“Are you sleeping any better?” Carol said.
Jim hesitated between the truth and a lie. “I’m sleeping fine,” he said.
Carol gave him a quizzical glance, and he knew he had hesitated too long. She had held him too many times, when the nightmare slapped him awake in the darkest hours of the morning.
“If you want to talk about it ...” she said.
“No. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a clipped impatient tone. Talking about it would do nothing but give him an excuse to wallow in grief and regret. That was the last thing he needed, and the last thing Carol needed to hear. Besides, if he told Carol now that he still bolted out of sleep with a shout of pure fury, tangled in cold sweat-soaked bedding, surrounded by the shreds of dream, confusing darkness with being blind ... If he told her about trying to go back to sleep in the shabby, cramped traveler’s cubicle ... If he told her about lying wide awake and exhausted in the night, wishing desperately she was still beside him, then he would seem to be asking her to take him back out of pity instead of love.
“No,” he said again, more gently, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Still holding hands, they reached the small park and set out along the path that circled the lake. Ducks swam alongside them, quacking for a handout.
“We always forget to bring them anything,” Carol said. “How many times have we walked here—we always meant to bring them some bread, but we never did.”
[9] “We had ... other things on our minds.”
“Yes.”
“Carol, there’s got to be some way—!”
He cut off his words when he felt her tense.
“Such as what?” she said.
“We could—we could get married.”
She looked at him; for a moment he thought she was going to burst out laughing.
“What?” she said.
“Let’s get married. We could transport to Spacedock. Admiral Noguchi could perform the ceremony.”
“But why marriage, for heaven’s sake?”
“That’s the way we do it in my family,” Jim said stiffly.
“Not in mine,” Carol said. “And anyway, it still wouldn’t work.”
“It’s worked for quite a number of generations,” Jim said, though in the case of his own parents the statement stretched the truth. “Carol, I love you. You love me. You’re the person I’d most want to be with if I were stranded on a desert planet. We have fun together—remember when we went to the dock and snuck on board the Enterprise for our own private tour—” At her expression, he stopped. “It’s true.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s true. And I’ve missed you. The house is awfully quiet without you.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“No. We talked about this too many times. No matter what we do, it wouldn’t make any difference. I can’t be with you and you can’t stay with me.”
“But I could. I could transfer to headquarters—”
“Jim ...” She turned to face him. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes. “I remember how you felt when you found out you’re getting command of the Enterprise. Do you think anyone who loved you would want to take that away from you? Do you think you could love anyone who tried?”
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you, either. But I lost you before I ever met you. I can get used to the quiet. I can’t get used to having you back for a few weeks at a time and losing you over and over and over again.”
[10] He kept seeking a different solution, but the pattern led him in circles and he could find no way out.
“I know you’re right,” he said, miserable. “I just ...”
Tears silvered Carol’s dark blue eyes.
They kissed each other, one last time. She held him. He laid his head on her shoulder with his face turned away, because he, too, was near tears.
“I love you, too, Jim,” she said. “But we don’t live on a desert planet.”
On the marshy bay side of the island, where the shore and the shallow warm saltwater met and blended, mangrove trees reached out onto the black mud flats. The tide receded, leaving behind a rich rank odor. Night fell and earth’s moon rose, full, silvering the dark water and the black mud.
Commander Spock of Starfleet, science officer of the starship Enterprise, citizen of the planet Vulcan, watched and smelled and listened to the marsh. The undeveloped side of the island showed no evidence of human or other sentient presences. The rich ecosystem fascinated him. The dopplered whine of mosquitoes, rising as the insects approached him, falling as they fled, formed a background to the low cries of owls and the sharp sonar of bats. He could trace their flight by the whisper of their wings. The owls flew with a feathery swoop, the bats in a series of abrupt direction changes. A snake slid from shore to water, the sound of its long, smooth slither barely changing as it made the transition. On the tide flats, small crabs danced. The claws of a fat raccoon scraped mangrove bark; its paws padded on the mud; its teeth crunched. In the morning, nothing would be left of the captured crab but a small pile of crumbled shell.
The local inhabitants of the island claimed cougars still lived here, but Spock suspected they made the claim for the benefit of tourists.
Toward dawn, a blue heron sailed out of the dark sky and plashed into the shallows. It stalked over the water, feet and beak poised. Spock wondered what it was hunting. He took off his boots and rolled up his pants and waded into the thick silty water. He could feel the vibrations of living creatures through the soles of his feet, like a constant low electrical current. His toe encountered a hard shape, which he picked [11] up and swished through the water to wash off the worst of the mud.
The mollusk was about half the length of his thumb, a univalve, its shell patterned delicately in black and white. Its body tapered to a point and its apex spiraled to a peak in a series of small sharp points. The creature itself had retreated inside the shell, drawing its horny operculum tight into the opening. Spock stood motionless till the gastropod gradually thrust out its feelers, its head, its body, and crawled across his hand.
Spock returned the king’s crown to the bay and started back to the conference center, taking the long way around the tip of the island. The marsh gave way to the ocean side: white sand, dune grass, palms. As the sun cleared the horizon, he reached a secluded beach. He went for a long, hard swim, testing himself against the currents.
