Past to Future

He was on top of the world.  Literally, if not spiritually.  Yet spiritually, also, in a sense... a sense far more limited than he liked.

The schism in perception caused Stephen April to frown, and try to push it out of his head.  As if that was possible.  As if it would ever be possible again.

Before him, at eye level, clouds stretched into the distance, a sea of cotton tufts glowing white across the sky.  Under the sun, jags of lightning danced in time to his restless thoughts, accompanied by occasional thunder rumbles.  Below sprawled the North American plain – gold desert, green earth, purple mountains.  April's cloak, slate blue in color, flapped and tumbled in the wind, a turbulent reflection of his mood, revealing off-white undergarments, a loose jacket, shirt, slacks.  The cloak, with its neck-high collar, lent him a brooding air – fittingly so.  He leaned into the wind, on a rail styled like old Victorian wood, and watched tiny silver shapes shoot across the dust-bowl.  Shuttles, or birds.

They called this place Sky One – an atmospheric orbital, held aloft by antigravity, much like the cloud-city, Stratos, on the planet Ardana.  Engineers from Ardana had in fact helped to build it; one more testament to the accomplishments of cooperation between peoples of the Federation.  Whoever would have thought, once upon a time, that one day cities would float in the clouds?

Too bad they didn't cooperate on everything.

He came here sometimes in need of clarity.  Clarity now eluded him, but it was still the closest he could get to leaving the world without actually leaving... which, soon, he would do, in fact.  The view, unlike any other – a last look – was worth it.  Nature's beauty made his heart ache; he shivered, from cold and wind, but more the sheer, unparalleled splendor of the sight, and the goose pimples it sent across his flesh.  Music in sight and color.  Music for the eyes.  He shook his head in awe.  Never did it fail to impress, amaze, to move him.  This was his world.  Had been, for the past three years.

His throat, dry in the thin air, cracked in a whisper:

"Beautiful world... how I love thee...."

"Stephen?"  The female voice jarred the spell; he jumped, startled, turned to find Tabatha Brisk in the doorway.  She wore her Starfleet uniform – naturally – while he didn't.  Yet.  Naturally.  She watched him for a moment, trying to gauge his emotions.  "Are you okay?"

April looked away, across the clouds, cleared his throat.  "Just... saying goodbye."

She stood beside him, placed her hands on the rail, sharing in the moment.  Finally she turned her head towards him, peered down.  "How are they?"

April glanced at her, down at his legs.  "They're fine."

She hesitated.  "You're not... resentful, are you?"

"Because I'm on my feet again?"  He shook his head, studying the plains.  "Look, down there.  At one time, we – humanity – imagined lines of separation.  Borders.  States, provinces, countries... ideas that separated us.  But the lines weren't there.  The borders weren't real.  It was all in their heads."  He guessed it was true: The more things changed, the more they turned out to be the same... to one limit or another.  "Am I resentful?"  He sighed.  "I walked spiritually, just as I finally made the choice to walk again, physically.  Like I said before the operation: If it made no difference either way, then..."  He shrugged.

Tabatha gave a slow nod.  There was more to it than that, of course.  Much more.  She brushed loose strands of dark hair out of her eyes.  Some showed tints of gray, but not as gray as April's.  Steel gray, like his eyes.  His age was catching up with him, beginning to show.  The lines in his face appeared etched deeper than ever, and his features sagged slightly, like his body, where he once stood proud and muscular.  "Have you spoken to Mehera lately?"

"Not since she went to her new ship."

Tabatha sensed the discomfort of the subject for him – Stephen April's romantic relationships never lasted, though he often wanted them to – and spoke no more about it.  It had been little different for him with the half-Trill, and Arcadia's one-time counselor, Mehera Galthrax.  Loving a man incapable of movement from the neck down was more challenging than it seemed.  The added difference in religious views crept in and drove them apart, ultimately.  But at least they parted as friends.

"Speaking of which," Tabatha said, "When are you coming back?"

