She unwrapped her sketchbook from the waterproof cloth she stored it in. Skirt draping off her bent knees, she propped it against her thighs and studied the rendering she’d done last night. She gazed at the charcoal smudges for a long moment, examining the curves and figures that had seemed inspired by warm spring moonlight. She frowned. Why she had thought that such a design would be a fitting memorial for Topa’s grave marker? She’d have to start over. Again. Maybe. She might be succumbing to the tyranny of perfectionism that inevitably derailed her projects. For once, you need to finish something, Rena,she scolded herself. Time to make good on all that “promise” and “potential” you’re supposed to have.
Or maybe your first instinct was correct and this design is a disaster.
Resignedly, she ripped the sketch out of her notebook, balled it up, and tossed it toward a tray full of glasses perched on an empty table across from her booth. The trajectory of the balled-up drawing drew her gaze toward a table of rivermen who sat nursing mugs of shodi,nonchalantly checking out her legs. Following their blurry-eyed gazes, she smoothed her skirt down over her calves toward the tops of her boots. Discontented grumbles and slurred complaints resulted, but Rena ignored them. Sorry, gentlemen, show’s over,she thought, reasoning that one of these days, Sala ought to hire a band or some dancing girls if his customers were so pressed to find entertainment that they’d resort to attempting to sneak a peek up a girl’s skirt. But there was one in the crowd at the table who didn’t appear interested in her underclothing; Rena realized he wasn’t one of the regulars.
He wore a riverman’s requisite soil-smudged jumpsuit, but his brown face lacked the wrinkled, chapped roughness that the wind-whipped rivermen developed over years of pushing barges up and down the Yolja’s lower curves. Black stubble covered his chin and cheeks, but it was obvious to Rena’s eye that the younger man had only lately decided to sport a beard. The haze made it difficult to determine whether he was Bajoran; he wasn’t wearing an earring. He must have felt her gaze, because he looked up from his drink to meet her eyes. He wore a kind, openly friendly expression, and because he hadn’t been trying to look up her skirt the way the others had, she smiled; he reciprocated. As they maintained eye contact, she briefly considered signaling for him to come over and sit with her, though she wondered about the propriety of the gesture, considering her—her— situation. Is that what I’m calling it now?But she’d been traveling alone for the past four days—ever since she left the Kenda Shrine—and the sound of a friendly voice not her own would be welcome. She wasn’t asking to buy him a drink or to share a dance, gestures that might be misconstrued for obvious reasons. Before she could act, a waiter had tapped the young man on the shoulder, diverting his attention. It’s a sign. Decision made,she thought, wondering what it said about her that she felt a twinge of regret.
She returned her focus to her sketchbook and the empty page in front of her. The same dilemma faced her now as had faced her when she first learned, that before he died, Topa had made three requests of her, his only living grandchild. The first request was that she go to the Kenda Shrine to obtain a duranjafrom the vedeks. Topa had never explained why a duranjafrom Kenda was important save only that a vedek from that shrine had helped him immeasurably during the Occupation. Whatever his reasons, Rena wouldn’t deny a dying man his wish.
His second request seemed on the surface to be simpler, especially for an artist: design his grave memorial. For Rena, asking the Emissary himself to preside over Topa’s death rites might have been easier than granting thatrequest. How to express a remarkable life in a couple dozen centimeters of metal! How to show Topa’s bravery, his kindness…If they had satisfied her, she could have resorted to the usual labels—resistance fighter, devoted father and husband, advocate for Bajoran independence. The labels failed to explain Topa.His nimble mind, always spinning ideas; even in his final days, confined to his bed as his immune system cannibalized his central nervous system, he would order Rena’s aunt Marja to keep the Ohalu book on playback. Vedek Usaya would stop by and feign mortification that Topa would pollute his faith with the radical text, and heated debate would ensue. She remembered how, before he was sick, he would stand in the middle of the stone-paved street in front of his bakery—the bakery that had been his father’s and his father’s father’s. Eyes closed, head tipped back, he would turn his flour-powdered face to the sky to be warmed by the sun. Once, as a little girl, Rena had seen him standing in the street swaddled in fog, his face up. Pragmatically, young Rena had pointed out that the sun was in hiding. Topa hadn’t budged, saying only, “But I know the light is there. When it finally breaks through the mist, I’ll be ready.” The metaphor was lost on the child, but not on the adult Rena, who wondered if she was the one now patiently waiting for the light, or whether she’d given up and retreated into the shadows.
“Excuse me?”
Roused from her reverie, Rena realized that the unfamiliar riverman stood at the edge of her booth. His youth surprised her; he had to be close to her age. From his smooth hands, which bore evidence of recent lacerations, she surmised that he couldn’t have long been in this line of work. And he was definitely human—a handsomehuman, with an engaging smile. Maybe a recent Federation transplant. She looked at him questioningly.
“I noticed you had some hardcopy,” he said, gesturing at her notebook, “and I was wondering if you could spare a sheet.”
At university, she’d been subjected to her share of creative pickup lines from men wanting to make her acquaintance, but this was a flimsier attempt than most. “You have a sudden desire to sketch one of your comrades?”
He shrugged sheepishly. “There’s a lady over there”—he nodded in the direction of the barkeep—“who’s offered to transmit a message to my family for me. I just need to write it down for her.”
Ripping a sheet out of the binding and passing it across the table, Rena said, gesturing, “Have a seat. You need a stylus too?” She unfastened a knapsack pocket and removed a writing instrument.
He nodded and scooted into the bench opposite her. Rena watched as the Federation boy—“Fed,” as she’d started to think of him—scribbled out several rows of Bajoran characters. As he wrote, he explained, “There’s no transmitter on the barge—there’s definitely not one here—and I don’t expect I’ll be to Mylea for a few more days.”
“You have business in Mylea?” Rena asked, curious. She’d heard gossip that her friend Halar had met an alien boyfriend who’d been doing dockwork over the winter and wondered if this Fed boy might be him.
“Not so much business as it felt like the right place to go when I took off from home a week ago. I figure I might be able to catch a shuttle or transport out from there. If I like it, maybe there’s a fishing outfit that could use a hand.”
The stylus flew across the hardcopy with a fluency Rena found highly unusual for an offworlder. Since the end of the Occupation, a number of students from all over the quadrant had dribbled into Bajor’s universities, including the one in Dahkur. In her limited experience with them, she’d found that the majority were translator-dependent; few of the aliens spoke Bajoran and none of them could write in it. Odd. She supposed he could be a local. A few Federation citizens came to Bajor when Starfleet stepped in to help the provisional government eight years ago. “So you haven’t signed on to work the river for the summer?”
“Nah. Linh was going to let me off at the next stop anyway. Someone back in Tessik told me about a must-see archeological site—Yyn?—that she thought I’d like. I kind of have some experience in archeology so I thought I’d check it out on my way to Mylea.”