Star Trek: Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Urgent message for you from Nah’namKir on Vulcan,” the yeoman said unnecessarily before pointing her to a booth where she could ostensibly read the message in semiprivacy. Concealing her puzzlement, Saavik remembered to thank the yeoman, then waited for her to go back to whatever it was she had been doing when she had arrived before activating the screen.

  She did not recognize the name of the city at first but, recalling a child’s long-ago lesson on Vulcan geography, she remembered that it lay within the northern polar region. It could only be the “minor city you’ve never heard of” that Tolek hailed from. It took her a moment to realize that the communication was not from Tolek at all but from the healer who had performed the autopsy.

  Performed the autopsy. The words did not make sense at first. Had Tolek finally managed to find a healer who saw things his way? Somewhere between concern and annoyance, it took Saavik a moment to realize that the victim was Tolek himself.

  The healer’s message contained the proper Vulcan mix of fact and compassion. “You were given as his next of kin … a search of all databases indicated that there was no one else … details follow … disposition of the remains upon your reply …”

  Somehow she managed to maintain her composure long enough to read through the “details,” such as they were. If she’d had any doubt that the previous five dead had been murdered, Tolek’s death erased it even before she got to the words “unknown etiology.”

  If she had believed him initially, would it have made any difference? If she had remained on Vulcan, if, if, if …

  She was able to divert the pertinent data to her private frequency for later retrieval, deactivate the screen, and somehow find her way back through the maze she’d traveled to get here, back to the sunlight and the tram station and Mikal …

  … who was standing in the waiting area in quiet conversation with Sarek. It made no more sense than the news she had just received. The outside doors had barely closed behind her when Mikal glanced her way. That was where her memory refused to work correctly.

  She remembered stumbling. She remembered Mikal taking her arm to steady her. She remembered seeing Sarek’s lips move but being unable to hear his words past the sound of her own voice shouting …

  She awoke in her room in the house in ShiKahr. It was dark. A single lamp in one corner was the only source of light. Somewhere in the house she could hear Amanda and Sarek. They were doing something she had never heard them do before—not as a child, not as recently as before Sarek left for Earth and the trial. They were quarreling.

  “What were you thinking?” Amanda was saying softly—Amanda never raised her voice—but passionately. “The impact this could have on her career, her future!”

  “The physician who attended her was Vulcan. The matter was handled most discreetly.”

  “Discreetly’! You arranged for her to ‘lose consciousness’—with the help of a nerve pinch, no doubt; don’t try to tell me otherwise—in a public place, on the grounds of Starfleet Academy, then used your diplomatic influence to have her sedated by a private physician and spirited away. You might just as well have … I … I don’t know what else you could have done that would have been crazier.”

  She paused for breath.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked again.

  “If you must know, it was my thought that some …

  residual effect of her assistance to our son on Genesis …”

  Sarek’s voice trailed off. Despite the swimming in her head, Saavik tried to sit up, managing finally to prop herself on one elbow, the better to listen. She had never before known the senior diplomat to be at a loss for words.

  “Oh, spit it out!” Amanda said. “You can say the words. I’ve never understood how Vulcans can build an entire culture of secrecy around a perfectly normal biological function! Spock went through Pon farr on Genesis, and Saavik saved his life. There! I’m not embarrassed by the words. And you …”

  Here her tone softened. “You thought there might have been … consequences.”

  “Yes,” Sarek said after a time.

  Saavik heard Amanda exhale. “Well, then, in that case I suppose you did what you thought was right. But the healers found no … residual effect, as you put it. Something else must have triggered her outburst. Poor child! I advised her against taking an assignment again so soon. Legend may have it that Vulcans don’t suffer from nervous exhaustion, but whatever label you want to put on it, she needs rest.”

  “Indeed. She will have it now.”

  What did that mean? Despite the vertigo, Saavik managed to get to her feet and stagger as far as the doorway before she had to steady herself, vaguely noting that someone had taken care to dress her in one of her favorite sleeping robes and brush out her hair. Amanda, no doubt, tending to her for—how many days? Add that time to the days it had taken Sarek’s private shuttle to reach Vulcan. By now Chaffee had no doubt sailed without her, and Mikal—

  Chaffee would as easily have sailed without you if Lieutenant Eyris resolved her family problem on Denobula and resumed her rightful place as science officer, she reminded herself. And Mikal—

  —no doubt demanded to know where Sarek was taking you, and can find you if he chooses. You have more immediate problems right now.

  The vertigo conquered, she followed the voices to the main living area, her senses so heightened she could feel the grain of the polished stone floor beneath her bare feet. What she also felt was a growing rage.

  “How dare you!” she demanded of Sarek before either he or Amanda could react to her presence and say a word. “You had no right!”

  She did not bother to finish her thought, did not trust herself to speak it, did not trust Sarek’s reaction, considering how he had responded the last time she’d raised her voice at him. He had no right to bring her here, assume responsibility for her life, potentially ruin her career as Amanda had pointed out, all for what? To save himself the shame of hearing what had transpired on Genesis? To intervene in her relationship with a male she had chosen for herself without asking his permission? To, in any event, act in loco parentis when he had no such right?

