Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  He felt the touch of another hand. Jim Kirk stood beside him, one hand on McCoy’s shoulder, the other on Spock’s. Their lives had been intertwined for so long….

  Jim’s face was full of grief, and yet of determination. He gripped McCoy’s shoulder hard, as if, like a Vulcan, he could transfer to him some of his strength.

  Thirteen

  Vulcan.

  A desert world, limited in material resources, yet limitless in the intellectual and philosophical achievements of its inhabitants.

  Saavik gazed upon it and wished what she had wished since the first time she learned about this planet. She wished she belonged here. She wished she had some right to this world, some claim to a place upon it and within its society. She had none of those things. She suspected she could never earn them, no matter her achievements.

  “Home, eh, Lieutenant?”

  “I beg your pardon, Admiral?” Saavik said.

  Kirk nodded toward the viewport. “Vulcan.”

  “Vulcan is not my home, sir. I have never been here before.”

  “Oh,” he said, taken aback. “I would have thought you would at least have visited it.”

  “I have never been invited to Vulcan, sir.” She tried to speak as she had been taught, without emotion. She almost succeeded, but Kirk sensed something of her isolation.

  “I think we’ll find that we’re welcome,” he said gently.

  “The planet Vulcan is in hailing distance, Admiral,” Captain Sulu said.

  “Thank you, Sulu. Saavik—send a message to Ambassador Sarek. Tell him we’re coming in.”

  She obeyed. A ground station accepted her message. She waited for an answer.

  “Rescue party—”

  In reaction to the voice, everyone on the bridge swung toward the speaker. Sulu gave a cheer of surprise and delight that mirrored all their feelings. Hearing Uhura’s voice, knowing she was well and free, was the first purely joyful thing that had happened to any of them in far too long.

  “—this is Commander Uhura. Permission is granted to land on the plain at the foot of Mount Seleya. Ambassador Sarek is ready.” She paused. Her voice close to breaking, she said, “Welcome. Oh, welcome back.”

  The fighter shivered as its wings spread into flying configuration. Sulu felt the energy of the ship glide into his hands and arms and suffuse his body with a powerful glow. He had never flown anything like this ship before. He had developed a considerable and more than grudging respect for the engineering abilities of the opponents of the Federation.

  He wondered what would happen to the ship. No doubt Starfleet would seize it and send it back to Earth to be dismembered and analyzed. The idea pained him greatly.

  He realized that this was quite probably the last time he would ever fly any ship, of any sort.

  “Commander Sulu,” Kirk said, “you’re on manual.”

  He nodded. “It’s been a while, sir.” He had not landed a ship of this size without gravity propulsion since his student days. And, of course, he had never landed a craft of this design. “Here we go. Retrothrusters!”

  The ship replied, responding like a dream. The dust of the plain at the foot of Mount Seleya billowed up around it as it settled to the ground.

  The ramp hissed out and lowered itself to the ground. Spock’s friends carried his litter out into the scarlet dusk of Vulcan.

  At the foot of the ramp, Kirk stopped short and looked out amazed. The plain led to the temple. To either side of the long steep path, Vulcans stood watching and waiting, curious and silent. Here and there a torch flared against the dim light.

  “My gods…” Kirk whispered.

  “Much is at stake,” Saavik said.

  Kirk knew little of the Vulcan philosophy of what he was about to ask, and he cared less. All he wanted to hear was an acquiescence to his demand.

  The light faded to the state of dimness where everything took on an eerie cast. More torches flared. Kirk heard running footsteps before he could tell where they came from.

  Uhura appeared before him. Jim embraced her with his free arm. Uhura’s eyes were bright with tears.

  “Sarek is waiting,” she said. “Above—”

  She slipped in between Kirk and Sulu and helped carry the stretcher up the long path to the crest of the hill, where the temple loomed dark and mysterious.

  Strange music teased the limits of Kirk’s hearing. As he trudged up the slope the music grew only a little louder. It and the flaring of the torches were the only sounds. The enormous crowd of people watched somberly and in utter silence.

