“What? That we were able to gather so much data, or that for once I credited everyone involved instead of hogging all the glory myself?”
“Yes,” she said without the slightest hesitation.
“It’s good to see you smile.”
“Is that what you perceive I was doing?”
“In your particularly Vulcan way. Sarek gave the V’Shar our data on the substance we found in the Kiral Valley.”
“That you found in the Kiral Valley.”
Mikal dismissed this with a gesture. “That we formulated as an antidote to the Romulans’ latest tricks. Your name’s going on that paper in tandem with mine.”
Her expression said it did not matter. Nevertheless, she was finding the conversation pleasing.
“Captain Mironova was correct,” she said as Mikal accepted another glass of champagne from a passing cadet, gesturing inquiringly toward hers, though she had not drunk from it.
Mikal gave her a puzzled look. “Correct about what?”
“At our first interview, she suggested a certain synchronicity in the contrasts between your scientific method and mine. This would suggest the potential for similar synergies in the future.”
Mikal laughed, turning heads at least in their immediate vicinity. Now it was Saavik’s turn to look puzzled.
“Is there something … humorous in what I just said?”
“I think I’ve just been propositioned.” Mikal finished his champagne in a single swallow, set down the empty glass, took her hand. “Walk with me …”
With no one pressing to speak with him at the moment, Ambassador Sarek watched them go. It had been in his mind to speak to Saavik, if not this evening, then soon, about her future. He had no doubt that, her sojourn with the V’Shar now complete, she would soon be leaving Vulcan and returning to Starfleet, where, he could more easily acknowledge now than he had with Spock so many years ago, she did in fact belong. Despite the many … interruptions, his intention to see her suitably bonded remained stronger than ever.
He could never repay her for what she had done for him. At the very least, could he not assist her in resolving this matter? He stopped himself. Had she not, in walking away in private, hand in hand with Mikal, indicated a determination, as she had since she was a child, to make her own choices?
“You’re pensive,” Amanda said quietly beside him.
“I have reached a decision,” he said in his characteristically abrupt manner, which had a tendency to startle those who did not know how much internal monologue accompanied it, and which he had found most effective in his career.
“Have you?”
“Childhood betrothal had its place in Vulcan’s past. It does not necessarily serve the present. Saavik must be free to choose for herself.”
“Good for you!” Amanda said in a tone that might be mistaken for sarcasm if one didn’t know the lifetime of affection that lay behind it. “Now may we say our good-byes? I have got to get out of these shoes.”
“We’ll be gone for a long time,” Mikal said. “More than two years, maybe three, maybe longer.”
Captain Mironova had announced earlier that Chaffee had just received new orders for an open-ended mission to the Beta Quadrant to backtrack the point of origin of what was believed to be the most significant of the Deema III rifts. The journey alone would take the better part of an Earth year.
Saavik had assumed Mikal would either return once more to Deema III or, in his restless manner, move on to the next project. She had given considerable thought to how she would respond when he told her where he was going next but was still uncertain what she would say.
“It should prove to be an extraordinary opportunity for you as a scientist,” was what she did say.
“We leave at the end of Tasmeen. Before that, though, I wanted you to know that I’m returning to Simeran for the first time since … since I left.”
“I do not believe I have heard you refer to your home planet by its true name before.”
“My home planet,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if the concept of a home had just now occurred to him. “I’ve never thought of it that way before. Not just as another dot on a starmap, not a nightmare of the past frozen in time, but a process, an evolving thing. You taught me that.”
“I?”
“I’ve never met anyone so free of self-pity. It helped me put my own into perspective. Come with?”
“To Simeran? I would be honored, but—”
“To the Beta Quadrant. Galina can pull some strings with Command. You started on this mission; it’s only logical that you follow through.”
She had assumed they would be going their separate ways after tonight. Spending the next several years together, living and working at close quarters with their contrasting personalities and methodologies had not occurred to her. Was this what she wanted?
“Galina’s right, you know,” he was saying. “You and I are a perfect balance for each other.”
“Scientifically, of course.”
“Of course.”
She hesitated. “I shall consider it.”
“That means no.”
“If I had meant no, I would have said—”
He waved away her objection, becoming a restless blur of movement, pacing, robes swirling, earrings jangling, eyes scanning everywhere except into her eyes.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” he was saying. “I also don’t believe that the future is written. There are so many reasons why you and I should never have met, and almost as many events that conspired to see that we did. Yes, I know,” he interrupted himself before she did. “That’s a completely unscientific assessment, but it’s all I’ve got. That and the fact that I never expected to fall in love with you.”
“Mikal—”
“No!” He stopped flailing about and came to rest, took her face gently between his hands. “If you were anyone else, I’d have been furious with you for going off into the desert, maybe even dying there, without telling me. But where I should have been angry, I was only frightened. Frightened for you, for us …”
“Mikal …”
How was she to put this? There were emotions she knew too well, primarily rage, and after that fear. But this one, this seeming most complex, inexplicable, and as potentially harmful as beneficial one, eluded her. Perhaps by the time Mikal returned from the Beta Quadrant, she would understand it better.
