“I see. Then I would like to speak with Commissioner Soreth.”
“I expect that you would.”
So this was how it felt to be on the receiving end of Vulcan literalism. Did it always sound so phony and evasive when he did it? “Then would you please connect me with him?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
Spock pressed his lips together in annoyance. Was this just petty bureaucracy in action, or something more personal? He noted the receptionist watching him carefully, as though anticipating an emotional outburst. So that was how it would be. The word had gotten out. Very well—he would simply not give them what they expected. “It is a matter of some importance,” he replied patiently. “Please contact the commissioner’s office; I shall wait.”
The prospect of having a supposed V’tosh ka’tur in his presence any longer than necessary was apparently sufficient to goad the receptionist into activity. It was not very long at all until he directed Spock to a free terminal where he could receive Soreth’s signal.
The commissioner appeared on the screen, his natural scowl deepening upon the sight of Spock. “What is it that you wish, Commander?”
“To gain access to Yonada’s computer banks for a research project.”
“You should take that up with the personnel there.”
“I have done so. But their lack of cooperation has made it necessary to go, as the humans say, ‘over their heads.’ ”
“Mm. What is the nature of this research?”
Spock spelled it out in basic terms. “I see,” Soreth replied when he was done. “Would it not be a more logical use of your time to assist in tracking down the bases and supply lines of the insurgents?”
“Logically, if we wish to find a lasting resolution to this problem, we should address the root causes of the insurgency. Otherwise, any insurgents we arrest will simply be replaced by others with the same motivations.”
“The root cause, Commander, is these people’s irrational refusal to abandon a belief framework which was invented to deceive them.”
Spock pondered that reply. “Then what do you perceive to be the solution?”
“Obviously, the re-education of the populace to eliminate these false beliefs.”
“All beings… need to believe in something,” Spock replied slowly. “Some fundamental principle to define and guide their existence. Surely it is when they feel those beliefs to be threatened that they are the most dangerous.”
Soreth looked down his nose at Spock. “That is the kind of sentimental thinking I would expect from a V’tosh ka’tur.”
“It is illogical,” Spock countered, “to disregard the role of emotion in sentient thought. Emotions evolved for a reason; logically, they must serve some practical function.”
“The human appendix evolved for a reason, but has since lost its purpose. Nostalgia for useless atavisms is not logical.”
“Nor is it logical to assume that a thing is useless simply because one is afraid to find a use for it.”
Soreth’s gaze was cold. “You impute emotion to me only because you project it from yourself. You are a half-human boy who lacked the discipline to achieve Kolinahr, and you have concluded that Kolinahr is worthless rather than confront the fact of your failure.”
The words stung, striking close to home. But Spock met Soreth’s eyes evenly. “I have… given considerable thought to the possibility that my recent choices are indeed so motivated,” he admitted. “It is certainly a tempting excuse to retreat from personal growth. But I cannot deny what I have learned.”
“You have done so—you have denied Kolinahr. You have denied what it means to be Vulcan.”
“Why can Vulcans only be one thing? Did Surak not uphold the combination of diversity as the highest ideal?”
“Had he meant to include emotion, he obviously would not have taught us to purge it. Your attempt to cite an authority as evidence for your refutation of the same authority merely illustrates how thoroughly your reasoning faculties have been contaminated by your exposure to humans.”
This was becoming an opportunity to become better acquainted with the emotion of frustration. No matter what he said, the elder Vulcan found a way to twist it. “Surak did not claim to be infallible. Surely he would have recognized the need for modification and refinement of his ideas.”
“Very well, then, tell me,” Soreth challenged. “What does it mean to be emotionally logical? How can you reconcile what Surak could not?”
Spock searched for a response. After a time, he had to confess, “That is a question I have only begun to explore.” He hoped he’d managed to say it without sounding embarrassed.
