The ubiquitous desert dust of Vulcan settled over the furnishings, and a species of tiny a’lazb, near-transparent glass spiders, industriously wove their almost-invisible webs in the corners of the ceiling. Tolek had deactivated the cleaning servitor before his departure. If he never returned, he wanted what little forensic evidence there was to remain in an effort to explain why.
Ten
Captain’s Personal Log. Having gathered more data than we could possibly have hoped, our mission is essentially complete. Command has ordered us home pending its decision on what, if anything, is to be done about the interspatial rifts we have discovered in the Deema system. If it were up to me, Chaffee would remain in orbit to conduct further studies while the brass muttered and consulted, which is probably why these things are never left to me. Based on experience, I’m guessing the drama will play out as follows:
Act I: Enter starship, heavily armed and bound for the Deema system, on the assumption that even though these rifts appear to be natural phenomena that have to date neither swallowed the planet nor proved to be the conduit for an invasion from another galaxy, “precautions must be taken.”
Act II: Exit Chaffee, reassigned to cataloging algae on some uninhabited waterworld, with advice to forget about Deema III.
Act III: Enter diplomats, complicating.
But I could be mistaken. Sometimes I am. Meanwhile, time to polish my boots. I’ve a wedding to attend.
• • •
The guests sheltered from the setting sun beneath translucent canopies of some delicate substance that fluttered slightly like sail canvas in the breeze as it stretched from one rock crag to another to another around the natural semicircular basin whose worn stone floor suggested it had been used for these rituals for a very long time.
“Another form of slime, I’ll bet!” Mikal whispered, surreptitiously snipping a sample to study later.
Mironova had ordered them to leave their tricorders aboard, though the wedding party had permitted them to record the ceremony from the ship; now she elbowed Mikal in the ribs to silence him.
The focal point of the semicircle was a waterfall, a twisting cataract that was mostly mist by the time it reached the lower level where the betrothed couple waited to begin their joining, in the presence of their respective clans and honored guests.
Scolex and hir mate (Lumbricina, Worm had told Saavik in extending the invitation, though we call hir Cina for short) stood veiled in the mist from the waterfall in the characteristic Deemanot S-shaped “upright” posture, facing each other—if it could be described in such anthropomorphic terms; mouth to mouth, in any event, close but not quite touching. They seemed to be glowing and, in fact, they were. As the guests watched, their clitella changed color, from an everyday reddish-pink to bright orange. When the transformation was complete, they touched, beginning at the head, gradually intertwining in a slow dance that seemed to resonate through the entire assemblage, for a gentle ripple moved through the gathered Deemanot, even to those separated by rock ledges, all the way up to the heights where the cataract began its tumble from the river that fed it to the pool below.
The three offworld guests, on a ledge of their own in a place of honor where the curve of the basin began and the mist from the waterfall only occasionally reached them, felt something like a mild electric charge pass through them, enough to raise the small hairs on the backs of the women’s necks and give the bald-pated Mikal gooseflesh, and cause them to glance at each other as if to say, Did you feel that, too?
As the bridal couple began to untwine and lower themselves to the floor of the grotto, Mikal took Saavik’s hand, and she did not pull away.
Slowly, sinuously, the bridal couple slithered over each other until they were lying head to tail, joined at the clitella. They then grew very still.
They remained that way throughout the night, and throughout the night the assembled Deemanot continued emitting their subliminal electrical “chant,” from which Saavik could detect certain concepts, most directed at the conjoined couple—wishes for health, fertility, longevity, and joy—but some conveying messages to their out-world visitors as well.
The visitors’ comfort had been seen to in all regards. Not only had they been given their own ledge, sheltered beneath a canopy, but the ledge had been modified by Deemanot construction (still unhardened in spots when they’d arrived, it was so new) to provide three couchlike forms where the guests could sit or even lie comfortably, should the night prove overlong. The provision of fresh drinking water and some of the native fruit showed a sensitivity to the fact that these creatures might need sustenance other than a mouthful of soil.
