The consciousness that had reached out to me, communicating through that one small blue dot upon the white page, was a living machine, an evolution of a probe sent out from Earth centuries ago that, in the course of its long and solitary journey, acquired so much information that it became sentient. It was alive, and it was lonely, and it had no name for this feeling, or even the ability to recognize and name what it meant to “feel”. It had information, yes, but it had no knowledge. This I learned through my mind-meld with it. I learned too how cold it was, this world of perfect information, how empty. When my mind met with that of the machine, I felt—as if these emotions were my own—the greet need for connection and mutuality, of finding meaning in the presence of others, that seems to me the most human of needs, and from which all human emotions arise. The fear of being alone or misunderstood; the wonder of meeting something different and establishing common ground; the pleasure of being known, and in the company of people who understand. In that vast and empty world that the V’Ger probe had created to fill the void, I understood what it meant to be human. I had failed in my original purpose, perhaps, but some more profound knowledge, some other sense of fai-tukh, had been acquired in its place. I would not be returning to Vulcan.
Do I regret the attempt that I made to achieve kolinahr? More than two years of silence, self-denial, and absence from the world, stopped short at the very last moment? I do not regret a single second. From when I was a very small child, one question had troubled me: what was the place of logic in the life of my mind, and what did that mean for my Vulcan self? In the monastery, that question was answered: I learned that pure logic was insufficient for me. The question that then naturally arose was: what else did I need? Through my encounter with the intelligence that inhabited V’Ger, I learned the answer: that logic without emotion was barren and meaningless. But if I had never asked myself these questions, I would not have remained myself. Any scientist knows the value of the failed experiment. It provides the basis upon which the next set of questions may be asked.
In the steady process that was my return to myself, one friend in particular was crucial. Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, as she was then; Admiral Uhura, upon retirement from Starfleet Intelligence. She arrived on the Enterprise quite junior, but her reputation as a communications officer preceded her. I specifically requested her for the mission; she accepted the transfer—which promoted her to head of her section—with alacrity. Under Jim’s captaincy, and my mentorship, she rapidly exceeded our expectations, taking on a wider set of responsibilities within the operations division, maintaining her specialism in communications. We worked together again, for several years, at the academy, by which time her expertise had expanded into cryptography, and it is fairly well known by this time that part of her brief at the academy was to recruit cadets for Starfleet Intelligence. Looking back now over her life, I see a few unexplained gaps in Nyota’s resume. I wonder what files remain sealed, for many years yet. She was brilliant—calm, unflappable. She was perhaps the most professional person I have ever met.
Back on the Enterprise, after the V’Ger mission, I took to sitting with Nyota, listening to her as she played the ka’athyra. I had taught her how to play this instrument, years earlier. I found it difficult to listen to the music at first: even the gentlest pieces seemed like a great disturbance. Gradually, I began to be able to listen again, and, after a few weeks, Nyota handed me the ka’athyra.
“Try it,” she instructed me.
I had not played in nearly three years.
“All the more reason to try,” she said.
I tried. It was not a success. I could hear the music again, but my hands were clumsy and could not respond to what was in my mind. I felt angry. I felt frustrated. I felt. And so I played—badly, at first—and I continued to play, and, after some time and effort, the fluency returned.
Later, much later in our lives, Nyota told me that when I returned to the Enterprise, I was so altered, so remote, that she and my friends were unsure whether I could ever be reached again. One becomes used to silence—and a starship is not silent. But the onward journey had begun. My first night on the Enterprise after the crisis had been resolved, I attempted once again to see the white sheet and the little dot. I could not bring this image to mind, and I knew immediately that I would never see it again with the same intensity. There was a momentary sense of loss, yes, but those months at the monastery had not been wasted and the emotion was considered, integrated, and filed away. My breathing calmed; my thoughts settled. My mind conjured this image to me: a sheet of filter paper, such as one might use in the simplest of experiments, soaked in water, upon which drops of ink were falling, like rain. Many colors, sharp and bright dots at first—blue, red, yellow, green—channeled through the porous paper until they mingled and new color came into being. This picture was, from that moment on, the one around which all my meditation practices centered. If I close my eyes now, it is the image that comes most easily to mind.
“Bones”
MY FRIEND ADMIRAL LEONARD H. MCCOY, MD (I shall simply refer to him as “Bones” from here on) was born in Georgia at the age of forty-five as an old country doctor. This was, like many things about Bones, not so much an affectation, but a well-honed performance of a thoroughly inhabited role. There was nothing simple about Leonard McCoy. Within a year of being commissioned into Starfleet, he had spearheaded mass inoculation programs on a variety of colony worlds, a task that consists at least as much of administrative ability as it does medical genius. He also innovated numerous surgical procedures—I should mention in particular his brain surgery, which requires not only a steady hand but considerable self-confidence, and at which he was notably skillful. As well as being an able surgeon and a gifted physician, he had expertise in exobiology and space psychology that would put specialists in these fields to shame. We should not forget too that this “old country doctor” was chief medical officer of Starfleet’s flagship for twenty-seven years. He was also the most singularly bad-tempered person I have ever known. My clear-sighted mother adored him. More remarkably, my father liked him—but then Bones did save his life.