"Soon.  Is sickbay ready?"

"More than ready.  From what I hear, most departments are – except security's having problems, I think."

April mentally tucked that note away.  "My turn: Are you resentful, that you're not chief medical this time out?"

"Of course not, Stephen."  After heading the Arcadia's medical department for three years, then working a top position at Starfleet Medical headquarters for another three, she was glad to take a break and help on the sidelines.  Plus she would still run her own shifts.

Tabatha struggled for what else to say – or to say nothing at all.  But saying nothing didn't feel right.  She was April's doctor, and his friend – perhaps closer to him than anybody.  They were the only two left, from the Arc's original crew lineup.  And, since Mehera left... his counselor, somewhat.  When he would let her be his counselor.  She knew something was bothering him; he had never been quite the same, since he left the Arc three years ago.  She had gone with him.  Yet she didn't understand exactly what it was that bothered him, this time.  Finally, she took a chance and said, "You haven't heard from Neria, either...?"

April was silent for a beat.  "It's not exactly a walk in the arboretum, transmitting messages from the future.  The Department of Temporal Integrity tends to frown on that."

Which Tabatha knew.  She felt guilty for asking.  "So you haven't heard from her, since..."

"No."

"I'm sorry," Tabatha said humbly.

April put a reassuring hand on her arm.  "It isn't your fault.  If it's God's will..."  He sighed.  "His will be done."

A second span of uncomfortable silence followed.  April stood straight and turned on his heel.  "I have to return to the surface before we leave.  I'll see you on board in a few hours."

Tabatha offered a weak smile.  "All right, Stephen."

He paused for one more last look, and strode through the door she just came through.  Tabatha watched him go, then stared out over the balcony, into the clouds, alone with her thoughts.  As he had been.

Mala Hendriksson nudged the lateral thruster controls, then watched through the shuttlepod's viewport as the sun swung high and behind the craft.  She hadn't used her personal cybernetics to access the pod's systems, so her awareness felt limited.  She was flying as any other pilot would.  Still, she was enjoying the moment, despite the anxiety that nagged her.

The flight was a short one – from the Arcadia, down to Earth – but unexpected.  She'd barely arrived on board and settled into her quarters, when she'd received special orders.

A patchwork of brown and green, then rooftop squares, defined themselves beneath her.  She banked, and saw angles grow and extend.

Then her destination lay directly below.  The pod lost altitude, straightened.  Ancient stonework filled Mala's sight.  The pod landed, so gentle and easy it took little of her attention. Almost landed itself.  Mala sighed.  The first half of the flight was over - the familiar, simply executed part of the mission.

~Now what?~ she asked herself.  She remained in the pod, undecided.  She didn't even know whether or not she was expected.  If she were anywhere else, she'd just go inside and introduce herself, state her business, ask to speak to Captain Stephen April.  But here?  This was not a place where Mala could feel comfortable.  And she was having more and more doubts that her new captain was someone with whom she would feel comfortable.  Not that feeling comfortable was essential to her.  She'd requested assignment to the Arcadia for her own reasons – and she was determined to do her job well.  Slipstream Drive.  So far she'd only flown it during holo-training.  Soon, she'd experience the real thing – while accessing the Arcadia's flight computer through her cybernetics.

First, she had to get through this present awkward mission. And now she had to wonder if the captain had yet been briefed about her. How closely had he maintained contact with Starfleet – from here?

How very strange that her prelude to the future was this journey into Earth's past.

The past held no appeal for Mala. It was her father who had been mesmerized by the past. She could still recall his excited voice as he talked of the ancient Polynesians – their boat-making and navigation by the stars, their explorations.  It was his obsession with those primitive explorations that had killed him – and Mala's mother.

