Winter's Child, continued.
I was born eight months and six days after the crash. By that time, they had found the EMH, and when my mother went into labor activated the program; the emitter's power source was too precious to waste with prenatal care. He said I was early and scrawny, but a healthy, ordinary human girl, and that my mother should be very pleased. If he was shocked to be brought back to life to attend to a very pregnant captain on a frozen ship, I've never heard about it.
In fact, there is a surprising lack of shock surrounding my birth – at least as it has been presented to me. In my hearing, it has never been said that any of the crew was startled when seven weeks after the crash, their captain pulled Tom aside and demanded a physical, which was not something she had ever asked for before. His announcement that she was seven weeks pregnant was apparently taken in stride, and no one has ever let slip that there was confusion and gossip and utter bewilderment.
All the same, though, I have my own theories. My mother was not exactly promiscuous, in the eyes of her crew; Greg Ayala once said that whatever captains like Kirk had done, my mother was cut of a different cloth, and since in all the stories she seemed welded to a phaser rifle I had to assume he meant other qualities. On the ship, it was commonly held that she hadn't given her heart or her body to anyone in the last five years. She was not married, not dating, and not involved. I cannot believe that everyone reacted as calmly to my intrusion as they would like me to think. I don't doubt, though, that out of love and respect for her their curiosity was quickly and ruthlessly stifled, to be discussed in whispers while lugging mattresses up four decks of ladders.
For my part, though, I didn't wonder. I had no model for what family life was supposed to be like, and save for that one whisper no one ever mentioned that I was missing a father, so I never thought to miss him. My bedtime stories were gently edited, and it wasn't until I was two and Zayek was born that anything contradicted those stories. Still, it wasn't immediately clear to me that Tuvok was an important part of the equation, because Zayek was, after all, Madelein Swinn's baby. That Tuvok took care of the child, and consequently cared for Maddie, seemed only natural; hadn't I been looked after by everyone my whole life? Of course, no one explains pon farr to a toddler, and Tuvok's betrayal of his wife in order to survive and his complex relationship with a woman who had until then always been Ensign Swinn were beyond me.
No, it wasn't until I was seven and the third child among us was born that I began to wonder. Tom and B'Elanna had been lovers my whole life; I was three when they asked my mother to make it official, and shivered through the ceremony in the ready room. And when B'Elanna began to grow and grumble a few years later, muttering insincerely about the efficacy of frozen contraceptives, it was explained that she and Tom were going to have a baby. When little Harry was born, my mother gripped my hand very tightly as she ushered me into the tube junction with everyone else to meet the baby. The Doctor wrapped the baby and presented him to his father first, a tiny wailing bundle.
"Your son, Tom," he said affectionately. The Doctor, who had been activated only a handful of times since my birth, looked around the impromptu birthing chamber and said softly, "I wish there were a way that I could be here to help you." Since the energy to activate his program was considerable, he performed quick physicals on everyone before he was switched off again. The adults were tired and cold but for the most part healthy, though he lingered with particular concern over my mother. Unable to put his worries into words, he turned his holographic tricorder to me.
"You've certainly grown, Bea," he said cheerfully. Since I'd been four when he'd been turned on last, when Beth Foster's paralysis had begun to affect her metabolism, this wasn't surprising. "And you're the healthiest of the lot. Your blood-oxygen efficiency trumps the rest, and you're very well adapted to the cold for a human." He scanned a moment longer, and pressed a few buttons on the tricorder. "Hmmm."
"Doctor?" My mother's best captain's voice cut across his musings. There was a sudden tension in the small room, and the EMH hurriedly moved on to Zayek. When he returned to little Harry, I was peering with fascination at the baby and so heard what my mother did not.
"No dice, Tom," the doctor murmured, and then, with an enormous smile, asked to hold the baby in much more audible tones.
At seven, my education hadn't yet gotten around to mammalian genetics, so I didn't guess what the Doctor was after. I was more worried about Tom's sudden fatherhood. Everyone exclaimed over Harry's tiny little cranial ridges and his brown eyes, saying how much he looked like his mother, but Eddie swore that his hair was that shade of coppery blond and Maddie said his cheekbones mirrored Tom's exactly. No one had ever said that I looked like anything but my mother, and they rarely said that, but I knew that Zayek had Tuvok's sharp ears and calm gaze, even at five, and now Harry had his father's bones.
