Star Trek: Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Rapamycin,” she added, following his train of thought in spite of herself. “An immunosuppressant drug, used centuries ago to prevent organ rejection following transplant.”

  “First discovered by chance as a microbe in the soil of a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean on Earth. One of those phenomena that are stumbled on by pure chance and end up saving countless lives. Taxus brevifolia is another. A humble little yew plant that turned out to be a primitive but effective cancer cure.”

  Somewhere during this exchange, the lift had deposited Mironova onto the bridge, dressed in a practical field uniform and carrying a mug of strong tea. She slipped into the center seat and listened, pleased that her experiment—call it catalysis, symbiosis, synergy—was working.

  “You are suggesting that perhaps the anomalies noted during the initial long-range scans of Deema III …” Saavik began.

  “… could be something that exists nowhere else, might be something that could save lives or be the basis for an unforeseen technology, and could end up being named for one or both of us,” Mikal finished, idly spinning in his chair. “I see another Carstairs Medal on the horizon.”

  Saavik quirked an eyebrow. Such things were of no interest to her. “Which you would expect me to share with you?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Saavik made note of the unnatural silence on the bridge, as if everyone including the captain were listening to their exchange. She concentrated on her scanners.

  “Biome 1, continuing. Typical foliage presenting. Native varieties to be expected in a veldt, including low scrub, several species of acacia, and over one hundred varieties of flowering grasses. However, orbital scan reveals none of the anomalous plant life found by initial probes to be present in roughly seventeen percent of the region …”

  Mikal was scowling at the scanner. “The initial scans showed peculiar mineral deposits as well, but I’m not seeing any now.”

  “Unusual mineral readings could be explained by meteor showers or other space debris,” Saavik suggested.

  “So could the plant life,” Mikal conceded. “Spores hitching a ride on the space debris.”

  “Which might have evolved into unusual flora on the surface.”

  “Granted. But plant life might have found the environment inimical and died off. Rocks don’t just pick up and walk away.”

  Mironova had finished her tea. She cleared her throat. “Time to get some dirt under our nails and find out.”

  • • •

  The breeze made a sound like bells. With nothing to impede it over broad expanses of flat land, it blew continuously but softly. The light from the planet’s Sol-like star was warm, the atmosphere temperate and clear, with a slightly higher oxygen content than that of Earth, invigorating. Rainbow-hued flower banks, self-segregated by color and variety, interspersed with the occasional low-growing and wind-shaped shrub or tree, extended as far as the eye could see. Despite the region’s being deep into its dry season, there was running water, in the form of an icy rill bubbling between banks deep cut into the rock bed and bordered with the surprise of mosses and lichens.

  “Odd!” Mikal commented, on his hands and knees taking samples. “Those didn’t show up on the orbital scans.”

  “Perhaps they are so sparse that our instruments didn’t register them,” Saavik suggested, studying her tricorder. “However, they are indigenous.”

  “These are not the anomalies you’re looking for,” Mironova said.

  “There also shouldn’t be running water this late in the season,” Mikal grumbled. “Riverbed should be mostly mud.”

  “Unless,” Saavik proposed, scanning a distant outcropping, “it is fed by an underground stream.”

  “Tastes better than recycled water, anyway,” Mikal said, dabbling his fingers in the stream and sampling it.

  Saavik made a mental note to double-check the med kit for antimicrobial sera. The landing party had been immunized against every known bug, but their mission here was to isolate unknown phenomena, even if they ended up in someone’s digestive tract.

  Ensign Graana was overseeing the assembly of a field shelter in the lee of a thirty-meter-high outcrop, an ancient volcanic upthrust, to judge from the degree of erosion, forced upward at an oblique angle several million years before.

  “Good choice of location,” Mikal announced, studying the outcrop, which was striated like a layer cake. “There are about three million years of history in those layers. And I for one intend to backtrack that stream and find the fountainhead. Ensign Graana, would you care to accompany me?”

