempt at self-defence.
He knew he had no right to the kinship he felt with these colonists. Their situation was quite unlike his. They had been born into a society that did not condemn - and indeed, uplifted - genetic enhancement. Their DNA had been altered in the embryonic stage, where the alterations to his had been done far later in life; meaning that they had not erased, by their very genesis, another worthy life. And, of course, they had never chosen to lie about their genetic status. But however unwarranted, the bond he felt was undeniable. He couldn't refute it. His engineered brain wouldn't let him forget it. All he could do was try to ignore it. To focus on Paris and Palis. To do his best not to think about the broadcast he'd watched last night before taking refuge in bed.
He hadn't meant to look. He'd left Doctor Norton's classroom absolutely determined not to switch on FNS — or any other news feed, for that matter. He'd departed the mess hall with the same clear resolve. But his evening routine required checking his correspondence, which meant sitting down at his computer terminal. And after he'd read his dispatches and sifted through a few messages from his team on the nephrology research project and checked — for about the seventeenth time that week — that his overnight leave request was still marked as approved, his hand had simply moved, as it always did, to the shortcut on the control panel that called up the Federation News Service.
Usually he just scanned the day's top headlines, perhaps perusing an article or two if something piqued his interest. It was always good to keep an eye on science and medicine press releases aimed at the layperson, so he knew what his patients would be seeing in their media. In interstellar news, the situation along the Cardassian border had grown increasingly interesting over the last couple of years, as negotiations spun on. Starfleet had finally secured a commitment from the Central Command to pull out of the Bajoran sector, and diplomats on both sides were dickering over timelines. The more optimistic predicted a three-month schedule. Pessimists seemed to think it could take years. If the murmurs Julian had heard around Starfleet Medical were true, plans for relief efforts were being made with a goal of establishing a Federation presence on Bajor sometime in the new year. As someone who'd be dispatched to his first posting at precisely that time, Julian was intrigued.
Last night, however, he didn't even look for news from the frontier. His eyes were drawn immediately to the top three headlines, all of which referenced the disturbances in Ghent. Julian had felt the colour drain from his cheeks, and a band of dread close about his ribs, and he'd tried to switch off the display. But his fingers wouldn't obey him and he couldn't find his voice, and the second headline had almost compelled him to select it.
"We Are Worthy": Disability Advocates Condemn Eugenic Leniency.
Julian had called up the article with a swipe of one numb fingertip. His vision had been blurring, and he couldn't actually read it, but the accompanying holocam footage played without needing a prompt. In a stately auditorium somewhere in Europe, a group of people representing a range of ages and ethnicities — mostly human, but with an Aenar, a Bolian, and a Betazoid among them — were gathered on stage. Some sat in antigrav chairs or wore neural transduction braces on their limbs. Others had the characteristic physical features of Trisomy 21 or other chromosomal abnormalities that did not preclude a happy and essentially healthy life. Two had VISORs, and another wore a visual translator, a translucent monocle-like screen that converted spoken language to text for the Deaf who eschewed aural implants for cultural reasons. Three generations of a family with achondroplastic short stature were dressed in the tartan of one of the old Scottish clans. A few of those assembled displayed no visible signs of disability, and likely lived with autism or neuropathic pain syndromes or a host of other hidden challenges that standard medicine, miraculous as it was, could ameliorate but not remove. There were young adults and mature faces, elderly people, and four schoolchildren of various ages. Each person on the stage took a turn addressing the assembled crowd, and when the woman with the visual translator stood up, one of her companions interpreted her sign language.
The headline was misleading. There was no outright condemnation, not of eugenics in general and certainly not of the Moab colonists. These people simply wanted to tell their stories, and to remind their audience — both in the room and in the much broader sense — of the grim history of the fight for the rights and acceptance of people living with disabilities. They wanted people to remember how easy it was to marginalize, ignore, and erase differences in the name of "advancement". They wanted people to remember that when fascist and tyrants rose to power — of which Khan and his contemporaries had been only the most recent — it had always been they, Earth's most vulnerable, who were the first to die.
It was moving, heartrending, and important testimony. Julian was glad they had the courage to offer it, and glad that society had progressed to the point where theirs was one of the most important broadcasts on a service that provided a voice to dozens of species on hundreds of worlds. He was glad they were speaking, and he was glad people were listening. But it had gored his heart to watch, to think of his little patients at the orbital clinic, and to know that his own parents were the very sort these advocates were warning against: people who were so intolerant of difference, so driven by the allure of easy success, prestige, and pride, that they had taken steps to remove at least one such child from the world.
