Title: Charm
Author: Dave Rogers
Email Address: daverogers@geocities.com
Series: VOY
Rating: PG
Codes: C/Kellin
Date Posted: 1st October 1999
Summary: Sequel to "Unforgettable". Kellin was caught and returned
to Ramura; but Tracers are nothing if not patient.
Disclaimer: Chakotay may have forgotten Kellin ever existed, but
Paramount probably remember they own her.
Charm
It had been hard on Chakotay, unfair even, and I didn't know whether
I'd ever be able to make it up to him. That was the plan, though,
and of course he'd forget the pain of losing me the second time just
as he'd forgotten the pain of the first. That was all part of the plan
too.
"You fell for that one, didn't you?" Curneth had contacted me almost
the moment I beamed back from Voyager. "Be careful, Kellin. It happens
to too many Tracers. That's why we rarely last more than twenty years
in the job. Sooner or later we fall for the romance, the uncertainty,
whatever - maybe just the fun of doing something wrong. Then we have
to be brought back ourselves."
"Is that a problem?" I'd replied, trying to conceal the germ of an
idea growing within me. "A Tracer tries to leave, we bring them back,
they forget everything. It all ends up the same."
"Not quite," Curneth had insisted. "You lose memories, lose whatever
you learned about Tracing - every job makes a difference, you know. In
the end, you lose your edge. The longer you can hang on, not make any
stupid mistakes, the longer you can stay in the job. And with your
record..."
"My record? I've never..."
His blank stare silenced me.
"How many times?" I couldn't keep the fear and surprise from my
voice.
"Three. And not many Tracers survive more than five."
"Survive?"
"As a Tracer, that is. The Bureau can find you a desk job."
I'd left it there, hoping he'd believe I was properly chastened,
afraid to reveal anything by mistake. But the dreams made sense now,
and I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind those memories
still lived on. And this time it was worth doing something about it.
I know the difference between romance and love, between a momentary
attraction and a lifelong bond. Chakotay was more than just a fling.
Tracing isn't purely dedicated to bringing back runaways. Those are
the high-profile jobs, the ones that made the Ramuran daily news
accompanied by a diffident, usually rather embarrassed, recanting by
the returning fugitive - as far as I know, always genuine, or at
least it was genuine in every case I've closed. But there are the
other jobs, the less attractive but socially just as necessary, that
aren't posted on the bulletin board back in the Trace Bureau for all
the juniors to see, but that would be passed on to the more
experienced, the more trustworthy, with a quiet word from a superior
in an empty corridor. I'd been an active Tracer for seven years
before a hushed conversation in a darkened room had sent me after a
young scientist who was experimenting with some little-known
principles behind the neurolytic emitter. In the end, he'd forgotten a
little, and I'd learned a lot more, and now he was a useful, happy
and highly-paid metallurgist with no current experience in
neurolytics. A job well done; case closed, except that I hadn't
forgotten a few choice experimental results.
So after I'd met Chakotay, and returned to my ship, and diverted
Curneth's suspicions for the time being, there was planning to be
done, and science to be investigated. I'd been turning the basic
principles over in my mind for two years, and only a few days of
experimentation were needed to determine two basic principles. First:
Memories removed by the neurolytic emitter were recoverable, although
doing so might be difficult and was certainly impossible at present.
Second: There was a way to protect a few seconds of memory against a
neurolytic emitter, by activating a small bioactive device at the time
of the experience. It was enough for the first stage of the plan. The
rest could wait.
It was hard, of course, going back. Curneth knew, of course, and I
knew he'd Trace me before long. No point trying too hard to hold him
off, no point trying to stop him altogether. I was there for another
purpose altogether, and even that was hard work. I loved Chakotay
for his strength, his stability and his air of calm; he was like a
mighty tree in the gale, stirred slightly but, at the root, unmoved
and unmoveable. I hadn't realised it would make him so infuriatingly
stubborn. But eventually, there was a time when I could see the love
we'd shared rekindled in his eyes, and it was time.
I'd persuaded him to let me talk about their last evening together.
"You'd become much more than a friend to me, but I knew I had to go
home, and you'd forget about me within hours. So I took the
initiative."
"More than usual?" Damn that sense of humour. I love it, but it was in
the way right now.
"Oh, yes." I was on my feet now, and he was watching as I walked
around him. "I moved closer to you... I thanked you profusely for all
your help... told you that I couldn't have done it without you..."
There was no time for subtlety, no time for risking rejection. I sat
in his lap, trying desperately not to blush. "And I touched you. I
told you I... I cared very much for you... And that I wanted something
to remember you by. And then I did this."