  He took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm before she could respond. The vestigial gill slits in front of her ears blushed pink, but she did not protest.

  “Good thing we’re far enough from any of the Deemanot cities to keep him out of at least one kind of mischief,” Mironova remarked as they strode off, studying Saavik for any possible reaction, but there was none.

  Mironova had been gathering wildflowers, mostly for their aesthetic value, as the others fanned out to begin their exploration. For a moment she held them to her nose and inhaled, sighing happily, then got back to being captain again.

  “You’re officially in charge down here, Lieutenant. But don’t expect Mikal to pay you any mind. Your job is to manage him so he doesn’t realize he’s being managed, but as long as he’s not a danger to himself or the landing party, keep an eye on him but leave him to his own devices. Carry on.”

  The team beamed down daily and set to work, each staking out a grid within which to gather specimens to bring back to the shelter, often several times daily, from dawn till dusk. From deep-core readings to the microbes on a blade of grass, using ship’s sensors, tricorders, fine tools, and often their bare hands, they weighed and measured, gathered and assessed, sifting soil samples, separating rock samples, carefully lifting plants from the soil without damaging their roots.

  Each evening they returned to the shelter to catalog what they had collected, discarding some specimens, beaming others aboard for further study in the ship’s labs.

  “Basanite,” Saavik recited, taking a chunk of gray-green rock from Esparza and placing it under the spectroscope. “Collected from—”

  “—level 47A, section 114c of the volcanic upthrust,” Esparza supplied, not a little smitten with Saavik and always too eager to please.

  “Indicating feldspathoids, plagioclase, and augite, as well as olivine, ilmenite, and magnetite,” Saavik reported, handing it back to Esparza, who almost dropped it in his nervousness but finally managed to set it in a container that Jaoui had already labeled. Jaoui sealed the container and placed it on the pallet to be beamed up, while Esparza handed Saavik a densely grained light-gray rock with flecks of darker gray, black, and pink, grinning fatuously when she glanced up and made eye contact.

  If she noticed Jaoui and Mikal smirking at Esparza’s puppy love, Saavik gave no sign.

  This is what you wanted, she reminded herself. A routine assignment without challenges or crises, methodical, meaningful tasks, duty, order, discipline …

  “Marble,” Mikal guessed about the new specimen.

  “Carbonatite,” Saavik corrected him, her gaze focused on the specimen despite his insistence on hovering just over her shoulder. The specimen in question had cost him dearly; he’d taken a tumble down an escarpment in his eagerness to pry it loose, sustaining more bruises to his ego than his person. “Containing in order of magnitude: phosphorus, niobium, uranium, thorium, copper, iron, titanium, barium, fluorine, and trace zirconium.”

  “Are you sure? I pulled that out of an alkalic intrusion on level fifty-three. I could have sworn it was marble.”

  “Angularity of the clasts suggests carbonatite,” Saavik replied, studying the readout.

  “You wouldn’t be disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreeing?” Mikal teased.

  Saavik looked up from the readout. “Geochemical analysis confirms.”

  She handed the specimen to Jao
ui, who was now smirking at Mikal; Esparza had gone off to find more specimens.

  And so it went.

  Mikal seemed somewhat less irritating now that they were downplanet and working every day. Perhaps the vastness of a wilderness devoid of other complex life was a better setting for the overlarge personality contained in his compact body, but Saavik found his presence off at a distance in her peripheral vision, flirting with Ensign Graana, lecturing the younger members of the team on the nuances of their craft, entertaining them during breaks by weaving flower wreaths and cavorting along the top of the volcanic ridge, the sunlight reflecting off the tattoos spiraling along his hairless brow less unsettling than at close range.

  By contrast, she was the consummate professional, and the team respected her for that. She gave few orders, confident that these young scientists knew what they were doing, and found those orders obeyed with alacrity. No one presumed to the familiarity they enjoyed with Mikal, who as both civilian and self-assigned class clown earned their respect for his credentials, but their fellowship in exchange for his.

