The Tree Remembers:
Chapter 02

  Kathryn exited the building and squinted into the afternoon sun.  It was a perfectly clear  day, one which she would otherwise ordinarily be itching to get out and make something of.  She reflected for a moment on how humans could be affected by good weather as easily as plants could be before sighing, pulling her coat collar up in the still nippy air and start down the street.

  As she made her way down the several downtown blocks of one of the two downtown cores in the Twin Cities towards her metro station, she looked around at how much the city had changed in the last decade and a half since they made contact with the other colonies.  They’d advanced so much, been given so much technology which was magic for them but off the shelf for the Koboli.  The impatient forward thinker in her could never think it was a bad thing, but she did wonder sometimes what her own culture had lost in each thing they’d been given instead of been forced to figure out for themselves.

  ‘Well it’s not like I personally figured anything else out,’ she figured.  Maybe that was a dumb impulse.  Most people didn’t themselves discover any meaningful advancement in technology; most people were just the passive recipients of other people figuring shit out either way.

  It was the little things, like how quickly their own domestically developed picture tube screens had been replaced by Koboli flat screens with virtually reality level resolution, or how in the same time virtually all of their gas burning cars had been replaced by advanced Koboli battery cells charged by advanced Koboli anti-matter power plants.  Their rockets, their prop airplanes and then just before they made contact their jet engine planes, all replaced with advanced Koboli anti-matter drive crafts.

  They were all objectively good developments, and maybe it didn’t matter who brought them the development.  She’d heard grumblings about how many good jobs had been lost because of the rapid advancement, how many people’s skills became redundant overnight.  It was less of a problem the last couple years though since most Koboli died when their world was attacked.  Before then, a lot of Koboli had— well the disreputable would say infiltrated, their society and taken over much of the development, manufacture, and deployment of all of these advances.  Now that there were so few of them left, a lot of Havenites had had to skill up very quickly.  

  ‘So maybe it was all worth it,’ Kathryn thought with an irreverent smirk before chastising herself for even having the thought in jest.  Her ex-husband was Koboli, her daughter half-koboli.  Not funny.

  A flock of flying squid flew overhead as she entered the stairway down to the underground metro.  She thought about how weird it was that so many things on her world were named for how they were in vague ways variations of things from Earth.  It made sense given that the world was colonized by people from Earth, but still weird nevertheless that now half a millennium later they would still be saddled with these increasingly nonsensical allegories.  It was like naming constellations after modern things, and their names being increasingly irrelevant to modern day people as modernity advanced century by century.

  The door to the train opened and she collapsed into a seat, noting how weary her body had become.  ‘When did that happen?’ she asked.  When she was young, forty-five might as well have been a hundred years old, but now that she was there, she knew some people well into their eighties and she could only dread how miserable it would feel to be in their bodies if her own apparent deterioration continued apace.

  And what could she do?  She exercised, tried to eat right, her military background made a certain militant vigilance about such things easier than it might come to others, but she could already feel the toll all that running was taking on her knees and already taking anti-inflammatory’s prophylactically before she went for a run lately.  Her tight, trim physique from her military personal training had already given way to an unfamiliar though still minor bit of pudge through her midsection.

  She noticed her ghost of a reflection in the window opposite to her seat.  Her red hair was drawn into a haphazard ponytail and her eyes were as blue as ever, and as much as her faint reflection failed to reveal too much, when she looked at herself in the mirror every morning, it was becoming ever harder to fail to notice the cracks in her façade.  The lines on her face which had been proliferating and deepening in recent years, the grey hairs she’d had to abandon plucking out some years back lest risk going bald.  She’d always understood herself to be a rather attractive woman based on her own assessment and the frequency with which she’d had to wave off would be suitors, but she’d never been one to draw her personal sense of value from her looks.  She’d always been more focused on her accomplishments, her ambition.  Still though, society valued what it valued, and it hurt all the same to watch youthful beauty slip away from year by year if not day by day.

  Unlucky enough to be staring blankly exactly at the wrong place, the sun painfully blasted directly into her eyes as they exited the tunnel and the train ascended to a section of elevated track and she watched the city race by.  She been coming to see this counselor for only seven weeks now, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it.  The military had been so macho, so resistant to taking mental health concerns seriously, so quick to see anything as a sign of weakness.  It had taken several sessions just to work through those sessions and get to what was bothering her.

