Lieutenant Torres was still curled up in bed two hours after sunrise. On board Voyager, she usually would have been awake and on duty for a several hours by this time of day. In this less than enchanting valley, she stayed warm in bed for as long as she could get away with it. B'Elanna was getting restless, however. She really needed to use the latrine corner but dreaded baring her bottom to the frigid air to accomplish what she needed to do.

Hearing the step of her lanky companion, she called out of the doorway, "What color is the sky today?"

"It's gray, actually. Stormy gray. I think it's going to either rain or snow. Maybe both. I brought in the rest of the vines from that patch down by the stream. I don't think we need to worry about running out of fuel for the fire, but staying in bed as much as possible today would probably be a good idea."

"Oh really?" B'Elanna sniggered.

"Relax, I won't paw you all day long. Just most of the day. Better get up and get your breakfast now, before that wind starts charging out of the crack in the ceiling again."

Groaning, the engineer without a ship had to agree that hiding inside and delaying the inevitable might be worse in the long run than just gritting her teeth and getting it over with. Quickly pulling on her jumpsuit and shoes, B'Elanna emerged from her hibernation and stalked to the back of the cave, grumbling constantly. "Don't you look, now," she called out.

"Such becoming modesty. I'm not interested in looking, Be'. I have other senses I prefer to use on you."

"Liar."

"I am not lying about having other senses I like to use on you."

"You like to look, too." Her retort drew answering laughter from Tom that echoed in the stone chamber.

Coming near the fire, she washed her hands in frigid water reserved for that purpose in a hunk of granite. B'Elanna had turned it into a basin by hollowing out a depression in it with her phaser.

"What would you like to eat this morning, ma'am?"

"Not ration bars. There are only a couple of them left."

"I guess we'd better not have any today, then. Chocolatey potatoes, Lieutenant? Or would you prefer the celery flavored ones?"

"I'm getting pretty tired of these roots, Tom. It's a good thing they taste good, or I would be refusing to eat them by now."

"Do you feel like pounding those seeds into meal? We can try making something out of it. Baked mush, perhaps?"

"Sounds awful," she said, crinkling her nose in disgust.

Tom had built up the fire. They sat around it, enjoying the warmth it put out while making and drinking Vulcan Ear Tea and consuming a few of the roots that had been cooked the previous night. They chatted a little, but as the wind from the cave roof increased, B'Elanna became increasingly more uncomfortable.

"Would you like to retreat back to the den, B'Elanna? It isn't going to be very comfortable out here today, even in the daytime, unless it clears up later."

"I know, but I get so bored lying in there all the time." Getting a look at his hurt expression, she quickly added, "I'm not getting bored with what we are doing in there, Tom, just with having to stay huddled up in there for so many hours at a time. I like to move around, pace a little. Spending all night in there is starting to get to me. If we have to start spending days in there, too, I'm going to go insane."

"Me, too, I have to confess. We should do something different today in our hidey-hole since it's daylight. I'll just have to figure out another way to help you burn up all that extra energy, that's all."

His smirk appeared, and she was tempted to throw something at him. Regrettably, his comment about the only heavy objects available being rocks happened to be true.

"Be', how about we play some cards today. Larson was kind enough to leave us a deck."

"Cards?"

"Sure. Gin. Poker. Maybe a little Rulgar. What do you say?"

"Any betting involved?"

"Oh, we could, just to make it interesting. You ever hear of Strip Poker?"

"As a matter of fact I have, Tom, but I've never played it before. From what I've heard, though, I don't think I'd mind playing with you."

"That's what I love about you, B'Elanna. That spirit of adventure."

By midafternoon, both were so bored with playing cards, even strip poker having lost its appeal, that they spent a little time outside the den, eating another meal and checking out the weather. Tom's prediction about it both snowing and raining had come true. The landscape outside was covered with a dreary coat of snow that had fallen earlier in the day. The snow layer was now in the process of being saturated by a steady rain. B'Elanna stood at the cavern entrance. Tom had his arms wrapped around her from the back, blocking the breeze that was blowing through the cave from the ceiling crack in the rear.

"Do you think it will turn to snow again tonight, Tom?"

"Probably. We have to hope that it stops by sundown or there could be a lot of snow out there by morning. If you think you're bored now from being inside all day, think how you'd feel if we were snowed in by a blizzard."