And I activated the device hidden in the toe of my shoe, and I had
something to remember him by again.
When did I start to hope that Curneth wasn't coming? Maybe then. It
seemed that the plan was forgotten, that I was hoping that the simple,
ill-conceived decoy attempt I'd thrown together might, against all
odds, actually work. And then, when I'd known he was coming for me,
the fear had been genuine, there had been no need to pretend.
Convenient, really, I realised; my subconscious chipping in to help my
conscious mind along the way. My fear as Voyager's doctor worked on me
had been a little more complex than I'd let anyone realise; fear on
the one hand that I'd lose Chakotay, lose all my memories of him
forever - for without one memory to start from, why would I try to
recover the rest? - and fear on the other that Voyager's amazing
holographic surgeon would, in a characteristic act of electronic
genius, deduce what I already knew. And make it known, of course, to
Curneth, and by the same token to all Ramura.
Convenient, too, that the memory I'd safeguarded wasn't accessible for
a few days after the neurolytic emitter had done its work. As I
recalled the memory of that kiss, of the feelings it had evoked in me,
I knew I could never have played the part that had come to me so
naturally when we parted. Even then, there must have been some small
recollection within me. I still needed, right at the end, to say
something; to give him some small crumb of hope, even at the risk of
Curneth noticing and dashing my own.
"You're such a kind person. I won't forget that." A brief smile, seen
and returned; and then we were gone, and it was time for patience,
stealth, and sheer hard work. Nothing unusual there for a Tracer.
There had been certain prerequisites, the building blocks of my plan.
The first, of course, was the memory of a kiss. My work on neurolytics
had stayed in my memory, so it was possible - though not easy, in fact
it took over a year - to reconstruct the memory engrams and re-implant
them. I had been unable to work any more that day, as the flood of
recollection overwhelmed me, leaving me shaken, lonely, fearful and
suffering an irrational craving for Terran ice cream. That was only
the beginning, though. I knew there had to be three more parts to the
plan.
First: oblivion. I had to understand why Ramurans remembered other
Ramurans, and find a way to circumvent the process. If they forgot
me, the Bureau wouldn't come looking for me. It would be hard, but
all my friends, all my family, everyone I cared about must be
affected. Second: distance. I'd seen roughly where in the Galaxy
Voyager was heading, but I'd need a way to catch up with them, and if
that Captain of theirs found a way to get them home - unlikely, but if
anyone could circumvent the laws of time and space to get her way it
was that Captain - I'd need to follow them there too. Finding him
wouldn't be a problem, of course; tracking down one individual in an
interstellar supercivilisation was all in a day's work for a Tracer.
Third: memory. Falling in love with Chakotay again every morning had a
nice romantic sound to it, but on the whole I'd prefer him to remember
my birthday occasionally. This was the opposite of the first part, of
course, so some basic research there would probably help.
It did help, in fact, in both senses. There's a pheromone that we
Ramurans secrete that appears to work on anything with a cerebral
cortex, blocking out the transfer of specific items from short term to
long term memory. A second, similarly universal, performs the same
function as the Tracer computer viruses on long term memory. There's
a third, secreted in a similar way but tailored very specifically to
Ramuran neurochemistry, that activates a backup set of memory transfer
pathways, as if the ability to remember other Ramurans had evolved
separately from, and later than, the ability to be forgotten. I'd got
plenty of material there for a paper that would blow away half the
Ramuran view of prehistory; a shame it would never be published. I'd
also found ways to block, temporarily, the secretion of the third
pheromone, and to block, rather more permanently, the secretion of the
first two. There'd have to be some tests done, though, and I couldn't
think of a better subject for the first than Curneth.
"Still looking for assignments?" His dry, precise voice woke me from
a reverie in the Bureau common room. "There have been so few real
challenges recently."
"I know," I smiled back at him, activating a micro-hypospray with
my hidden right hand as I did so. Then I stood up and strolled
over to the assignment board, talking as I went. "Half the fun seems
to have gone out of the job lately. I've been thinking about a career
move."
"Desk job?"
"Maybe something a bit more radical. I've been thinking about leaving
the Bureau altogether."
I could almost hear the alarms going off in his head. But he kept his
cool, and just said, "Don't stray too far, Kellin. Keep in touch. We
wouldn't want to lose you." Not a very well veiled threat, but
subtlety was never Curneth's favourite che'skra hammer.
Two days should be about right, I thought, so I stayed off work the
next day. The day after, I walked up behind him at the assignment
board, and said, "Still looking for assignments?"