The chanting seemed to have a soporific effect on Mironova. Once it became clear that the wedded couple would not move until sunrise, she had barely hidden a yawn behind her hand, curled up like a cat, and fallen into a light doze.
“Deceptive,” Mikal whispered, observing her with something out of their former affection. “Sound a Red Alert and she’ll be on her feet with her phaser drawn in a nanosecond.”
Saavik stopped herself from pointing out that they had left their phasers on the ship along with the tricorders. The chanting was having a strange effect on her as well. For one thing, she did not mind that Mikal was still holding her hand. For another, she was remembering the fal-tor-pan …
“He is not himself, but he lives,” she had told Admiral Kirk, not realizing at the time how much was contained in that simple yet accurate statement.
Her only thought, when she and David found the bewildered child in the snow on Genesis, was to keep him warm, somehow get him to safety even after Grissom was destroyed. Watching him age in conjunction with the dangerously unstable planet, almost certain even before their capture by the Klingons that they would all die there, she had nevertheless sought to comfort this stranger who was Spock but not Spock in every way that she knew how. Even grown to adulthood, his understanding of what was happening around him was primitive, yet his trust in her was absolute. He followed her with his eyes wherever she went, a look of puzzlement on his face. If she thought too long about the contrast between him and the Spock who had been the most important person in her life, she would go mad.
So she had blocked all other thought from her mind except the need to stay alive, to keep Spock alive. The sound of Kirk’s voice on the Klingon communicator had all but shattered her control. There was no logical reason for him to be here. How? Why?
Even when they were safe at last on the pirated Klingon vessel en route to Vulcan and Doctor McCoy took her aside and explained it all to her, she could not believe it was happening.
“You’re in shock, young lady,” a haggard-looking McCoy said, two fingers on the pulse at her wrist. The Klingon ship had nothing resembling a sickbay, and he hadn’t had any of his instruments with him when he’d been detained on Earth. “No need to say anything,” he’d headed her off before she could. “I don’t need to know every gory detail of what went on down there to put the pieces together with what’s in here.”
He’d tapped his temple then, and she’d given him a puzzled look.
“Of course. You have no idea about the katra. How could you? We’ve got some time before we get to Vulcan. Let me explain what’s going on, at least as much of it as I understand myself …”
How could she, indeed? she’d thought, castigating herself in retrospect. By paying closer attention, by continuing your studies in the telesper skills, that’s how! Had you known, you might have prevented all of this! You might have accompanied Admiral Kirk to the engine room, known that McCoy had been entrusted with Spock’s katra, and—
And what? Instructed the admiral to bring McCoy to Vulcan, where Spock’s katra would have been enshrined in the Hall of Ancient Thought? Would that have been preferable to what happened instead?
“My logic is uncertain where my son is concerned,” Sarek had told the high priestess T’Lar before the fal-tor-pan began. Saavik’s logic had started to fray before they even arrived
at Mount Seleya.
Once there, Saavik had never felt more of an outworlder. At first she was angry. Angry with herself for not knowing that a mind could be re-fused into a living body, angry with whoever it was who should have told her. How could the Vulcan Masters keep something so important a secret? After McCoy explained where they were going and why, inasmuch as he understood it, she had rushed out of the improvised sickbay, seething with anger, hoping there was some duty she could fulfill on the bridge of the Klingon ship. Admiral Kirk, his own nerves frayed from the battle with Kruge, had spun the center seat around sharply at the sound of the opening door.
Seeing the anguish in his eyes, the dirt and bruises on his face, Saavik had hesitated, almost turned and run back the way she had come.
“Saavik?” Kirk said, as if uncertain what to say to her. “What is it?”
“I … I thought I might be of use … on the bridge, Admiral,” she said, squaring her shoulders, damping down her distress with as much dignity as she could muster. Her glance quickly took in everyone there: Sulu and Chekov at helm and navigation, Uhura at comm. There was what appeared to be a weapons station where there ought to have been a science station. Clearly there was no place for her. “I see I was mistaken, sir.”