  The thoughts whirled around her as she stormed back to her room, sealing the door to protect what little privacy she had left, dressing quickly and finding herself outside the wall, in the public thoroughfare, seeking transport to the place where Tolek’s body lay waiting for her to claim it.

  It was over quickly.

  There is a universal sameness to the places where the unclaimed dead lie in wait, regardless of the planet or the culture, a coldness to the places where they are kept in stasis, regardless of the climate or the ambient temperature the inhabitants find amenable.

  Even before she entered the mortuary, Saavik felt chilled, and not only from the weather in Nah’namKir, where the temperature when she arrived was around twenty degrees Celsius. A human would be quite comfortable, but the Vulcans who passed her as she walked from the transport station wore several layers of insulated clothing, something she had not considered in her haste. But that was not what was making her cold.

  Why was she overreacting this way? Her contact with Tolek since his reappearance in her life had been so minimal, yet she felt as if she had lost her oldest and dearest friend.

  Well, have you not? Until Spock came along, who else was there?

  The same healer who had sent her the communiqué met her at the entrance, and again she found herself walking down seemingly endless corridors, though this time there were no retinal scans, and the portals opened to the healer’s touch. Even knowing what lay within the hermetically sealed chamber, knowing from having read the other autopsy reports that there would be no marks on the body (though had she not seen enough carnage in her life to be unaffected if there were?), and that he would appear at first to be in repose, merely sleeping, forever.

  Seeing him now, a wan, inert thing on the mortuary slab, he who had protected her, rescued her under the most dire circumstances, and only once come t
o her for help, help that she had given grudgingly and from a distance when, with all the resources at her disposal, she might have, if not helped him solve his mystery, at least prevented this …

  She recalled the single tear that had trickled down her cheek as she watched Spock’s photon tube make its ponderous way down the track before it was jettisoned into space. If they had not been near enough to Genesis for it to be caught in its gravity well … Another “if” she could not tolerate.

  She couldn’t bear it, not again. She could not!

  This time her breakdown had no words, only sound, a noise that was deep, guttural, animal. It had barely freed her throat before she caught herself at the edge of the table to keep her knees from buckling. Was the room spinning around her or was it she who was moving, flailing around, smashing lab equipment, cursing in every language she knew until the healer managed to summon an assistant and together they were able to restrain her and …

  This time when she awoke, she was not alone. One minute Tolek was there, alive and speaking to her, explaining that it was all a ploy—albeit a bad one, and he apologized—to get her attention, make her take the matter more seriously. Then Spock replaced him, the Spock she had known before Genesis—wise, patient, the calm that balanced chaos—and he too was speaking, though she could not hear the words, and then …

  She’d been sedated again, apparently, sequestered in a remote part of the city’s main hospice, not imprisoned, exactly—she was certain she would find the door unlocked if she’d been able to reach it—but by implication given to understand that she was not on her own recognizance and someone would have to come for her before she was free to leave. She tried to sit up but couldn’t, didn’t remember dozing, but she must have, because where first Tolek and then Spock and then emptiness had been, there was Amanda, sitting patiently at her bedside. It took her a moment to realize this was not illusion.

  “I cannot …” was all she managed to say.

  “Of course you can’t,” Amanda said, one hand on her brow as if feeling for a fever, or perhaps initiating a light meld; for all the human’s protestations, Saavik had always suspected that Amanda’s esper skills were greater than she let on. “No one but you, and perhaps my son, would expect to push themselves beyond their own endurance.”

  “Cannot lose … anyone else …”

  “You won’t,” Amanda said with a touch of steel, stroking Saavik’s hair and then withdrawing, hands primly in her lap, willing to wait how ever long it might take.

  “Tolek …”

  “Will be interred among Sarek’s kin.” When Saavik looked surprised, she added. “He was obviously very important to you. No other reason need be given.”

  “I am responsible …” This time she did sit up, wrapping her arms around her knees to steady herself. “He would not be dead if I had believed him.”

  The whole story came pouring out then, from the chance meeting in the marketplace that was perhaps not chance at all, to the moment she had lost control in the mortuary. Amanda listened without speaking until she was certain Saavik was done.

  “What could you have done to change any of that?” she asked at last.

  Saavik scowled. Was it the lingering effect of the sedation that made it impossible for her to think clearly?

  “I suppose you feel compelled to blame yourself,” Amanda said mildly, studying her hands. “Humans often do that when they can’t control a situation. It rather surprises me from you, though.”

  A flicker of anger swept the fog out of the corners of her mind, but rather than lash out again (At Amanda? Was she that much out of control?), she forced herself to calm and said, “Perhaps I should have listened to you. Do you think the savants at Amorak will accept me after … after all this?”

  “In its time, Amorak has sheltered brigands and reprobates of all stripes and transformed them into sages,” Amanda said with a smile. “I think they would welcome one whose only crime was caring.”

  The food was bland enough to make fasting easy, almost mandatory. The long refectory tables, the bowed heads, each individual lost in his or her own thoughts, the silence punctuated only by the sound of spring water poured from carafe to cup, the scrape of utensil against bowl were all too familiar even as they were alien. Was it her fate to end her life as she had begun it … what was the word humans used? Institutionalized?

