“This is hardly the time to criticize Spock!” Kirk said angrily. “Or to deplore Murphy’s Law, for that matter.”
“What is ‘Murphy’s Law’?”
“ ‘Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.’ ”
“How apropos.”
“What do we do to make things right?”
“It may already be too late.”
“Sarek—!”
Sarek gazed at the frozen screen in silence.
“The fact that Doctor McCoy retains even a semblance of sanity gives me some cause for hope. You are fortunate that you failed in your plan to burn my son like a barbarian chieftain. Had it succeeded, McCoy would surely be lost to us by now. The mind and the body are not a duality, they are parts of a whole. If one is destroyed, the other must disintegrate. If they are separated…the greater the distance, the greater the strain, until it becomes intolerable.”
“The strain on McCoy, you mean.”
“Precisely.”
“What must I do?”
“You must recover Spock’s body from the Genesis world,” Sarek said. “You must bring it, and Doctor McCoy, to Mount Seleya, on Vulcan. Only there is the passage possible. Only there can both find peace.”
“What you ask,” Kirk said, “is difficult.”
“You will find a way, Kirk. If you honor them both, you must.”
Kirk glanced again at the frozen image of his two closest friends.
“I will,” he said. “I swear it.”
Even before Jim Kirk and Sarek had left the records storage center, the questions the ambassador had left unanswered began to trouble Jim.
“Sarek,” he said, “if I succeed in what you ask…will Spock know? I mean—will he be aware of himself? Will he retain his individuality?”
“He will not be as you knew him,” Sarek said.
“I understand that!” Kirk said. The lessons of the mind-meld remained fresh in his consciousness. “That wasn’t my question.”
“Your question is one that cannot be answered in a few simple words, Kirk. There is no time—”
“I’ll take the time!”
Sarek regarded him coolly. “Will you take ten years of your life? First you must learn to speak Vulcan, and then you must dedicate yourself to study. In ten years you might approach the simplest questions of this philosophy…and the question you have asked is far from the simplest.”
“Ambassador, with all due respect—that explanation is getting pretty stale! ‘I cannot answer your question because humans are too immature to understand. Humans are too uncivilized—’ ”
“I said nothing against humans. Do you forget that Spock’s mother is human? She has studied the discipline of ancient thought these many years. She has earned a place among the adepts and the teachers. Granted, she is extraordinary. But even you might reach a moderate level of comprehension—”
“I get the picture,” Kirk said, irritated. “It still comes down to, ‘None of your business.’ Is that what I’m supposed to say to Harry Morrow, when I ask him to bend regulations into the fourth dimension?”
“You must say what you think best,” Sarek said, without irony.
Hikaru Sulu leaned forward in his leather armchair.
“Admiral, I—”
“No!” Kirk said sharply. “Don’t answer me now. I want you to think it over first.”
The image of James Kirk faded abruptly from the ’phone screen.
On the surface, what Kirk had asked Sulu to do was not very difficult. A volunteer mission, a few days out, a few days back. But if worse came to worst, the consequences could be grave. Kirk had not softpedaled the most severe of the possibilities.
Kirk’s intensity troubled Hikaru. It was Kirk who had first commented on the crew’s obsession with the death of Spock, and now he himself seemed obsessed and driven. What he hoped to accomplish was not entirely clear to Hikaru—who had the definite impression that Kirk was not clear on the details, either.
But it was certain that Kirk felt responsible for Spock’s death, and that he could not accept it. Hikaru believed Kirk had taken on this mission to expiate the guilt he felt, and he understood Kirk well enough to know that he would never be free of the guilt, or of his grief, until he completed what he had sworn to do.
Cold rain skittered against the window. Hikaru sat in the dark for an hour, thrashing questions around in his mind.
He admitted to himself that he feared for James Kirk’s sanity.
The house was very quiet. He shared it with four other people, but tonight he was the only one home. He was, in fact, the lone member of the household on Earth. Only rarely was everyone home at the same time, but even more rarely was everyone else gone.
I shouldn’t be home, either, he thought. Dammit!
He got up and went out the back door into the garden. Without his noticing, the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared. The full moon was risen halfway to its zenith. The wet lawn felt cold against his bare feet and the air was ozone-washed. In the near distance, the sea rushed against the shore and away.
His mind chased itself around in circles. He needed to think about something else for a while, or better yet to think of nothing at all. He began to move in a bo routine, bo-no-ikkyo, though his bo, his wooden staff, was back in the house along with his gi, and the black belt and hakama he had only recently earned when he passed his shodan test.
Tsuki, deflect, tsuki, yokomen, yokomen—
Over the years he had studied a number of martial arts. He was an excellent fencer, and he had progressed to the first of the several degrees of brown belts in judo. But his interest in judo had always had more to do with the fact that he was learning it from Mandala Flynn (he believed she had the same feeling about fencing, which he had taught her). Aikido was different. It was a martial art dedicated to non-violence, to demonstrating to one’s opponent the futility of violence. He had been training for some years now. The thrill of being promoted to shodan, of putting on for the first tune the black belt and the hakama, the long wide pleated black trousers, was just as intense as what he had felt when he received the orders giving him command of Excelsior.