“You should get some rest,” Kirk said warmly.
So should you! Saavik thought, managing, just barely, not to say it aloud. She accepted his directive as an order. “Aye, sir.”
She couldn’t return to sickbay; McCoy would mother her to death. She was not about to commandeer some Klingon officer’s private quarters, if such there were; she’d heard all but the commander slept in barracks, regardless of rank. The engine room was Scotty’s territory, even on a borrowed ship, and he would fuss over her in his way worse than McCoy. She roamed the corridors until she found what appeared to be ship’s stores, secreted herself in the darkest corner behind crates of squirming gagh, and found she could no longer hold back the tears. They were hot tears, tears of anger, and of shame.
She could barely bring herself to think of what she had done on Genesis, yet how could she have done otherwise? The sight of the trembling, bewildered man-child huddled in pain, not understanding what was happening to him, had moved her to act—beyond logic, out of some primal instinctx that had kept his species and hers alive for perhaps a hundred millennia, adapted to their desert environment by needing to mate only once every seven years, but making that need inexorable.
If she had not done what she did, he would have died. Why, then, when it was over, did she feel shame?
She had mastered all of these emotions, she thought—or if not, she was too exhausted to care—by the time the ship touched down on the floor of the valley below the long, narrow path leading up to the place of the fal-tor-pan. If she had expected the sight of the dozens of torchbearers, of the dreamlike wraiths of priestesses in their filmy white robes to evoke some ancient species memory, some sense that this was her homeworld, the place where she belonged, she was disappointed. She had no more idea what was transpiring than her human crewmates did.
As the rite began, and Sarek retreated from the gathering place, having made his confession of inadequacy to T’Lar, Saavik saw his eyes pass over the crew of the late Enterprise and, in barely masked surprise, fix on her. In her peripheral vision she could see the Lady Amanda, standing apart, her outward calm a careful mask, Saavik knew, for the fear churning inside her.
She had quickly lowered her head and looked away, as if deep in meditation. In fact, she did feel something urging her to enter the landscape within, some conjoining of the minds of the gathered priests and priestesses, focused like a lens upon the red-robed T’Lar, strengthening her powers to do what must be done if Spock and McCoy were to be restored.
At first she hesitated to join her mind with theirs. Would the fact that she was not fully Vulcan impede them somehow? Neither is Spock, she reminded herself, and McCoy is nothing Vulcan! At first she only feigned meditation so that Sarek would not approach her, not so much as motion to her with the uptick of an eyebrow to say, Come, child, and be with your family!
She could not. Not now, perhaps not ever, lest he ask what had transpired on Genesis.
As if he would! she castigated herself. Have the events of the past two days so rattled your brain that you have lost all reason? Control, control, now as much as on Genesis, now more than on Genesis, lest you disrupt the rite with your chaotic thoughts …
She found herself standing by default with the rest of the crew, if only because she had walked with them up the long path and there did not seem to be anywhere else for her to stand. Admiral Kirk liked to talk about Starfleet as a family, and such it might be for some. But seeing Scotty at a loss and glancing to her for instruction—as if to say, You’re one of these people. Tell me what’s the proper protocol here!—visited her with the thought that she was as much a stranger to them as to “her own kind.”
It was with great effort that she had gathered all of these thoughts as they whirled about her, tamping them down with the last shred of control remaining to her. Perhaps Spock was not the only one whose mind needed restoring.
But whether it was the tatters of her own control or the power of the myriad minds surrounding her, she at last found the place where she could meditate, bring her mind into focus with the others, and bowed her head in earnest as the lightning flashed and the two who had been conjoined were returned each to their rightful place—
—and the two beneath the waterfall began to separate from each other as the Deemanot marriage rite concluded.
The wind had changed direction, sending a spray of mist from the cataract toward the guests on their ledge, shaking Saavik out of whatever dream or reverie had taken hold of her. She cleared her thoughts and looked about her.
The wedded couple were separating from each other, and a satisfied almost murmur reverberated through the minds of the gathered guests; even the offworlders experienced it. The ceremony appeared to be coming to an end.
