The Tree Remembers:
Chapter 01

  “So Kathryn, how have you been?”

  Kathryn heard the question but didn’t answer.  She continued staring out the window at the trees waving in the cold early spring breeze.  She’d heard the question many time from him, and so far had answered it as many times, but was starting to wonder what the point of it all was.  Nothing ever seemed to change from it, just dredging shit up from the past.

  She’d spent the whole trip to his office thinking about what she was going to say and how she was going to say it, rehearsing the conversation in her head.  She did that often when she was anxious about a conversation she was going to have.  She’d role play it out loud when nobody could hear, playing both parts, imagining the scene.  It didn’t seem to matter that as soon as a real other person was introduced it always played out differently immediately.

  He managed to keep his gaze on her without it feeling like he was staring while waiting patiently for her to respond.  Trick of the trade, she supposed.

  “I’ve been thinking about dying a lot lately,” she admitted, already off her imagined script.

  Her counselor raised an eyebrow, giving her a chance to continue before responding to her initial remark.

  “Not like,” she darkly chuckled, “not like killing myself or a death wish or anything,” she clarified.  “I mean I’ve been thinking about just… I don’t know, the reality that I will be dead at some point, and how… weird that is.”

  “How so?”

  Kathryn answered with a heavy sigh in frustration.  “I don’t know…”

  The counselor sensed that she’d reached a mental impasse.  “A lot of people come to feel that way when they reach a certain point in their life, when their existence shifts from one of a perceived endless amount of time and opportunity to one of more certain finitude.”

  “So just a regular run of the mill mid-life crisis then?”

  “Does the idea of undergoing such a pedestrian phase and experience of your life bother you?”

  “No, it would actually be somewhat reassuring.”

  “How so?”

  “Reinforces that I am in fact still human, still just a person.”

  “Is that in doubt for you?”

  Kathryn looked back at the counselor and scrunched her face somewhat in scrutiny.  “No.  Not like, literally of course.”

  “Then in what way?”

  Kathryn sighed.  “It’s not me that doubts it, it’s everyone else.  It’s hard being thought of as ‘The Great So-and-so’.  Other people just see the most accomplished person on the planet when they see me.  The first Havenite in space, the first modern Havenite to set foot on the original New Horizon, the first Havenite to make contact with humans from another colony, then aliens from the other side of the galaxy, then stick my dick in the middle of their galactic civil war, get Kobol destroyed then win the war for one side.  All that stuff being the same person tends to leave people thinking you’re something more than human.”

  “Do you think you’re responsible for what happened to Kobol?”

  Kathryn stared blankly at the counselor.  “Why would you say that?”

  “I didn’t, you did, just now, when you were listing your accomplishments.”

  “Did I?  I don’t know… I suppose I do a little.  Maybe the people who like to accuse me of that are starting to get to me.”

  “For what it’s worth, that’s not my understanding of the situation, and I can’t imagine anyone I know thinking that about you.”

  “Yeah well you weren’t fucking there were you?” Kathryn snapped, triggered.  She looked back out the window, looking for answers that weren’t anywhere to be found.  I think we all had a hand in that happening… If we hadn’t been so eager to explore, so eager to just…”

  “Stick your dick where it didn’t belong?” the counselor suggested with a comforting smile.

  “Yeah, exactly,” she chuckled.  “If we hadn’t been so eager to just get out there and see what happened…  You know I spent a lot of time playing through every step that led to Kobol, trying to figure out any mistake I made, any off ramp that could have avoided that…”

  “Yes I do, you did a lot of that with me here in this room.”

  “The only way it could have happened any differently would have been if we’d just never went to that new system, if we hadn’t sent out the drone ships to open rifts around new stars we wouldn’t have gotten involved at all and Kobol never would have happened.”

  “From what I understand, and obviously I can only go on what you’ve told me, but from what I understand, if you hadn’t gone through that rift and encountered that alien drone ship, it was only a matter of time before the linked Bobbin faction won their war and assimilated the entire galaxy, us included.”

  “Yeah…” Kathryn listlessly affirmed.  “So I guess in one sense we were,” she gave a nervous chuckle tinged with horror at the thought, “lucky.  Lucky that everyone on Kobol died if the alternative was every human being wiped out of existence.  Or worse… maybe they would have taken time to figure out how to assimilate us into their link.”  A cold, morbid shudder ran up her spine at the thought.