Mala, like her Aunt Lara, was fascinated by the future.  Mala's own brain and nervous system held many future possibilities, contained in the implant Lara had created.  But there was an important difference between Mala and her aunt.  Lara had not trusted the present, not her peers, not the scientific establishment.  As the years passed, she'd trusted fewer and fewer people, finally only Mala.  When Mala rebelled and left, Lara had no one at all.  ~And in a way, Lara was right.  Despite all her precautions, she was murdered.~

But despite the unique differences that Mala's cybernetics made in her life, she had no desire to repeat her aunt's reclusiveness.  She was determined to live in the here and now.  Only occasionally did she regress to uncertainties, and this most often in matters of personal relating, rather than the obligations of duty.

She startled a little, as her musings were interrupted by a very here-and-now voice from the shuttlecraft's com unit – asking for her identification and reason for her presence there.

In the quiet of the temple, he stared up at the cross.  A cross.  Fixed above the altar, an angled sculpture of gold-inlaid wood, glaringly out of place in this particular temple.  It did not belong here.

April rested on his knees, hands folded, cloak crumpled around him, and bowed his head.  "God, my God," he whispered. "Why have you forsaken me...?"

The cross answered with steadfast silence.

"Excuse me... are you Captain April?"

April lifted his head, turned.  A blue-skinned Bolian approached, in plain garb, a civilian.  A Bolian in a Jerusalem temple: A sight for which he would have traded latinum, to see the reaction on someone's face from the era of its construction, a thousand years past.  Scattered through the pews were various individuals, locked in their own private communion, not all of them human.  There was a Ktarian, a Vulcan, another Bolian, a Benzite... a dark-eyed man he assumed was Betazoid...  Did the ancients ever foresee aliens one day walking the Earth, frequenting their temples and churches?  Did their anthropocentric views apply to such 'heathens', these Gentiles?

These were the people, for whom and for whose rights he had given up his goals, to preserve and protect.  And yet the temple, for all its magnificence in architecture, drew few visitors to its intended purpose.  Instead of a shrine of worship, it served mostly as a museum, an occasional attraction for wayward tourists – who were confused to find that some people actually came here for other reasons.  Belief in an intangible, immaterial and invisible deity defied their sense of order about the Universe.  April understood.  He had felt the same way, at one time.

He feared he might be influenced to feel the same way again.  If so... if being called back out to that Universe, to get it pounded into him day in, day out, through exposure to the wild array of races and cultures who without qualm denied or defied God's existence, or had no concept of God... if it was to be a test of Stephen April's faith, from none other than The Almighty... he could accept it.  He would know, then, at least, the enemy he fought.  But what he feared more: That there was no need to fight, for he would only be battling himself.  That it was all in his head.

That they might be right.

Nevertheless, that didn't stop a misguided few from trying to 'spruce up' the temple, by adding crosses and symbolic items from other denominations.  The significance of the cross didn't come until centuries after the temple was first built.  It didn't belong here.

Like him.

"That's me," he answered the Bolian.

"Forgive my interruption."  The man gestured a blue hand towards the entrance.  "A Starfleet shuttle has parked outside.  The pilot says she is here to pick you up."

April looked over his shoulder towards the large doors.  He hadn't been reissued a Starfleet communicator yet.  But he didn't understand why the pilot didn't come in to get him, if she was here from Starfleet.  He bowed his head once more, crossed himself in a one-handed gesture, got up.  "Thank you."

Wind blew through the courtyard, whispering cry echoing his skyborne environment.  Beyond the western wall of the temple complex, dusk descended, painting the sky with pinks, reds, oranges.  On the other side of that wall laid a vast tract of grassy green parkland, full of people walking, running, playing, working... enjoying life's richness and simple pleasures.  Paradise... a paradise Man built.  With or without divine assistance?, April wondered – a matter of debate and interpretation for him, as it was for religious scholars for decades.  How could it be Paradise, without God?

And here he was, leaving it... his own personal expulsion from Eden.

April's cloak billowed around him as he walked; he reached out, pulled it close, fastened it.  In the center of the courtyard, growing dim under the sun's fading rays, rested a shuttlepod – sleek, stark in modern contrast to the stone ground on which it sat.  April was not too surprised that the pilot showed little apparent regard for the sanctity of this ancient site, by landing here.