It had made him feel vile. It had driven him to shut off the computer as soon as the last speaker said her piece, and the commentators started talking instead. And it had almost certainly brought on the nightmare.
Now, stepping out into the sunshine and the riot of spring fragrances that danced on the ocean wind, Julian tried to will away the emotions and the memories. Paris. Palis. And cherry blossoms?
It was customary to bring flowers for a danseuse. Roses were traditional, but uninspired: there would be florists' carts thronging in the cobbled courtyard before the Palais Garnier, with bundles of roses of every colour and variety imaginable there for the asking. Sometimes Julian enjoyed sifting through the dizzying selection to find a single perfect blossom. Once, he'd brought Palis four dozen, so they could strew them all over her bedroom until the whole flat smelled like a damp conservatory. But at the end of the day, roses were dull. De rigueur. Impersonal.
A stem of cherry blossoms, on the other hand, plucked by Julian himself just before leaving campus… that was perfect. A little slice of San Francisco, a taste of Starfleet Academy. He'd been luxuriating among the cherry blossoms for the last two weeks, and they wouldn't be in bloom much longer. It wasn't as though there were no cherry trees in Paris, of course, but the San Francisco variety were special, intertwined with the city's history as a Pacific port. They were a part of his daily life that he could share with her, and bringing her a branch would show creativity, imagination, and personal effort: all the things that were most meaningful about a gift.
Delighted by the idea and very glad of the distraction, Julian meandered down one of the neatly-raked paths in search of the perfect branch. He studied the hazy pink clouds of fragrant loveliness as he went. The air was crisp but balmy: it was going to be a hot day. There was something satisfying about beaming to another continent knowing you were leaving a pleasant day behind you for everyone else to enjoy in your absence. Almost as satisfying as the magic of escaping a bitter winter storm for some sunny beach halfway around the planet. Transporter technology had completely erased the tedium of the seasons: there was always something fresh just the touch of a button away, even if you weren't always free to go there.
Today, though, Julian was free, and he felt it! He wasn't sure he had ever needed this escape so desperately. Getting away from the stress of his final semester was important, to be sure. But getting away from the shadow cast by the arrival of the Moab colonists, and the tremors it was sending through the bedrock of his haven at Starfleet Medical? That was too great a mercy to quantify.
He found the tree he wanted. It was just off the path, one of the ones surrounded by manicured greensward instead of flowerbeds. The groundskeeper and his staff made sure to sprinkle such spots around generously, in the hope it would encourage wayward cadets to study where they wouldn't trample the flora. Julian had learned over the last eight years that it didn't always work: teenagers and those in their early twenties were legendary for their obliviousness, and there were bound to be careless personalities in any group of young people. For his part, he did try to mind the flowers when looking for a place to spread out. He preferred the grass anyway, possibly as a consequence of growing up in a land of rolling meadows where the flowers, for the most part, were grown behind low garden walls.
Having found his tree, he surveyed the branches. He only needed one small, slender cutting. About forty centimetres long, with a cluster of offshoots laden with blossoms. Julian craned his neck, gazing up into the downy canopy, until he saw just the right branch. It reached out from a limb just over his head, and he got up on his toes to achieve better leverage as he closed his fingers around the root of the branch and prepared to apply a careful counterforce with his thumb. His tongue found its way into his cheek as he focused on the task at hand…
"Just what do you think you're doing?" a stern voice demanded, disapproval and accusation cutting a chilling swath through the gentle wind.
(fade)
Julian's heart was in his throat, and he eased back down onto the flats of his feet, his left arm sinking with his stomach but his right still reaching up into the tree. He turned his head, rueful apology starting to crease his features as he realized he had been caught in the act by the only person on the Academy campus who would frown upon what he was doing.
The elderly human man stood on the edge of the path, feet widely planted in their rubber boots, and arms crossed over the bib of his overalls. His wispy white hair was whipping in the breeze, and his bushy brows were furrowed into deep crevices not just of accusation, but of outright condemnation. It was Boothby, the groundskeeper and the perennial foe of the clumsy and the careless.
"I… er…" Julian began. He knew he should get his hand the hell out of the tree, but he couldn't quite coordinate the necessary muscles. He didn't feel much like a Starfleet cadet, top of his class and mere months from becoming a practicing physician and surgeon. Instead, he was yanked back in an instant to the age of nine, when he'd broken an upstairs window trying to figure out how to use his first tennis racquet.