"There seem to be very few really challenging tasks at present," he
replied. Nearly the same words; had he forgotten?
"Are you thinking about a career move too?"
Now he looked round at me. "Why, who else is?"
"One of the new recruits, I forget who it was. A small man, dark
hair." That described nearly half the class. Curneth gave me a strange
look, and I realised that I hadn't managed to keep the sense of
triumph out of my voice; but what did it matter? By the time he had a
minute to think about it, he'd have forgotten all about it. And,
possibly, all about me; because this time I'd synthesised a version of
the second pheromone that worked on Ramurans, and had slipped a dose
of it in Curneth's cup of trah.
Three days later, I saw Curneth in a public walkway. I turned,
followed him, overtook him and carefully twisted my ankle and fell
right in front of him. He helped me up, gave me an arm to help me hobble
over to a bench, then asked me my name and address so he could call me a
transport. Thirteen years I'd worked with him, and although we weren't
close friends we'd always had a good working relationship. Now it was
all gone.
Erasing myself from Ramuran society was more a matter of thoroughness
than actual difficulty. Family gatherings, class reunions, works
parties, council meetings - all it took was a couple of hours of
attendance, a few drops of pheromone in the drinks, and patience. By
the end of the afternoon I would already see puzzled expressions, and
hear snatches of questions - "Who's she?" "Was she with you?" "She's
not staff, is she?" When my own brother asked me to dinner, I almost
burst out laughing. When my mother sat next to me at a concert and
looked right through me, I almost cried. The longer it went on, the
more, I realised, I was giving up for Chakotay. Running away from home
was simple enough; but this, the slow erosion and destruction of all I
knew, all I cared about, and the loss of everyone who loved me, was
almost too much to bear.
Eventually I could find nobody who knew me, nobody to miss me or to
send out a Tracer after me. It was time for the Tracer virus to be let
loose on the Tracer databanks. We'd known this might happen some day,
but the virus was so powerful and so adaptive that even our own
systems weren't proof against it. It showed, I suppose, how much of
our society's insularity depended on the consent of its members, and
especially on the loyalty of the Tracers. We all thought escape was
impossible, but deep down I think we all wanted to believe it.
Freedom, as I was learning, can be a heavy burden.
And at last I was free. No record, no memory of my existence anywhere.
I felt naked and alone, shorn of the basic ties of intelligent life
forms everywhere; and yet there was an exhilarating sense of power. I
had my skills, my ship, my weapons and my cloaks; I could go where I
wanted, be who I wanted, do what I wanted. And I had a trail to follow
too; that would be an easy transition, a slow introduction to the
complete freedom I had built myself, through the familiar routines of
the Tracer.
The Malon know most of what goes on in the clockwise half of the Delta
Quadrant. It's a long haul to Malon Prime - it took me three months -
but it was worth the journey. Captain Janeway had, it seemed, been
able to bend the laws of time and space a remarkable amount. The last
reports had her passing beyond the limits of Malon space two years
ago. While I might be able to travel that fast at maximum warp, my
fuel supply would never last out, and I had no friends anywhere to
call on for more. There was only one alternative; not a pleasant one,
but I'd used it before. Hitch a ride from someone faster. There
weren't too many candidates, and only one was likely to be heading for
the Alpha Quadrant.
The Borg don't bother us, and we don't bother them. It's voluntary on
our part, but it's debatable whether they have any choice in the
matter. The computer scientist who developed the Borg-specific version
of the Tracer virus has been honoured in the greatest way Ramuran
society is able; he or she has been Erased, name, family, race and
even gender completely removed from our records and memories. All we
know is that the Borg will never look for us and, if they find us,
will leave and never remember. The Borg virus also keeps us informed
of its current status; some time the information will stop, and then
we'll have to be ready. Meanwhile, we can track major Borg cube
movements, and if necessary follow them, although it takes a cool hand
on the cloaking modulator controls to keep them unaware of us.
It took a few more months of waiting before a Borg ship was headed the
right way. I spent most of the time carrying out every piece of
maintenance I could think of; when I ran out of ideas, I installed a
backup cloak generator, and made some modifications to the proton
cannon to give it a multi-adaptive energy modulation scheme, an idea
I'd got from some of Voyager's Borg data. After I'd finished that,
things started to turn strange. I was woken one morning by a familiar
voice, and he was standing by my bunk.
"I've been assigned to talk to you."
He couldn't be here. I must have been working too hard, alone too
long. "Go away. You're just a figment of my imagination."
He frowned. "If that were true, I'm sure I'd remember."
