She stood then, her ankle joints cracking slightly and, deliberately turning away from him, leaving herself vulnerable—no need for undetectable methods of killing out here; he need only leave her to the predators—slowly withdrew the blade from where she had concealed it at her waist, using it to cut a section from a cactus taller than her head whose trunk showed recent regrowth where she had cut segments before. Carefully trimming away the spines, she began to carve out the pulp, sucking the juice, eating fastidiously. The entire process took several minutes, during which time she either had her back to him or the knife was engaged. Her wordless message was unmistakable. I am not afraid of you. Go or stay or die where you stand; it matters not to me!
“I have brought food and water,” he said only after she’d begun to eat, raising his voice slightly, as if he
felt he had to speak loudly to hold her attention, though they were only a few meters apart. “I’m willing to partake of both first to assure you none of it’s poisoned.”
“Or that you have built up an immunity to the poison over time.” She shrugged, still chewing. “Food need not be actually poisoned to be tainted.”
“Ah. So everything about me is tainted? How dramatic!” It was his turn to raise an eyebrow, and slowly, his gestures elaborate, almost mimetic, so she’d know he wasn’t reaching for a weapon, to remove a water flask from a carry bag concealed beneath his cloak.
She ignored him, finished the segment of cactus as if it were the most delectable thing she’d ever eaten. When there was nothing left but the tough outer skin, she walked a distance—again with her back to him—and buried this near the edge of the pool. Let the insects have it, but not too near her camp. Returning to her flat rock, she drove the knife blade into the sand several times to clean it, then put it away, continuing to watch him, but as she might have watched one of the bats, with mild curiosity but no genuine engagement.
“You’re so certain I am responsible for the deaths of your … compatriots.” He seemed to find this amusing, shaking his head slightly, as if at some private joke. “And I suppose you think I’ll stand here until the sun comes up. I won’t, you know, and if I leave, I won’t return. Say I did kill them. What do you think I’ll do when I depart? Do you want more deaths on your conscience?”
His twisted morality intrigued her. By his reasoning, either she would do what he wanted, or he would return to killing, and the blame would be hers.
“And, no, I’m confident you won’t kill me, not yet, anyway,” he said to her unasked question, putting away the flask when it was clear she wasn’t interested, and presuming to sit uninvited on a boulder slightly higher than where she was seated, just at the edge of what she might consider her personal space. Did he think this gave him the advantage, or did he sense she had planned it this way? “If you’d wanted to kill me outright, you’d have done that the moment I appeared. And you won’t kill me now, because you need to know why. Who am I, other than a name? Why did I kill the others? Did they possess some secret that needed to be silenced? Other than the terrible secret of their origins, of course. Do you also possess that secret, you wonder, without even being aware of it? Nothing so complicated, I’m afraid. I sought them out only as a way of getting to you.
“Still not interested?” he asked off her silent stare. “Pity.”
He shifted his weight on the rock as if settling in for the duration. Saavik could see him more clearly now, though the shadows still concealed his eyes. He seemed familiar, though that did not surprise her. It was logical that his masters would have selected him because the shape of his face so closely resembled the one she saw in the mirror on the rare occasion when she indulged such vanity.
Focus! Do not let anything about him distract you!
“Let me tell you a story,” he began. “You may listen or not as you choose …”
Romulan scientists had devoted generations of research to weeding out “undesirable” genetic traits in their populations and fostering desirable ones, and extensive ancestral and biogenetic records were kept on every Romulan from birth. It was for this reason that a young nonentity named Narak found himself summoned to the Bureau of Sciences and offered what his summoners referred to as an “opportunity.”
At the time, he was an enlisted man with an undistinguished career, no family connections, and thus, essentially no future. In addition, had he refused the “opportunity” without so much as learning what it was, it was doubtful that once he’d left the building—assuming he’d been permitted to leave—he’d have gotten halfway across the public square without meeting with an unfortunate accident. Cautiously, weighing his limited options, he had indicated an interest in this “opportunity.”
All that was required of him, he was informed by the panel of anonymous scientists who had summoned him—he was almost certain he recognized the voice of one from public broadcasts, though in retrospect her voice might have been as easily disguised as the face hidden in shadow as they all were—was the donation of tissue samples and other “genetic material,” and his silence. The procedures were painless, he was assured, could be performed immediately, and he would be on his way back to his unit before his superior officer had noticed his absence. The panel would give him a moment to decide.
What was there to decide? For the first time in his undistinguished life, he had something that someone else wanted. If the gods had chosen to provide him with an ideal genetic array and the chance to use it to his advantage, who was he to refuse such largesse?
“It’s always easy to cast blame when one does not know the whole story,” he said, his voice still too loud. “Is it logical to blame someone for what is done in his name when he does not know about it? For all I knew, they would use my blood and tissue to cure illness or prolong life. Would you not have done the same? Oh, I’m sure within your Federation such things are a matter of choice, so you wouldn’t have any idea what it’s like not to have the option of refusal.”
