5The Village's New Role
Once the party was over, after Miral had congratulated Brax on his acceptance to the Starfleet Academy program and left with Alixia and their closest friends to talk over all the fun they'd had, Miral returned to her family's quarters and indulged herself with a half pint of replicated chocolate chip ice cream, pondering all she'd learned and, even more, what she suspected about the Fair Haven program.
First and foremost it was a recreational program, of course. She understood that well enough. From the Stardates recorded on the program history, her Daddy originally created it more than a year before Captain Janeway, Commander Chakotay, Lieutenant Commander Tuvok, and other crew members were lost when Voyager encountered the spatial anomaly that caused the Disaster (always capitalized in any logs referring to that day). When she looked into the ship's computer and reviewed the names and pictures of all the deceased members of the crew, however, she saw that several had died long before that terrible event-but not all of the lost had been recreated. Why not? Had she simply not seen them during her visits, or didn't her Daddy want to remember some of them? The program had been updated from time to time, too, as some of the Stardates had occurred during the eleven years of her own lifetime-long after the Disaster.
'Is this what Daddy has been doing when he's been "tinkering with" this program? Is this more than a recreational activity for him? Is this a...memorial of some kind?'
"Miral, I'm home," she heard her Daddy say as the portal to their quarters swished open. She looked out of her doorway and saw her mother wasn't with him. She probably was still in Engineering, working past the end of her shift, as usual. Good. He was the one she needed to speak with anyway.
"I'm in my room, Daddy," she called out. As she knew he would, her father came in and gave her a kiss.
"Did you have a good time, Sweetie?" he asked, just before his eyes flicked down to the terminal screen display. He hesitated a moment, processing what he'd seen...crew photos, all deceased members of Voyager's crew. "Oh" was all he said before taking in such a huge intake of air, Miral wondered if he would float up to the ceiling the way he would if the artificial gravity momentarily failed. He let it all out fairly quickly, but along with his exhalation he emitted a very tiny "ah" sound.
"Made some observations while you were visiting Fair Haven, I see," he said softly.
"Yes, I did, Daddy. I had a great time with my friends, and they all said they'd had a good time today, too, but I couldn't help noticing...well…" Miral gestured to the screen in front of her, populated with the faces of the lost, and said, "I see so many of these faces on the holocharacters, and I talked for a little while with Mr. Sullivan and...Katie O'Clare...and I wondered if Fair Haven is more than just a recreational program. To you, I mean."
Her father walked to her bed and sat down on its edge, twisting his lower lip in that way he had when he was about to say something that could be uncomfortable for the person he was addressing to hear, or if he was thinking so hard he wasn't aware of what his lip was doing. Finally, he admitted, "Yes, it's a lot more than 'just a recreational program,' although it was only that when I first created it. After the Disaster and all it took to rebuild Voyager so we could get underway again, I needed to mourn the people we'd lost, especially our entire command team. I had to rebuild myself, really, to become the captain our surviving crew needed. It was a good thing we found out you were on your way into our lives back then, because I needed something to be optimistic about. Your mother did, too. And I wanted to remember the lost the way they were, if I could.
"So, since I already had this Irish village program, with holodeck characters who were somewhat self-aware, and I knew Captain Janeway liked going to Fair Haven to relax and be Michael Sullivan's Katie O'Clare, it just seemed like a natural thing to do to let her 'retire' there with him. Then I added Tuvok and Chakotay, and when we lost Joe Carey, I added him, too. And I just kept adding people so I could visit them whenever I had the time to enjoy their company for a while. And the rest of the crew does that too, when they get the chance."
"Doesn't it creep them out when they see dead people on the holodeck?"
"They're only images of the people who died, Miral. They're not 'dead people.' I created the holocharacters from the way they looked and spoke in the log records they left behind. I never pretended I was able to recreate them exactly as they had been when they were alive. I couldn't know what their opinions and thoughts might be in every instance."
