Star Trek: TOS - Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  Saavik filed this message with the others and sighed. Perhaps when he had run through the entire roster and found no more deaths, Tolek would abandon his quest, and at least some of her unease would abate.

  As a scientist, she had to admit that the three deaths were puzzling, yet Vulcan healers with far more expertise than she had performed exhaustive tests and concluded that they were the result of an inexplicable but not unnatural cause. Any attempt to obtain more data than Tolek had already given her would hit the unbreakable wall of Vulcan privacy.

  It was not a lie to keep the truth to oneself. But how many unspoken truths had obfuscated Vulcan history, truths that might seem small in their concealment but that, over time, could aggregate into larger, more damaging untruths? Was it only humans who subscribed to the concept of “little white lies”? Not for the first time, Saavik wondered how a “minor clerk in an adjudicator’s office” had managed to acquire as much information as he had.

  Had she allowed their childhood bond to obscure the fact that she knew nothing about what Tolek had become in the intervening years? Could she trust him? And if not, was any of his story true?

  Her final thought as she slipped into sleep that night was, I still owe him one lizard egg …

  She dreamed.

  Hellguard, hunting in the early morning hours before the suns came up, when the false dawn yielded some light but as yet none of the vicious heat. Crouched behind a rock, facing into the light so that she cast no forward shadow, she was stalking a night-crawling millipede hurrying toward its underground burrow before the sunlight struck and killed it. The creature was the length of her arm, its body mostly liquid; ingesting it would keep her hydrated for several days. As it scurried along the ground, and she stood to fling one of her collection of throwing sticks, what she saw made her drop the stick and shrink into herself in horror.

  Tolek, sprawled on the desert floor, skin blackened and blistered, teeth drawn back in a rictus of death. It was her fault, for letting him go off with only one lizard egg.

  The sound of her own hoarse cry woke her, bolt upright, staring into the almost dark of her starlit quarters, the sound of the impulse engines, the atmospherics purring softly, regulating airflow, temperature, every aspect of life controlled, comfortable, safe.

  Saavik threw aside the bedclothes, enjoyed the softness of carpet beneath her bare feet, ran her fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, feeling the prickle of sweat on her scalp. She stepped into the sonic shower, savoring the simple pleasure of cleanliness, order, predictability. Would she ever take these things for granted?

  She brushed her hair until it gleamed, slipped into one of the several field uniforms lined up in the wardrobe, absently chose for breakfast the first thing that came to mind from a thousand entries in the replicator. To be clean, fed, and sheltered, to have duties to perform and know exactly what the day would bring was all she asked.

  Not until she emerged into the corridor, uniform impeccable, demeanor to match, did the resonances of the dream retreat to the darker corners of her mind, never gone, merely at bay. Today was to be their last day in the grassland, a final survey of the plant life before they moved camp to Biome 2.

  Despite their meticulous gathering and cataloging, they had not found a single anomaly either on the ground or under constant daily scans.

  “Where in the hell did they go?” Mikal demanded of no one in particular, turning to the four points of the compass, tricorder set to maximum range, then in gradually decreasing radii until he was glowering at the grasses beneath his feet. He’d pored over the long-range scans for hours, comparing them to the daily readings, mystified.

  “Still nothing, Galina,” he said into the communicator in his other hand. “Even the microbes are ordinary, and there’s no complex animal life at all, nothing that might have moved out of range. Unless some of the plants have feet.”

  “You mean like the pseudolichens of Piscine V?” Mironova reminded him, laughter in her voice. “Oh, that’s right, they had fins …”

  “You didn’t think it was funny at the time!” Mikal said testily.

  “Not when one bit me, no. But when you fell facedown in the mud trying to catch it … Right,” she said, becoming serious again. “Last day in Biome 1, children. Make it worth your while. Chaffee out.”

  “Super!” Mikal grumbled, shouldering his collecting bag and striding off toward one of the last unstudied grids, close enough to be seen and well within communicator range, but far enough away to offer solitude, which suited Saavik perfectly. She set to work on her own patch, grateful for the silence.