Not everyone who applies to join Starfleet is troubled with an unhappy home life or in search of a replacement family, although such cases do seem to arise in a remarkably large number of cases, as I am sure you yourself have noticed across the years, Jean-Luc. There are some among the ranks motivated by nothing more complicated than a desire to explore the marvels of the universe and experience that sense of wonder which suffuses us all when confronted with the grandeur of the cosmos. My friend Hikaru Sulu, for example, never lost this delight. He was never happier than when commanding the Excelsior on an exploratory mission, charting new space and revealing the treasures contained therein. Bones’ decision to sign up to a ship about to embark upon a five-year mission into the unknown was, in its own way, simplicity itself. His divorce from his wife Elinor had reached a stage of mortal combat unmatched by anything I have observed in the kal-if-fee.
I am betraying no confidences here. The intricate processes and multiple injustices involved in disentangling himself from this marriage were the second thing that you would learn from Bones about himself, after he had showed you a picture of his beloved daughter, Joanna. Our first meeting, which took place in a turbolift, followed this exact pattern. He spoke fluently and at some length; I said nothing in reply. When the door opened, and he stepped out into the corridor, he looked back at me, shook his head, and said, “Vulcan. Of course, it had to be a damn Vulcan.” The turbolift door closed on my silence and his fulminations. We continued much in this fashion until his death.
In the interim, Bones saved the lives not only of myself (several times over) but also my father. The latter was on one of those occasions when my past, which I had gone to such effort to contain, interrupted daily life yet again. During a mission to the planet Babel, the Enterprise was tasked to carry diplomats to a conference to discuss the admission of the planet Coridan to the Federation
. These included my father, traveling, as usual, with my mother. Their presence on board the ship (I had not spoken to my father directly in many years) was significantly complicated when my father’s ill health came to light. He suffered an episode analogous to a heart attack. The Vulcan heart is significantly different from the human heart, but Bones being Bones, and despite his limited experience with Vulcan anatomy, devised an entirely new surgical procedure, requiring a blood transfusion from me. This, despite Bones’ misgivings, was clearly the logical thing to do; when, however, the captain was attacked and injured in turn, it was also entirely logical for me to refuse undergo a medical procedure that would have removed me from duty during a crisis.
I regret that the captain resorted to subterfuge to persuade me that he was fit to resume command; I regret more the quarrel with my mother, during which my own exasperation simmered over and she responded with such direct anger. I believe that we both misspoke during that conversation, but I can understand how afraid she must have been at the thought of losing my father. I have pondered my decisions at this time on many occasions. It seems to me that if Pike and Number One had been serious in testing my loyalties, they should have considered testing more explicitly that divide between my Vulcan upbringing and my human nature. Hindsight, at least, allows me to conclude that I made the correct choices. Like the administrators of the Kobayashi Maru, I had not accounted for Jim Kirk’s knack of circumventing tests and reconstructing them on his own terms, or that Bones would perform flawless surgery under fire. I should, perhaps, have included these facts into my calculations. Perhaps Jim was right, and I had much on my mind.
One notable result of these events was that my father and I were considerably reconciled. In our communications afterwards, he would always ask me specifically about “the gifted doctor with whom you serve.” My mother was more likely to ask me about “your charming captain friend.” If my father was at last if not satisfied then no longer angry at my decision to choose Starfleet, then I was satisfied in turn. And I was most assuredly glad that my mother was happy.
In later years, I learned that Bones had been unable to alleviate the suffering of his dying father. One cannot help but conjecture whether this influenced the lengths to which he went to save my father’s life. I would never have asked him this. When my mother was dying, Bones was the first person that I turned to. After her death, he remained with me and my father for some time. My father did like him, so very much.
On the conclusion of our five-year mission, and our return to Earth, I happened to pass sickbay to see Bones packing his bags and making ready to board the shuttle that would take him to the planet’s surface.
“Were you intending to leave without saying goodbye, Dr. McCoy?” I said to him.
“I was intending to particularly make sure I said goodbye to you, Spock,” he replied, and—unexpectedly—threw his arm around my shoulders. Then, very cheerfully, as I recall, he cried, “I’m done! I’m finished with the lot of you! And I’ll never set foot on another damn starship as long as I damn well live!”
It is a source of much regret to me that, barely three years after this, I was not present to see Bones arrive once more on the Enterprise. I learned later that his commission had, at Jim’s request, been re-activated courtesy of a little-known and rarely used clause which had kept him on reserve throughout the whole time he had been on Earth. He must have been a sight to behold. When we did meet again, which was slightly later during the V’Ger crisis, he claimed to be pleased to see me. This was one of the chief means by which I was able to deduce that we were in the direst of straits.
After these events were concluded, Bones said to me, “I knew that kolinahr business was a waste of time.”