"You left things out. They don't know they've died."
"You noticed that? It's true. You know, Captain Janeway was so focused on getting us home to the Alpha Quadrant, she never would have actually retired before we got there. I couldn't include that fact in Katie O'Clare without making the hologram miserable, so I didn't try." Her father paused a moment before saying, "On Earth and other planets of the Federation, you can still find cemeteries where people were buried a long time ago. Centuries, even. Stones have been raised or slabs used to mark their graves with their names and when they died. Since we bury our dead in space, there's no 'place' we can go to if we want to have a little chat with whatever essence remains. Like Vulcans do when they visit an ancestor's katya on Mount Seleya. Fair Haven serves that purpose for our crew. Instead of stones marking their lives we can 'talk' with their images, to remember what they were like. Everyone understands that and accepts it."
Miral glanced back at her terminal's screen and noticed a couple of images she was quite sure she'd never seen in Fair Haven. "I don't think you added everyone who died, Daddy."
Her father's wry smile reemerged. "That's true. I didn't. There are a few members of this crew I don't particularly care to remember, and no one else has ever mentioned that they want me to include them, either. If you compare the list of Fair Haven 'residents' against the list of crew members who aren't with us anymore, you can look up the ones missing from Fair Haven and check the official logs to discover what they were like and how they met their...demises. In most cases, I think you'll be able to figure out pretty quickly why I didn't include them."
"Daddy, you'd let me go into the logs? By myself?"
"Don't you already sneak in to read them? There's a time and an identity stamp whenever any of the logs is accessed. I keep my eye on whatever you look into, you know. Captain's prerogative. And a father's, too."
Since her Daddy was chuckling, Miral relaxed and laughed with him. Of course he would check up on her. That's what fathers did if they loved their daughters. And her Daddy did love her, she knew that well enough.
"Well, Miral, I think I'm going to go to the replicator and conjure up some dinner for your mother and me. Do you want me to make anything for you after your day of partying on the holodeck?"
"No, Daddy. I ate so much today I don't know if I'll need to eat tomorrow, either-even though I know I will."
"Okay. If you change your mind, just let me know," Captain Paris-her Daddy-said as he got up from the edge of her bed and walked out to the living area of the Paris-Torres quarters. Miral turned back to her terminal screen, tempted to take her father up on his permission to look into the logs and research exactly why a Bajoran woman named Seska hadn't been given a restful "retirement" in Fair Haven. But Miral had already been away from her parents for most of the day, and even if she only snacked a little, it would be nice to share a meal with them. She'd had to eat meals with only one parent or on her own often enough before, and she knew she would again, many times, before they reached her parents' home in the Alpha Quadrant.
That wasn't really home to her, at least not yet. Someday it might be, but to Miral Torres Paris, Voyager was her only home-even if it sometimes was a little like Joe Carey's ship in a bottle on her family's upper shelf-with the walls pressing in on her when what she really wanted was a nice shore leave, or even a foraging party that would take her out into the open on the surface of a natural world.
Shutting off her terminal, she followed her father into the living area and stared up at the bottle on the shelf while she listened to him as he punched in the order for their evening meal. "I asked Mommy about Lieutenant Carey's Voyager in the bottle once," Miral remarked softly. "She told me the story so you wouldn't have to."
"I know, Sweetie. She mentioned it to me that night."
"I understand now why you didn't want to finish it. The missing nacelle makes sense to me, too. It's sort of a reminder of Mr. Carey's unfinished journey. I don't think his sons will want to finish it, either. It will be enough if you bring it to them, to remind them their father was thinking about them and missing them while he couldn't be there to watch them grow up."
"I think so, too, Miral."
Tom Paris, the once-reluctant captain of the good ship Voyager, put his arms around his daughter and gave her a prolonged hug, broken only by the sound of the replicator dinging to let them know the meal was ready. That was only moments before the portal swished open to allow Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres to enter as she called out, "I'm home. What's for dinner? I'm starved."