“I see. And I am sure you will explore it with the same commitment and success with which you explored Kolinahr.” He said it with far too much satisfaction for someone who was supposedly emotionless. But Spock knew simply pointing that out would do nothing to open his mind. It never had with him. “Admit it, Spock—you are a dilettante, lacking the patience and maturity to commit to anything. You refuse admission to the Vulcan Science Academy to attend Starfleet. You abandon Starfleet to pursue Kolinahr, and then abandon Kolinahr to become ka’tur. As a scientist, rather than focusing your intellect in a single field, you dabble in everything, and as a result make no lasting contribution to any science. You have no ‘fundamental principle’ to guide your existence, aside from inadequacy and failure. One would have expected better from a son of Sarek—even one raised by a human mother.”
“You are a hypocrite,” Spock said tightly, his hands clamping the edge of the console. “You condemn emotion, yet take pleasure in taunting me. You are so proud of your supposed logic—tell me, what will happen if I take this matter to Captain Kirk, to Natira? What reason will you give them for denying me cooperation in carrying out my orders? The fact that I offend you? How logical will that sound to them?”
Soreth’s scowl was unreadable. After a time, he spoke. “Very well. You have authorization to proceed with your research. It is a waste of time, but I cannot see what harm it can do.”
“Then our business is concluded.” Spock reached for the disengage switch.
“Is it? I imagine your anger will linger for some time. I imagine you feel a powerful urge to lash out violently. What will you do with that urge?”
“I will manage it,” Spock told him.
“Perhaps this time. But if you were so easy to provoke this time, what of next time? What happens when something more is at stake than simply your pride?
“Pay close attention to what is inside you, Spock. The Vulcan heart is not a force to be trifled with. Like the lematya, it cannot be tamed, only caged. Give it free rein and it will destroy you, or those around you.”
“There must be a way to master emotion without denying it,” Spock insisted.
“Other V’tosh ka’tur have tried. The results have usually been disastrous. What makes you think you can do better?”
Spock simply switched off the viewer. He had no answer.
* * *
“This is not the first time the People have battled over the rule of the Oracle,” said the wizened old man.
Christopher Lindstrom looked at him curiously. “You mean, between pro-Oracle and anti-Oracle factions? The Oracle hasn’t always been in control?”
“The Oracle has always been our guide,” Paravo said, more with annoyance than with anger. He was a respected figure in the community, an Oracular loyalist, but motivated more by nostalgia than ideology. He had no hatred for the current system; he simply didn’t want to deal with change. “But there have been those who have rejected its wisdom and rebelled against it, like disobedient children.”
“But what about the Instruments of Obedience? Didn’t those prevent any rebellion from ever—”
“Patience, young man! If you wish to learn, then you must listen!”
Lindstrom subsided and smiled to himself, for Paravo’s advice resonated with him more than the old man realized. He’d learned a lot abo
ut listening since the first time he’d worked with the Enterprise crew. Back then he’d been a young lieutenant just a few short years out of the Academy, so brash and arrogant. He’d considered himself an expert, but it had all been theory—critiquing and building on field sociologists’ work, evaluating first contacts from the comfortable remove of a ship or starbase. The mission to Beta III had been his first field assignment to a planet whose culture wasn’t already well understood, already extensively written about in his journals and tomes. And he hadn’t made a good showing of himself at all.
The Enterprise had come to investigate the disappearance of the Archon a century earlier, following up on the recent discovery of its recorder-marker buoy. The buoy had been badly damaged by thermal radiation, its databanks wiped, but its course tracked back to Beta III’s system. Upon arriving, the crew had discovered another mystery: visual scans of the surface showed that the architecture and clothing of the humanlike natives were right out of nineteenth-century America.