  She looked out the window again for a while.  The sky was a high overcast, like someone had covered the world in was paper, the sun only a gradient of light like a distant candle.  Ordinarily she liked this time of year, the promise of spring, the world just beginning to rub it’s eyes and wake to the renewal of life.  But lately she had just been sensing the futility of it all.  Every new renewal of life only ever led to another inevitable cycle of death.  She’d started to feel the cold, mechanical futility of it all.  No matter how lushly the world returned to life, it was destined to just die again.  The world may renew next year, but life of previous years was just gone.  It had it’s time, but was now just a forgotten memory buried underneath the new.

  “In fact there’s only the one thing I could and should have done differently…”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yeah…”

  “We’ve talked about that quite a bit.  Do you still feel responsible?”

  “I am responsible Doc, there’s no way around that.”

  “We’ve worked through how there was no way you could have known what would happen when you brought her along.”

  “Yeah, but still… it, fuck.  It was reckless.  We could have found anything there, any danger.”

  “And you had every reason to suspect you would find nothing but a lifeless geologically interesting system on the other side of the rift, a reasonable field trip for a young person and experience to share with her parents.”

  “But I’m the one who seeks danger, you know?  Or at least I was.  It’s not so much the what I did in bringing her, it’s the why.  It was selfish.  I wanted to make her like me, make her see the appeal of being like me and being into what I am.”

  “From what I recall, wasn’t it originally her suggestion?”

  “Maybe, but I…”  Kathryn just shook her head and looked back out the window.

  “I think you’re looking for a way to assume blame for that Kathryn.  I think it’s easier for you to blame yourself than to accept that bad things can just happen sometimes with no one to blame and nothing you should have done differently.  It’s scary to be afraid that there are monsters in the shadow of every hidden corner.”

  “It’s hard… seeing it on her face every day.”

  “Yeah… I bet.”

  “Every time I see it in her eyes it just makes me think about it, about what I could have done differently, how I could have spared her that.  She’s so different now, something seems… so broken in her and she won’t talk to me about it.  I wish she would.  She’s so withdrawn now… she used to be so full of life.”

  “You’ll have to be patient with her.  It was less than two years ago and it was a lot for someone so young to process.  Just give her time Kathryn.  Be there for her.  Accept that she will thrash and lash out at you.  If you want to rebuild a relationship with her I’m afraid you’re going to need to assume some abuse and neglect from her as she works it out.  People are resilient Kathryn but it takes time to metabolize trauma, even if you’re trying.  And you should also be prepared for the reality that growth inevitably means change.  She’ll never be the girl she was.  That girl is gone.  She’s something new now, and she can grow into something healthier with time and support, but you’ll have to get to know the new person she becomes on this new person’s own terms.  She’ll resent it if she feels you missing or longing for the person she used to be.  She could lash out, tell you it’s your fault she’s not who she was.  You could do everything right and she may still lash out at you.”

  “Yeah…”

  “It’s important you understand Kathryn that things often don’t work out.  You’ve lived a life where most things have for you but that’s not the common experience.  You may never be close with your daughter again.  She may never fully recover from her experiences.  In some sense that’s not even possible.  The person she is now and will be going into the future is a person for whom that traumatic experience is a core part of her, something that will be sitting in the living room of her mind with her for the rest of her life.  At best she’ll be able to let it go to sleep and not bother her much, allow her to ignore its presence most of the time, but it will never not be there. It’s a lifelong companion for her now.”

  Kathryn sighed as she stood up.  She closed the few steps to the window and looked out at the cityscape beyond and down to the individual specs of people and vehicles swarming below.  “I just wish I could have my little girl back, Doc…” she said quietly enough it was almost a whisper.

  “You haven’t suffered loss much in your life have you?  You’ve never really lost anything you weren’t prepared or willing to lose have you?”

  Kathryn scrolled through things she’d lost in her mind.  Her parents, but they were never close.  Jaren, but the marriage had run its course.  Kobol, but it had never been her world; she’d just suffered the defeat of its loss.  Her Star Fleet career, but she’d left it behind with them begging her to stay.  He was right.  For all her grumbling, she’d led such a charmed life.

  “Maybe I feel guilty for that,” she said, for a moment not realizing she hadn’t said the rest out loud.

  “What’s that?”

  Kathryn shook her head as she continued looking out at the city.  “Maybe I feel guilty for having done and been so much and it having cost me so little.”

  “Oh, I think it’s cost you plenty in your own ways.”

  “Yeah…” Kathryn responded, looking down at nothing in particular.  After a time, she added: “Emily came to see me again.”

  “Former President Emily Sato?”

  “That’s the one… still trying to convince me to get into politics.”

  “And you’re not interested?”

  “It’s not…” Kathryn sighed and shook her head.  “It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just…”

  She sat back down on the couch and looked at the counselor, hoping he would prompt her to what to say next, but he seemed to understand this was a time he needed to leave  her hanging to find her own words.

