It had been a bad week at school, whispers behind her back, half-muttered insults spoken just beyond arms’ reach. If Spock was visited with déjà vu, he did not allow her to know it.
“No doubt you could,” he had acknowledged dryly. “However, I had a more arduous challenge in mind for you.”
This piqued her curiosity.
“You bring it, I do it.”
She was less confident once he’d told her.
“I have spoken to the savants at the Temple of Amorak,” he said. “They would be receptive to your pursuing a course of study with them while your peers explore the rigors of Vulcan’s Forge.”
It was not the first time they’d discussed this. Given the gaps in her education, Saavik had not been schooled in the telesper techniques that were second nature to most Vulcan children by the time they were her age. While both Spock and Sarek had taught her the rudiments of mind-meld and self-healing, any attempt to fill in the missing pieces of her memory were resisted more mightily than wearing shoes.
For one thing, she did not wish to know whether her Romulan heritage might have weakened her innate esper abilities. Discovering that her skills were weak would be yet one more shame to countenance. For another, there were too many things she did not wish to remember.
Heretofore Spock had not pressed the point. One thing he had learned about her was that, young as she was, she was almost his match in stubbornness. This time, he had hoped the tradeoff in not having to undergo kahs-wan would appeal to her.
Instead, her jaw tightened and she glared at him.
“If I refuse? No Academy?”
It was as if, despite the nurturing, the embrace as a coequal member of Spock’s family, she still mistrusted her good fortune, still expected to be cast aside.
“Have I at any time suggested such an outcome?” Spock asked long-sufferingly.
“You think it.”
“And you know this without a mind-meld? Fascinating.”
The glower deepened.
“Know this, Saavik-kam. When it is time, I give you my pledge that I will sponsor you at the Academy. It may seem illogical to you that I promise this so far in advance, but it is as a token of my faith in you that I do so.”
“I … I do not understand.”
“Such is my confidence in you and your innate abilities and your sense of honor that I can logically promise you my patronage. However …”
Even if she had been able to find the words to respond to this, she did not have time to speak them.
“… before Vulcan had logic, it had curiosity. We have as a people driven ourselves to extraordinary lengths—often to the sacrifice of life itself—in our insatiable desire to know.”
This gave her pause. History spoke of tharavul, Vulcans who had had the telepathy centers of their brains excised in order to gain permission to live and work inside the Klingon Empire. Spock himself had once risked blindness in order to study a parasitic creature that had taken over his nervous system, simply because he had never encountered its like before.
As she cast about for something to say, some argument to counter this, Spock said, “To lack curiosity about any subject, Saavik-kam, is to be less than fully Vulcan.”
That made her angry. It wasn’t fair, and they both knew it. At the cellular level she would not, could not, ever be fully Vulcan, and for her mentor, of all people, to accuse her of something that was not her fault, something that others had decided before she was even conceived … It was a trick, a test of her reasoning abilities, something he’d challenged her with throughout the years since they’d saved each other’s lives. And who but the half-human Spock himself had more right to challenge her?
Nevertheless, at the age of eleven, she had held fast. She would not retrieve those lost early memories, did not want to remember. The few events she did remember clearly were unsettling enough.
• • •
Among themselves they referred to it only as the Place. What else could it have been called? Surely not an orphanage, for at first only some of them were half orphans, and at the time, given the scraps of education provided them, they would not have had the words even for that. Words like “mother,” “father,” “family” were not included in their vocabulary.
When they were old enough to eat solid food but not yet old enough to feed themselves efficiently, they were seated at a long table where they could watch the door at the end of the room, waiting. Saavik could recall even now the rumble of hunger (long before she understood the meaning of real hunger) and vague aromas simmering up from huge vats in the next room, as the small ones, perhaps thirty of them, waited silently—outcries of any sort earned a sharp slap—for the proctors to appear.
One proctor pushed a trolley containing dull metal tureens filled with bland foods of a universally nondescript neutral taste, texture, and color. Another proctor took each toddler’s hands in turn and held them down on the tabletop as a third spooned something into each waiting mouth, open like a bird’s, then moved down the row to the next child. When they reached the end, the three would trundle the cart back to the start of the row and deliver another spoonful.
The method was tedious but equitable. The children were seated in different positions in the row with each meal, so that no child was always fed first or last. After each spoonful, the spoon was carefully dipped in a sterilizer, because even the scores of immunizations the children had been given from birth could not anticipate the stray viral infection that might run rampant in such close quarters. The one-spoonful-at-a-time ritual satisfied hunger and gave each child the chance to digest slowly before the next spoonful, and to learn patience, all at the same time.
Their hands were held down to keep them from grabbing at the spoon themselves. There must be order, efficiency, nothing so inconvenient or time-consuming as messy self-feeding. Any child who resisted—refused the next spoonful, expressed a dislike for whatever was on the spoon, had the effrontery to spit it back—was fed no more at that meal. The children learned quickly.