  Repeated short-range scans here had found no mammals, no birds or reptiles or fish, not even insects. Subterranean scans revealed numerous varieties of annelids, ranging in size from tiny threadlike creatures to some ten to fifteen centimeters in length, possibly the primitive ancestors of the Deemanot, busily aerating and fertilizing the soil. The plants, in the absence of insects, were either self-pollinating or relied on the wind. There wasn’t so much as a gnat or fly to be found anywhere. Saavik didn’t mind at all.

  She’d flung the sharpest of her throwing sticks with practiced accuracy. It knocked the lizard off the ledge where it had concealed itself, breaking its back. In the time it took her to scramble over the rocks to retrieve it, a swarm of flies had already gathered, though the lizard was still breathing feebly. Smashing its skull with the first rock that came to hand, she’d had to fight off the flies repeatedly, raising another of her childhood’s unanswered questions. How did they survive? What did they feed on when there were no dead lizards—or children?

  The memory lasted less than a second before she shoved it back into the engrams where it lay waiting, impossible to erase, even as she wondered, Why? She had successfully repressed the childhood memories for years. Was it only Tolek’s reappearance in her life that brought them forward now? As her hands worked methodically, gently scooping under the roots of one specimen after another and placing them in her collecting bag, her mind would not be still.

  She had chosen this grid last because it was far from the water sources and the soil was thin. As a consequence the plants that grew here were more usually found in desert rather than grassland. She had hoped that might reveal some anomalies, but instead she found only the ordinary, as if any plant could be considered ordinary.

  Plagiobothrys nothofulvus, salvia columbariae, common name chia, chaenactis stevioides, make note of the white flowers, be mindful of the spines …

  The cataloging occupied only a portion of her mind, but she persisted.

  Abronia villosa, also called verbena, both attractive and fragrant, fabaceae, subspecies sophora flavescens, echinops gmelinii or thistle, edible and medicinal, artemisia scoparia or wormwood, thymus gobicus, purple-flowered mint, fragrant, sweet tasting, excellent for tea …

  Six

  Saavik’s first morning on Vulcan, Amanda had found her in the garden just before dawn, crouched in a flower bed, scrabbling in the soil with her fingers. The human trod softly, but the child sensed her presence and spun around like a cornered thing. There was dirt around her mouth, and her jaw worked on something that crunched audibly.

  “Was there nothing in the kitchen that pleased you?” Amanda asked, sitting on one of the numerous stone benches arranged along the sinuous paths, careful to make herself as small and unthreatening as possible. “I know Spock taught you how to use it, and the names of many of the foods it can make for you.”

  The child spat the root she’d been chewing—a species of apiaceae native to Vulcan that Amanda had cultivated for its delicate, lacy flowers, not its edibility—into the dirt, inelegantly wiping her chin with the back of her hand. Clambering to her feet, she looked about her in the increasing light at the order and beauty of the many plantings Amanda had nurtured over the years, and though she had never seen a garden before, sensed that she had done something wrong.

  “Not eat these?”

  “We do not,” Amanda said gently,
keeping her voice neutral, implying no judgment, simply a need to impart information. “You’re right, some of them are edible. But we do not eat them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t need to.”

  “Why they’re here, then?”

  “Because they’re beautiful. And some of them have lovely fragrances, don’t you think?”

  She had noted the child’s tendency to smell every new thing she discovered—logical in a feral child, as were all her behaviors in the context she’d come from.

  That first day, while Amanda observed, she had walked along the carpets and the polished floors on her tiptoes, moving lightly from room to room, touching everything gingerly as if it might attack her, but touching nevertheless. Her overlarge eyes gleamed with curiosity. Her manner was contained, though the flare of her nostrils indicated she might bolt like a fawn at the slightest unexpected sound or movement. And whenever she touched an object—a vase, a chair, a wall hanging, the padd on which Amanda had been reading a novel before she arrived—she also leaned in close and sniffed it.