What did he expect from her? she wondered. Pity, understanding, acceptance? Whatever it was, it was not hers to give. She thought of Tolek, refusing to accept the bullying of a proctor, refusing to cry out as his fingers were crushed in the cabinet door, thought of Spock and his personal Kobayashi Maru. There was always the option of refusal. She damped down the urge to ask him if he’d have been drugged, his tissues taken by force, if he’d refused. She was afraid he might say yes, and she might be tempted to forgive him.
Having made his “donation,” he had suddenly found doors opened for him that had been closed before. His lack of family no longer mattered. Able now to choose any career path he wished, he chose a safe one as a bureaucrat, little more than a bookkeeper at first, but a keeper of secrets as well. Those secrets, he hoped, would one day make him powerful. Leave the posturing and flamboyance, the challenges and duals and assassinations, to others. Information would be his weapon.
He was bright, thorough, unobtrusive, yet able to say the right things to his superiors in a way that made them nod and smile when he was speaking but forget he existed as soon as he had left the room. As he rose through careful promotion, never drawing attention to himself but always moving upward, he began to be entrusted with highly classified material. That was where he learned of what could only be called a Romulan Lebensborn program.
“Are you familiar with the term? It’s from some Earther language—don’t ask me which one—and while Earthers didn’t invent the concept, they have tried more perhaps than any other species to perfect it. In fact, as I understand it, several survivors of the last known human eugenics program caused your mentor’s death not too long ago.”
How was it possible he knew about Khan? Had she no secrets? Or was it simply that Spock and Enterprise were so well known that news of his death had traveled as far as the empires?
“Children were bred and born, some to volunteers, some by way of prisoners—Romulan criminals and Vulcan captives like the ones on the misbegotten planetoid where you spent your early years—who had
desirable genetic traits. Those who ‘bred true,’ that is, those who possessed whatever particular traits the scientists were seeking at the time, were adopted into important families. Those who were deemed ‘flawed’ … am I boring you?”
For a second time she had turned her back on him. Conveying that she cared not whether he continued talking or lapsed into silence, went or stayed or was eaten by a le-matya, she had begun to gather reeds from the edges of the pool, cutting only the driest ones with the intention of making a fire. At the same time, still not entirely convinced he wasn’t trying to lull her into complacency, her message was clear, My back may be to you, and you may think me off guard, but the knife and the skills with which I use it are equally sharp!
Behind her, she heard him laugh again. It was a humorless sound, more disdain than amusement, but even his disdain rang hollow. She knew where his narrative was going and wished he’d get on with it.
“Living like an animal all this time, and now you choose to undergo some ritual of civilization? What are you trying to prove?”
She ignored him, hearing him drink from the water flask again before he went on.
“By now you’ve intuited something of what this narrative has to do with you,” he said wetly. Without looking she could picture him wiping those full lips with the back of his hand, perhaps even spilling a few precious drops into the sand, and she wondered if what was in the flask was only water. “I’ll be brief. Offspring who proved less than optimal were eliminated—some euthanized, some dumped on colony worlds, though Hellguard was the worst of those.”
She had scooped a depression in the sand and lined it with stones. Now she arranged the reeds so that the fire would be sheltered from the desultory wind and reached into her sash—her gestures almost as elaborate as his had been in reaching for the water flask, to show she was not going for a weapon—and retrieved a palm-sized fire starter. Suddenly she was aware that he was on his feet, moving toward her. She gritted her teeth to keep from reaching for the knife. Not yet.
“So, not quite mad after all,” he observed. “A madwoman wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to bring a fire starter with her when she stormed away from the shrine. You planned this meeting almost as carefully as I did.”
She glanced up to find him standing quite close by, looking down at her in a way that made her flesh crawl. At last she could see his eyes, as large and dark and luminous as her own. Almost convincing.
“Looking at you, one cannot imagine what those who rejected you were thinking,” he mused. “What possible imperfection did they think they saw under their microscopes? Whatever it was, it caused them not to kill you outright. Perhaps in addition to all the other perversities perpetuated on Hellguard, they allowed you to live in order to test your endurance. Had they not abandoned the colony when they did … Say something, anything, please.”
Intriguing, she thought, how he vacillated between mockery and what seemed to be a need for her approval. She glowered at him.
“It is an interesting fairy tale,” she suggested. “Far more palatable than ‘I raped your mother and abandoned you to starve.’”
He started visibly then, the careful mask slipping before he remembered who was supposed to have the upper hand here.
“Oh, you’re good!” he said, recovering himself, though not easily. “Grown to adulthood without knowing who your parents are, but you accept the revelation so casually?”
She’d been concentrating on getting the fire started. By now the first few wisps of smoke revealed a small flame, which she nurtured into permanence.
“You do accept that I’m your father?” he reiterated against her silence, and she thought, Good!
“If one fairy tale, why not another?”
Carefully, she fed the fire. She had given considerable thought to what gesture she would make when he arrived, and making a fire seemed the best choice. Not necessary for warmth so long after she’d acclimated herself to the cold desert nights, certainly not necessary for cooking now that she was accustomed to eating animal flesh, and raw, once more. Not even necessary to ward off predators, since nothing larger than a gli snake had threatened her in all this time. Why then?
