CHAPTER ONEWHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND—2375
JAKE. SON.
I was on Bajor, in the fire caves, with Dukat.
Falling.
But now I’m here, in the wormhole, with the Prophets. They saved me. It’s only been a few minutes, but the spaces between seconds feel like decades. It’s not easy to explain, son. Time. The future, present and past are all unraveling and coalescing around me, through me.
I need to talk to you. I need to do this now before I talk to Kasidy, and while it’s all still… linear for me.
The Prophets saved me, and they have work for me to do, things they want to teach me. But before I’ll allow any of that to happen, I wanted, needed to talk to you. To send this transmission to you.
A few years ago, when you came with me to watch the wormhole inversion, there was an accident I never told you about. I was trapped in subspace, and while I was there, I experienced a different timeline. What was minutes for me there was years, even decades, on the outside, in normal space-time.
I wasn’t dead or even lost. I was stuck somewhere outside of time. In that timeline, son, knowing I was out there somewhere, you lived a life of mourning and obsession, with only fleeting moments of happiness. You were so preoccupied with trying to find me, save me, that you let your life and loves slip away.
I know I’ve only been in here for a few minutes, but I’m thinking now about how me being here, in the wormhole with the Prophets, could feel like that to you. Jake, I think of you in that timeline and how your sadness twisted into obsession, how in the end you had nothing and no one. I don’t want to see you go through that now, son. I won’t lie to you, I don’t know when I’ll be back, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be in your life.
When I was around your age, my father started talking to me differently. We’d have conversations, it was always father and son, but it also became man to man. Honestly, a lot of it was me just listening to your grandfather as he told me about his life and what he learned along the way. At the time, I often didn’t see the point he was trying to make to whatever story he was telling me, but as I got older and I began to live my own life, I found myself thinking about the things he told me about his more and more.
There’s so much I never talked about with you, about me, about our family. I just thought I would when the time came; that we’d be having these conversations in person. But life isn’t always what we expect or what we plan. When I get back, we’ll do this the right way, but for now, right now, let your old man tell you about his life and some of the things he’s learned along the way.
CHAPTER TWOFAMILY—2332–2338
MY FIRST MEMORY IS OF HOLDING MY MOTHER’S HAND.
I was a baby, no more than a year old. My small fingers reached out, exploring the boundaries of my new world, and I found her. Those little hands held onto the enormity of her fingers, and even though I couldn’t remember her face, or really anything about how she looked. But I could feel her, feel her love for me, feel the safety and comfort she gave me. My whole life, that feeling has never really left me. I always wondered how I could remember something from such a young age. I understand now that I could hold onto that memory because part of my lineage isn’t linear.
Now, I realize that memory isn’t of Mama, the woman that raised me, the woman I thought was my mother, Elizabeth Sisko. That memory is of my birthmother, my father’s first wife, the woman that a wormhole alien inhabited to orchestrate my birth.
Sarah.
Now that I’m here in the wormhole, it’s easier to understand that the love I felt, and thought was from one woman, was actually from two—one human, and one that existed outside of time. When I made first contact with the entities that live here, in the wormhole, we didn’t just communicate—we helped each other. I gave them an understanding beyond themselves, and they helped me to look within myself.
Jake, this may be hard for you to understand, but Sarah, or rather the entity that inhabited her, knew me, saw me save her people time and again, and cared about my well-being long before she went back in time to conceive me.
Because it had happened, she ensured it would happen.
I know Sarah, in her own way, loves me, but she didn’t raise me. The truth is Elizabeth Cohen Sisko is the only mother I’ve ever known.
Thinking about her now, Jake, I realize we never really talked a lot about your grandmother. I know you’ve seen pictures and even a few holographic recordings of her, but that was well after she was a mom with four kids. I want to talk to you about what she was like before that, back when I was still an only child, like you are now. In those early days, before my brothers and sister showed up, and with my father working, it felt like it was just Mama and me.
She was my first best friend.
Back then, Mama had long, thick, black and brown dreadlocks that framed her round face perfectly. Her small button nose and high cheekbones would lighten up every smile. Every night she’d read to me, her voice soft and gentle, like a melody that soothed you whenever you heard it. Some nights she would read Aesop’s fables. On others, it would be African folktales, or mythology from different cultures. Her brown eyes would light up with excitement as she took on the personalities and voices of the characters. I was always so enthralled that I fought to stay awake, but I’d always lose that battle only to dream of faraway lands and mysterious creatures. Mama would leave a nightlight on, and usually that was enough. But sometimes, I’d look at the shadows on my wall and imagine the monster from the story we’d just read together. On really bad nights, I’d wake up screaming, and Mama would come into my room and stay or let me sleep with her and Dad.