Whose bones did I have? Whose ears? Waiting for my mother in the nest we shared, I undid my braids and worried at my tangled dark hair. Was I supposed to have a father, who held me when I was born and counted my toes and watched me while I slept, as Tom did?
It was Zayek who went looking for me a few days later, the only one who noticed my deeper silence and, I'm sure, my judicious observation of the new baby with his father. He was a very real friend, a serious boy who I could still get to laugh when Tuvok wasn't around, and we'd always gotten along. He found me behind the ops station, watching my breath evaporate, and sat beside me for a few minutes before saying anything. One of my favorite things about him was that he never wasted time with pleasantries, but that time I found it profoundly irritating.
"Are you angry, that Tom cannot spend time with us as before?"
"No."
He considered, then offered, "Frustrated, then, that our lessons will be rescheduled until B'Elanna is back on her feet?"
"I don't care about engineering class."
He raised an eyebrow. I knew he practiced this, and usually I teased him mercilessly for it, but that day I wasn't in the mood. "Then, if you are not irritated by our change in status, what it is?"
"Don't be so Vulcan, Zayek. 'Change in status.' There's a baby, of course they don't have any time for us." He waited, very still beside me, and I finally turned to him. "You wouldn't understand. You have a father."
That broke his calm somewhat; he wasn't as good at being Vulcan when he was confused, and he wrinkled his nose at me. "You're mad because I have a father." I rolled my eyes, knowing as I did how childish it sounded, but didn't say anything. "Because Harry has a father?" he said. "Well. You could talk to Naomi. She was raised on Voyager by her mother, was she not?" Grateful that he didn't take it personally that he wasn't the person I needed just then, I hugged him, if only to make him wrinkle his nose again.
Naomi was almost always in the garden; she said that it reminded her of before, when the ship was brighter and she used to work in aeroponics with Neelix. While we pruned and tied up plants, she would tell me stories about him and Kes, who had cared for her often, and I liked hearing about something other than hostile aliens and derring-do. It made Voyager sound like a warm, exciting place to be a child, full of kind and welcoming people. In the well-lit, plant-filled corridors, I could almost believe it.
I went that day and helped her to harvest the khari wheat, stripping the grain with chapped fingers from the purplish stalks. It took me nearly a half hour to start talking, but when I finally voiced my question, rushing through it my embarrassment and confusion, she stayed quiet until I had finished. "… and Zayek thought that maybe, since you had only a mom too, that – that – "
"That I could explain?" She smiled, but kept her eyes on her work. "I know what it feels like, Bea, to wonder about your dad, but it's not that I don't have one. See, I was – I started growing inside my mother before Voyager got thrown across the galaxy. My father wasn't on the ship, so I never knew him." Her nimble fingers skimmed over the plant, and her face was serene, but my hands shook as I tied up a full bundle of grain to be threshed. "All I ever had was stories, and of course," she took the bundle from me, squeezed my hand surreptitiously, "my spikes."
"But I don't think I have a father," I said, tugging my hand back and fumbling over fresh stalks. "I know I don't have one here, I get that, but I don't think I have one at all." Naomi turned to me with amused eyes. I hated that, so I hurried to explained, "My mother never even told me stories. Maybe there aren't any."
"The captain – she's very private, Bea. She must miss your father very much, and if he's not here, he's almost certainly dead. If I were her, I wouldn't want to think about that. It's very hard, to be alone." She sighed, and fixed her hazel eyes on mine. "The thing is, though, that you're human, and humans can't just reproduce without – with only a mother. It doesn't work like that Bea." She squeezed my hand. "No, you're a combination of both your parents, even if you only know one of them."
"But – "
"Do you look just like your mother?" She tucked a strand of dark hair behind my ear, and rested her hand on my shoulder. "Those differences came from somewhere, didn't they?" I said nothing, but I nodded: she had confirmed exactly what I had been thinking. "I know it's hard. But the thing is, your mother loves you so much. She loves you double, Bea, and all of us do too."
They were comforting words, but hardly answered my question. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't be loved – I just wanted to know where my ears came from. I knew that I couldn't ask my mother, because if she hadn't told me yet she didn't want to, and the sorrow that surrounded her was too profound to deepen it with childish questions.
I resigned myself to not knowing, and life beneath the ice went on.