By the time they were deemed old enough to feed themselves, to march in single file into the refectory and sit silently at the long tables with their hands in their laps until they were given the signal to begin, the sheer freedom to move one’s hands and eat what one wished in the order one wished to eat it made some of them almost giddy. But there was also the matter of eating everything on one’s plate before someone else snatched it away when the proctors weren’t looking.
Rumors abounded that some few of the eldest were permitted to eat with the proctors, where they were taught proper table manners and even allowed to speak, but no one Saavik knew had ever seen it happen. The adults abandoned Hellguard soon after, and she never learned if it was true.
Her other memory was about the doors.
Doors between places opened and closed automatically. But the doors to cupboards and other storage places had to be opened and closed manually. From the time they were old enough to walk, the children were responsible for keeping the doors closed. To take something from a cupboard, usually that day’s identical-to-yesterday’s jumpsuit, and leave the door so much as ajar for more than the few seconds necessary, was to incur at least a scolding, at worst a dangerous retribution.
It was how the tips of Tolek’s fingers had been damaged.
Beyond that, there was only sameness, one day indistinguishable from the next. Day meant the lights were bright, night meant they were dimmed. Every activity—eating, sleeping, exercise, instruction—occurred at regulated intervals in between. None had ever felt rain on their faces, grass between their toes; none had ever seen the stars.
For most, it meant acquiescing to the sameness, blending in, becoming indistinguishable from one’s peers. For others, it meant defiance, however inward—expressing it outwardly had too great a cost—a defiance that said, I am I, and you will not change that!
Saavik was among them. So was Tolek. In a different reality, their childhood bond might have grown into something
else, the genotype emblazoned on their jumpsuits forbidding it notwithstanding.
A human would have called it a girlhood crush. In the context of Hellguard, it had other dimensions. The crushing came when Tolek told her they could never mate.
What, in their universe, did they understand about mating? At their age the urge lay dormant, inchoate, but somehow they knew it was there.
“Explain!” Saavik had all but shouted when Tolek told her. They were sprawled in the artificial soil in the atrium, after a rather violent game of kickball in which they’d both been eliminated, by design. The adults insisted on a certain amount of vigorous exercise, especially for the older children, in addition to daily chores like laundry and scrubbing floors and preparing meals, in order to siphon off some of their energy. Saavik and Tolek had played badly in order to be eliminated from play and have some time to talk.
She was over seven years and he was nearly nine by now. Within a matter of weeks, everything they knew would be taken from them.
“What means we can’t mate?” she growled at him, fists clenched, ready to hit if he didn’t tell her. She’d hit him before, and he’d held her wrists and laughed until she’d started to laugh too. She adored him. “What means?”
“See this?” Tolek pointed to the last string of numbers on the pocket of his jumpsuit. “They don’t match yours. You look for a male with the same numbers. You can have each other when you’re older. Or someone else, if you get to go to Rom-u-lus.”
“Don’t want someone else!” She’d pouted. “Want you.”
He’d shrugged. “Can’t.” He thrust his chin in the direction of one of the senior proctors, supervising the kickball game and out of earshot. “They decide.”
Saavik uttered a string of curses on “them,” feeling her heart break. “Run away,” she suggested.
She hadn’t expected Tolek to laugh. “Oh, so now you believe in ‘away’!” he taunted her, and she had hit him then, flailing with her fists so he wouldn’t see her weeping. They’d rolled around in the dirt with him gripping her wrists and laughing helplessly until the proctor separated them, cuffing them sharply about their tender ears, and both forfeited dinner that night.
A few days later, Saavik was assigned to kitchen duty, lugging piles of plates from the storage pantry to the refectory, laying them out methodically on the long tables. The plates were heavy and she could carry only a few at a time, which meant many trips. Why she couldn’t have access to one of the trolleys the proctors used (she had asked and been told not to be impertinent) was only one of innumerable because-we-said-sos. During one such trip, balancing the heavy crockery in both hands and tipping the cupboard door shut with one foot, she hadn’t managed to close it all the way.
The kitchen proctor was a particular martinet, perhaps because she was very young and, save for the sigil on her uniform, might have been mistaken for one of the children herself. She scanned the long rows of cupboard doors, seeking flaws by habit, spotted the open one, and swooped.
Before she could finish saying, “Number 8390923, you have left the cupboard door ajar!” someone raced past her and slammed it shut.
“Closed!” Tolek announced, out of breath, hands behind his back, leaning against the cupboard to hold it shut, his tone smug.
It was the smugness, no doubt, that earned him what happened next.
The proctor grabbed him by the arm and swung him around. He was almost as tall as she and no doubt stronger, but he knew better than to resist.
“Is it?” she hissed, her face inches from his, shaking him, her nails digging into his arm. “Let us be certain, shall we?”
Still holding him firmly, she opened the cupboard with her free hand, swinging the door wide, eyebrows raised. Saavik was never entirely clear about what happened next.
Perhaps Tolek tried to close the door a second time, to defy the scenario the proctor seemed determined to create in order to bring retribution down on Saavik. Perhaps the proctor meant to make an example of him as a warning to Saavik, or a way of forcing her to watch someone else suffer in her stead.