After this had been happening off and on for about a week, Mama told me she had found a new book for me. It was a small, thin book titled: Life Doesn’t Frighten Me And Other Poems by Maya Angelou. I remember that before I knew anything about Maya Angelou, I immediately liked her name because it said she was an angel, and Mama
told me angels protected people. The book wasn’t much bigger than my hand. We opened it together, and almost immediately, as Mama read and acted out the poem, it put me at ease. The words of this woman—this angel—told me that even though things might look and feel scary sometimes, in the end, there is nothing to be afraid of.
The book quickly became my favorite, and even though I never told Mama, I would often pull it out at night, feeling their power emanating off the page as I read the words aloud in the quiet of my room.
Our days were just as much fun as our nights. Every morning, class would begin. Even before I realized Mama was a teacher, she was homeschooling me. Over breakfast every day, she would ask me about the story she had read to me the night before. She’d want to know what I thought about the monster, or the characters. Sometimes she would ask me what I would’ve done differently if I were in the story, or if I were telling it. One-word answers were never allowed in our house. “Sentences or not at all,” Mama would say.
Whenever I didn’t know a word, she wouldn’t just teach it to me, she’d explain the etymology in a way that I promise you was fascinating to me at four years old. And whenever I didn’t understand something, whether it was a word, something in a story, a math problem, or just why the sky was blue, she never lost her patience, and she explained it to me (sometimes in a hundred different ways) until I got it and could describe back to her what I understood.
That was Mama.
Before Elizabeth Cohen was my mother, she was an orphan, a second-grade teacher, and a photographer. Her parents Sonya and Alonzo were Starfleet officers aboard the U.S.S. Leondegrance. They were killed during a First Contact mission gone wrong. Captain Nyota Uhura brought the Leondegrance back to Earth, to take “Tin Lizzy” to her godparents in New Orleans. The story goes that Captain Uhura brought little Elizabeth to her godparents in an antigrav stroller that looked like the tins that mints were kept in centuries ago. And the name Tin Lizzy was born.
As a kid, Mama grew up not wanting anything to do with Starfleet, but she was fascinated with people. When Elizabeth was five, she’d beg to go to the park—not to play with other kids, but to people-watch. She was mesmerized by all the different species but didn’t really understand that they came from different worlds. Since they were on Earth, they were human. For hours after a visit to the park, Elizabeth would talk about the human with the pointy ears, or the human with the blue skin, or the
human that looked like a cat. This would often go on throughout dinner and well into her bedtime. After several of these conversations, her godparents got her a holo-camera, probably more for them than it was for her. She’d capture images from the day’s park adventure and then project them into the living room or fall asleep to them in bed nearly every night.
By the time she was a teen, she’d gone retro and turned in her holo-camera for an old-style camera that used film. As a kid, I’d spend hours with Mama in her studio, watching her develop pictures she’d taken. We’d be standing together in the near darkness of the small developing room, and magic would happen right in front of me. I’d hold her hand in the fading sunset emanating from the light panel above us. She’d slip a sheet of paper into a tray filled with liquid, and an image would slowly, patiently appear. It was as if she had the ability to breathe life into those sheets of paper.
Mama was a talented, even gifted photographer. So much so that some of her pictures still hang in the New Orleans Museum of Art. But as gifted as she was, she would be the first to say teaching was her true calling.
I’ve been in Starfleet for over twenty years. I’ve seen some very impressive technology and breakthroughs, but the truth is that the future isn’t built with technology or even by engineers. The future is built by teachers. Every mind that is educated, every consciousness that is opened to new ideas and different ways of thinking, is a brick paving the way toward tomorrow.
Mama was in her fifth year of teaching at Dorothy Mae Taylor Elementary when she learned of a new weekly cultural program being instituted at the school. Once a week, a local chef would cook non-replicated meals for the student body with pots, pans, and real ingredients. The idea being to give the student body a completely authentic taste of New Orleans cuisine and Cajun cooking.
As the story goes, after about a month of different dishes like red beans and rice, po’ boys, jambalaya, and even Hubig’s pies, she went to meet the talented but impractical chef that had devoted his life to an extinct, archaic, and unnecessary career.
They were married three months later.
In my life, I’ve met and been friends with a lot of people that are married. Honestly, son, a lot of the time, people are married for more than
what’s apparent and less than what everyone else thinks. For some, it’s just because the two work well together—convenience. For others, it’s out of a physical attraction, and for the select few, it really is because of that thing everyone wants when they wed.
Love.
Even as a kid, I could see that what Mama and Dad had was special. Your grandfather always told me he didn’t know what he did that made Elizabeth fall in love with him and want to spend the rest of her life with him, ...
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