The cast of characters of my story – the living, breathing ones that I saw every day – was limited, and the worlds beyond the glacier never intruded.
Tuvok was a silent force behind our survival, working tirelessly to improve our lives, but spending little time in common space. He said the extreme cold weakened his control, and he kept away to respect our privacy and protect his own. Still, he taught the children mathematics and theoretical science; we endured classes in Starfleet protocol for the promise of self-defense lessons, which were exciting, no matter how serious Tuvok tried to make them. He taught us calm our minds, to fool ourselves into feeling warmth when we were so cold we thought we'd die, and to be patient. I was a little afraid of him, but grateful all the same: he was the only one who could confront my mother when her guilt overwhelmed her.
Madelein Swinn was a generous, intelligent woman, an engineer who liked working with her hands. If the cold bothered her, she never let us know, and she was always busy. When we were particularly rowdy would bundle us up and take us below decks, organizing games and races in the corridors. The first time Tuvok underwent the pon farr, isolating himself to protect the crew and completely prepared to die, she alone figured it out and confronted him, overcoming his logic with her own.
Juliet Jarot was a young woman, aged by the cold and fear we lived with. She was a Betazoid, and, like Tuvok, kept her distance. Raised on Earth and used to humans, she still found it wearing to constantly shield herself. She worked in the gardens fourteen hours a day, devoted to the plants that maintained our feeble grip on survival, and it was botany, zoology, and genetics that she taught. Naomi spent most of her time there, too, and learned compassion and patience. I didn't know Juliet well, but I would have trusted her with my fears and secrets, as I trusted Naomi.
I can't think of Greg Ayala and Eddie Matteo separately, although I know that they were very different men before the crash; Greg joked that after three years cuddling with a stranger for warmth, you start cuddling for other reasons. They were an excellent team. Eddie was a creative engineer, always tinkering, and he and Greg were always building some new material or machine to make our lives a little easier. Still, they weren't above grinding flour and running the dynamo, and I caught them more than once, hand in hand, wandering the halls and imagining their life above the ice. Greg taught us history, Eddie physical science, but together they taught us hope, firm in their beliefs that we would be rescued, or that Harry and Chakotay were alive.
Tom Paris taught a different kind of hope. He was my favorite babysitter, and I spent a lot of time with him when I was young; he would wrap Zayek and I up in blankets and teach us old Earth card games while everyone else salvaged below. He told the best stories, played the best games, and always answered questions with the truth. He cared for our injuries and illnesses, but for our souls, too; it was he who managed to replicate my mother a single cup of coffee for her birthday by spending nearly six days running the dynamo while she slept, or surprised Naomi with a photo album that he'd found in the wreckage of her old quarters.
B'Elanna Torres I trusted too; she didn't lie, and she didn't mince words. Terrifying but reassuring all the same, she never hesitated to give me something to do when she caught me hanging around. She taught us practical engineering, and tried to explain how a starship should work. In retrospect, I think that her patience for me had a lot to do with my fatherlessness, but I appreciated it regardless. She scared Zayek silly.
Beth Foster was the one who taught me faith. Her spine had been broken in the crash, far beyond the Doctor's ability to repair without a surgical team or a power grid, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. She worked constantly, trying to build a transceiver or work out the ship's position from the last data recorded before the crash. She wasn't that interested in spending time on anything but her work, but the crew understood, and gave her the space to believe that she could get back to Federation space and medical science.
Joe Carey, noticing just how many skilled engineers had survived, decided to focus instead on food production. He let Juliet work in the gardens, but he built a mill to grind flour and tried his hardest to create palatable meals. He kept the conference room alive and almost warm with his presence, chased Zayek and I good-naturedly away from bubbling pots more than once, and always tried to remember birthdays. We were always hungry, but Joe taught me from an early age what it was to work very hard so that your friends could survive.
The rest of us – Naomi, Zayek, Harry, Ada, me, and little Miral – are a work in progress.
If I were to ask my mother to describe the routine of a single day aboard a living ship, she would be able to do it without hesitation. There were schedules and protocols and rules, duty rosters and shift changes. Everyone and everything had a time and a place, and their orderly, Starfleet days passed in an orderly, Starfleet way.