As a child Spock had not learned to swim. His home planet, Vulcan, spun hot and sere around its ancient scarlet sun. Large bodies of open water were rare on Vulcan, for the world retained barely enough water to sustain its ecosystem. Early the first morning of the conference, before anyone else had risen, he took himself off alone and gingerly attempted to swim. His tall spare body was not naturally buoyant, but after a few floundering false starts he managed to stay afloat. Once he figured out how to make forward progress, his skill increased rapidly.
Several kilometers from shore he paused to tread water. The tip of the island was a thin white streak of beach and a thin green streak of vegetation. Eyes open, he let himself sink beneath the water. A meter beneath the surface, a barracuda gazed at him stonily, its powerful silver torpedo form motionless except for the occasional flick of a fin. Spock knew it to be a ferocious predator. He searched his mind for fear; he found none. Vulcans trained themselves to maintain an emotionless state of equanimity under all conditions: Spock continually tested himself against that ideal. He resisted fear and pain; with equal determination he resisted pride and despair, joy and grief, and love.
One moment the barracuda peered at Spock, the next it vanished. Its streamlined shape cut through the sea with barely a motion, and Spock was alone. Perhaps the [12] barracuda had no interest in the copper-based green blood of an alien; or perhaps it simply was not hungry.
He swam to shore, toweled off the saltwater and smoothed down his short black hair, dressed, and crossed the beach. White san
d gave way to dune grass; dune grass gave way to trees and shade. A few human people already lay on the sand, exposing themselves to the sun. Humans had evolved beneath this yellow star. Unlike Vulcans, they possessed some natural protection against ultraviolet radiation. Nevertheless, Spock thought they took an unnecessary risk. Some wore bathing costumes, which struck him as ridiculous: inadequate protection from the sun on the one hand, an obstruction to swimming on the other. He saw no point to the use of clothing as decoration.
Though it was broad daylight when he reached the conference center, the lobby was deserted. Most of the other participants had either left after the presentation of the final papers the day before, or they had partied late into the night and now still slept. Deltan people, particularly, showed a considerable tolerance for engaging in intellectual discussions all day and carousing most of the night. They did their celebrating in a private group, however, claiming they could not risk damage to other beings with frailer emotional capacities. The other beings, including human people, apparently took this as a challenge. The resultant commotion helped Spock decide to avoid the wild portions of the conference center and spend most nights exploring the wild portions of the island instead.
“Excuse me, Commander Spock? You have a package.”
Spock went to the desk. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to send it rather than to have it synthesized locally; messenger stamps covered the wrapping. Spock accepted the package. His mother’s handwriting addressed it.
He took it to his cabin and regarded it curiously before breaking the seals. Though he had been on earth, and on Spacedock in high earth orbit, for some months, and though his parents currently resided on earth, he had neither visited nor called them. Sarek, his father, the Vulcan ambassador, disapproved of Spock’s decision to join Starfleet. The breach in their relationship extended over some years, now; [13] as he saw no way to heal it, Spock accepted it. He seldom communicated with his mother, either. Unlike his father, she could accept his making decisions about his own life. She never tried to win him to Sarek’s point of view. But the disagreement between her husband and her son put her in an awkward middle position. Though Spock did not admit to feeling any pain over their estrangement, he was not indifferent to the feelings of his mother.
People who looked at Spock saw a tall, slender man of completely controlled physical power; green-tinged complexion, upswept black eyebrows and deep-set dark eyes, smooth black hair cut in straight short bangs, ears tapering up to points: a Vulcan. Or so most people perceived him. But his blood was not completely alien to the seas of this world, for his mother, Amanda Grayson, was a human being. She possessed all the feelings and emotions of a human being. Though he wished his mother could escape her feelings, Spock knew that the tension between him and Sarek hurt her deeply. His only solution, unsatisfactory as it might be, was to stay away.
He opened the package. It contained a short note of greeting that wished him well, made no mention of his silence, and hardly hinted at the intense emotions behind it. Only the signature broke the cool tone: “Love, Amanda.”
The package contained a shirt of brown silk velvet embroidered with gold at the neck and sleeves. Spock gazed at it, wondering what had possessed his mother to send it to him. It was the sort of garment one might wear to a party, and surely Amanda knew that he attended only the parties he could not avoid, parties to which he would be required to wear Starfleet formal dress. Being human, his mother was more subtle and less directly logical than a Vulcan. That did not necessarily make her actions less meaningful or less comprehensible. Spock understood, after a moment, that she hoped for him to find other rewards in his life than his work. She wished him happiness.
He tried the shirt on. Of course it fit. He had to admit that he found the texture of the fabric aesthetically pleasing. He folded the gift into its package and slipped it in with his other belongings, among the memory modules and a bound copy of the paper he had presented.
[14] His vacation had ended; it was time to return to the Enterprise.