Yokomen, kakushibo, sweep, reverse, thrust, dogiri—
Usually he could lose himself in the motions, but tonight the question he had been asked and the decision he had still to make remained uppermost in his mind, spoiling the flow and the peace of the routine.
James Kirk planned to return to Genesis, whether he got help and the Enterprise from Starfleet, or merely a blind eye turned when he departed.
If he was denied permission, or expressly forbidden to go…
Sulu thought of his magnificent new ship, up in Spacedock, waiting for him, nearly ready to fly. That was where he should be, not down here Earthbound, waiting for debriefings, waiting to testify, waiting to find out from Starfleet whether he had kept his nose clean enough to rate being given back his command.
They had no right to take it from me in the first place, he thought. But they did, and they made very clear the conditions under which I might hope to regain it.
Yokomen, tsuki, yokomen, sweep and turn—
He lost the rhythm and the pattern. He stopped. He blotted the sweat from his forehead, from the sides of his face.
He weighed Excelsior against what James Kirk had asked of him. He weighed his ambitions against his allegiance; he weighed the future and the past.
He made a decision, without regret and without reservation.
He swirled back into the routine, moving lightly over the springy wet grass while the last fall roses perfumed the air. The pattern of his motions was smooth and pure, the way he hoped and tried to form his life.
Saavik ran through the steamy, humid glade, pushing aside rain-laden fronds that doused her with cascades of sun-warmed water. She followed the sound of the cry, pierced to her center by its despair. The tricorder in her hand beeped and clicked with life-sign readings, but she hardly glanced at it. Its data were superfluous.
She burst from the forest. It ended so abruptly that she stopped. David hurried up behind her, breathing hard.
“Not so fast,” he said between gasps. “We don’t know what that scream was.” He bent over to catch his breath. “It might be a predator—it might be one of Vance’s dragons.”
Saavik wondered who had designed this section of the landscape. Enormous cactuslike trees stretched bulbous fingers to the sky. On the rocky surface, gray, leathery succulents spread their thick leaves like wounded wings, soaking up the sun.
The ground quivered gently beneath Saavik’s feet. It was like a caress—but the illusion shattered when the pain-filled cry came again. Whatever made that sound experienced no pleasure from the trembling land.
Saavik strode forward, the gravel of the desert crunching beneath her boots and sliding beneath her heels. The rounded, waterworn stones made the surface treacherous and slippery and difficult to negotiate.
“Was this a ‘little joke’?” she said to David.
“What?”
“Waterworn stones, in a desert that has never seen water? False history, false geology.”
“We wanted to make it seem real,” David said. “Layered. Not as if everything were brand-new.”
“In that, you certainly succeeded.” The cacti might each have been a thousand years old. The succulents might have been left over from an earlier age, living fossils of the beginnings of evolution.
She continued deeper into the forest of cacti. The dryness was a relief after the oppressive humidity of the glade, but what glimpses she could get between the gnarled and looming trunks hinted at another abrupt change of climate.
A hundred meters farther on, the ground was covered with snow.
The rumble of a temblor surrounded her. She tensed—and the cry came yet again. She had been expecting it—
We hear the cry whenever the ground quakes, she thought. As if there were some direct connection…. But she amended her hasty deduction. She did not have enough data to draw a significant conclusion, and besides, the creature, the being, might simply be frightened by the earthquakes.
“Grissom to ground party. What’s going on down there?”
Saavik stopped and flipped open her communicator.
“Saavik here, Captain. We have strong life sign readings, bearing zero-one-five. We are proceeding to investigate.”
“All right, Saavik, I concur…. But be advised that we are tracking a severe and unnatural age curve for the planet. The harmonic motion of the core is increasing in amplitude at a rate that is making me very nervous.”
Saavik covered the microphone of the communicator. David was staring in the direction of the snow, apparently ignoring her conversation with Captain Esteban.
“Do you have an explanation?”
“Later,” he said with an intensity that belied his outward indifference to Esteban’s information. He gestured impatiently. “Let’s go!” Without waiting, he started toward the snow-covered bluffs beyond the desert, moving away from her in more important ways than simple distance.
Saavik uncovered the communicator pickup. “Grissom, your message acknowledged. Will advise. Saavik out.”
She snapped shut the communicator and followed David across the desert. He had already passed beyond the limits of the twisted cactus trees. A breeze ruffled his curly golden hair. With every step he took the wind grew stronger. By the time Saavik reached the edge of the forest, the wind had begun to swirl flakes of dry snow against David’s feet. He was only about fifty meters ahead of her. She stepped out of the shelter of the cacti, into the whine of the wind. The temperature dropped precipitously, perhaps thirty degrees in as many paces. The wind howled past them.
David reached the first patch of solid snow, stopped, and gazed down at something. Saavik joined him. A trail of small, blurry footprints led from the edge of the snow and up the white-blanketed slope. The wind had obscured their outlines. A sudden flurry of snow threatened to bury them entirely.