  “I guess it’s that I don’t know if I have the heart to start something new like that anymore.  I’m worried that if I went down that road it would just be to be going down any road instead of standing still, you know?”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  “I miss it man, I really do…”

  “What do you miss?”

  “Being in the game, a part of the action, at the centre of things, having my hands on the hinges of history, it’s like a drug.  I’m not like, hungry for power for power’s sake or anything.”

  “No, I’ve never gotten that sense from you, just that you relish being a part of it all.”

  “Yes, exactly!  I never set out for that though.  In the beginning I just wanted to be the best officer I could, to be the best candidate I could possibly be to be the first to go back up into space and visit that old ship.  I wanted to touch history, to… be a part of it, a part of history, to…”

  “Be remembered,” her counselor suggested.

  Kathryn started tearing up at hearing him say that, but she wasn’t sure why.  “Yeah,” she acknowledged, fighting back a full-on crying fit out of nowhere.  “Ah!” she exclaimed.  “Don’t know where this is coming from!”

  “Someone or something can only be remembered if it is noticed in the first place.”

  “Yeah, well… I’ve certainly been noticed, haven’t I.”

  “Can you think of a time when you felt like you weren’t noticed the way you needed to be?”  It was one of those time where Kathryn felt it pretty obvious where the counselor was trying to lead her but she had to get there on her own anyways.

  “Yeah…” she sniffled.  “You know… as a kid.  I was so… lonely.  I was smart, too smart for my age.  I was weird to the other kids, I had trouble making any friends, you know all that.”

  “But there was more than that wasn’t there?  At home?”

  “Oh… my parents were good people.  But sometimes… sometimes I wonder if they ever even wanted kids.  I mean they only had me.  Maybe I turned them off the whole idea,” she chuckled.  The counselor said nothing, he just waited for her to continue.

  “And yeah, okay, find.  I felt unseen by them.  I have no idea where I got my fascination with space and history and everything, with the ‘bigger story’,” she said with air quotes.  “I just always felt so small, and I—”

  She stopped, and a lost look came over her eyes.  “So small…”  The counselor allowed her the space to be quiet in her thoughts for a while.  “I felt so small, so… insignificant.  I felt like I didn’t matter to anyone, like my parents thought of me as just a burden they had to dutifully care for with no passion or meaningful investment.  They were just there.  I was… just there.  Left to discover the cosmos all on my own.  I read about the giants of history, the firsts of things.  The Wright Brothers, the Armstrongs, the Senguptas.  I taught myself about the wondrous immensities of the infinite cosmos, and it made me feel… well not large, but… I guess it would be more accurate to say it made everything else around me feel as small as I already felt in the context of the infinitudes of the universe.”

  “That must have been comforting.”

  “It was, and it made me want to be a part of it.  I worked so hard, sacrificed so much… And then I got there!  I did it!  I was selected to be the first modern Haven astronaut!  And then Jaren showed up, the colonies made Contact again… I was important, I was a part of history, I… mattered.  It was wonderful.  And then after all that Jaren and I had Maggie and things settled down for a while, but I was still in the game.  I led the Earth expedition headquartered on Orbital One, still at the forefront of everything we were discovering, and then when the first portal drone ship reported back…”

  She looked down at her fidgeting hands, at her mangled thumbs from years of neurotically chewing on them when she was nervous and resisted the urge to bring one to her mouth.  “It just gets away from you, you know?  You get swept along with history at some point.  People seem to think I’m magic or something, like I’m charmed.  Oh Kathryn, you’re the only one who can do this, you’re the only one who’s qualified.  Okay maybe I am, but that’s only because I’m still the only person doing the new things, you know?

  “The only thing that makes me special are the things that got my foot in the door, the things that allowed me to excel in the academy and in the space program, the things that got me up to that ship first in the first place.  Everything after that was just…”  She had trouble finding the right word.

  “Inertia.” the counselor suggested.

  “Exactly.  Yeah.  Inertia.  You become the designated most qualified person for anything nobody is qualified for, and people start to think there’s something special about you in particular, like you’re the only person who could do any of these things.  After the war I had to step back, had to let other people lead the way for a while, it became too much!”  She paused for too long before adding: “Plus I had to take care of Maggie.”

  “I imagine it must have been frustrating that Maggie wasn’t the same kind of person as you in that way.”

  “Very true… She was such a different kid.  So personable, so friendly, so at ease with the world around her.  She’s an artist for god’s sakes.  I just couldn’t relate to any of that at all.”