Because there was something common to their ancestry that caused long-civilized Vulcans to retain firepots in their homes and gave Romulans an affectation toward lighting the corridors of public buildings with flaming torches. Something about fire made a Vulcanoid want to sit and talk. And despite her disclaimer, she needed him to keep talking.
So, he claimed to be her biological father. Not a very original ploy. Neither was his attempt to make her empathize with the hapless young soldier all but force-marched to the sperm bank to make his “donation.”
He sighed and retreated to his rock. “This is taking longer than I’d hoped. You don’t mind if I continue?”
But she was looking past him suddenly and, as suddenly, the knife left her hand (how it got from her sash to her hand to begin with he never saw, focused as he was on trying to read her thoughts in her careful face) and sailed past his left ear, causing him to scramble to his feet, his own weapon—a small Romulan disruptor, if she were to judge correctly from this distance—at the ready, too late.
She’d thrown the knife from where she’d been crouched over the fire. Now she got to her feet and strode past him as casually as if he were just another of the tall cacti gathered in a clump behind him, where her knife had fixed itself, pinning a variety of very large lepidoptera attracted by the firelight. Its palm-sized body was mostly liquid, but that liquid contained a few trace nutrients that long-ago desert dwellers had prized.
Twisting off the wings as she returned to the fire, she allowed them to flutter toward her visitor who now, realizing the knife had not been aimed at him, had put the disruptor away and was trying to recover his equilibrium. One colorful wing clung to his travel cloak, the other came to rest on one of his boots as Saavik sucked the moisture out of the moth’s body and dropped the remaining exoskeleton casually into the fire, where it flamed blue for a moment before disintegrating.
Her point had been made, and quite literally driven home. Now she knew how heavily he was armed and where he had secreted the disruptor. The fact that he’d reached for that meant he hadn’t brought an Honor Blade. Just so, she had the measure of him. Triumphant, she busied herself with gutting a gli snake she had killed the night before, preparing to roast it over the fire.
“Go on,” she challenged him as the snake meat began to sizzle. “You were about to tell your daughter another fairy tale …”
Doubtless the authorities had never intended him to discover what disposition had been made of his genetic material. Indeed, having required him to donate it, they’d quickly forgotten about him, leaving him free to use his employment for research purposes. As he worked his way up in the hierarchy, acquiring higher and higher clearances and access to greater and greater secrets, he learned the details of the program to breed superior offspring, and its various failures.
He began at great risk to himself to delve ever deeper into the files until he found that, indeed, his DNA had produced a single female offspring who, having been found “unacceptable” for reasons even his clearance level did not permit him to learn, had been spared elimination but relegated, along with a handful of others, to a distant colony world where their presence was only one of several horrors.
“From then on I became driven to find you. You cannot know the risks I incurred, burrowing through files, following one lead after another, hacking databases whose very existence should have been denied me. I will tell you only that it took the better part of a year to learn the name and location of the place where you and the others had been left in the care of those who were charged with keeping you fed and healthy until such time as … well, even the most hidden of files did not specify what was in store for you. I was haunted by the thought that I might not be in time. How I was to gain access to this place, much less retrieve you, was not something I could even p
ostulate. My thought was that I could somehow alter the files to indicate that there had been an error, and that Specimen 8390923 must be returned at once to the homeworld. Had I thought it through further, I’d have realized …”
His voice had become a monotone, soothing almost, if one did not heed the words, background noise like the chittering of the chiroptera lurking in the forks of the cacti ringing the clearing, curious but not daring to come too close because of the fire, whose light was reflected in the glowing coals of their eyes. Saavik busied herself with turning the spit on which the snake was roasting, the aroma of the meat, and that time in her life when it was a regular part of her diet evoking memories of Tolek and the others that she wished would go away. More than ever she wondered if there had been anything she might have done to prevent their deaths, since it was clear they’d been murdered on her account.
“… ultimately it did not matter because the colony had been abandoned and the planet eventually destroyed itself. Were I not in a position to learn more, I might have despaired, thinking you were dead. But I continued my search, based only on a sense that if you had died, blood of my blood, I would somehow have known.”
By that logic, how could you not have known I existed from the beginning? Saavik thought, not for the first time clenching her teeth to hold in the words. She wanted to lash out at him, make him stop speaking, but he was correct about one thing: Her curiosity would not allow it. She had to know.
Feigning a calm she did not feel, she lifted the spit from the fire and waited for the meat to cool enough to eat. Should she offer him some? The desert dweller’s traditional courtesy was the thought foremost in her mind as other parts of her brain hummed with the permutations of what would happen if he ever stopped temporizing and got to his real reasons for being here.
“Something told me you still lived, but how? I kept searching but found nothing.”
“Yet, you are here,” she said, meeting his eyes. Dark, like hers. Was he truly her father? He could be anyone. Did it matter? Was biology alone sufficient?
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 20