  The windswept silence was often punctuated with sounds of idle chat and floating laughter wafting over great distances to her sensitive ears. Saavik had hoped it would be possible to learn to live out under the sky again. Why, then, did she feel uneasy?

  “Because, as humans are wont to say, ‘It’s lonely at the top’?” Spock suggested.

  She could not be certain when these conversations had begun. The dialogue she and her mentor had sustained from the earliest days when they were primarily exercises in proper grammar, coupled with ideas to challenge her fears and ever-boiling rage, had continued in her mind after Spock’s death and since his “resurrection,” as it seemed impossible to sustain these conversations with the ghostly, puzzled Spock who had greeted her with a bemused lack of recognition just before Bounty’s departure.

  But had they begun even as the awful truth wafted up from Enterprise’s engine room as the ship sped away from the blossoming destruction of the Genesis device, or later? Try as she might, she could not recall.

  She could see herself, as if from a distance, standing at attention as the coffin slid down the torpedo rack to the sound of bagpipes (all but excruciating to Vulcan ears, yet somehow appropriate), but could not recall what she was thinking at the time.

  She did recall a moment—a flashback, humans called it—when she had heard the whimpered distress of the boy-Spock on Genesis and realized what the problem was (“It is called Pon farr … Pon farr …”), the face of her mentor superimposed over the evolving face of this troubled, primitive being, and she had almost recoiled (I cannot do this, though I must. It is not proper, yet if I do not, he will die …). But duty had won out, and she had done what needed to be done. But where was her mind at the time? And what about the times in between, and since?

  She could not recall.

  Forgetting was not something she did as an adult. It was not something, as a Vulcan, she should have been able to do. To her it signaled a part of her other heritage, and as such it was anathema.

  She could not remember. And the not-remembering infuriated her. Perhaps that was why she filled those mental lacunae with conversations she might never be able to have in actuality.

  Was it truly lonely at the top? She turned the thought over as she might a palm-sized rock, examining it until, It is logical, she concluded. Fraternization between officers and crew is discouraged, therefore it is possible to seek companionship only among one’s fellow officers, and the captain of a ship must be the most alone of all.

  And yet that is not what you fear.

  Was it only wishful thinking, or some manner of delusion, that rendered Spock’s voice so clear, as if he were actually here and speaking directly to her?

  She realized for the first time that she had neglected to inform him of her whereabouts. Throughout her adolescence, and especially during her years at the Academy, his weekly subspace messages had sustained her, helped her control her anger, her frustration at the spoiled and immature humans surrounding her, her exasperation that things could not move faster so that she could get out into space where she belonged.

  Why had she neglected to tell him she had taken another assignment? Was this another of those lacunae? What was causing them? The same mix of guilt and bewilderment that had her hearing his voice in her mind?

  “Fear?” she repeated. If she spoke aloud, what of it? The others were scattered all over the grid; no one could hear her.

  It is I, Saavik-kam. You need not dissemble. It is not the solitude you fear but your own innate gifts.

  “That is not correct,” she said stubbornly. “I have never shied from my gifts as scientist and—”

  —leader?

  “I do not wish to lead, except as I do now, as a scientist guiding a small team of fellow scientists. Surely the model of your own life is such that—”

  I served as balance to an innate leader such as James T. Kirk. My path is not yours, Saavik, nor should it be.

  Saavik banked down a sudden flare of anger. Was this madness, to argue with someone to whom one owed one’s life, someone who wasn’t even here?

  “While your advice is always welcome, Captain Spock,” she said formally, “it is my life! I will live it as I choose!”

  At that moment a shadow fell over her in the late evening sun, Ensign Esparza lugging a laden specimen bag back to the shelter, reminding her that she was not alone and that if she had been speaking aloud, it was past time to stop.

  Alone but not alone, not alone but lonely? Subjects for future contemplation, which reminded her that between the work downplanet and her research for Tolek, she had been neglecting her meditation.