He'd been inspired by footage from Wimbledon that year, and had replicated a model far too large for his body. And he'd been practicing against the back wall of the cottage, because he had no friends — again — so soon after the move to yet another quiet village for reasons he'd been too innocent to understand. He'd been enjoying it, too, solitary endeavour though it was, until he heard the glass shatter.
He'd known he would be in trouble. His mother's disappointment and gentle scolding had been bad enough, scalding his conscience as she ushered him inside and confiscated the racquet. She'd gone upstairs to gather the shards of glass, and Julian (in those days still thinking of himself as Jules, as he'd been born) had been so stricken with guilt that he'd flung himself on his knees next to her, trying to scoop up the shattered panes as quickly as he could. The result had been predictable, and he'd felt even more guilty as his mother fussed over his sliced fingers and scored calves with the dermal regenerator. She'd cried, and he'd cried, and then she'd settled him in his bedroom with Kukalaka and a cup of sweet, milky tea while she went to finish cleaning up his mess. As the remorse had dimmed a little, dread had set in — because Jules had known all too well by the age of nine that it was going to get exponentially worse when his father got home.
Over the years, Julian had deliberately lost track of his father's mercurial employment history, and he didn't care to remember if he'd been working at the power relay station that summer, or at the interior design firm where he'd been engaged to manage employee timetables but had spent most of his brief tenure making a hopeless tangle of the swatch collections and colourbooks. Either way, he'd been near the end of his hitch, at that dangerous time when he knew he was looking down the barrel of another pointless failure, but no one had actually suggested the inevitable parting of the ways. That phase of any new venture was always accompanied by foul moods, and on that day coming home to a broken window had been the straw that broke the camel's back.
Julian's mother had barely got the words out of her mouth when the shouting began. He'd heard his father storming around below, and then the thunderous percussion of his boots on the stairs. The Bashirs didn't customarily wear shoes in the house: they were supposed to come off in the vestibule, so as not to track in muck or to mark up the floors. Jules had known he was in terrible trouble when he realized his father had forgotten this rule. And the bedroom door had flown open with almost enough force to take it off its hinges, and the shouting had resumed afresh — only this time, it was right in the room with him, towering over him, getting closer and louder by the second.
"I… I—I—I—" Julian stammered, trying to tear himself free from the memory's icy tentacles. Boothby was still glaring at him. He knew there really was no excuse for the position he was in, and he silently upbraided himself for not even pausing to wonder if he was allowed to take a branch from one of the trees. And realizing in the next agonizing moment that he shouldn't have had to wonder, because obviously he should have known it was forbidden! All his intelligence and all his accomplishments, and he was still a wooden-headed fool now and then.
And that sounded so much like the voice of his father that the last shreds of his courage very nearly abandoned him on the spot, dragged back into the depths again.
He remembered every word of the lecture, or tongue-lashing, or tirade, that Richard Bashir had levied at him as the price for an exuberant moment of childish abandon. But what stood out in Julian's memory most starkly weren't the attacks upon his clumsiness, his ingratitude, his lack of common sense and common decency, and his general dearth of consideration for his mother's efforts to keep the house presentable or his father's right to return to a peaceful home after a hard day at work. What he remembered was how his father kept coming back to one recurring demand, repeated over and over again at ever-increasing volume. How the hell does anyone hit a tennis ball hard enough to break a window, anyway?
Even after his father started to wind down, and shifted the focus of his rage from his son to the previous inhabitants of the cottage (Just because it's a historical building doesn't mean they need to use historical glass, now does it? Bloody idiots!), Julian remembered how terrified he'd been. Not just of the shouting, and the punishment to follow, but of the undercurrent of panic in his father's voice as he came back again and again to that impossible question: How the hell does anyone hit a tennis ball hard enough to break a window?
