There will be no songs of love
There will be no sweet refrain
There will be no soft goodbye
Or slow walk in the rain
There will be no whispered words
No vows that can't come true
There's only me
Waiting here for you . . .

from Chris Isaak's Wrong to Love You

I don't know why I loved her. Maybe I was imprinted on her, in the manner of little birds who have lost their mothers before they are hatched. Maybe she was the brightest, most beautiful, most courageous person I had met. And perhaps, for a while at least, she was the one person who loved me.

Didn't she know that I loved her? She knew that I would die for her. She knew that I had no one else. Didn't she care?

***

When did it begin? Perhaps in Voyager's brig, when I told her I would kill her and she didn't believe me. Perhaps when I did try to lash out, and she put her arms around me.

With the love came desire. It grew slowly, from something I couldn't identify, to a yearning which was a torment. I asked the Doctor to give me something for it, for this longing which wracked my body, interfered with regeneration.

He laughed. "Seven, it's normal. Your human body produces hormones which react with your brain . . ."

"I want a treatment, not a medical lecture," I interrupted.

"I'm not going to drug you into sexual catatonia," he answered. "It's not healthy. Seven, it's part of being human." He gave me several books of poetry instead.

". . .When I meet you suddenly, I cannot speak.
A thin flame runs under my skin.
Seeing nothing, hearing only my own ears drumming,
I drip with sweat. Trembling shakes my body,
and I turn paler than dry grass . . ."

And strangely it did help. Knowing that someone else had felt this way.

"I'm your captain," she said in the brig on the Dauntless. "I can't always be your friend. Do you understand?"

"No," I said, and I didn't. One of her hands rested on my shoulder, with the other she adjusted my implant. I joked about understanding if we were assimilated. She laughed then, and looked at me and my heart raced.

I thought then that I understood. I thought that if she were not my Captain, that she would laugh, and look at me with that look of delight, and touch me even when she didn't have to.

After I found the wormhole, I thought that she would say something, speak of the future, but she didn't. If anything, in those last few weeks on Voyager, she avoided me. Once, in a rare moment together in the mess hall she said "When we get home you'll be able to look up your family."

What was she talking about? She was my family. All I wanted to do was take her in my arms, touch her hair, taste her skin, hold her body against mine, talk so much I wouldn't need assimilation to know her every thought. What did I want with the distant relatives of relatives I could barely remember?

Even in those first few days after our arrival on Earth, I still hoped. I thought there was a moment she was waiting for, when she was no longer my Captain, or when Starfleet had finished with the medical tests. I hated it when anyone touched my implants-except her, that time on the Dauntless. I hated their tests and I wished she had been with me. I thought they would not let her come to me.

And then we were free, and I learned that Starfleet was giving her anything she asked for.

I was a celebrity of a kind. My picture was on all the newsfeeds. I didn't hear from her.

The last time I saw her was a reception for Voyager's crew. She was across the room but I saw her immediately. She was wearing a dress; red and soft, it showed the shape of her breasts. Her hair was pulled back, for it was getting long again.

I directed my hearing toward where she stood. I heard my name--it was someone I didn't know, asking her a question about having me on the ship. " . . .pleasant, but she's very tall and she has funny things on her face." They both laughed. She didn't see me.

I left the party. I left the next day on a commercial freighter. At the first spaceport I had the "funny things" removed. At the next I changed my name.

For a few moments I think I considered trying to find the Borg, be reassimilated. But the collective had no more of her than I did; what was the good of a thousand voices if none was hers?

So I became the second engineer of a freighter whose owners didn't ask too many questions. The work was easy. My shipmates left me alone, but that was nothing new. And there were the spaceport bars.

They say spaceports are designed for people with things to forget. There are recreational chemicals, other lonely people, professional companions, holoprograms of a variety unknown to Starfleet. I tried it all.

The women always looked too much like her, or not enough. The drugs had unexpected and unpleasant effects on me and usually made the memories more intense. Soon I gave up on both.

That left the holoprograms and they weren't much better. I would walk through some elaborate scene or other and I would think of DaVinci's studio. I remembered how the sun slanted through the windows.

I had imagined Earth sunny; everyone on Voyager had talked so much about the sun. But when I was there it was overcast the entire time.

One day the bar's holodeck menu included San Francisco. It was a simple program; I could see that from the size. Not the usual sort of thing. Perhaps the bar owner had received it from a customer with an unpaid bill.

I opened the description: a small number of locations in San Francisco. It is where she had lived; it is where I had imagined us . . .

I didn't know most of the places, but I remembered the pier. Remembered her talking about it, saying how, when she returned from a mission, she always wanted to go there. I thought she would show it to me, but of course she didn't.

I ran the program. There were no people, just the pier, and the ocean and the sky.

Trying to forget wasn't working. I bought a copy of the scene, paying too much because the owner could see how anxious I was. The freighter holodecks are primitive: not much computer space, and they don't give the illusion of physical substance. But the pier was small enough to run on the one on the ship I worked.

I know little of holoprogramming, but I added her to the scene. It took a while, but my eidetic memory made it possible to create her, just the way she looked the last time I saw her. I then had the program make her six months older.

And now, when I can't sleep, which is often, I go to the holodeck to watch her. She walks on the pier, alone. I have made it bright; sun glints on the water. She nears. My breath catches: remembering her beauty and seeing it are different things. A breeze blows her hair, which is six months longer, and loose. And then she walks past me. If I am not careful, she walks through me. The ship's holodeck is so limited. And even if it weren't, I wouldn't know how to make her see me.