  Perhaps all of it was as simple as that. Perhaps she should have taken Amanda’s advice after all. Too late now. But there were ways to meditate while one worked, flamboyant tattooed distractions notwithstanding.

  • • •

  Two specimens of rock remained. Giving the others permission to beam aboard for the night, Saavik reached past Mikal to retrieve the first.

  “Microfibrous chert,” she announced as the spectral analyzer completed its first pass and she reset it for a second to confirm. “As with all of the other

  sedimentary rock we have collected, it shows no indication of animal fossils. This, coupled with the complete absence of complex life-forms, suggests that it is possible to hypothesize the Deemanot may in fact be the only animal life-form on the planet, though the small range of the sample makes the hypothesis inconclusive …”

  Mikal sighed. “It’s getting dark. Time to pack it in for today.”

  The shelter had its own light source, and there were rations and sleeping bags if they wanted to spend the night. Mikal, Saavik surmised, didn’t want to miss the first round of drinks in the off-duty lounge. Or perhaps some other form of recreation.

  She could not know that in fact he would have preferred to stay here all night with her, studying the way the tendrils of her hair, straying out of the practical clasp she had bound them in, arranged themselves against the whiteness of her delicate neck, and the thought made him wonder if he could trust himself.

  “There is one sample remaining,” she insisted, misreading his impatience, taking a perverse enjoyment in making him wait. “It may explain the anomalous plant life detected by the long-range probes.”

  He sighed again. “It is odd we haven’t found any unusual specimens at ground level yet. I’m wondering if the whole thing wasn’t a fluke.”

  “A fluke?”

  “Scanner error, something in the atmosphere that distorted the readings. We should have found something out of the ordinary. Maybe this will be it.”

  It was heavy, dense, dark in color, and smooth in texture, almost as if it had been polished, as indeed it had, by forces so powerful they could not be duplicated by any human endeavor. It was a chondrite—a meteorite, in lay terms—a stray chunk of rock from the time the universe began, broken free of an asteroid
or comet, or perhaps tumbling through space on its own for billions of years until the planet’s gravity had drawn it in, the atmosphere burnishing it as it gathered speed and struck the surface, embedding itself in the surrounding rock, an alien come from another place, as were the two intelligent beings who studied it.

  Saavik’s suggestion that it and its brethren scattered all over the planet following perhaps millions of years of meteor showers might be responsible for the anomalous life-forms their orbital scanners had detected might not be as strange as it sounded. One of the earliest theories of the origin of life was that it had been transported from other galaxies on such stray alien things. If any of the chondrites the science team gathered over the next several weeks showed evidence of even the most primitive life-forms, and an evolutionary progression could be found between those life-forms and the plants they had yet to identify, they would solve one mystery—and create another.

  But while the chondrite contained all of the expected components of interstellar dust, metal droplets and silicate spherules embedded in a fine-grained matrix of predominantly iron ore, repeated scans showed no trace of life.

  Now it was Mikal’s turn to reassure Saavik. “There’ll be others. We’ll solve this.” His voice drifted off, and there was a faraway look in his eyes. “And maybe my sins will be forgiven …”

  He seemed to be referring to something other than the metaphorical toes he’d stepped on in order to earn this assignment, but Saavik did not pursue it. Sealing the chondrite into the final container and setting it on the pallet, she signaled the ship to beam it, and them, aboard.

  There was a subspace text from Tolek waiting for her in her quarters, with detailed accounts of contacts with the other Hellguard survivors, sometimes successfully, sometimes thwarted by the inalienable Vulcan right to be left alone.

  Saavik filed this message with the others and sighed. Perhaps when he had run through the entire roster and found no more deaths, Tolek would abandon his quest, and at least some of her unease would abate.

  As a scientist, she had to admit that the three deaths were puzzling, yet Vulcan healers with far more expertise than she had performed exhaustive tests and concluded that they were the result of an inexplicable but not unnatural cause. Any attempt to obtain more data than Tolek had already given her would hit the unbreakable wall of Vulcan privacy.