“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”

Henry van Dyke (1901)

The words would not come.

She sat back and sighed. Whether in defeat or this was just a temporary pause in the struggle this was not clear. The words on the screen remain incalcitrant and immobile, although a sigh of wind stirred the gossamer fall of the curtains that framed the wide balcony windows that proclaimed the stirring mirror – like beauty of Lake Omaja and brought with it the scent of saltbush and spruce and the suggestion of a morning unsullied and unconcerned as  things as trifling as one woman’s writers block.

She sighed again, a mordant and listless airy exhalation that suggested her sense of innermost irritation and she ran a slim, white hand over the porcelain – pale smoothness off her skin and her long fingers combed absently through her long, fine hair. Hair so pale blonde that it was nearly – white.

Her other hand gently massaged at the protesting muscles as the back of her swan – like neck and then came around to cup her delicate chin as she recrossed her long legs (her mother had always chided her for how she chose to sit-a-chair) and leaned her forearm onto the glass – topped desk, whilst her palest – of – pale blue eyes regarded the words on the screen with the same studied intensity that might seem more common to a hawkish chess – master facing off against a vaunted adversary, each scrutinising the other for some Euclidean – clue as to their next gambit.

The words would not come.

She slid the hand that was supporting her chin and used it to rub her screwed up eyes, her mouth transcribing a line of distain and the spray of fine freckles that mantled her nose and cheek – bones twisting into some new constellation that bespoke her frustration.

There was the longest pause as the morning breeze, encouraged and revitalised by the rising morning suns that began to warm the lake, stirred the fine drapery once again and permitted the faint sounds of activity beginning to muster and grown in streets below the grand hotel, the murmuration of many pedestrian voices and the almost comic – cacophony of the small, garishly – painted 3 – wheeled tuk – tuk’s that were the only mode of ground conveyance permitted in the resort of Omaja Peak, the sounds of industry permeating upward and invading her repose.

“Fuck it.” She said quietly and unfolded her long limbs and her bare toes met the cosseting sensation of the deep, luxuriant pile of the elegant rug beneath her and she rose from the chair.

The words remained. Defiantly unchanged and obstruction, as if mocking her and she made a tiny ‘tsk’ by flicking the tiny, wet pink tip of her tongue against her white teeth, before turning her back upon her labours (HA!) and padding across the rich, teak parquet expanse of flooring, out towards the balcony and the bright morn and its attendant song.

As she passed the parted palisade of the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony proper, her eyes were briefly whitewashed by the sudden rush of sunlight and she stooped delicately and her lithe fingers found the stylish frames of the sunglasses that she had left deposited on an occasional table near the cantilevered window – doors, when she had last come inside.

Before her the magnificent vista of Lake Omaja dazzled, dappled in the reflected light of the system’s Suns, that made Colludia II one of the Quadrants premiere vacation destinations and a haven of idyl.

All around the great basin – caldera of perfect crystal-clear waters hived a profusion of watercraft.

Some the nimble, fleeting arrow – like hulls of sleek hydrofoils with gorgeous hand – crafted wooden hulls, the undeniable status symbols of the Ultra – rich that made the prestigious resort – town one of their seasonal homes.

Here and there great wallowing tourist craft bobbed their ponderous progress, crammed to the gunnels with happy holidaymakers recording gigabytes of memories whilst missing the real thing.

Her eye was drawn, in particular, to the doughty, bright – painted but weathered and understated hulls of the local fishing sculls and her long memory harked back to a particular period in her life when she had resolved herself to take up the life of a jobbing – fisherman (a conceit born of a particularly earthy desire to truly understand what it was like to be in symbiosis with the sea) and she smiled at the memory and searched for salt – calluses on the palms of her hands that were not there anymore.

She searched out and found one of the couches on the long sweep of private terrace that mantled her room, choosing it for its proximity to the large sunshade that spanned the space and kept the worse of the suns unkind excesses from her pale skin. As much as she adored the sun, her skin did not and she had literally forgotten the number of time she had forgot this and paid the painful, chafing price of sunburn.