If I tried to do the same, I'd be doomed to failure. There were no schedules on the Voyager I grew up on; there was one reliable chronometer on board, and the time it showed bore no relation to the dim light that filtered through the layers of ice overhead. There was always work to do, and it wasn't dictated by protocol so much as necessity, because if the oxygen production system failed, it didn't matter whether we pruned the garden or not. There was no really sensible division of labor, and the routine that we settled into for a few weeks would be upset by the next crisis and entirely replaced afterward.
Moreover, a given day on a frozen ship is simply not very memorable. It was always dimly lit, and always cold, and the creeping frost made everything seem fuzzy around the edges. I woke each morning not because any kind of alarm went off but because the gel pack nestled in my blankets had gone cold. If my mother had slipped a new one into the nest before she left, I would still have been woken by the knawing in my belly. We ate breakfast, hard bread or pale wheat mush of which we never quite got enough, and then Zayek and I would be tutored by whoever happened to be free. It made for a haphazard education, made more so by the fact that we had few functional PADDS and no access to the computer core. We studied everyone's pet subject and skipped over what no one could remember, meaning that we knew a great deal about 20th century history but avoided basic biology in favor of complex genetics. We were probably the only Federation children under ten who could have analyzed Borg technology but didn't know a thing about the water cycle.
After lessons, which went on for as long as our instructor felt like talking, we would help with "chores," and each day would fade into the next. Hours spent in the garden, or helping B'Elanna harvest kilometers of wiring, or pounding flour with Joe, all run together now. I remember the birth of every child and every celebration we had only because there were so few, and they stood in such sharp contrast to the grey monotony of every other day.
But those gatherings, in my memory, are bright. I know that they took place in rooms as dark and icy as everything else, but I remember how happy everyone looked at our annual everyone's-birthday party, or Eddie and Greg's wedding, or Ada's birth. It was like a glimpse into the past; my mother would usually be called upon to officiate or make a speech, and her grief would lift, to be replaced by a heartbreaking pride in her ship and her crew. Tom's eyes would sparkle and his jokes would get worse, and B'Elanna would stop being the grim engineer and be for a moment his partner in crime. There, I saw Tuvok's wry humor and heard silent Beth sing, watched Maddie draw Greg into a polka to Juliet and Eddie's uproarious laughter. They were my family, the men and women who had raised me, but in those moments it was as thought I had never met them before, and it was then that I understood how much had been lost in the crash.
Even in the midst of celebration, though, my mother never let go of her guilt for long. I would see the flicker of pain in her eyes as she watched her little band, acutely aware of how many of her charges weren't there, of how many bodies lined the corridors below. Sometimes I would catch her glancing at me, and it seemed I could see right through her smile to the sorrow below.
That second wedding took place only a few weeks after little Harry's arrival, and I sat back and watched, still preoccupied with fatherhood. Tom had the baby wrapped against his skin for warmth, and as he sat joking about the other Harry's crush on Greg, the wrong twin, and the resident ex-Borg, he kept a gentle hand cradling his son's head. Even my mother laughed at the story, and I again caught a glimpse of the captain that she had once been. She was, for an instant, transformed by joy, and I thought again of what Naomi had said about my father, and how hard it was to be alone.
Later, as she brushed and braided my dark hair, I asked her, "Are you happy, mama?"
She didn't answer, but she paused a moment, her hand working through my snarled hair. "Why do you ask, Beatrice?"
I couldn't answer that without asking the question that I'd promised myself not to, so I simply said, "You look sad, sometimes."
Softly, she said, "Are you happy?"
It was too complex a question for a seven year old, but I considered it, only too aware that she had neatly sidestepped my own. What was happiness, anyway? "I like being alive. So, I suppose, yes."
"Are you lonely here?" I couldn't see her face, and she seemed weary, worried, as she had always been, ever since her ship had come to ground for the last time.
And, of course, I was lonely. It was lonesome, to live trapped here, but knowing that there were worlds and people and adventures on the other side of the glacier. But I didn't want to say that: the ice and the isolation weren't her fault, and were nothing she could fix. "I have you, and Tom, and Maddie and Joe and everyone. I have Zayek. I have classes and jobs to do. There isn't much time to be lonely." I turned around in her lap. "Are you?"
"Oh, no." Her response was instant. She searched my eyes, the lines of my face, then kissed me on the forehead. "Beatrice Teya Janeway. How could I ever be lonely, when I have you?"
I knew it was a lie, but it was one she needed to tell, and one she needed me to believe.