  Kirk’s legs began to ache. He had fought off his exhaustion for so long that he could not even remember when last he had slept. He kept going.

  A young child let go her father’s hand. She walked with great dignity to Spock’s side, and followed for a few paces. She looked down into his face, saluted him, and whispered, “Live long and prosper, Spock.” Then she slipped away and vanished into the crowd again.

  Sarek waited on the steps of the temple, accompanied by several dignitaries and by six members of the priesthood. The tall, stately women watched with utter impassivity.

  Finally Sarek strode forward to meet them. Kirk stopped, no longer sure what he should do.

  The music faded so gradually that he was uncertain of the transition between sound and silence.

  Sarek gazed at Spock. He reached down and placed his long, graceful hands against the sides of Spock’s face. Kirk wanted nothing more than to grab him and shake him and make him explain what would happen now. He glanced sidelong at McCoy, who had reached the raw edge of his strength.

  Sarek said nothing. He took one pace backward and nodded to the members of the priesthood. They moved between Kirk and his friends so easily, so gently, and with such assurance that they hardly seemed to be displacing them. The women took Spock in their hands and carried him away. Sarek followed.

  Kirk watched, astonished. The Vulcans carried Spock easily, but their hands were not underneath his body.

  They were on top of it.

  Kirk hurried after them.

  He passed between massive stone pillars and stopped at the edge of a circular, slightly dished platform. An altar rose at its far side. T’Lar, the leader of the Vulcan priesthood, waited in stately silence as her subordinates brought Spock to her. They began a low chant that penetrated to the bones.

  Sarek paused and faced Kirk.

  “This is where you must wait.”

  Unwillingly, Kirk obeyed. The music began again. Sarek faced the altar as his son’s body sank gently to the age-smoothed granite and lay motionless as stone. The music and the chant ceased simultaneously.

  “Sarek,” T’Lar said. Her voice, barely a whisper, carried to them sharp and clear. “Sarek, child of Skon, child of Solkar. The body of your child breathes still. What is your wish?”

  “I ask fa-tor-pan,” Sarek said. “The refusion.”

  “What you seek has not been done since ages past. It has succeeded only in legend. Your request is not logical.”

  “Forgive me, T’Lar,” Sarek said. He sounded very tired, and Kirk realized this must be the most difficult thing he had said in a hundred twenty years. “My logic falters…where my son is concerned.”

  T’Lar looked beyond Sarek to Kirk and his friends. She looked Kirk straight in the eye. Her gaze, as sharp as a weapon, touched him, then granted him mercy. She turned her attention to McCoy.

  “Who is the keeper of the katra?” The question, clearly, lay in ritual; she knew the answer to what she asked.

  Sarek nodded at McCoy. McCoy stared straight ahead, fixed by the power of T’Lar’s eyes.

  “Bones—” Kirk said urgently under his breath.

  McCoy finally replied. “I am,” he said hesitantly. “McCoy…Leonard H.” He took a long breath of the rarefied air of Vulcan. “Son of David and Eleanora…”

  “McCoy, son of David, son of Eleanora…”

  McCoy shivered.

  “Since thou art human, and w
ithout knowledge of our philosophy, we cannot expect thee to understand fully what Sarek has requested. The circumstances are extraordinary. Spock’s body lives. With thine approval, we will use all our powers to return to his body that which thou dost possess: his essence. But, McCoy…”

  T’Lar let the silence surround them and press down against them. Kirk could see the faint sheen of sweat on McCoy’s forehead.

  “You must now be warned,” T’Lar said, speaking with complete formality. “The danger to you is as grave as the danger to Spock.”

  Now Kirk shivered, and tried to tell himself it was only the rapid cooling of a desert at night.

  “You must make the choice.” T’Lar waited for McCoy’s reply. Her dispassionate expression offered neither encouragement nor warning.

  McCoy, in his turn, let the silence stretch out.