  It would be months before she abandoned the need to touch and smell everything before she found it acceptable. Until then, every piece of fruit had to be rotated in her fingers in order to examine it from all sides. Then it was squeezed, sniffed, studied to determine whether it could be eaten whole or needed to be peeled. If, once broken into, it had multiple seeds, these were also examined. If their color was too bright, they were rejected as potentially poisonous. As there were no birds or lizards available to test them on, one had to follow one’s instincts.

  Prepared dishes were also scrutinized, their individual components separated and sniffed, tested with the tip of the tongue and, when it did not swell in protest at hidden toxins, accepted and ingested heartily.

  But that would take time. That first day, having examined everything in the main room and finding it safe, Saavik had turned to find Sarek standing beside his wife. The struggle on her face (Newcomer, stranger, why did I not hear him? Danger? No, Spock said two. Pa-rents. Sa-rek and A-man-da. Safe) was a wonder to behold.

  She managed her introduction to the ambassador as carefully as she had that to his wife, her overlarge eyes meeting his unblinking, as if to say, After what I have survived, am I to be afraid of you? Even so, Amanda saw the great weariness in the dark smudges under those eyes. It had been a long journey from the colony world where Spock had sequestered her for a year, and no doubt between excitement and anticipation of the unknown, the child had barely slept.

  “Are you hungry?” Amanda asked. First food, then sleep. There was a lifetime for the rest.

  The child nodded. Even if she hadn’t been, she’d have replied in the affirmative. When there’s food, eat. When you can, sleep. And even when you sleep, be aware!

  Amanda had had the presence of mind to set out the meal beforehand, and while ordinarily a guest was served first, in this very special case her teacher’s instinct caused her to take her own portion first and taste it, to show the child that it was safe. Still, though it was obvious that she was famished, Saavik waited until both Sarek and Spock also began to eat before she joined them.

  “Don’t you see, Sarek?” Amanda said against his later skepticism. “Her reaction was quite intelligent. ‘Maybe humans can eat this safely, but that doesn’t mean I can.’”

  “She thought you might be attempting to poison her?” Sarek made no effort to keep the incredulity out of his voice. They were alone in the privacy of their rooms, the child’s inquisitive eyes and ears safely tucked into bed in her own suite of rooms at the far end of the hall.

  “Not necessarily. But she did intuit that not all species can necessarily eat the same things. It was a scientist’s thought, and quite logical.”

  Sarek’s expression softened. He had originally concurred with his wife that taking this child into their home was the right thing to do. That did not mean it would be the easy thing to do.

  “Intuition? A human characteristic,” Sarek had remarked. “The child is not human.”

  “Nor is she entirely Vulcan,” Amanda reminded him. Any suggestion that they might have had this conversation before, about another child, was absent from her tone. “We have to make allowances for that. Logically.”

  “And you are willing to make such allowances?”

  “Of course!” Amanda replied. “Aren’t you?”

  Wisely, Sarek had kept his thoughts to himself for the next little while. Gradually Saavik learned to trust them both, though it would be a long time before she stopped examining every new thing that came her way, sniffing a garment before she put it on, caressing the fabric as if to analyze the very molecular constituents of the fibers with her fingertips, needing to know, learning to trust.

  Gradually socialized, she had learned not to engage in these childlike behaviors when anyone was watching, but sometimes when she was alone she could not resist examining some new thing with a more than Vulcan intensity.

  And so that first morning in the garden, out of old habit, she had seen what to her was a food source, and perhaps with a further intuition (Do not disturb the pa-rents. Make no trouble. No matter what Spock says, they may send you away), she had helped herself, rather than venture into the kitchen. Now that she had thought it through, she felt furtive and ashamed. There was so much to learn. What if she did something wrong? What if they sent her away?

  Amanda saw all of this in those liquid eyes and reached out her hand. With no choice but to trust, Saavik took it.