Yet it was not so ancient.  The temple, the famous Temple of Solomon, destroyed millennia past, had been partially rebuilt in the 21st century.  World War Three destroyed it again, along with the rest of Jerusalem, in a blast of nuclear annihilation.  Its reconstruction was not begun again, nor completed, until the 22nd century.  Coinciding with the rebuilding of the temple came the start of a new era in human history, the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.  An ancient prophecy foretold that the temple's reconstruction would herald a new millennium of peace on Earth.  The first united world government followed, then the Federation.  There had been peace on Earth ever since – for the most part.  The prophecy seemed fulfilled.

But was it?  The prophecy also claimed that a messiah, a physical incarnation of God and savior of humanity, would return from Heaven, to sit on the throne of a new kingdom on Earth, and rule this new government.  Here was the temple.  But no messiah.  Not unless one counted, maybe, Zefram Cochrane, who by discovering warp drive, ushered in the new era of peace.  But he didn't stick around to rule anything.  Cochrane himself would have dismissed the notion as hogwash.  The more zealous adherents, clinging to the foretelling down to the letter, claimed that the savior would yet return.  Centuries went by, and here it was, four hundred years later, and still no purported messiah.

Some believed that He had already returned, visible only to those who believed, claimed His people, and left again with them – for a new Earth, in a different dimension, a parallel universe perhaps, and that humanity, in this world, had been abandoned.  Yet, freed of the pervading evil of dark, influential forces, they struggled out of the mire of a savage, sinful past, and somehow found their way.

Then, also, there was the interpretation that He would still, yet, return – in a different form, as a new man.  As ashamed as he was to admit – to himself, for he'd never tell it to another – Stephen April had wondered, for a time... perceiving himself to be God's intended messenger for this new age... if he was the messiah.  Humanity's spiritual salvation had certainly been his goal, and no one in the last two hundred years, since the Federation's founding, attempted so ambitious an undertaking as he, in a godless age predisposed as he once was, to science over religion.  But once the glow of his hour of personal rebirth faded, and he started doubting, questioning his crusade, he knew that he could not be the one.

There had been peace on Earth – for the most part.  Not a perfect peace, nor an entirely perfect world.  That slight misalignment echoed to April in everything.  In a perfect world, humanity would have embraced the message he brought – the key to the missing, final stage in evolution fostered on humanity by the Federation: The spiritual element.

They didn't want to hear it.

Rumors began circulating.  The once-great Stephen April, renowned commander of Starfleet's first quantum slipstream starship, a bit of a celebrity in his own right... confined to a wheelchair by a paralysis he accepted, three years ago, as a blessing... had cracked, his mind as broken as his body.  A religious cultist, a zealot... a lunatic, a crackpot.

It made no sense.  Yet it did.  Earth was as perfect as it could be, for all the dark ages of the bloody past it endured.  There was an old saying: If it's a good idea, you'll have to shove it down people's throats.  But in a perfect world, one shouldn't have had to.

He wasn't alone, however.  Some did hearken to his call, at first, seeking the truth he brought.  They listened, and heard.  His crusade started slow, but with promise, and his followers grew.

Then Neria – his daughter, fifteen years older, from a future she had helped to create; but, like father, like daughter, not solely responsible... who constantly found ways to change her father's life – sent word.  After replacing him as Captain of the Arcadia, her second and final mission on Starfleet's behalf – to her own altered future – had uncovered disturbing ramifications of the path her father chose.  The Humanists – those self-proclaimed defenders of Earth, champions for human purity, bigots – had manipulated his message, tied his popularity to their own... twisted it... and sparked a holy war, ending Earth's Federation membership and hurling the world back three hundred years.  Or would have, had Neria not warned him.  Faced with this tragic truth, bound by Neria's honesty, Stephen April gave up on his evangelism.  It was the only way.