"I was going to make grilled cheese sandwiches and plain hot tomato soup," Tom began, but as his wife groaned he added, "but I decided a nice meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy and green beans almondine would be more to your taste after a long shift in Engineering. Oh, and Miral, I also decided to order a plate of Icheb's favorite nachos, in case you have room in your stomachs after all the goodies you ate at the party."
"Oh, yes! I can always find room for Icheb's nachos!"
As Miral sat down with her parents and enjoyed a family meal, she had a lot to think about. Since the entire crew missed their lost friends, her father had set up Fair Haven as a way to remember them. Mr. Carey's ship in a bottle was not just something her parents had promised to deliver to Joe's family, either. For as long as the journey through the Delta Quadrant lasted, that model of Voyager would be a memento of the good friend her parents had lost so senselessly, right around the time Miral was born. They never wanted to forget him. And someday she would travel in space because she wanted to, not just because she'd been born on a starship. She knew she would enter the Starfleet Academy program, like Icheb and Naomi and Brax, and become a Starfleet officer like her parents. Before she did that, however, she had a lot to learn.
Miral swallowed her last nacho and announced, "Daddy, Katie O'Clare mentioned some books to me when I was talking with her and Michael in Fair Haven today. One of them was called 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.' And the other was about a fairy queen. I think I'd like to read them and 'expand my horizons' the way Katie said she was doing."
"I'd go with Mark Twain and the Connecticut Yankee first, if I were you," her Daddy said with a laugh. "The Faerie Queene is a bit much to handle at your age. Maybe for anyone of any age to handle these days! It was written eight hundred or so years ago, and the language is pretty dense. I'd wait a few years before tackling that one. Now, another book you might want to try is 'Treasure Island.' That one's about Long John Silver, pirate treasure, and…"
And as she talked books with her parents at the dinner table, something clicked within Miral's mind. Cultivating her imagination could take her places outside the ship during those times she felt its walls closing in on her.
And if that wasn't quite enough, she thought, 'There's always Captain Proton.'
Note: This AU story is one which didn't fit into the "Facets" storyline, since a few of the characters in this one survived who were killed off in our group project as published on AO3. That feeling of being "closed in" during the Pandemic also helped prompt me to write this story, but I'd always wanted to explore the timeline we saw briefly with Icheb and Naomi, 17 years after "Shattered" took place, in a little more detail-especially what it would be like for Miral growing up on a ship that anticipated traveling for three more decades before arriving at its journey's end.
How did the ship survive and, apparently, thrive after losing all three members of their command team in the Disaster? What would Miral know about those who had died before she was born? And if the crew had to spend weeks or months repairing the ship before being able to proceed again on the journey to the Alpha Quadrant, how would that change the order of what happened in the episodes we saw in the restored timeline? Would Neelix be willing to leave Voyager and remain with the Talaxians after such devastating losses, especially if the remaining colonists were few in number and by joining the Starfleet crew, would bolster its badly depleted roster. Might not some find that a better prospect than going to yet another alien system which would probably want to expel them when they grew tired of the Talaxian presence? The Federation would be much more likely to help them settle somewhere as a group on a colony world. Thanks to Pathfinder and Project Watson, the Talaxians could already have requested and received asylum in the Alpha Quadrant before Voyager resumed its path to the Alpha Quadrant.
Hence this exploration of another "what if?"
Thanks to my co-writers of "Facets," Seema, zakhad, Penny, jemima, and Rocky, who provided a framework for the development of this story-especially Rocky, who allowed me to use the name Jad for Tabor and Jor's son, which she'd used in her own post-"Shattered" story. It's the first name of the actor who portrayed Tabor on the show. And of course, I must acknowledge and thank Paramount/CBS/whatever, the entity which owns Star Trek lock, stock and torpedo barrel. Thanks all!