Cadet Hikaru Sulu danced back, sprang forward in a lunge, and retreated before his opponent’s saber could score the winning touch. He lunged, lunged again—and the scoreboard flashed the final touch of the final match of the Inner Planets all-around fencing championship.
The referee awarded the point, the saber match, and the championship to Cadet Hikaru Sulu.
Almost oblivious to the reaction of the audience, gasping for breath, his heart pounding after the long and intense match, Hikaru raised his mask and saluted his opponent. He had competed against her in the intercontinental championships, when he became the first Starfleet Academy fencer in ten years to win a place on the pan-earth team. Her school took most of the other positions, and she was team captain. He had never beaten her before.
She stood with her head down and her saber hanging by her side. She had won this competition two years running. She owned it, by right and by tradition as well as by training. She belonged to one of the most powerful families in the Federation, an aristocracy of old money and old accomplishment. Fencing was their sport. How dare a Starfleet Academy fencer, a provincial, practically a colonist, come in and think he could destroy her sweep?
When she raised her mask, she looked so angry, so stunned, that he feared she would leave the floor without observing the conventions of politeness.
He extended his ungauntleted hand to his opponent. She always moved gracefully, athletically, but now she had to force herself to stiffly shake his hand.
On the sidelines, Hikaru tried to think of something to say to her, but she flung her mask and saber and gauntlet on the floor and shrugged off the coach’s consolation.
She glared at Hikaru. “You illiterate peasant!” she snarled. Followed by her teammates, her admirers, and the coach, she stalked into the locker room.
“ ‘Illiterate peasant’—?” Hikaru was tempted to quote a few lines of poetry. If his opponent’s parents, whose families had done nothing within living memory but protect their [15] positions, had literary pretensions, then their library shelves probably held a copy of one of Hikaru’s father’s books. Fire in Frost, maybe, or Nine Suns.
Probably, Hikaru thought sullenly, an unread copy.
One team member lagged behind. “Proud of yourself?”
“Yes,” Hikaru said. “I am.” For all his opponent’s lack of grace in losing, she was the best saber fighter he had ever seen. He had not expected to beat her.
“She would’ve been the first fencer to take the saber championship all three years.”
“What do you expect me to do?” Hikaru asked angrily. “Fall on my sword in remorse?”
The team member scowled and strode away.
Hikaru had believed if he were good enough, they would accept him. They would forget his lack of position and his poverty and respect him for his accomplishments. He had been foolish to believe that. He had no chance of being accepted; he had never had a chance. Even if his parents’ careers were lucrative, which they were not, only the old money and the old positions and the old connections counted.
Despite himself, Hikaru started to laugh. Finally, the snobbery had passed beyond the limits of pain. Finally, he could only find his teammates hilarious, and, in a strange way, pitiful.
Right after the medal ceremony, he put his weapons in their case and returned to the Academy dorm to study.
Because his mother worked as a consulting agronomist, his family had moved from world to world throughout his childhood. His education had been thorough in some subjects and nonexistent in others. Classes at the Academy were a constant struggle to catch up punctuated by an occasional subject that he could have taught better than the professor.
Starfleet had granted him the assignment he requested, but his being allowed to take it depended on his commission, and his commission depended on his final grades for the final term. He had to do better than just scraping through.
With the championship medal cold
in one hand and his weapons case heavy in the other, with his teammates off somewhere mourning their champion’s loss instead of [16] celebrating his victory, he wondered again if he should have quit the team months ago. He would have had more time in which to study. But the truth was he loved to fence, and the training gave him the energy to keep on studying. And maybe it kept him sane. Even early on, when he first realized he was competing in the chosen sport of a completely different social group, he enjoyed fencing too much to quit.
Now, a week later, near dawn, Hikaru strolled along a beach, kicking away the memories of the championship match as he kicked the damp sand. At the edge of the sea, a glassy sheet of water swept across a scattering of smooth-worn and ageless pebbles. The sea and the sand and the wind and the small polished stones at the waterline all sparkled with a cold hint of autumn.
He had won the championship, and the grade; he had his commission and he had his assignment. He was done with the fencing, done with the finals, done with the Academy.
He returned to his beach camp, where smoke from the fire crosscut the brilliant salt tang. Sparks flew when he threw another piece of driftwood on the fire.
He sat down and leaned against a huge storm-burnished piece of driftwood, an uprooted cedar tree polished to silvery gray. The sun’s edge cleared the horizon, rising into air too pure and sky too clear to explode into sunrise. In the east, the sky lightened. Overhead, it glowed an intense indigo. In the west, the stars still glittered in the night.
Only a few hours remained of his leave, only a few hours more of peace and solitude and learning about his home world. He had been born on earth, but raised on a dozen alien worlds. He had spent the last three years here, but study and practice had taken all his time till now.
He had chosen to spend his leave by the ocean not because he particularly wanted to, but because he could afford neither the time nor the money to go offworld. At the age of twenty, he had seen mountains higher than the Himalayas, deserts wider and dryer and crueler than the Sahara, all manner of wonders, planetary and stellar. Stories of earth’s splendors never impressed him.
STAR TREK: TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure Page 2