He hadn't known then what his father feared. He hadn't known why the incident had scared his mother. But he'd felt their fear, and it had fed his own. Years later, of course, long after he'd been fitted for a racquet that fit his body, and a whole series of ever more high-quality replacements, long after he'd been put into tennis lessons where he was able to play with other like-minded youth whether they liked him personally or not, Julian had finally understood. Genetic engineering had side effects: everyone knew that. His own apparent lack of any detrimental consequences was an aberration Julian still couldn't explain, and it had only been proved out by the test of time. When he was nine, his parents had no way of knowing he was going to grow up as he had, healthy, functional, and perfectly well-adjusted. They had been vigilant for adverse events. Adverse events like augmented strength run amok. Like finding out their son had both the force in his arm and the lack of self-control required to break a window with a tennis ball. They'd both been afraid, one hiding it in tears and the other in wrath, that the incident was the first symptom of some pernicious pathology instead of what it had proved to be: a simple, silly accident of the sort active and imaginative children often had when they were isolated and bored.
"I'm waiting for an answer, Mister," said Boothby, but there was a little less of an edge to his voice. His eyes were travelling over Julian's frozen frame, and when they came to rest on his face they were no longer blazing with indignation. Despite the stern scowl still crinkled around them, they were soft with sympathy. "I'm not going to shoot you, boy. Just explain yourself."
"I…" Julian began again, but he knew he was on the verge of another fit of stammering, so he closed his dry mouth, rolled his tongue fruitlessly around it, and then pressed his lips tightly together before choosing a different word. "The blossoms," he said, and the jag was broken. "I wanted to bring some to Paris. My… the woman I love is dancing at the Opéra National tonight, and I thought…"
"You thought you'd take her some of my cherry blossoms, because roses are boring," Boothby said sourly. It was such a perfect encapsulation of Julian's own thought process that he felt his cheeks burning. Hearing it aloud, and perhaps especially in that tone of voice, he saw how foolish and frivolous an idea it was.
"Yes, sir," he whispered, staring down at the toes of his meticulously-polished boots where they had sunk into the softness of the grass. He couldn't meet the groundskeeper's eyes, and he still hadn't figured out how to get his hand out of the tree. He just stood as he was, pilloried by his own embarrassment.
"You are aware, aren't you, boy, that they have cherry blossoms in Paris?" Boothby said sarcastically.
Julian managed a fractional nod. "Yes, sir," he breathed again.
"I can't hear you," said Boothby, in the same barking cadence drill instructors loved to use.
It had the desired effect. "Yes, sir!" Julian repeated, forcefully and far more audibly.
"So then what's so special about these?" the groundskeeper demanded.
Julian knew it was silly to answer, but he didn't want to dissemble. He tried his best to be a truthful person and an honourable cadet. He wanted to be worthy of the uniform he wore, and the only way he could even hope to outweigh the single, glaring lie that had brought him here was by telling the truth in everything else.
"They're special to me, sir," he said. "I look forward to them every year. I've been enjoying them all week. Longer. They smell…" He knew it was absurd to contend that these cherry blossoms somehow smelled sweeter than any others. Every variety contained the same bouquet of aromatic hydrocarbons responsible for the distinctive scent, and scientifically there shouldn't be much difference. But somehow there was. "They smell like springtime at the Academy, sir," Julian confessed awkwardly. "And since she doesn't really visit me here, I thought it would be a way to bring… to bring…"
"To bring her a piece of your daily life," said Boothby, sounding pensive. His voice hardened again in disapproval. "So you thought you'd just rip off a whole branch, and go gallivanting off to Europe with no one the wiser?"
That had to be a rhetorical question, and Boothby was a civilian, not an officer: Julian did have the option not to respond, and he took it. He was too acutely humiliated by his foolishness to manage a dignified reply, anyway.
"Hmph!" Boothby grunted sharply. "That's what I though. You cadets, you're all the same. Think the grounds just sprout like this after the first good February rainfall. You don't see the work that goes into it, so you don't appreciate it. Do you have any idea how old that tree is? How long it's stood right there on this campus, shading the heads of cadets who've grown up to be some of the most famous officers in Starfleet history? A hundred and twenty-two years, Cadet! James T. Kirk himself probably sat under that tree!"
Julian looked up in surprise, suddenly too fascinated to be embarrassed. His fingers finally released their hold on the branch, and his errant right hand found its way back down to his side. "A hundred and twenty-two years? Really?" he asked.
Boothby nodded stoutly. "Yes!" he said. "It's one of the ones that was transplanted from Kyoto in memory of another famous Starfleet officer who passed away that winter. Lieutenant Commander Hoshi Sato — that name mean anything to you?"
Julian shook his head, still entranced.
The groundskeeper scoffed. "No, and why would it?" he asked, nodding at Julian's shoulders. "Psychology? Nursing? Pharmacy?"