She shivered. "Did you ever live in a cold climate like this before?"

"Only for a couple of years. My father had a few diplomatic-type postings on the European continent. There was a fair amount of cold weather and snow there. The skiing was fun, though. What about you?"

"No, my mother couldn't tolerate the cold as well as I can, and you know how wonderful I am about it."

"My father wasn't very good in the cold, either. The admiral always had to have the environmental controls cranked up all the way in winter." He hesitated; Tom had been wanting to ask her a question about her father, and he wondered if this would be a good time to broach the subject. Might as well try. "What about your father, Be'? How much do you remember about him?"

"Not a lot. Sometimes I can remember what he looked like, but it's hard to picture him now. I remember him holding me, though. He used to read to me when I was little; he had a very deep voice. And we played games that made me laugh - he laughed a lot, which my mother almost never did. And it's funny, I can remember that he wore some kind of scent - I guess it was for shaving - whenever I smell it on someone, I still think of him."

"Did you ever try to find him after you grew up? If your mother was giving you a hard time about being too human, he might have worried he would only make matters worse for you if he tried to contact you or visited you when you were young."

She was silent for a long time. "He still should have tried."

"So even when you got to the Academy, you never looked up his posting in the Starfleet records, to find out where he was?"

"No."

The flatness in her reply saddened him. He understood; she had been too proud to do it. "Maybe you can still find out something about him from the Starfleet personnel files on Voyager. They'd be pretty skimpy, but there might be something in them. You should try it, B'Elanna." Feeling her stiffen in his arms, he bent down and nuzzled her on the back of her ear. "But only if you want to, of course."

"Hrumph." His final comment was made just in time to prevent her from lashing out at him. "So Tom, since we are talking about my parents, what about your mother? You never talk about her. What was she like?"

"My mother was great, B'Elanna. She always tried to keep my father from going overboard when he started pushing me. She didn't always come out on top, but she always tried. It isn't like she didn't encourage us, too, she did, but it never felt like we were being shoved into anything. Mom had a lot of responsibility, being an admiral's wife - planning parties, things like that - but she always had time for us. My sisters and I could always talk to her. And it's funny, when my mother asked me to do something, I usually did it without dragging my feet too much. She had a way of making an order seem like something you wanted to do anyway."

"Like Janeway?"

He chuckled in her ear. "The way Janeway touches you sometimes when she gives an order, that does remind me a little of Mom in a way. Don't let the captain know that, though, she may not appreciate it."

"Tom, when is the last time you saw your mother?"

A sudden sharp squeeze startled B'Elanna, and she felt him bury his face against the back of her neck. "Tom?" she asked, her heart sinking. Her query had seemed innocuous, but plainly, Tom was as sensitive to this question as B'Elanna had been to being asked about finding her father.

Eventually, he was able to say, almost inaudibly, "In the courtroom, when I was sentenced to Auckland. She was crying so hard . . . "

B'Elanna turned around to face him, sincerely sorry for having asked him. His eyes were tightly closed, as if to block the bitter memory from his sight. As B'Elanna stroked his bearded cheek gently with her gloved hand, he leaned his face into her hand.

"Tom, I think we've been watching this miserable drizzling rain long enough. Let's go back inside our den and warm up a little."

His eyes slowly opened. Turning his lips to where her hand still lingered by his jaw, he kissed her on the palm of her glove as he said in a low voice, "Yes, let's."

At the sight of Harry, Kes's face lit up. "Hello, Harry, this is a surprise!" Then another reason for his coming to Sickbay suddenly occurred to her, causing her welcoming smile to turn serious. "You aren't hurt, are you?"

"No, I'm fine. I had some news for the Doctor and thought that it would be a good excuse to come see you."

"In that case, you can address me directly, Ensign." The Doctor briskly walked out of his office. "What is it, Mr. Kim?"

"Doctor, we've made a lot of progress with the engines and the circuitry, so even though some things still need repair, the holodeck replicators aren't needed for parts any more. Lt. Carey has opened them to other uses. I hope you don't mind, but I put your name down for a reservation for Holodeck One for 2330 hours. You don't mind going so late, do you? I didn't think it would matter when you went, as long as you didn't have any patients."

"I can go into the holodeck, now?"

Harry could not tell if the prospect thrilled or frightened the Doctor. Did a hologram actually "feel" anything? "If you are too busy to use the holodeck, Kes and I will be glad to take the time from you."