  Was it the thought or the food that brought the wave of nausea that made her set aside her spoon and hope no one noticed? What was the protocol for not finishing the food one had been given? A human classmate at the Academy had told her once of an ancient Earth tradition known as “Eat everything on your plate because there are children starving in China.” Vulcans, who had eliminated the climatological and political reasons for hunger in the time of Surak knew that molecules returned to molecules, it was all star stuff, and that which was not eaten would decompose and be born again in the endless recycling of a universe, and there was no guilt attached.

  And yet, someone had grown this, harvested it, prepared it, served it. Was the fact that she was expected to rise with the dawn tomorrow and, following the first meditation, to repair to the grain fields or the orchards or the hydroponic gardens to participate in this process, and that over the course of her stay here she would participate in all aspects of this simple life as well—harvesting crops, preparing meals, scrubbing floors, the only material difference between here and the facility on Hellguard that she could see in her first hours here being that the propaganda films had been replaced by meditation—sufficient excuse for leaving the table without finishing?

  She watched others finish and return their empty dishes to the kitchen area. What was one to do if one could not finish?

  “If thee has not hunger, it is illogical, and perhaps unhealthy, to continue to eat,” the ancient beside her said so quietly no one but she could hear him.

  Simar, she recalled, and was about to thank him, when with a motion so subtle one would have had to be looking directly at him to see it, his deceptively tremulous hands reached sideways and exchanged his empty bowl for hers, and he said, in the same low voice, “Alternatively, when one is still hungry at the end of a meal, it is logical to seek further sustenance.”

  His eyes were so pale they were almost white, his face so withered from decades in the desert that his eyes had almost disappeared, and yet he emanated such compassion she found it almost overwhelming. Was it that which caused her to rise perhaps too abruptly from the long table, or was it the memory of Tolek in the marketplace, devouring her unfinished plaberry pastry as if he had not eaten for days?

  The shrine had originally been a fortress in the violent times, dug directly into a cliff face and expanded over the centuries by means of a honeycomb of corridors and inner chambers. Some of the ancient carvings—friezes of sieges and battles, faces contorted in agony, piles of corpses—had been left in place as a reminder never to return to those times. The walls were anywhere from meters to kilometers thick on the mountain side, hence soundproof, weighty, as if the mountain were a living thing holding the inhabitants in its embrace, warm in places where ancient lava flows still made their sluggish way deep underground, cool in others. Saavik let her hand trail over the stone as she walked, feeling the contrast—warm and cool, warm and cool, warm and cool—so temperate compared to the alternating rage and cold anger she was feeling.

  Yes, feeling. She was nothing Vulcan at the moment. But if she was not Vulcan, what was she? The alternative only made her angrier.

  “Will you allow yourself to be ruled by mere genetics?”

  The voice was Spock’s, reminiscent of the many challenges with which he had honed her logic when she was younger.

  “Did you not?” In public she was always deferential to him as a mentor, but when they were alone she confronted him as a peer. “I have seen how you try to deny one-half of your heritage, though it is nurturing. Mine was nothing nurturing. Do I not have the right to do as you do?”

  “I had hoped to
spare you some of the … uneasiness I have experienced.”

  “‘Uneasiness’?” That merited an eyebrow. “One can hardly dismiss Kolinahr as merely ‘uneasy.’”

  Now he was the one to raise an eyebrow. “Explain.”

  Her chin was stubborn, and yet it trembled.

  “I will not judge that which transpired before I knew you.” He had been at Gol while she was still on Hellguard. “But some might say you ran away.”

  “Do you say that?”

  “I only wish to know how one can run away from something that exists inside one.”

  No! she thought, stopping in her headlong rush to …

  where? She steadied herself against one wall of the shrine that was particularly warm beneath her touch. That conversation had never taken place in the real. Kolinahr was not a matter to be discussed lightly. She would not have thrown that in his face.

  You are overcompensating, she told herself, for the emptiness where Spock once was, where Spock may never be again, regardless of the fal-tor-pan. But these are daydreams, projections, unworthy of the Spock who went before. You have much work yet to do.

  Amanda is correct about one thing. The answer lies here, where you are, where you can rest and seek the answers in your mind. The shrine, the regimen, the hot springs will heal you. As with Starfleet, you require order, discipline, even a uniform, if one can call traditional Vulcan robes a uniform. Everyone here wears the same, eats the same, follows the same path, even if it is only for a time.

  How long will you stay here, and where will you go next? Back to Starfleet—if they’ll have you, after the scene in the tram station—or perhaps deeper into the realm of the mind?

  Is there a Kolinahr at the crossroads of your future?

  “Those are the orders, Mikal,” Captain Mironova said, unnecessarily, really, since Mikal had the padd in his hand and could read them for himself. “We’re due for departure in three days. That’s not enough time for me to replace you if you decide to go walkabout, but it would be nice to have at least one experienced scientist from the original expedition return to Deema III with us. Eyris is back, but she’ll need to be brought up to speed. Don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be.”