I shook my head, closed my eyes and waited for him to go away. But he
didn't, so I tried again. "Look, Chakotay, this isn't real. You're not
real. I'm just hallucinating."
"You're jumping to conclusions." He certainly looked real, and I
began to wonder. "I don't mean you any harm. Can you start clearing
up a few things now?"
I decided to give in. I had an autodoc in the cargo hold, so I could
treat myself later if I was hallucinating. "Clearing up what? We met,
we fell in love, now I'm coming to find you again."
"You're not telling the truth. I have no memory of meeting you. You
might remember a relationship between us, but it didn't exist."
There it was, the one thing I'd feared all along. Maybe I could find
him, and maybe I could convince him to take me back; but if I
couldn't, what then? I began to realise how completely I'd severed my
ties with Ramura. "I'm going to the Alpha Quadrant, Chakotay. I'm
going to find you."
"Wrong direction. Don't go."
"What do you mean?" I was afraid now, afraid of losing him before I'd
even started to look.
"I just want to make it clear how I feel. I don't want to play this
game."
I felt desperate now. "Then what can I do? Go back to Ramura?"
"They aren't going to be able to take you back."
"Chakotay, stop it," I pleaded. "Just give me a chance to think."
"Fine. I'm listening."
I took some deep breaths, and centred myself. "It's my decision, my
life. I'm coming to find you, Chakotay."
"On my ship, I give the orders. But I'm going to try to do more than
that."
His ship? But this was my ship. Something didn't make sense, and at
last I realised what it was. "Chakotay, tell me about Voyager."
"We've met people with ships that are faster and more powerful. But
Voyager's always managed to be a match for the best of them."
"Has it got ice cream?"
Remembering now, I mouthed the words as he spoke them: "I'm surprised
you didn't have any the last time you were here." There must be a
problem with the memories I'd recovered from the neurolytic emitter.
Instead of staying sensibly in long term memory, they were intruding
on my perceptions. I could overcome that simply enough. It could wait,
though; I'd laboured so long in anticipation, I needed at least the
illusion of time with him.
I smiled, at last, and relaxed. "Let's have some now, shall we?"
"I thought you might like to get something to eat--unless your
memories of our mess hall aren't good."
"Can I have your pudding?"
"Gladly."
And then, just when it was getting to be fun, the comms terminal alarm
sounded.
A Borg scout sphere was heading for the Beta Quadrant, destination a
planet called Romulus, mission - not difficult to guess. The small
spheres were for scouting, but the cubes tended to follow before long.
In another time I'd have simply tagged along, Traced my assignment and
watched. Somehow, though, I felt that Chakotay would have found a way
to do more, to safeguard these neighbours of the Federation. For all I
knew, Romulus could be the finest flower of Beta Quadrant
civilisation, a centre for arts, sciences and humanities, an exemplar
of the heights a liberal, egalitarian state could reach. It probably
wasn't, but it probably didn't deserve to vanish from history. Even a
Borg scout was far too much for me to contemplate taking on alone, of
course, but I realised I could give Romulus a fighting chance.
I matched directions with the sphere's flight plan, activated my cloak
and worked my ship up to warp factor eight. My sensors quickly
detected the transwarp conduit, and as the sphere flashed by, I
slipped in, unseen, behind it. Then, during the days that followed, I
patched into the modified Tracer virus in the Borg computers and
executed a simple command.
Eventually, the conduit terminated, and the Borg scout sphere, with my
small ship unseen behind it, emerged into normal space to a warm
Romulan welcome. For the past two weeks the Borg had been broadcasting
on all subspace bands at maximum strength, and the message was simple:
We are coming to destroy you. The most peaceful society would have had
to react in some way, and from the forces the Romulans had been able
to muster I suspected that peace wasn't their favourite che'skra
hammer. Their ships were huge, green, and powerful, and I was glad
they couldn't see me because they didn't seem to be in the right mood
to quibble over who was or wasn't a friend. I left what looked like
the battle to end all battles behind me, and ran for the Federation.
There's really not much to say about the initial stages of Tracing,
especially when the assignment is on a civilised world. There are
slow, tedious months of surveillance, learning to understand a new
culture enough to find its information sources. There are equally
tedious weeks of hacking into databases, studying public records,
viewing old newsvids, or accessing whatever other records may be
available. The people I'm looking for tend to be noticeable in a
crowd, even if they do get forgotten instantly, so there's generally
some trace to follow. With Chakotay it was easier than usual, because
people remembered him; but there was the added complication that he
clearly didn't want to be tracked down.