All she remembered was the look on Tolek’s face as she realized that two of his fingers were caught in the door, and the proctor was leaning all her weight on it, holding it closed.
His jaw was clenched, eyes clamped shut, his face a mask of pain, but he made no sound. Then, his fingers crushed, the pain no doubt near unbearable, he forced his eyes open, blinking away tears and fixed them, pale and accusing, on his tormentor. She recoiled inadvertently, releasing the door and his hand. Virid blood spurted from mangled flesh and severed capillaries, spraying all three of them.
“Fortunate it wasn’t your entire hand!” the proctor sneered, but her voice was shaky. “Report your carelessness to the infirmary at once! And you!” She grabbed Saavik by the hair at the nape of her neck to keep her from running after Tolek, shaking her. “Not a word to anyone, or what happens to you won’t be an accident!”
Neither was this! Saavik thought, but she bit back the words.
Tolek wore his damaged fingers as a badge of honor thereafter. The flesh healed eventually, leaving livid scars, but the nerves were damaged and he had lost all sensation in the fingertips. Nevertheless, he managed to survive, as Saavik did, learning to hunt in the desert when the time came.
Whatever memories she had of that time, Tolek was always there.
Now here he was in the marketplace in ShiKahr, well nourished, grown to adulthood, his hair, close-cropped and tamed in the Vulcan fashion, already graying at the temples, his pale eyes holding memories neither wanted to examine too closely. Nevertheless, the memories came flooding back, suspended almost palpably between them. Saavik pushed them away, focused on the now, wondering why Tolek hadn’t had his fingers regenerated. It was only one of innumerable questions she would like to have answered.
He asked if they could have tea together, sit at a small table in a public place where the murmur of other voices, he hoped, would prevent them from being overheard.
“By whom?” she asked, but he had cut his eyes away from hers—less perceptible than a shake of the head to anyone who might be watching—and did not elaborate. It was their secret meetings in the air ducts all over again.
She had intended to return home with her purchases immediately to prepare the meal, but only because she could think of nothing else to do before she beamed aboard Chaffee on the morrow. It was still midafternoon. Surely she could afford a little time for someone who had once been the most important person in her universe.
Tolek paid for the tea and asked her if there was a particular type of sweet she favored. This question, considering their shared background, startled her as it would not have if asked by anyone else. She tried not to think of small animals killed and devoured raw, roots grubbed up with the dirt still on them, insects squirming against the tongue even after one bit their heads off, and told him he could choose.
Tolek chose two plaberry pastries, rich with fruit and still warm from the baking (“I can never get enough of these,” he explained almost apologetically), and Saavik followed him, carrying the tea, to a table in the center of the plaza, though she would have preferred a spot near the greenery at the edges. Still, if Tolek was concerned that they were being watched and listened to …
He arrange the utensils on the tabletop as they’d been taught. Her years with Spock’s family had helped her learn to relax at mealtimes, sit up straight instead of hunched over her plate, but where had Tolek been in those intervening years? She saw him consciously stop himself from guarding the plate with one hand out of old habit, lest someone snatch it from him.
“This was no chance meeting,” he said after a brief exchange of pleasantries during which he pointedly gave her no information about himself, and she was too constrained by propriety to ask. “I sought you out.”
“For what purpose?”
“To warn you,” he said succinctly. “Before they murder you too.”
Three
Sa
avik’s impulse was to blurt out “Who? Why? How do you know?” But what was the logical question to ask first? All she could think of to say was, “Have you gone to the authorities?”
“The authorities!” Tolek echoed her, and they were back to being children again, he always the older and wiser. “The authorities have examined the three dead and concluded that they died of natural causes.”
Saavik barely managed to control a flash of anger at being patronized here, now, after all this time. “I have no knowledge. You will have to explain from the beginning.”
Tolek reached into a pocket to produce a device no larger than his thumbnail. Activated, it projected a holo-image in the center of the table. “Do you remember Rajek?”
As the image solidified, Saavik noticed that it was visible only from certain angles, specifically from where she was sitting. If she shifted her position in the slightest, the image disappeared. Even as she was tempted to ask about the technology, she called to mind a stocky boy of about her own age and—the identicode on the uniform pocket more visible at first than his face—from the same mate-cohort.
At least he had been stocky the second-to-last time she’d seen him, going off over the horizon with a pack of the strongest boys … to hunt, they’d said, but no one asked what. The last time she’d seen him, being helped onto the Vulcan rescue ship, too weak to walk, the natural bulk of his frame had only accentuated his deprivation. His ribs seemed more pronounced than anyone else’s, the muscle wasting more obvious.
The tiny holo’s presence pulled Saavik back to the present. The figure that had materialized in the center of the table, no larger than the palm of her hand, was of a prone figure in the rigor of recent death, an older version of the boy Rajek, his face and body filled out with adulthood and good nutrition, but the attitude of death suggesting that the end had been violent.
Rajek’s image was replaced by two others in turn, a slender female with silk-black hair, and another male with pronounced Romulan brow ridges who would never have passed for even part Vulcan. Their facial expressions seemed less agonized than Rajek’s, but they were no less dead.
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 4