Mironova roused herself from her doze, yawning and stretching and bounding lightly to her feet, straightening her uniform tunic. Mikal had somehow ended up sharing Saavik’s couch, and not for the first time she had to extricate herself from his embrace and try to find her dignity. When she dared look at him, he was grinning at her.
A slithering on the rock face below them turned out to be Worm, who slid hir full length upright onto the ledge and greeted Saavik with a light touch above one ear as before.
The rite was successful, s/he explained. Both are with child.
“Lovely!” Mironova said, beaming as Saavik translated.
With Worm escorting them, they joined the others on what passed for a receiving line.
“Thanks ever so much to all of you,” Mironova said, embracing Scolex and Cina without waiting for the translation, “and blessings on all your children!”
Captain’s Personal Log, Supplemental. Brilliant idea, if I may say so, getting the Deemanot’s permission to record the wedding ceremony from the ship while it was taking place. Not only will it serve as an excellent proof of concept for the argument that this is a species with whom diplomatic overtures ought to be made, but giving the rest of the crew the opportunity to “attend” the wedding, so to speak, has assuaged some of their feelings of not having been invited. There are, of course, always exceptions …
“It’s like nothing new or interesting will ever happen again!” Ensign Cheung moaned. “I’m bored! I can’t stand it. I wish we were back on Earth already!”
A bit of a whiner at the best of times, Cheung was less than happy with the prospect of spending most of the return trip to Earth cataloging every bit of data the landing party had collected in the Deemanot museum. She’d been weeping openly during the wedding (“Blubbering,” Palousek had categorized it, explaining to a puzzled Saavik that it actually meant Cheung was happy), watching the holos again and again, murmuring “Oh, how sweet!” every time and bursting into tears again. Even Jaoui and Graana had r
olled their eyes and avoided her. But it was Saavik, uncharacteristically, who’d snapped at her.
“If you are suffering from depression, Ensign, I’d suggest you report to sickbay. Otherwise, I will thank you to spare me and your crewmates further caterwauling!”
Cheung blushed but wisely kept her mouth shut. Ta’oob and Jaoui, who were also in the lab that evening, tiptoed around their superior officer for the rest of their shift. But word quickly spread throughout the small ship that Lieutenant Saavik was in a … mood.
It was not Pon farr. Of that much she was certain.
(“It is called Pon farr … Pon farr. ” There had been no recognition in the boy’s face—not of the words, much less of their meaning. She at the time had felt nothing more than the need to help him.)
As a scientist, she was familiar with the symptoms, even though she had never experienced them. She would know it when it came upon her, and it was not now. Few outworlders knew that the initial stages were actually quite pleasant, resulting in a heightening of all the senses and an augmentation of the innate Vulcan appreciation of all the universe had to offer. This was necessary for the species to survive and procreate. Only unanswered did Pon farr become a fearful thing.
Engrossed in supervising the cataloging of the hundreds of specimens and thousands of tricorder readings they had gathered from the planet, she did not at first notice the subtle changes in sensory input—her normally acute hearing became even more acute, sight and smell and touch, especially touch, became ever more sensitized. But when she found herself distracted, unable to concentrate, she became aware of the rest.
What disturbed her most was the anger. Every little thing—Cheung’s whining, a ruined tray of slime specimens that Esparza, mooning over Graana now that it was clear he had no chance with Saavik, had dropped, spattering it on his boots in a fit of clumsiness—things that would ordinarily have merited a raised eyebrow and perhaps a mild scolding (“Were those the only specimens of that particular class of slime, Ensign?” “No, sir. There’s plenty of slime from the tunnels, sir. I just—” “As you were, Ensign. Just try to be more careful.”) suddenly set her teeth on edge and made her want to smash things, perhaps even hurt someone. She had managed to avoid such thoughts since an unfortunate hair-pulling match in art class the first year she came to Vulcan, and a classmate, an intolerable snob named T’Amar, had characterized her first attempt at clay sculpture as “primitive.”
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