"No, that's quite all right. It was just a little disconcerting, that's all. Last time I went, Lt. Paris was with me."

"Harry and I will be glad to go with you, Doctor, if you want us to come." Harry tried to catch her eye, but she would not look at him. Gloomily, he realized that his other plans for the evening would have to be put on hold if the Doctor said yes.

"Thank you for the offer, Kes, but this first time, I should go alone, I think. Perhaps another time."

"Of course, Doc. Some other time." Harry's enthusiasm returned.

"Mmmm . . . .that feels wonderful, Harry. Don't stop. Oh, yes, Harry, yes . . . "

Harry moved his kneading hands from Kes' neck and down her spine, pressing his thumb into each vertebrae as he found it, prompting ever more enthusiastic groans from his Ocampan fiancée with every knob of bone he fingered in his travels. Finding them became easier as he worked his way down to the small of her back, where the thickened skin covering the elogia thinned out the further down he went. By the time he reached the location of the last bones that he could massage with his strong thumbs, Harry had Kes writhing in exquisite pleasure. It was strange to have a lover with a primary erogenous zone down her spine, but, this was the Delta Quadrant, Harry Kim was a Starfleet officer, and weird was part of the job.

"Kes."

"Mm-hmm?"

"Can you give me a little more of an anatomy lesson?"

She lazily turned her head towards his. "Didn't we do enough of 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' a little while ago to suit you?"

Harry had never seen Kes with as self-satisfied a smirk as the one he was seeing now. His own face assumed a similar expression when he bent down to her ear to whisper, "I have a feeling that that's a lesson I will want to have repeated over and over again, but the visible anatomy isn't what I wanted to talk about." He planted a chain of kisses along the edge of her elfin-shaped ear. "I was curious to learn why the Ocampa make love pretty much the way other humanoid species do, even though the mom carries her babies in a birth sac on her back."

Flopping herself onto her back, Kes grabbed hold of Harry's hands and poised them above her abdomen. "The equivalent of the human ovary is located here," she said, patting his left hand on the middle of her flat tummy, right over the navel, which in an Ocampan woman was located in the very center of her abdomen, below the waist. "There are two ovaries, like in humans, but they lie so close together that it almost looks like there is only one, sort of like the Terran nuts . . . I can't remember what they are called, but they are beige and oval shaped, with a seam all around them."

"Could be walnuts. There is a thin, hard membrane between the halves, and from the outside there is a line all around, showing the separation of the shell halves."

"That's what they look like. They are larger than walnuts, though. All right, so, there are tubes leading out from the outside of each ovary. When the Elogium starts, a flood of eggs comes out of each ovary and flows down the tubes into the vagina where they meet with the father's sperm."

Kes pulled his hands along a line up the center of her abdomen until she reached a spot just beneath her ribcage. "The eggs and sperm travel up the migration tube inside the body, reaching the spine at about here. The migration tube works kind of like the digestive system - by a peristaltic action that is maintained through coitus. That's why we have to make love for days, Harry." The way she said it made the prospect daunting, but desirable.

"Kes, I don't know if I will have that kind of stamina!"

"Yes, you will. That sticky stuff on my hands and my swollen tongue will have hormones in them that you will get from me to help stimulate you. You'll do just fine."

"Whatever you say."

"To go on, then, the tube splits to go around the spine and enters the elogia, the birth sacs, at this level." Kes had moved Harry's hands until they were now in the valley between her breasts.

"The surviving eggs and sperm, which are now embryos, flow into one elogium or the other. The embryos try to attach to the wall of the sacs, but most die off. Only the strongest survive."

Kes stretched her arms up and over her head while stretching sinuously, smiling up at him so enticingly that Harry couldn't help kissing her. He was enjoying the response he was getting, when the implications of what she had said hit him. "Kes, there are two sacs?"

"Yes, Harry, there are a pair of sacs. Ages ago, when the Ocampa lived on the surface, all births were multiples. Usually twins, but a fair number of quadruplets were also born, since each mother only had one Elogium in her life. The Ocampa would have died off long before the Caretaker came if that weren't so. The dissident movement thought that the Caretaker was causing all the singleton births with the nutritional supplements he provided. That's one of the reasons why we were growing our own foods. If that is correct, you and I are more likely to have twins than a single baby. I guess I should have told you this before."