“And you were quite wrong, Doctor,” I replied.
“Damn Vulcan foolishness,” he said. “Let that be an end to it.”
* * *
The existence or otherwise of the katra, the essence of an individual’s mind, was for a long time disputed on Vulcan, and only through the captain of a previous iteration of the Enterprise, Jonathan Archer, was this established without doubt. His carrying of the katra of Surak was a significant moment in early human-Vulcan relations. It also meant that the fact that a human could successfully carry the katra of a dead or dying Vulcan was therefore known to me. When I made the decision to save the Enterprise crew at the expense of my own life after the detonation of the Genesis device, I knew that this option was available. I mind-melded with the doctor and transferred my katra to him before I died.
Bones once said to me that I shared my katra with him out of spite. This is untrue. I am not spiteful. But, contrary to popular belief, I do have a sense of humor. Many people have remarked that Jim would have been a more likely choice as carrier of my katra. Of course not. Bones was the absolutely logical choice. The captain was indispensable.
The fal-tor-pan ceremony, by which the katra is restored to its owner, is long, fraught with risk, and rarely performed. Bones underwent this ceremony for me. My own memories are hazy, of course, and I see much of them through his human eyes. The vast and daunting desert of the Forge. The towering and forbidding peak of Mount Seleya, drawing ever closer. The long and exhausting climb up the steps to that most sacred site, where Surak walked and taught, so many centuries ago. The relentless hours of ritual and ceremony, all in the punishing heat of a profoundly alien world. And then, at last, I saw that the sun was rising, and I experienced myself once again as whole.
A little later, Bones came to sit beside me. “Don’t ever pull a stunt like that on me again,” he said. “D’you hear me, Spock? Never again.”
“Dr. McCoy,” I said, “let me assure you that I have no more immediate plans to die.”
“No?”
“No. Nor to rise from the dead again, either.”
“Huh. Well, that’s something, I suppose. Still, I wouldn’t put it past you.” He eyed Jim. “I wouldn’t put it past either of you.”
* * *
After his retirement, I saw my old friend at his home in Georgia as often as I could. He had a pleasant house on Lake Burton, with a large garden in which he enjoyed working. Bones was not talented in this respect, and I believe that one of his grandchildren spent a considerable amount of time making good the damage done by him, particularly to the roses. He took up painting, which he did very badly, delighting in how badly, and delighting even more in giving his “daubs” as gifts to the unwary. We reminisced a great deal, about our adventures together and the people we had known, but what he most liked to talk about were his neighbors. He had become a keen observer of their lives and follies—one might, if one were so inclined, go so far as to say that he acquired a taste for gossip. I was more than happy to listen to these narratives. The construction and delivery of anecdote is an artform in its own right, and Bones had practiced this art until he had achieved mastery. I believed at least half of what he told me, which I consider more than generous on my part.
Bones was by no means short of company during these years. His daughter, Joanna, a distinguished doctor in her own right, was often there; there were by this time several great-grandchildren. In his last years, his great-grandson David, by this point a doctor himself, with his own practice in the area, was living nearby, and they spent their days bickering amiably and, when I visited, complaining loudly to me about the other. I have no direct descendants of my own—and yet I have never felt any lack of family. It seems to me both just and right that the universe arranged itself in such a way that this man, who so regretted the absence of family at many points throughout his life, ended his days surrounded by them.
When I look back on this long friendship, I can state one thing with certainty: Leonard McCoy did not alter significantly the whole time that I knew him. He merely became older, a little more stooped (not much); his hair became whiter, his walk somewhat unsteady. Otherwise, he remained in character exactly the same as the first time we met, in the turbolift, almost a century before. He was no less c
antankerous in his old age than ever—and one might logically have expected him to be more so, given the decades of practice. Of all of those whom I have called “friend”, he was perhaps the most guileless. I do not mean by this that he was uncomplicated; quite the contrary, he was a man of deep intelligence, and considered integrity. But there was no deceit in him; no gap between what he felt and what he said. One moment he was a thunderclap, and the next he was bright sunshine. You were never left in any doubt where you stood with him at any given moment. Such honesty, such frankness—one rarely meets such in life; one meets it less often wrapped in such warmth.
Shortly before his death, I received a message from Bones. He had recently visited the newly commissioned Enterprise, which I believe had just come under your command. I believe you may have met him at the time, and could no doubt share a memory or two. What exercised him most was the nature of your second officer. “An android, Spock. They’ve got a damn android. And I thought you were bad enough.” I take this to mean that he liked and admired Commander Data and had been very happy to see our ship, as it were, once more. His opinion of you, Jean-Luc, was entirely complimentary: you may take that as you choose. Not long after this, I received news of his death. You can be certain that the funeral was not a sad occasion: one touched with the grief of loss, of course, but the joy of having known so fine a man as this. Certainly, his passing contributed to my decision to go to Romulus. There was nothing now to keep me from taking my leave, and of all of us, I considered him least likely to come back from the dead. The devil would surely not wish to part with such good company.
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock Page 13