The sky held no clouds. The snow was not falling; it was, rather, being carried by the wind from some other source. The icy, stinging flakes cut the visibility to almost nothing.
Saavik sat on her heels and looked closely at the vanishing footprints. She shook her head and rose to her feet.
“Those are not, I think, the tracks of Sauriform Madisonii,” she said. Neither, though, were they the tracks she had hoped to find.
In the Starfleet officers’ lounge, Jim Kirk feigned calm as he waited for Harry Morrow’s reply. Morrow stared silently out into the night, his reflection black on black against the wide expanse of the window that stretched seamlessly from one side of the lounge to the other. The Starfleet commander’s expression remained unreadable. Kirk forced himself not to clench his fists.
“No,” Morrow said finally. “Absolutely not, Jim. It’s out of the question.”
All the repressed tension fueled Kirk’s words. “Harry—Harry, I’m off the record now. I’m not speaking as a member of your staff. I’m talking about thirty years of service. I have to do this, Harry. It has to do with my honor—my life. Everything I put any value on.”
He cut off his plea when a steward stopped at his elbow with a tray, removed empty glasses, replaced them with full ones. Jim held himself silent. After an interminable time, the steward left.
“Harry—”
“Jim,” Morrow said carefully, “you are my best officer, and if I had a best friend, you’d be that, too. But I am Commander, Starfleet, so I don’t break rules.”
“Don’t quote rules, Harry! We’re talking about loyalty! And sacrifice! One man who died for us, another at risk of deep—permanent—emotional damage—”
“Now, wait a minute!” Morrow said. “This business about Spock and McCoy and mind-melds and—honestly, I have never understood Vulcan mysticism. Nor do I understand what you hope to accomplish—I’m sorry! I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself. Understand?”
“Harry, you don’t have to believe. I’m not even sure I believe. But if there’s even a chance that Spock has an…an eternal soul—then that is my responsibility.”
“Yours!”
“As surely as if it were my own.” He leaned forward. “Harry, give me back the Enterprise! With Scotty’s help—”
“No, Jim! The Enterprise would never stand the pounding.”
Kirk realized that Morrow had not understood a word he had said all evening. Harry did not believe him and did not trust him. Worse, he would not permit him to draw on a thirty years’ friendship to help him complete a task that bound him as strongly as any Starfleet mission he had ever undertaken.
“You’ve changed, Harry,” he said with anger and contempt. “You used to be willing to take some risks.”
“I used to have different responsibilities than I have now,” Harry said sadly. “Jim, I’m not completely unsympathetic to your request, believe me. I’ll contact Esteban. If anything comes of…what Grissom has found on Genesis, I will of course order them to bring it back.”
“How long—?”
“At least six weeks.”
“Impossible. Harry, Leonard McCoy is being driven mad! He wasn’t properly prepared for what happened to him, he wasn’t trained—in six weeks the damage could be fatal!”
“You’re not dictating any terms here! Grissom’s mission is vital—we have to have the data on Genesis before we can make a decision about it! And you want me to order them to turn around and come straight back so you can—save a dead man’s soul? Can’t you see how that would sound? No. I’m sorry.”
“I repeat: give me back my ship.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. I can’t let you have the Enterprise.”
“Then I’ll find a ship—I’ll hire a ship!”
“Out of the question!” Morrow said again. “You can hire one—but you won’t get it anywhere near Genesis. The whole Mutara sector is under quarantine. No one goes there until the science team gets back, and probably not even then. Council’s orders.”
“Then let me speak to the Council!” Jim’s voice rose, so absorbed was he in the urgency of his quest. “Harry, please! I can make them understand!”
He realized that every person in the lounge was either staring at him or making a noticeable effort to avoid doing so. He drew back, forcing his temper back under control.
“No, you understand,” Morrow said. “You simply have no conception of the political realities of this situation. Tensions are strung so tight you could play them like a piano! The Council has its hands full trying to deal with delegations from both the Romulan and the Klingon Empires. My gods, Jim, can you imagine the repercussions if you go in there and announce your personal views on friendship and metaphysics?” He shook his head slowly, stroked the condensation in stripes down the side of his glass with his forefinger, and clenched his fist. “Jim—! Your life and your career stand for rationality, not intellectual chaos. Keep up this emotional behavior, and you’ll lose everything. You’ll destroy yourself!”
As one friend accused him of abandoning lifelong rationality because of a duty to another friend who had continually perceived him as totally illogical, Jim Kirk felt an almost hysterical urge to laugh.
“Do you hear me, Jim?”
Jim stared at him for a long time, searching for some way to respond to having been so irrevocably refused. He sagged back in his chair.
“Yes, I hear you,” he said. He truly was not sure if he had heard everything Harry Morrow had said to him, but it did not matter. He sighed. “I…just had to try.”
“Of course,” Morrow said. “I understand.”
Jim said nothing, certainly not, No, you don’t, you don’t at all.
“Now take my suggestion, Jim,” Morrow said kindly. “Enjoy your leave—and let all this tension blow away.”
“You’re right,” Kirk said with reluctance. He picked up his glass and raised it to Morrow. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Any time.”
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 35