  “You and I will go inside and have a proper breakfast,” the human said. “Then if you have no other plans, I thought we might spend some time in the garden before it gets too hot. We will teach each other about plants.”

  And with that simple task, Saavik learned that there was more than eat/not eat, and the scientist flourished.

  Mikal’s voice shook her out of her reverie.

  “I found something,” he said, taking a specimen out of his sample bag and crouching down to her level to show her.

  She had been sitting on her heels beside one of the numerous watercourses, gathering a sample of what appeared to be a species of apiaceae that had particularly long roots, the better to take advantage of the rare dry-season groundwater. For a single moment all of her memories merged, from the time when she had had to live on roots to survive through that precious morning with Amanda in the garden (“We also call it Queen Anne’s lace,” Amanda had explained. “And wild carrot. The root does taste sweet, so you were wise to want to eat it”), only the first of many. She was holding the delicate flowers to her face to remind herself of the light sweet scent that had sparked the memory. If Mikal had not happened by, would she have taken a bite of the root for old time’s sake?

  “What is it?” she said quickly, scrambling to her feet to cover her confusion. The sun was over his shoulder, and she would have the excuse of not being able to see clearly what he was holding in his hand.

  “Ordinary-looking portulaca,” he said. “Something you’d expect to find in this biome, but …”

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “I don’t know why, but something seemed odd about it. I ran the tricorder over it before I put it in the bag. The molecular structure is completely off. It’s not from this world, or even from any other known world in this sector of space. I think we’ve found our anomaly.”

  “Say again?” Mironova’s voice issued from the communicator in Mikal’s palm.

  “I said, ‘We’ve found our anomaly.’” Mikal scowled at the communicator, a newer model than he was used to, and adjusted the frequency. “It’s akin to portulaca. Also known as purslane or moss rose. Low-growing spineless succulent with multicolored flowers—”

  “I know what a moss rose is, Mikal,” Mironova cut him off. “I expect you’d find them in that biome.”

  “Except we didn’t until now, and the molecular structure’s wrong.”

  “Stand by …” Mironova said, sounding preoccupied. “
We’re showing pop-ups on scanners. All around you, at about the same rate as the initial scans, and in approximately the same locations. I’ll be right there.”

  “We can just as easily …” Mikal began, but Mironova was no longer there. “… beam it aboard or send you the tricorder reading,” he finished stubbornly into the silent communicator just as the transporter sound came from behind him.

  “You could have, yes.” Mironova took the small flowering plant from him and ran her own tricorder over it. “But always better to see the thing in situ, isn’t it?”

  She scanned the area the same way Mikal would, turning in a slow circle, and Saavik wondered who had taught whom that trick.

  “Cabin fever?” Mikal muttered, but Mironova ignored him.

  “More of them,” she announced, indicating banks of the low-growing succulent where there had been bare ground moments before. “Yellow flowering variety at two o’clock, variegated red and white at seven. And you’re telling me this is the first you’ve seen of them. Explain.”

  “We cannot, Captain,” Saavik replied. “We have studied those grids meticulously and cataloged the majority of them individually and hands-on. Even if they had been dormant, below the surface waiting to sprout—”

  “—they’d have shown up consistently on orbital scans, but they didn’t,” Mikal finished for her. “But the bigger mystery is the molecular structure.”

  Mironova waved that away. “Might be something unique to this planet. We’ll figure that out after we figure out how they disappear and reappear. And what the hell is that?”

  She indicated a vine that had suddenly appeared from a cleft in the outcropping near the shelter, sprouting intertwining branches as they watched. As if in time-lapse photography, in a few moments it grew to several feet tall, sprouted leaves and silver-blue flowers that, where the tendrils grew into the shade of the rock, gave off a faint phosphorescence.

  “That wasn’t here before, I swear it wasn’t!” Mikal said, groping for his tricorder, a sense of excitement in his voice for the first time since they’d gotten here. “I would have noticed.”