Watching


I was caught studying sexual behavior, and I had to make a joke of it. I did not learn anything from following B'Elanna and Tom around, except how easy she is to provoke, which I already knew. And how readily they believe me to be a fool. But I knew that too.

I was studying the ship's databases, studying the crew. There are moments when I am naive, when I wonder if I love her. When I think perhaps it's admiration, or loneliness, or wanting to be like her. It is all those things, but I know, from my research, that it is more. I know that this is love, that women do fall in love with other women. And that the desire is real, that that happens too.

It is Tuvok who caught me, who discovered that I had been accessing private as well as public databases. I was not recording whose personal files I was looking at, so it did not seem a violation of privacy to me, but of course, it was.

I think he knows. Once he said to me "Is the Captain's opinion important to you?"

"The Captain's opinion is important to everyone on the ship," I said, but that was not an answer to the question he was asking. I could not answer that question.

When he called me into his office to discuss my unauthorized access of personal holovids, I thought I could detect something. Not pity exactly. Not pity for the child/woman caught with someone else's sexvid. Sympathy perhaps.

Nevertheless, I believed he would tell the Captain. So I embarked on my study of Tom and B'Elanna.

I pretend to be a fool. It is a role I slipped into. It kept people from being too wary, kept the men away. Poor Harry, when I asked him to take his clothes off.

But I have started to play the fool for her. Because I am afraid. Afraid that she will see how I feel, that she will realize that I love her. That she will be disgusted or saddened. She is not a stupid woman. So I pretend to be one.

Still, some of the sexvids surprise me. There were a number in which women have sex together. I found most of them boring, though sometimes if I only listened, if I imagined the woman crying out to be her, I felt a warmth, a tingling.

The Doctor wanted me to date, suggesting I find a man to ask out. Perhaps he's missing a few subroutines, but even so, he could have discovered homoeroticism for himself. I wonder if he's censored, and if so, if it was his creator or Starfleet.

Judging from their pornography, I determined that the crew of Voyager is not completely heterosexual. But no one ever says anything. Sometimes I tease them. I tell Harry my criteria for a date: job performance, interest in astronomy, quantum mechanics, music. There is only one person on this ship with a stated interest in all these things. I wonder if he will even joke "Perhaps you should date the Captain," but of course he doesn't.

I did not mean to injure Lieutenant Chapman, only to be clumsy. I wonder if he is the one who had the holoprogram set in ancient Greece.

I told the Doctor I was interested in perfection. She seems to me perfect when objectively I know she is not. Her hands, thin and elegant. The unevenness of the skin just to the left of her mouth. The asymmetry of her smile.

The Doctor began to fall in love with me. I did not realize as quickly as I should have. When I did, I was not sure what to do. So I pretended not to understand. It is my answer to almost everything.

There is a story I read, in my survey of the literature of love and courtship. It was called the Happy Hypocrite, and was about an evil man who fell in love with a good woman. He wore a mask of goodness to court her, and when, eventually, the mask is removed, rather than being exposed, his face had come to match the mask.

I hope that there will come a time when I can remove my mask. Perhaps if she is no longer my Captain, perhaps when we are in the Alpha Quadrant. Perhaps then she could love me. If she couldn't, at least I wouldn't have to live in close quarters to her rejection.

But after I read the story, I began to wonder. I fear that there will come a day when I can reveal myself, stop talking about "copulation" and "procreation," and tell her that I love her. But I fear that, even after I have removed my mask, she will see only the fool.

***
I suggested that she try romance, and I came back to hear a tale of dating hell. God, what was I thinking? She's a child. Or maybe a pubescent.

I laughed when I heard what she said to B'Elanna, about everyone on deck 12 section 9 knowing when she and Tom are having intimate relations. I thought for a minute that she was conducting her study solely in order to annoy B'Elanna, but then Tuvok said she had been doing computer research also, though he did not say exactly what files she was accessing.

Occasionally I catch her watching me. I look up and find her gaze on my hands, or the left side of my face. And I think I see a moment of something real. I think she is looking at me with--hell--desire. How can I think that? It's like those child molesters who believe the child wants it.

Except, of course, I do nothing. Don't want to do anything.

I had a dream. Seven was cooking dinner. I was explaining sex to her. She did not seem to understand what I was saying. It is not an erotic dream. Disquieting rather. I wonder why I have her cooking dinner. The idea of domesticating her, taming her? I don't think she'd cook well; it is an occupation better suited to artists than scientists.

Sometimes I overhear things. More often Tuvok overhears them and tells me, calmly and without emotion. I hope he hears them in public places. Anyway, he almost never tells me who he overhears, just the general gist of rumors.

They complain about Seven, of course. And my behavior with her. That I spend too much time with her, playing Velocity and such like. That I ignore Chakotay. (I started the working dinners in my quarters after I heard this.) Most disturbing is the complaint that I am trying to mold her, that I want to remake her, shape her in my image, break her. I don't understand this. She is not the person I hoped she'd be, no, but it is not because I wanted her as a replica of myself. I wanted a friend. Not a child.

She declared that she was not interested in dating, that there was no one for her on this ship. The Doctor recounted this, verbatim I assume, since his memory is perfect. It made me cringe, the whole recitation. He's even more in love with her than he was before. And why not?--she's his creation. Her hair, her clothes, her reconstructive surgery. The voluptuous body containing the child's mind. I'd like to erase the subroutines that make this so exciting for him, the comics and pornvids his creator somehow merged into his program. And he'd be happier, not failing to be Humbert to her peculiar Lolita. But as Seven herself would say, I have no right to alter his personality.

Oh, but if I rewrote his taste in women's fashion, would anyone have to know? Couldn't she wear some clothes? I'd say something myself, but I've left it so long, I dare not. It would be interpreted as possessiveness or puritanism or something. And perhaps it's better she parade around in those silly outfits, that appear to reveal everything, but reveal nothing.

I received Tuvok's report about Seven's "field research." I suggested that she might want to try romance herself. Perhaps I wanted her to date, perhaps I wanted her safely off in the arms of some dim ensign. And perhaps, for just a moment, I imagined something else.