Kes looked contrite, as Harry did seem a little stunned. After a very long minute of contemplation, however, he smirked a little and held up his hands to help her to a sitting position. "I think we can handle whatever comes, although I'm not sure what I'll do if it is quadruplets! Go crazy, I guess. That is, if we are even genetically compatible enough so that we don't need test tube help, like Klingons and humans have to do when they mate with one another."

"Oh, we are compatible, Harry, I checked with the Doctor. Twenty-two pairs of chromosomes, plus the gender pair. He was surprised that we were so similar. We shouldn't have any trouble at all reproducing." She pulled herself around to sit facing him on his lap, her legs wrapped around him, her arms around his back, and kissed him.

"That's good to know. And this is good, too," Harry said, a twinkle in his eye.

Kes asked him, "Why is this good?"

"Because with you sitting on my lap like this, I can massage your spine like it was the keys of my clarinet."

He began to finger her spine like he was playing a tune, and Kes threw her head back, laughing ecstatically, "I love it when you play the clarinet, Harry . . . oh, Harry!"

Tom stared at the turbulent stream crashing through the narrow defile at the western end of the valley. He didn't think that they would be able to make it through, unless they used the climbing equipment to scramble parallel to the stream a meter or so above the level of the water whenever there was a low spot. The problem was, Tom could not see past the bend in the gorge. The bend was about one hundred or so meters from where he was standing. He knew from his tricorder readings that the gorge extended beyond it for a total of two kilometers, but whether or not the footing was good enough to permit them to walk to the end of the gorge was a major question. That needed to be settled if they were to try leaving that way. It was an iffy proposition, to be sure.

Starfleet's standard tricorder was a terrific tool for telling you where something specific that you were looking for was located, as it did when guiding Tom and B'Elanna to the vein of dilithium crystals. It was even better at examining the composition of a substance, such as evaluating foodstuffs for nutritional value, for example. That function had been just as essential during their exercise in survival on this planet. It was even good for measuring geological formations, such as how tall a cliff was, or how deeply a rock formation extended.

Tom knew from the tricorder he was holding in his hands that there was a much more open area beginning two kilometers away, but he could not tell whether it was a wide space in a much larger gorge or the beginning of a new, sizable valley. Two kilometers of rock were in the way, obscuring the readings for the open area. He could also not precisely measure the gorge walls past the bend to determine if any rock shelves extended above the stream to help their climb. There were more specialized tricorders carried by cartographers that would tell you that, but no one expected Tom and B'Elanna to need one of those on this mission.

"What do you think, Tom? Can we make it?" B'Elanna picked her way carefully down the slope to the shelf on which he was standing.

"I can't tell. Not enough data. Do you want to try triangulating the tricorders to see if we can get a better outline of the cliff face past the bend?"

"I don't think we can get far enough apart to use triangulation unless one of us gets on the other side of the stream." They looked at the churning, foaming water. It was a good ten meters across to the other bank, with no decent place to ford. "You can try to get across if you want to, Tom. I don't think I'd like to try it."

"I think I'll pass, too. It's too bad, though. If we hit a shelf like we did during the last stages of the climb for the dilithium, we would be in good shape. As long as we could find shelter before night fell again, that is."

"Too risky this time of year."

"Agreed."

As they climbed back up to their valley's floor, B'Elanna asked. "Do you think it's worth checking out the other exit tomorrow? I don't recall what it was like from my trip in that direction the first day we were stuck here."

"We can hold off for a couple more days, if you want. Food isn't going to be a problem; the roots are abundant here even if they are getting boring to eat. It's only the fuel that's getting scarce." The reasonably long-burning vines were starting to run out; they had to go farther and farther afield to find a patch to exploit. The knotted straw was not a long-term solution. B'Elanna had been right; they did take too much work for the heat and light they put out. Plus, they needed the straw for fresh bedding.

Arriving back at the valley floor, Tom got a good look at the load of vines and foods B'Elanna had found, piled on top of Neelix's blanket. "Did you dig up every root and patch of Vulcan-Ear Tea you could find in this valley, B'Elanna?"

"Don't be such a baby, Paris. Just twist the end up, hoist it on your shoulder, and start marching. You're strong enough to manage your half of this puny load." He shot her an exaggeratedly hurt look but did as she said. An hour later, they reached the mouth of their cave.