For a long time, the Arcadia had been missing.  Despite the secrecy and security heaped around its last mission, April hacked his sources in Starfleet, concerned for his daughter and former crew, and learned, at most, why it was classified: The Arcadia had traveled to another time.  Where, when... past, or future... he did not know.  Not until Neria sent the ship back.  Then they locked it down tighter than a Borg fortress, and turned it over to the Department of Temporal Affairs, to go over with a fine-tooth comb.  Her entire crew was reassigned.  All but for Neria, who remained in the future, 2396, the year she originally left to stop the Usurpers.  Arcadia spent her days in a remote, isolated drydock, until, a few weeks ago, Starfleet released her for return to active service.  When they approached and offered him command once again, it seemed too fortuitous to ignore... as if God's will.

Perhaps.

When Mala saw the figure of a man striding toward the shuttlepod, she opened the hatch and jumped down, then stood at attention.

April blinked at sight of the young woman: dark-haired, brown-eyed, a swarthy hint in her complexion – East Asian possibly, or Pacific Islander, in genetic stock.  On the burgundy collar of her uniform she wore three pips, two solid and one hollowed – all silver... which told him immediately she must be from Arcadia.  Officers in the slipstream program wore silver, unlike the standard gold denoting the rest of the fleet.  He had almost forgotten how young Starfleet liked its officers.  They seemed to get younger and younger.  Couldn't be over thirty... unless maybe she was El-Aurian... and already a command-level officer.  How did she know who he was?  In his prim yet casual attire, he could have been any mere civilian.  Perhaps she checked his file.  It certainly made sense, to get to know everything one could about one's commanding officer before meeting him... especially when one had to transport that superior officer, manually, where he could watch everything one – or she, in this case – did.

She was the first Starfleet officer he laid eyes on in some time.  At Hendriksson's emergence from the shuttlepod, her lively jump from the hatch, a flutter went through April... a symbolic reminder of a life he thought he left behind.  He almost felt disappointed that he accepted the offer to command Arcadia once again.  April craned his neck, peering past the western wall at the pink embers in the sky, the orange overcast from the fading sun.  He loved sunsets.  It meant leaving this planet, Earth, his homeworld, his home... the simple life he had chosen, and just beginning to grow on him... the unfulfilled goal of a new future, full of promise... It meant leaving all this behind.  The second schism in perception again caused him to frown.  Once, when he was a younger man, hungry for the stars, he could not wait to leave Earth.

Searching quickly for some assurance that he was doing the right thing, to dispel his reticence, April found it in the woman before him: In her uniform, so smartly cut, hugging her body; in her excited aura, barely perceptible, but there.  An explorer.  She had that hunger, he could tell.  It was in her step, when she came out and stood at attention.  The eagerness for adventure, for the unique experience which was the Universe.  It gave him a brief taste, a shadow of the thrill he felt when Admiral Thoreau contacted him, offering April his old job... when Stephen April realized he could go to the stars again.  He called them home, before.  He might call them home again.  Might call that ship home, again.  His heart beat faster, imagining it.

He examined Hendriksson visually – her stance, posture; her face, her eyes.  Eyes said much about a person.  April had eyes impossible to ignore, a gaze softly piercing, or laser-like in intensity when he wanted it to be.  His intent: To gauge her sturdiness, her quality.  He had met, led, and worked with a lot of officers in his time.  Some were exceptional.  Others... weren't.  April had always demanded the best from those around him.  A great relief of relinquishing starship command was that he hadn't had to deal with it anymore – didn't have to worry over whom he entrusted with his life, and the lives of his crew.  Now he felt that tendency returning, to hold others under the light of scrutiny; an old habit.

Hendriksson gazed back, unflinching, then looked away briefly, uncomfortable under his silent barrage, calmly drilling into her via steel gray peepers.  She appeared simple enough, yet something about her radiated 'different'.  April had a sixth sense about people – telling him, in this case, that there was something... more, to this Mala Hendriksson, then met the eye.  He didn't know what it was – yet – but wasn't alarmed.  It was as it should be: Arcadia deserved the exceptional.