"Medicine," said Julian reflexively. His head tilted a little higher as he added, unnecessary for his audience but essential for his sense of self-worth; "I'm going to be a doctor in just a few weeks."
"Well," said Boothby, unimpressed but not dismissive; "if you were an anthropology or linguistics major, you'd know her. That little doohickey in your combadge that makes it so easy to talk to your Andorian friend? She pioneered that device. Among other things."
Julian's eyebrows shot up. "You know I've got an Andorian friend?" he asked. He couldn't help it.
"Course I do," Boothby grunted. "I know everything that goes on on this campus. He interrupted you just the other day when you were studying on the knoll up there."
He pointed, and Julian followed his arm to see, with no astonishment whatsoever, the tree he'd been lounging under on Thursday afternoon before Erit came looking for his lab coat. "Is that one a hundred and twenty-two years old, too?" he asked, fascinated.
"Older," said Boothby. "That one's a transplant from the garden in Golden Gate Park. Most of the ones around it are hybrids, quite a lot younger…" His eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Are you trying to distract me, boy?"
"No, sir," Julian said hurriedly. The thought hadn't even crossed his mind until the man suggested it. "It's j-just… interesting."
"Hmph." Boothby nodded once, curtly, and his scowl deepened. "You can't just rip a branch off a tree!" he scolded, returning to his message. "It tears the cambium, shreds the bark, leaves a nasty open wound to attract fungi or parasites. You wouldn't hack a mole off a patient's face with a butter knife and walk away, now would you?"
Julian hung his head. Ordinarily, he could stand up to a dressing-down as well as the next cadet. This was different. Perhaps it was because the elderly civilian reminded him a little too much of his father. Perhaps it was because the turmoil he'd been fighting these last few days had worn down his will to stand up for himself. Perhaps it was because he knew the criticism was well-deserved: he had been thoughtless, and he had been about to rip a branch off the tree. Whatever the reason, he found himself bowing under Boothby's stern castigation.
"No, sir," he mumbled.
"No!" Boothby barked. "What would you do?"
Julian looked up in surprise — again. "Sir?" he said. Was he really being asked to rattle off a clinical procedure? By the gardener? Boothby raised his bushy brows, waiting for his answer. "Well, I'd…" Julian gathered his professional mindset, what he thought of as his Doctor Voice, and answered with crisp confidence; "I would first apply a nerve blocking agent, of course; either pharmacological or non-invasive, as circumstances dictated. Then visualize the blemish with my tricorder, isolating the margins of the mole. With a high-frequency laser scalpel set to a radiance appropriate for the patient's skin according to species, I would excise the mass using a contoured elliptical approach. Further tricorder imaging would confirm the removal of all affected dermal and epidermal cells, with resection as necessary. Then close the wound with a dermal regenerator on a moderate cycle, clean the area, and remove the neural blocker. Finally, I'd give the patient a mirror, so they could see the change."
In the classroom or the Infirmary, that recitation would have earned him words of approval from his professor or his preceptor, and concurring nods from his classmates. He probably would have won himself some bonus marks for including consideration of the patient's feelings about a facial mole — a natural thing to do in practice, but easy to forget in a procedural recitation. Boothby only tilted his head back slightly, looking thoughtful. "Awful lot of steps for something you could hack off with a butter knife," he muttered slyly.
"Well, yes, but in order to do it properly—" Julian began. Then he understood, and he deflated measurably. "Oh. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't think. It won't happen again."
"Didn't happen this time, now did it?" Boothby said, still irascible but oddly mollified. "Stopped you just in time. Now. Do you want to see how to do it properly, or not?"
"How to…" Julian didn't quite understand.
"How to cut a stem of cherry blossoms for your fancy French girlfriend!" said Boothby. His eyes narrowed. "Not very sharp for a doctor-in-waiting, are you? Here, let me show you. Which branch were you after?"
He stumped down off the path, flipping open one of the pockets of his overalls as he did so. He drew out a small pair of garden shears, blades curved like talons and gleaming with freshly-whetted keenness. He flipped them with a deft toss, and offered them, handles-first, to Julian. "Go on. Take 'em," he growled. "I don't hold with lasers, myself. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways."
Julian took the shears, spying the hook that was holding them closed and sliding it out of the way with his thumb. A strong spring expanded, forcing blades and handles apart. He looked from the tool to the tree, not at all certain he had the nerve for this.