"Home, Sweet Home," Tom called out sarcastically. After sorting and stowing away the food and fuel vines in the cavern, Tom walked outside and strode out toward the cliff. On the off chance that it would be different this time, he hit his comm badge. "Paris to Voyager. Come in Voyager." Silence was his reply.

"Tried your badge again, didn't you, Tom."

"Caught me."

"Yes, I did," B'Elanna chuckled, grabbing him around the waist.

He bent down to kiss her lips. "Mmm. Do you have some sort of disciplinary measure you want to use on me?"

"Let me think about something appropriate."

They stood wrapped up in each other for a while. The question they really wanted answered was looming over them more every day. Where was Voyager? Now that the sky was Earth-blue, close to its natural bluish-purple, they should have heard from them. It had been almost a week by the ship's time, over four days down here on the planet, but the skies were silent to their hails. Up to now they had refused to talk about it, but Tom gave voice to what he had been thinking for most of their stay planetside.

"You know, Be', I kind of wish you were up there on Voyager."

"Getting tired of my company?"

"Not at all. I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun if Harry, say, were here instead of you. It's just that I wish Voyager's best engineer was up there fixing whatever it is that must have gotten broken for them not to have picked us up by now."

"What if Voyager just isn't there anymore? If it was destroyed. How long do you think we'd last if we never get picked up?"

"It's hard to say. The winter is harsh at this elevation. If we went out of the mountains, toward the eastern coast, it might not be so bad. We aren't too far from there. We would still have to wait out the rest of this winter in another valley, though. Maybe we could find one with a better cave."

"You don't think we could stay here, either, then."

"I don't think that there are enough resources for us here, do you?"

"No," she sighed. "The tubers are really getting old with me, Tom. They fill our stomachs and are fairly nourishing, but they aren't really nutritionally balanced. And when our clothing wears out, we could have serious problems. I haven't seen anything that we could use to make cloth, and there aren't any animals for us to skin."

"Maybe in the warmer weather there would be some kind of vegetation we could use. Fig leaves, perhaps?"

"Fig leaves?"

"Sure. I wouldn't mind being Adam to your Eve, Lt. Torres, even if this place isn't exactly the Garden of Eden."

"At least we wouldn't have to worry about any Cain or Abel."

"What! You mean you know all about Adam and Eve? I thought I was going to have another chance to entertain you with a story."

She sniffed at his mock look of shock. "I HAVE taken an Earth cultural history course or two in my time." She rubbed her face in his shoulder a moment, as she returned to her point. "You do understand, Tom, that even if we could figure out a way to survive here, we wouldn't be Adam and Eve. We couldn't have any children. Klingons and humans need a lot of technical help to mate, which my mother loved to tell me whenever she felt it hadn't been worth the trouble to conceive me."

"I'm glad she did go to the trouble, B'Elanna." He brushed her hair with his hand. "And I love you enough to marry you anyway, children or not."

"You won't give up on that Klingon marriage stuff, will you?" B'Elanna laughed, wishing that he loved her even more than just "enough."

His mood turned serious. "No, I won't. I care for you too much. But the truth is, I'm glad I can't get you pregnant, because I was beginning to worry about that. This isn't much of a place to raise a kid. We'd have enough trouble surviving here for long; a baby would have no chance. I don't think I'd like to see anything like that happen."

She was silent. Watching a child wither away in a place like this would be terrible to see.

Trying to lighten the mood, Tom gave her a quick hug, then released her to grab her hand. They paced along the cliff, just to release some energy. "We can try to find another exit from this valley and look for someplace else more hospitable again tomorrow, B'Elanna. If only Janeway had been able to land a shuttle here, we'd have had more supplies, warmer shelter, and better transportation to go house hunting." He sighed in a way that she had come to know was the prelude for a joke.

She looked up at him suspiciously. "What?"

"I didn't say anything." The blue eyes were glinting with humor.

"You've got something else to say, Paris. What is it?"

"I was just thinking that there IS one reason I'm glad they didn't send a shuttle. Keeping warm with another person around would have cramped my style."

"You're reverting to pighood, Tom," she said severely, but her shoulders were shaking with laughter as she gave him a gentle tap on his shoulder. "Don't make me break anything."

"You could fix me up afterward."

" Assuming I wanted to!" Continuing their banter, the Adam and Eve of this world walked arm and arm down to the cave.