  “Well as much as these things can be a roll of the genetic dice, it is as much a product of her environment, so you can at least be happy that you offered her a safer and more seen feeling environment than you had.”

  “Sure, unless…  You know, sometimes I wonder if we were never really that close and she’s just that way because she takes after Jaren, if she feels safe and seen because he makes her feel that way when I’m just like my own parents at the end of the day.”

  “I think you might be catastrophizing to some degree there.  From what you’ve told me, you tried quite a bit to bridge the gulf between the different kinds of people you were.  Different as you may be, I’m sure it meant a lot to her that you tried.  It means you care, that you care enough to try to know her even if it’s challenging.”

  “I hope so…”

  The counselor waited to see if she had anything to add before continuing.  “And now?  I mean with respect to the inertia of your life?”

  “And now Emily is trying to drag me right back into the thick of it, and I want it, I really do.  But I don’t want to do it if I want it for the wrong reasons, you know?”

  “What would be the wrong reasons?”

  “If I just… can’t retire, if I just become one of those people who can’t let go.  If I become addicted to it and can just never find peace because I can’t let that go.  If I can never be happy letting someone else lead.  I don’t want to do it if it’s just about ego, you know?”

  “I think I do.”  He paused to give her the chance to add something more before continuing.  “Sounds like something you’re going to have to think about for a while.  Is there something in particular President Sato is pushing you towards?”

  Kathryn guffawed.  “Yeah.  There’s an open senate seat in my home district.  She wants me to run there in the upcoming special election.  She thinks it would be a perfect springboard to a run at the presidency.”

  The counselor raised his eyebrow.  “Wow,” he offered.

  “Yeah.  Yeah…”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Honestly if feels like a lot.  It feels like so much.  But at the same time… ugh, I can feel that pull, that familiar call to action.  It’s exciting.  The idea of learning a new kind of competition?  A whole new arena to learn my way around?  The idea of just… accepting I’ve made my contributions and it’s enough.  Even if it’s more than anyone else has contributed, just feels like politely sitting down and waiting to be dead.  I don’t think I could ever live that way.  I don’t know if I should want to be able to.”

  “Well put that way no, it certainly doesn’t sound very appealing,” the counselor observed.  “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.”

  “Well I could certainly be involved in politics without trying to be the fucking president myself.  That feels… I’m worried that doing that would just be… I don’t know, allowing the inertia to continue to take me where it wills instead of choosing what I want to do.  Does that make sense?”

  “Perfectly, of course, yes.”

  “Sato is so invested in me.  She thinks she sees something in me, something beyond the inertia.  It just feels like so much to live up to.  But at the same time, if there’s something more there, I have a sense she’d be the one to be able to see it.  She has a way of… seeing through people, seeing the stuff they’re made of, understanding immediately what they are and aren’t capable of.  I don’t know… maybe it’s all just her own self-styled propaganda.”

  “I think if you have the opportunity, you should get away for a while.  Take a trip somewhere, do something interesting that doesn’t have anything to do with the fate of the worlds.  Bring Maggie along if you can.  I think the best and only thing you can do as far as reaching her is just spending as much time with her as she’ll allow.  Simple proximity has a way of connecting people.”

  “Well… Felix is going on that research expedition into he wilds to study the squiddies.  I have always wanted to learn more about them.  Some simple observational research might be just what I need right now to get my mind off of everything.  I’m pretty sure Maggie has been interested in them enough for me to be able to drag her along as well.  I mean she won’t be happy about it or want to go I’m sure, but she might let me insist if I sweeten the proposition enough for her.”

  “That sounds like a great idea Kathryn just remember, you can’t push her too hard.  You should probably try to resist pushing her in general as much as you can.  She’s in a delicate space.”

  “Yeah, I know…”

  “But so are you, and you can’t neglect that either.  You have a lot to figure out yourself, this trip could be productive in that as well, to be away from the demands of history for a while,” he smiled.  “I would encourage you to reflect on how you would feel if you have already made all of your meaningful contributions to our society.  I would encourage you to reflect on how a life not a part of the action could be meaningful and fulfilling.  Your locus of personal value and meaning seems to be distinctly external to yourself, and I don’t think you’ll ever find peace until you can bring that locus within yourself.  This doesn’t you can’t continue to aspire to ever greater heights of accomplishment, but you’ll never be satisfied, never able to savour your victories until you can learn to embrace your ambition in a more healthy way, or learn to let it go.”

  “Thanks Doc, I’ll give that some thought.  I guess that’s time hunh?”

  “I’m afraid so.  I think we made good progress today though,” he offered as he stood up to walk her to the door.  “Reflect on what was said here today.  I look forward to hearing what you’ve made of it all by next week.”