"Which branch?" Boothby asked again. With his free hand, Julian pointed. He felt like a fool, but the groundskeeper seemed to be taking the matter extremely seriously. He squinted at the bough, and the offshoot Julian had indicated. "Not a bad choice," he allowed gruffly. "Young growth, but not too new. Isn't load-bearing. And you didn't get greedy. Just right for slipping into a bud vase, am I right?"
Julian nodded. Palis had just such a vase, made of Bolian crystal, that she liked to set on her dressing table where the morning sun could cast prismatic rainbows through it onto the wall and ceiling.
"Well, what you want is a nice, clean cut about a quarter-inch north of the bud," said Boothby. "That's six millimetres, to you Starfleet types."
Us Starfleet types and the rest of the Federation, Julian thought dryly. Dozens of species on hundreds of worlds, all content to use a standardized decimal system for clarity and convenience. He wasn't quite tactless enough to say it aloud. Until coming to America, he had never imagined there were humans out there who still used the archaic Imperial system. The United States had been one of the last countries on Earth to move on to metric, and in some areas people clung to inches and feet as a sort of regional badge of honour. Every culture had its foibles, and this was one.
Besides, he could make a cut at six millimetres with preternatural precision. He shifted his grip on the shears and moved them into place.
"Not straight across the branch," Boothby said, putting on a show of mild annoyance that didn't quite hide the fact that he was enjoying his captive audience. "Angle it. That's right. About forty-five degrees. Then you want to make one quick, clean cut all the way through. Get ahold of it, boy!" he said sharply, before Julian could cut. "You want it to hit the ground and knock loose all the petals?"
"No," Julian said with a little chuckle of amusement. He curled his left hand around the stem. "I don't want that."
"There. Good enough," said Boothby. His reluctant praise was amusing: the blades were placed at exactly six millimetres and angled precisely forty-five degrees. The lasers he so scorned could not have been more accurate. If he hadn't been feeling just a bit impudent as his confidence returned, Julian would have balked at that degree of precision. "Now cut."
Julian clenched his hand, drawing together the handles of the shears. There was a clean, satisfying crunch, and the slender branch came loose in his fingers. He drew it down out of the canopy gently, careful to let the blossom-bearing twigs disentangle themselves slowly from their neighbours. He shook loose a few stray petals with one gentle twitch of the wrist, and looked up at Boothby, a little abashed, when he realized he'd been smiling in quiet delight.
"Right. Give me the shears," said the groundskeeper. Julian handed them over, and Boothby produced a damp cloth from his back pocket. He wiped down the blades, and the faint smell of chlorine rose to mingle with the scent of the flowers. Boothby sheathed the tool, and from another pocket produced a vial with a tiny brush embedded in its lid. The golden fluid within had the consistency of olive oil. "Let me hold that for a minute, and you're going to paint this on the cut," he said, taking the branch and giving Julian the vial.
"What is it?" he asked, unscrewing the cap.
"My own recipe," said Boothby. "Can't be telling you doctors about it, or the next thing you know you'll be mass-producing it and taking all the credit. Paint it on, just a drop or two. It'll help seal the cut, and keep the germs away."
Julian smiled at the colloquial expression, and did as he was told. He capped the bottle again, and offered it to the groundskeeper. In return, he was given his blossoms.
"Tell her to cut off another quarter-inch before she puts them in water," Boothby instructed, shuffling back up the slope and onto the path. "They'll last longer. And don't you go spreading the word that my cherry trees are fair game for every lovelorn young fool on campus. I'm making an exception for you, Cadet. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Julian said warmly. "I'm very grateful. But… why?"
"Why, what?" snorted Boothby.
"Why make an exception for me?" asked Julian awkwardly.
Boothby shrugged. "Because you were interested in the history of the tree?" he said. "Because I've just had an old friend remind me that you kids don't learn all your important lessons in the classroom? Maybe because you look like you could stand to have something go your way today. Go on, get out of here: off to Paris and that lady of yours. She must be something special."
"She is," said Julian softly, almost dreamily. He turned the branch of cherry blossoms in his hand, drinking in the fragrance. Then he looked up at Boothby. "Thank you."
"Hmph!" the groundskeeper said again, and he went loping off down the path. Not until he was gone did it occur to Julian to wonder just how beleaguered he looked, if even Boothby had seen it.
(fade)
French Language Glossary:
de rigueur: according to the current fashion, often with the connotation of "overdone" or "trite".