  It hadn’t even been her idea.  In fact, she’d pretty much been forced to go by her— what would she even call Patricia at this point… fiancée maybe?  They weren’t formally engaged or anything but she already kind of thought of Patricia as her wife.

  It wasn’t like Kathryn had become such a problem that Patricia gave her some kind of ultimatum that she had to get counseling, or she’d leave, nothing so melodramatic.  She just cared about her, and could tell that something was eating at her.  She knew that speaking to somebody about it could help, but she needed to help Kathryn push past her innate inclinations to see the need for counseling as some sort of show of weakness or vulnerability.

  And she’d been right.  Because kind of a lot had happened over the last couple years.  She’d made first contact with an advanced alien species, stumbled into the middle of their civil war, helped one side defeat the other, get Kobol obliterated somewhere in there, and oh yeah, allow her teenaged daughter to be captured by a malicious hive mind and be utterly traumatized by being experimented on and pumped for information she didn’t have.

  Kathryn sighed heavily as she looked past her reflection in the opposite window and watched the train take a turn and veer away from the scummier parts of the city just outside downtown towards the nicer suburban areas.

  If it wasn’t for her Maggie she probably wouldn’t have gone no matter what Patricia said, but enough time had gone by that it had become clear that Maggie wasn’t getting better as time went by.  She was in fact becoming more withdrawn and distant.  Kathryn felt a growing hostility towards her from the girl, something seething beneath the surface.  It wasn’t like she couldn’t imagine why, the problem was that there were so many things which she could imagine the girl being angry about at her that it was hard to figure what particular thing it might be on any given day or if it was always just one or two things, or just all of it all of the time.

  But beyond Maggie there were other reasons why she’d been bent out of shape the last year or so.  Retiring from Star Fleet had been a difficult transition.  It hadn’t been her plan per se, after she’s led the winning war effort against the enemy Bobbin faction, she’d initially just planned to take a well earned extra long vacation.  But the more time went by the harder it became to imagine going back to that life.  The more distance she had from it, the more she realized she didn’t feel like she still had a place there.

  Maybe it was the way they looked at her when she still dutifully made an appearance at Star Fleet functions, the ‘Great’ Admiral Kathryn Barnes, ‘Woman of Firsts’, ‘Winner of Wars’.  The more her life slowed down and she had the chance to reflect on her life, the more she saw of what the things others would so readily praise her for had cost her personally.  Her marriage, so much of her daughter, her own trauma from it all which was now only beginning to bubble to the surface…  She just felt less and less happy to be praised for it all, which was funny given how much a yearning for that praise had driven her to do all of that in the first place.

  And maybe the counselor was right, maybe it was all just feeling the absence of a certain kind of praise from her parents which she’d been seeking all those years, she thought as the train reached her stop and she exited the car after the doors slid open.  As she descended the stairs to street level, she wondered where that craving for validation had gone.  It didn’t feel like the kind of thing that evaporated with age.  She’d know people who still had it when they got old and it just made them bitter as they felt the window for their life to mean something more close on them.  It hadn’t gone away when she had Maggie.  Maybe she’d have been a better mother if it had, she thought.

  And it wasn’t even the whole ‘winning the war and opening up the galaxy for humanity’ thing, she thought as she walked the suburban streets as townhouses nearer to the station gave way to larger single family homes, and found herself glad that she wasn’t the kind of famous that required a lot of security and living in some sort of private gated compound.  She thought about how the kind of ambition that led her to accomplish what she had was an ambition that was never satisfied no matter what you accomplished, that there was never any meaningful finish line for that kind of thing.  But now it was finally having the chance, or maybe just finally being resigned to, just slowing down for a while, just being still for a time.  Having the space, finally, to reflect on what her life had meant to her instead of what it meant to the world.

  What she’d realized is that while she didn’t regret the life she’d led and while she was proud of what she had accomplished, it was a life she didn’t want to return to.  She was ready for a new chapter in her life, whether that meant figuring out how to be happy living a life of relative obscurity or finding a new start to follow, starting some new passion to occupy her life with.

  As she walked up the steps to her outwardly happy home and approached the door, she wondered why getting into politics the way Emily suggested left her with such a feeling of smelling somebody’s fart and wondering who’s it was.