I found him, at last, on a Federation colony world called Dorvan, a
rich, lush, forested planet close to the remains of the Cardassian
Union. Pacifico El Guerrero, as his colleagues on the ruling council
now called him - from what he'd told me, I could understand why he'd
want to conceal his past - lived on a hunting reserve not far from
Dorvan City. After extracting all I needed from the Dorvan data
archives - fully cloaked, of course - I resolved to take a long walk.
As I approached his house, I saw him, apparently digging over a small
patch of ground nearby. He was older, of course, with a touch of grey
around his temples, and rough brown trousers and a light tan shirt had
replaced his red and black uniform, but I recognised him at once. The
sadness in his eyes, though, was something I hadn't expected to see,
and so I took a closer look before revealing myself.
Rites and customs for disposal of the dead vary enormously from
culture to culture, but we Ramurans don't know much about other
cultures. It always seemed natural that any physical evidence of
anyone's existence should be destroyed as completely as possible after
their death - why leave clues for an enemy to follow? - but apparently
humans cherished their corpses, buried them in special places and
marked the places where they lay with decorative slabs of rock. This
one was less decorated than most, bearing only the single word,
"Kathryn". A woman's name, and one that meant a great deal to him.
I didn't know who Kathryn might have been, but I felt that Chakotay
needed me now as much as I needed him. I'd planned to take things
slowly, to build myself an identity here on Dorvan, then to get to
know him slowly. That would have been safe. But I've never been afraid
to take risks when it mattered, and here and now nothing mattered more
than Chakotay. I made sure, at least, that I was standing behind him,
and then I dropped my cloak, stepped forward, and laid a hand on his
shoulder.
He barely noticed at first, deep in grief. Maybe he thought I was
somebody else. Then he spoke, and the tone of his voice made me want
to hold him and comfort him and take away the pain.
"It killed her in the end. It would have killed anyone, seven years of
hell like that." He shook slightly, stifling a sob. "I think she was
already dead inside the day we got home. It's just taken a few years
for her body to catch up."
"I'm sorry, Chakotay," I answered softly. "Is there anything I can..."
He spun round suddenly, rose to his feet and grabbed both my shoulders
roughly. "Chakotay? Nobody's called me that for years, except..." He
looked deep into my eyes, puzzled yet intrigued, and his grip on my
arms relaxed. "Do I know you?"
At last, I could play it all out again. "We've met before."
He laughed bitterly. "If that were true, I'm sure I'd..."
I could see his expression change, and then with a brief "Wait here!"
he was running into the house. Emerging, moments later, with a small
black rectangular object with a strange opalescent sheen to it. He
opened it up, and revealed a sheaf of thin wafers of material, covered
with writing. "Say something. Anything. Just... talk to me."
"I've come a long way to find you, Chakotay," I began. Then my sense
of humour stepped in to help. "And ice cream, of course. I'd go half
way across the galaxy for that alone."
"Kellin." My heart leapt into my throat as he said my name. "It is
you. Your hair, your face," he tilted his head to one side, "your
ears, your voice... it's all here, even if I couldn't remember." He
showed me the writing on one of the sheets. "Something your viruses
couldn't erase."
"Oh, I don't know." I couldn't resist smiling. "Some kind of bio-
engineered nanostructure with pigment altering properties..." But his
attention was wandering, back from me to the slab of rock and the
single name on it.
I followed his gaze. I didn't dare ask who she'd been, but I managed
to ask the question I'd been dreading. "Did you love her?"
He didn't look round. "I don't really know. Maybe I'll never really
know. But she needed me, and sometimes I was all she had. I had to be
there for her, just because she needed me. And I was, right to the
end."
Only then did my memories of him come fully back to life, completed by
the understanding of what sort of man I had fallen in love with. I
heard myself saying, gently, "You're such a kind person."
Then he looked at me again, with more life in his eyes, and a touch of
surprise and disbelief. "You said that before. I remember!"
"You remember me? That's not possible."
"I remember. You said it twice."
I shrugged, and grinned. "I guess originality's not exactly my
favourite che'skra hammer."
He smiled then, a deep, genuine, loving smile, and at last I knew it
would all be right. He'd forgotten me the first time, and I'd
forgotten him the second, but there's an old saying: the third time is
the charm.
"Your favourite what?"
"Che'skra hammer. Surely I must have told you how to play che'skra?"
He reached out for me, and I was in his arms at last, and revelling in
the sound of his voice as he gently replied,
"I must have forgotten."
THE END
(
geocities.com/southbeach/1380) (
geocities.com/southbeach)