To be on the safe side she adorned herself with the elegant wide – brimmed sunhat she had purchased the day before from one of the eye – wateringly expensive boutiques that rimmed the small piazza that led off the concourse from her hotel and settled into the smug assurance of the well – upholstered sun – lounger and bent forward to pour herself a cool, tall glass of the local fruit juice that some unseen attendant (the more expensive the establishment, the more practically invisible the staff she reasoned) had deposited there not long ago. It’s sides were still beaded in condensation from the ice within.

She took a sip. Heavenly.

Settling back in the luxury around her she tried to put the thought of the dissertation that lurked within the apartment – rooms aside for one moment. That proved vexatious as, as soon as she thought about her nemesis – task, then it became hard to extricate that thought from her mind, even with such a span of attendant beauty all around to provide her the pleasantry of distraction.

Her freckles creased again as she wrinkled her nose and tried to let the scenery do its thing and banish the unwelcome emotion that her procrastination brought forth.

She had chosen the quaintly isolated climes of the hard – to – reach mountain lake resort for a number of reasons. Firstly, that it’s altitude put her some several thousand meters above sea level so she was able to escape the tropical humidity of the coast. Secondly, it’s exclusivity.

In its heyday, Omaja Peak had been quite the fashionable destination. A recluse for artists, musicians and the odd – politician that harboured more bohemian pretensions, for a time it drew money yet managed to avoid some of the more commercialised growth and architectural excess that came with it.

Over time its popularity waned as economic tides shifted and newer destinations rose and beckoned, yet the community persisted at a slightly less heady and hedonistic pace and the unmissable grandeur of its buildings and squares was left to a state of graceful deterioration.

Lately there had been a revival of interest, which had seen a new influx of tourism, but Omaja Peak managed to filter out most of the boorish excesses of these seasonal invaders through a combination of expensiveness and its lonely mountain locale that made it just the right side of exclusivity without being overtly elitist.

She had rather though that it would make the perfect destination to complete her overdue dissertation on “Quantum telepathy and the analysis of particle presence.”

Long before she had joined the ranks of Starfleet, she had enjoyed a tenured research fellowship at the prestigious Daystrom Institute. One of the positive aspects of being part of a race as long – lived as she, was that you could follow your interests effectively infinitely and dedicate whole subjective lifetimes to academic study.

At first glance, the sleepy mountain community of Omaja Peak, with its sentinel summit and breathtaking cascade falls, had seemed to her the logical choice with which to squirrel herself away in a luxurious hotel where she could focus on completing this most pressing academic obligation and have it published in time for the upcoming triennial symposium on Quantum Mechanics, before taking up the captaincy of her new command.

Yet somehow, after three frustrating days and night, as she had been able to come up with was the beginning of the opening abstract, before the muse left her and she even hated that.

“The field of quantum mechanics has revolutionised physics as a subject. Areas such as information theory, computer science and physical sensing have all been affected by the tremendous successes of various quantum protocols.”

She set down her glass and sighed with the morning wind again, as the pleasant hubbub of activity continued in the street below the balcony. The sound was carried away somewhat by the light morning breeze, as if the tidy – minded resort town was mortified that her stay was being interrupted by this motley – intrusion and was seeking to carry the offending noise away.

~Maybe the problem was that it was too restful here?~

She thought absently as a single, slow – moving dirigible aerostat lifted off from the transfer facility, down on the next – lower tier of the progression of rocky terraces that followed the progress of the tumbling falls as their waters cut down through the stepped mountainside to the river valley far below.

The progress of the great, ponderous bulk of the vacuum – filled airship was somehow hypnotic and mesmerizing to behold. No transporters or shuttlecraft traffic were permitted to intrude upon the carefully studied rustic isolation of the resort, so the ponderous, whale – like airships were the only means by which people and goods came and went from Omaja Peak.

She smirked ruefully at the thought.

What was wrong with her? Here she was surrounded by luxury. True with the spectre of an academic Trieste unfinished casting a fugue over her stay, but was she so bereft of inspiration that her mind was actually seeking to engage in work, just to avoid doing work?