  “I choose the danger,” he said. Under his breath, to Kirk, he muttered, “Helluva time to ask.”

  Kirk repressed a smile and fought down a laugh, knowing it to be a laugh of apprehension. He and McCoy both knew the choice to be between madness and the risk of death.

  “Bring him forward!” T’Lar said.

  Sarek led McCoy across the long empty platform and stopped before the altar. Kirk knew he could do nothing, yet he hated letting McCoy go alone, to face…

  A bolt of heat lightning shattered the silence.

  McCoy let Sarek draw him forward to the altar. Abruptly he stood all alone.

  Spock lay before him, and T’Lar stood above them both. McCoy was aware of music, a rhythmic chant, and the thin sharp sighing of the wind. The powerful voice of the Vulcan leader echoed around him. “All that can be done, shall be done, though it take full turn of the Vulcan sun.”

  T’Lar stroked her fingers along his temple. Her touch was like fire, and he gasped. An alien consciousness stirred deep within his mind. Terror-stricken, he struggled against it.

  The voice he heard was wordless and silent, yet so loud he feared it would strike him deaf. He could not see, and he feared he had been blinded as well.

  “Yes! Strive, fight! Employ the power of thine alien emotions! Wrest back thy life!”

  Thunder pounded at him, and he screamed.

  Built high on the slopes of Mount Seleya, the retreat of the adepts of the discipline of ancient thought had grown and changed over many generations. Its hallways and galleries cut deep into bedrock. It was said that they looped back upon themselves and never reached an end; it was said that one could wander through them for a lifetime and never walk the same path twice.

  Amanda Grayson, student and adept of the discipline, citizen of Earth, knew of no one who claimed complete familiarity with the maze. Most of the deepest caverns had long fallen into disuse. Even the most ascetic of Vulcans preferred open spaces, open air, and the heat of the huge red sun.

  The retreat overlooked the plain at the foot of Seleya. Amanda stepped out onto her balcony, into darkness. The face of the retreat stretched away to either side, a long stream of carven rock. Its organic curves and graceful arcs flowed easily and imperceptibly into balconies, pathways, entrances, windows.

  Amanda put her hands on the smooth surface of the parapet. The stone held the heat of the day, though the air had already grown chilly.

  Long stretches of time often passed during which the plain far below remained deserted. In all the years Amanda had studied the discipline, she had never seen more than a few people at a time approach the temple. Citizens who had reached the death of the body were brought to Mount Seleya by close family members, perhaps by comrades with whom they had formed intellectual ties. The student-adepts then helped the citizen sever the bond between body and mind, between substance and soul. After that, the body could go to dust and ashes, but the presence retired to the Hall of Ancient Thought. Always before, the student-adepts carried out the procedure in private, in an atmosphere of calm.

  All that was changed. An enormous, silent, curious crowd had gathered on the plain. Their torches cast an eerie glow over the land, the courtyard, the temple. The light was far too dim for Amanda to see the processional, but she knew every detail of the ceremony. She followed it, in her mind, as if she could affect it with her imagination and carry it to the conclusion she sought. And perhaps she could. She dared not try to reach out to her son with her thoughts, not now, not yet, but her heart was with him.

  T’Mei knocked softly on the door, entered, and paused at the balcony’s doorway. The young Vulcan was still many years away from adding “adept” to her title of student, which Amanda had done not too long before. Adepts of the discipline never abandoned the appellation, “student.” They preferred always to be reminded that the universe still held things they did not know. T’Lar, the most learned of them all, had recently and without comment ceased to use the title “adept.” She now called herself merely student.

  “Amanda?”

  “Yes, child.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No, my dear,” Amanda said. “I don’t need anything, except to have my wishes answered.”

  “I cannot do that,” T’Mei said.

  Amanda smiled. “I know it. Come stand by me.”

  T’Mei joined Amanda on the balcony. She moved so gracefully, with such self-possession, that she made hardly a sound. Her dark gold hair fell free past her waist.