Lindstrom had jumped to the conclusion that the Archon crew had contaminated the culture. He’d also misremembered his history, dressing the landing party in eighteenth-century garb. Both had proved to be costly mistakes; not only had he guaranteed that Lieutenants Sulu and O’Neill would be conspicuous in a rigidly conformist society, but he’d missed an important clue to the source of that conformity. In fact, it had been the Landru computer that had imposed the styles, downloaded from the Archon’s memory banks shortly before the ship had crashed. Landru the man had programmed his cybernetic avatar to allow creativity and growth, but the machine had understood that only on a superficial level. Its idea of innovation had been to impose periodic cosmetic changes on the architecture, clothing, and so forth, recycling Beta III’s historical styles over and over for sixty centuries. With the Archon’s arrival it had finally gained access to something new, and methodically added it to the rotation. The only change it had made in the imported forms had been to speed up the clocks to fit the planet’s twenty-two-hour days.
But Lindstrom hadn’t figured this out until much later. He’d been impulsive and judgmental, too quick to jump to conclusions, and had contributed little to the landing party’s understanding of the culture. In his defense, what they’d seen had certainly been shocking: a whole community erupting into savagery and afterward behaving as though nothing had been wrong; a father allowing his daughter to be ravaged; an old man being blasted dead for the slightest disapproved speech. It had been only natural to feel angered and disturbed. But Kirk and the others had managed those feelings, had filed them away with the rest of the information they gathered. Lindstrom should have done the same. Whatever his personal feelings, he shouldn’t have let them keep him from listening, from trying to see the locals’ point of view—not necessarily to approve of it, but simply to understand it.
Lindstrom figured his attitude was the reason Kirk had left him behind with the other experts assigned to help the Betans rebuild after Landru’s shutdown. Maybe Kirk had concluded that such an arrogant hothead was a liability to a starship’s sociology department. Or maybe he’d felt that an extended stay in an alien culture would help Lindstrom come down off his high horse (and it’s hard to fit one of those into an ivory tower). Either way, it had been just what Lindstrom had needed. Getting to know the Betans as people rather than dissertation subjects, experiencing their reactions firsthand as they’d struggled to adjust, had soon turned him around. He’d finally started to think about how other people saw things, even about how the Landru computer had seen things. And that empathy had later proved useful when a failsafe had kicked in and Landru had reawakened. It had been the S.C.E. who’d done most of the work shutting it down again, but Lindstrom had done his part, as he’d failed to do as a member of Kirk’s team. And it was his ability to see other points of view that had made the difference.
It was a lesson he’d taken very much to heart in the years since. Indeed, Soreth wasn’t the first person who’d accused him of identifying too much with the peoples he studied. But what Lindstrom saw in Soreth and his staff was the same kind of condescension he’d been guilty of before Beta III, the same tendency to judge a people by one’s own theories and preconceptions instead of getting to know how they really saw things. Lindstrom was determined not to fall back into that trap, especially now that he’d come to admire the Yonadi and their deeply held beliefs so much. There was a special strength to subjugated cultures, a determination to retain their identity against all odds, and usually it was the intangibles of faith that they clung to when their oppressors stripped away everything else they had. It made their spiritual lives particularly rich, fascinating to study as a sociologist and moving to experience as a man.
It also made their folklore rich and deeply layered, as they used it to preserve their history and beliefs, sometimes in encoded form to confound attempts to repress it. This had been particularly hard for the Yonadi, given that the Oracle could hear their every word and sense some of their emotions and urges, and punish anything that defied its doctrines. Yet they had managed nonetheless, and Lindstrom was certain that the People’s tales of their past held many important lessons for the present. Spock had been skeptical due to the imprecision of oral history; but Lindstrom felt that very imprecision could help preserve meaning, by breaking it apart and distributing it among numerous tales, numerous perspectives and slants. By assembling all the different viewpoints on a past event, one could reconstruct the original in full dimension, like a holographic image.
Whether Paravo’s tale would be a valuable piece of the puzzle remained to be seen. It was an account of a great battle between armies of good and evil, focusing on a legendary hero named Vocari, leader of the Oracular forces, who could strike down his enemies with the Oracle’s fire— which could be a reference to energy weapons, or simply a mythological embellishment. “Which high priestess did he fight for?” Lindstrom asked when that information did not emerge on its own.
“Why, for golden Ganela, first of them all, of course. Did I not say this was a battle of the dawn times? Now pay attention.”