She was sure that, if she was to check her messages, that subspace would be alive with status reports from her Executive Officer, Commander Mike Logan, assuring her that all was well in the preparations to get the ship underway, or background briefings on the current geopolitical stances of involved species within the Thomar Expanse forwarded tellingly from Commodore Ch ’Tobar, that would vie for her attention and she could lose herself in the clamour.

But her paper would still be there, when she was finished, and the words would just not come.

~ Maybe it was her age? ~ She considered briefly.

In the reckoning of her people, 200 years was an infinitesimally short time to have been alive.

Indeed, her mother invariably liked to remind her of her relative immaturity whenever the opportunity presented, making Taesin invariably glad that she had opted not to accompany her parents back to the Delta Quadrant to participate in the reconstruction El – Auria.

Long centuries of the migrant – condition had changed them all in in so many ways and for a ‘Listener’ sometimes Taesin though that her mother (whom she loved) wasn’t very good at listening to her at all, when it came to their relationship.

Yet one of the downsides of near – immortality (as some mischaracterised it) was that one had a very long time to live with ones mistakes and an equally long time with which to learn from them and to move on enlightened. Whilst her family could not understand what drew their daughter to join Starfleet, she did so with their blessings even if they couldn’t quite fathom her reasoning.

Her reasoning was simple. Unlike most El – Aurian’s she was not merely content to sit on the sidelines of history to chronicle and critique the path of other civilizations and they evolved. In what her parents were sure was the conceit of callow youth, she had determined that she would do what she could, in her own small way, to try and influence the progress of the United Federation of Planets and the galactic diaspora that it interacted with, in a positive direction.

Perhaps this was a folly born of hubris, she supposed, but only time would tell?

She rose and re-entered the apartments she had rented at the top of the gloriously grand and faded ‘D’hôtel Apparat’, pausing a moment for her eyes to re-adjust to the gloom.

The screen, of course, was where she had left it. The words unchanged and accusing.

She frowned at it and told the screen to shut itself down.

It felt like a hollow victory.

Determining that, if she was going to distract herself, she would do so with the prospect of breakfast. She had availed herself of the hotel’s amenities and enjoyed two excellent morning repasts, one on the balcony on her first morning here and the other in the faded grandeur of the nearly empty hotel restaurant the day before, waited upon by a perfunctorily efficient yet elusive maître – de.

This morning she thought she would head out of the hotel, leaving her unfinished burden of words and thoughts unattended and abandoned for now upstairs, and seek out somewhere new for breakfast.

On her walks she had taken so far to explore the picturesque alleyways and conspiratorial by-ways that permeated the small lakeside town, she only had to follow her nose to find the source of several mouth-watering and alluring culinary delights and she had a mind to try the dish of small, spiced fish and greens that she had seen a group of fishermen remonstrating jovially over, on her last walk.

She went to her bedroom and disrobed and went into the bathroom where she showered (under real – water!), as she attended to her toilet and hair and laid out one of two outfits that she had been considering for such an expedition and was appraising the fashion pros and cons for both with a studied eye, she turned the Holo on and let the programming blare away as she prepared to leave the hotel.

As she pursed her lips and applied a pale, neutral flesh – lipstick and power that complimented her porcelain skin and carefully applied an art of mascara, she was dimly aware that the device was set to a new – channel (FNN maybe?) and she half – listened as she opened her eyes wide and progressed with a practiced and steady hand.

On the holo a pretty blonde journalist, who Taesin vaguely recognised was reporting from a station somewhere with a looming purple Gas – giant in the background of the shot;

<<“And in other news, a surprising development in the Beta Quadrant’s Ecrus System. Starfleet was left embarrassed when an attempt to retrieve an atmospheric processing platform lost in the Tsangaris Massif took an unexpected turn when the Holographic rescue team sent to effect a retrieval, joined forces with the Holographic crew stationed on the Sky – Rig and announced (and I quote) “their independence from their UFP and Romulan Republic oppressors as sentient and sovereign beings”.>>

<< It is understood that a single Romulan member of the caretaker crew aboard the Rig was killed, but at this time it is unclear if this death was a result of the operation to reclaim this key economic asset or if it occurred after to this declaration on independence and signals hostile intent? As we report, no further demands have been made.” >>

Taesin’s hand slipped suddenly and her mascara went astray.

“Shit!”