She held his hands between her own. “If I am to subscribe to your theory, there are also numerous reasons why it was necessary for me to go off into the desert at precisely the time I did. Without being able to tell you.”
“Flawlessly argued.” He sighed. “You’ll always have secrets, and that’s as it should be. That’s not the part that bothered me, but—”
“But it is not yet time,” she said, and whatever else he might have said, he didn’t. In that one moment, they understood each other completely.
He squeezed her hands, then released them, giving her his best winsome smile. “It’s a small universe. Is it logical to assume our paths will cross again?”
“Scientifically, of course.”
“Of course.”
Twenty
“Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide,” wrote T’plana-Hath in the before-time.
Spock had returned to Mount Seleya to pay a courtesy call on the priestess T’Lar. Isolated as she was within the realms of thought, she might not be aware of how well the re-fusion of his mind had succeeded, and he wanted her to know. Following their encounter, he thought he might revisit the computers in the training room, just to test himself against his last session and see how far he had progressed. He had not expected to find someone else there before him.
For reasons she could not explain, Saavik had returned to Mount Seleya as well. She was doing much as Spock had done following the re-fusion—looking for answers. She had the computers on silent mode, yet she spoke her answers aloud. Curious, Spock observed
his protégé without making his presence known.
“Gottfried Leibniz,” he heard Saavik say. “Seventeenth-century human philosopher, who perceived time as neither an event nor a thing, hence neither measurable in and of itself nor able to be traveled.”
Spock smiled. Had Leibniz had children? If so, he might have arrived at a different conclusion. Surely there was no better arbiter of time than watching a child come of age, this child in particular.
Hovering in the archway, Spock made no sound, yet somehow Saavik sensed his presence. She turned.
“My mentor, I did not expect …”
His gesture suggested that it was he, not she, who was the intruder here. And there was something more.
“Surely we no longer have need of titles, do we, Saavik?” Not Saavik-kam, she noted. “Where I might at one time have attempted to mentor you, it has been my experience that I have learned just as much from you. We are peers.”
As a child she had stood up to him, even defied him, making clear where the boundaries were. Why, as an adult, was she suddenly shy around him? This would not do.
He had crossed the threshold, stood beside her at the three computer consoles, contemplating the answers she had been seeking.
“One can only wonder what Leibniz would have thought if he had had the opportunity to travel aboard a starship,” he mused.
This whimsical way of looking at the universe was, Spock thought, something new, perhaps a resonance of Doctor McCoy’s mind in juxtaposition with his own. Then again, as his mother frequently pointed out, he was half human.
“Indeed,” Saavik ventured. “There is the temptation to consider his philosophy primitive, if one takes it out of context. Centuries from now, how primitive will our philosophy seem to those who follow?”
“Thus why it is necessary to leave oneself open to new thoughts, new ideas.”
“You are yourself again,” she observed. “This pleases me.”
“Perhaps almost as much as it pleases me?”
Humor, she thought, and together they left the training room to contemplate the stars from the promontory outside.
Neither spoke, neither touched, yet somehow their thoughts were the same. When she had first been accepted to the Academy, she had hoped for nothing more than the quiet life of a research scientist. But from the beginning Spock had seen in her a natural leadership ability and urged her to take command training in addition to the sciences. At the time, her sense of gratitude and not a little hero worship had led her to reluctantly agree.
Following the events on Genesis, having seen the kinds of decisions starship captains were sometimes forced to make and the terrible consequences if things went wrong, she had wanted to distance herself from command as much as possible.
Now, looking back on the decisions she had made—some by choice, some by necessity—she acknowledged Spock’s wisdom, his ability to see what she had at the time been unable to see for herself.
Enterprise, the new Enterprise, would retrieve Spock shortly, return him to where he knew, without any hesitation, that he belonged. While she was far less certain of her place in the universe, Saavik was certain that there was at least one place out there where she was always welcome.
This time she would leave Mount Seleya with more confidence. She would report to Starfleet HQ Vulcan and request clearance from Starfleet medical to return to duty. If Enterprise would have her, she would go, and take her place among the stars.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Margaret Clark, for swift and merciful editing. May the wind be at your back. Special thanks to Diacanu, for calling Mikal “a swashbuckler,” and thus making him visible. Homage to Robin Curtis, Susan Schwartz, and all Romulans, cloaked and visible. And of course, to Jack, ever and always.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margaret Wander Bonanno is the author of Dwellers in the Crucible, Strangers from the Sky, Catalyst of Sorrows, Burning Dreams, and Unspoken Truth, as well as Its Hour Come Round in the Mere Anarchy series, and “The Greater Good” in the Shards and Shadows anthology. She lives on the Left Coast.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 30