  “One of your wishes is to be in the temple,” T’Mei said.

  “Yes. I never thought I’d live to see the time when my own son was a subject of the discipline. Certainly I never would have wished it! But now I do wish I could be there. Spock is balanced between refusion and oblivion—and I can’t even help him!” She slapped the parapet with anger and frustration. From the time of her marriage to Sarek she had known that to adopt Vulcan manners completely would be her destruction. Exhibiting her emotions beyond all courtesy would have run counter to her own upbringing, but neither did she try to smother or deny her feelings. At the beginning of her training, this all-too-human characteristic counted against her, but she proved herself worthy nonetheless.

  Once in a while she appreciated, and even envied, the equanimity of Vulcans. For Amanda, the days since Spock’s death had been an unending succession of powerful emotions: grief when the news first came, and hope of saving his presence, then a desperate anguish when it seemed that even Spock’s katra had been lost. And now she was faced with the powerful, incredible possibility that her son still might live.

  But it hasn’t been easy for Sarek, either, Amanda thought. Equanimity or no, he’s felt these past days deeply.

  T’Mei rested her elbows on the parapet and gazed thoughtfully down at the temple.

  “It would be most fascinating to attend the refusion,” she said. “It is unlikely that this precise constellation of circumstances will recur in our lifetimes.”

  “Or in this millennium,” Amanda said. “But I want to be down there for personal reasons—not historical ones.”

  “Your position is ironic,” T’Mei said. “A student-adept, yet a relative of the subject, when the subject is unique.”

  “Ironic’s hardly the word for it,” Amanda said. No student-adept could ever participate in, or even observe, the transfer of a close relative. The katra was fragile and easily lost. To free it from the bearer and place it in the Hall of Ancient Thought, the student-adepts formed delicate, temporary psychic ties around it, and dissolved them again on completing the passage. If mental connections already existed between a subject and an adept, as they did when the two belonged to the same family, the resonances created an interference that invariably proved disastrous.

  How the interference might affect the refusion, no one even attempted to speculate.

  When James Kirk’s message arrived, it had a galvanic effect on the inhabitants of the retreat. Many questions had to be answered instantly, questions that for generations had been discussed, analyzed, and debated without any final resolution. Amanda would have had no time to prepare her case, even had she w
ished to argue against her exclusion from the ritual—which she did not. She knew from the beginning that she could not be a member of the group that assisted her son. She understood the logic of avoiding such a completely unnecessary risk. But her intellectual acceptance of matters did absolutely nothing to diminish her emotional desire, her need, to be in the temple, to try to help.

  “It is unfortunate that you must forgo participating in this unique experience,” T’Mei said.

  “I don’t give a hang for the uniqueness of the experience!” Amanda said angrily. She had to switch to Standard to get her point across. Vulcan was far too refined for what she had to say. “Dammit! Right this minute I wish I’d never studied the discipline!”

  “Amanda,” T’Mei said, perplexed, “I do not understand.”

  “If I weren’t a student-adept, I wouldn’t endanger Spock just by being near him! At least I could be down there! At least Sarek and I could be together tonight!”

  She turned away from T’Mei and stared down at the bright sparks of the torches. She was furious at her helplessness at the injustice of the universe, too furious even to cry.

  T’mei stood beside her in silence, unable to comprehend her hope, her grief, her anger, or her love.

  Jim Kirk was exhausted. He had spent the long cold Vulcan night knowing he could do nothing but wait, knowing that it would make sense…that it would be logical…to rest. But he was too tired to sleep, too keyed up. It seemed that this night he might lose all the people who meant the most to him. He had lost David already, and he had not even been permitted to contact Carol and tell her what had happened. Or, rather, he had not been prevented, but it had been made clear to him that if he left the mountain and the temple before the end of the ritual, he would not be able to return. To the Vulcans, the stricture seemed completely logical. To Kirk, it seemed a cruel choice. In the end, he had stayed. He could not help his friends, but he could not leave them, either, not when they both ran such a tremendous risk.