Lindstrom filed the claim away, even though some specifics of the story didn’t quite fit with the legends of Ganela, or of the creation of the Oracle. There were many traditions, with more conflicts between them than Paravo cared to admit. But myths and legends changed with each retelling, Lindstrom knew. The truth was in the heart of the tale, not the precise details.
Still, one detail caught his ear as the tale progressed. “The battle raged for fifteen days and fifteen nights,” Paravo intoned. “It was fought in the depths, it was fought in the mountains, it was fought in the Halls of the Creators. The clash of blades, the cries of dying men echoed through the caverns, hills, and Halls.”
“Tell me more about the Halls of the Creators,” Lindstrom said. “I’ve heard them mentioned in some other tales.” They seemed to be a version of the afterlife, a resting place for the honored dead, those who’d given their lives in service to the Creators.
“The Halls of the Creators, where the privileged are laid to rest,” Paravo answered, echoing the formula used in the other tales. “In this hallowed place, our proudest and holiest spend eternity under the Creators’ loving gaze. The blasphemers begrudged them this privilege, and so took the battle to the Halls themselves to lay them waste. Yet Vocari stood his ground at the entranceway, his forces arrayed behind him, blasting holy fire from his hands, to keep the rabble from desecrating the Halls. They struck him with their stones, their arrows, and their swords, so that his blood ran red throughout the Halls; yet still he kept on fighting, the conduit for the Oracle’s wrath, until the bodies were piled so high that none could enter. Finally, with the enemy’s charge smothered by their own base flesh, Vocari surrendered the life he had clung to in the Oracle’s name, and won his eternal place in the Halls he had died to protect, the Halls he had anointed with his very blood.”
“So Vocari and his army—they were actually in the Halls? Even thou
gh they were still alive.”
“Yes, yes, of course, for that was where they were needed.”
“So where are the Halls? What are they like? What awaits the honored dead when they arrive there?” Something about this was nagging at him. It wasn’t just the disconnect between this legend of the Halls and the Oracle’s orthodox cosmology (or, for that matter, Rishala’s more mystical traditions). It wasn’t even the suggestion that the Halls of the Creators were a physically accessible place; that wasn’t necessarily literal, any more than Odysseus’ visit to the underworld. There was something else tickling the back of his mind, something that seemed out of place.
But Paravo’s descriptions didn’t tell him much. They were fairly routine depictions of paradise—eternal plenty, luxury, the works. After twenty more minutes with the old man, Lindstrom was no closer to figuring out what was bothering him. But maybe another version of the tale from another teller might give him new perspective. Lindstrom knew he just had to keep listening.
* * *
Until yesterday, Tavero would never have thought that he would play a role in the holy struggle. To be sure, there was no question of his devotion to the Oracle. He always listened to the recordings of Dovraku’s sermons and did his part to smuggle them safely to other ears, to keep Tasari’s thugs from discovering them. But he was just following where others led, passing on what others made and sent forth. He believed in the cause, but he led an ordinary life.
All that had changed now, though. First he had come face-to-face with the godkiller Kirk himself. He was proud of how he’d reacted, unhesitatingly striking out at the devil while others cowered in fear, or let themselves be swayed by his words. He hadn’t been able to strike the godkiller down, of course; that was not a task for a lowly one such as he. But he had given Kirk notice that his lies would be fought at every step, that the true believers would face him without fear.
And now, he knelt before the Great One himself, tasted the presence of the man who would save the People from their betrayers. He had never expected this when he’d gone to see his neighbor Moredi. He’d known the man was involved in the resistance, had expected simply to pass his news along and content himself with the thanks of a noble fighter for the cause. But he’d had no clue that Moredi was close to Dovraku himself, and he had been amazed when his neighbor had come to tell him that the prophet wished to hear his tale. It had been terrifying, in its way. He was just a youth, not ready for such responsibility. But of course he couldn’t deny the summons of the Great One. And he’d reminded himself of the unexpected bravery he’d found when facing Kirk, and that heartened him.
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