One time she found a brackish pool, the water undrinkable, but it attracted a strange kind of land fog that formed jewel-like dewdrops nurturing the cacti that ringed the pool, even fostering lichen that grew in long strands between the cactus spines. The presence of moisture brought wildlife—snakes, lizards, even chiroptera, their leathery wings batting so quickly they could not be seen, making a kind of eerie wind noise as they came to feed on the night blooms of the cacti, their sonar cries, imperceptible to human ears, mildly irritating to a Vulcan’s. Here she made her camp, and waited.
The reopened spatial rifts in the Deema system were proving to be a treasure trove.
Most were tiny, temporary, opening and closing in an eyeblink, able to be recorded by ship’s instruments but retaining their mystery, too brief and ephemeral to reveal where they led or what lay on the other side. Others were more stable, able to be threaded with unmanned probes and followed to various previously mapped sectors of the Alpha Quadrant, still others to regions as yet unexplored by Federation vessels. Thorough study, with the possibility that some might be used as shortcuts in the future, was estimated to take decades, and Chaffee and her science crew were on point and credited with the discovery.
Most of the anomalous plants and minerals the original landing party had discovered appearing and disappearing on the surface of Deema III turned out to have originated in a far-flung star cluster on the edge of Tholian space. Whether any of the several dozen planets in the cluster were habitable, much less whether they contained intelligent life and, still less likely, whether those hypothetical life-forms were deliberately sending specimens through the rifts or the rifts themselves were somehow scooping up rocks and uprooting greenery from those unmarked worlds, were facts as yet unknown.
Mikal should have been ecstatic, and on one level he was. There was work enough here even for his boundless energies, academic credit enough even for his fragile ego, except that for the first time in his life he didn’t want it.
“Divvy it up among the team,” he told Mironova when she asked him why he hadn’t signed any of his reports. “In fairness it belongs to all of them.”
“Generous of you,” she said, “if out of character. What you really mean is it should be shared with the entire team, including the missing one.”
“Salt in the wound?” Mikal accused her. “Isn’t that the Earth expression? Tell me you’ve heard something.”
“No more than you.” Mironova shrugged. “In point of fact, probably less than you. Starfleet scuttlebutt goes only so far. You’ve got a direct line to the Vulcan ambassador.”
“Who’s been as forthcoming as an Aldebaran shell-mouth,” Mikal grumped. “Oh, we chat every few weeks, and we’re all so very cordial, but if there’s another being in the whole of the Federation who can say as much while saying so little …”
“We can credit Lieutenant Saavik with the work she’s done on the first mission, and with the initial contact with the Deemanot, but that’s it, I’m afraid,” Mironova said pragmatically. She hated watching Mikal brood, as much for the sake of wanting him focused for the mission as for his personal welfare. “Lieutenant Loth is making good progress with the Deemanot.”
“Right!” Mikal snorted. “If you can filter what Worm and the others are actually saying out of his maudlin drivel. Betazoids can’t help ascribing their own feelings to every species they interact with. Saavik—a Vulcan—would have simply reported what was on the Deemanot mind without the emotional frills.”
“If only a Vulcan had been available,” Mironova reminded him, seeing him wince and regretting her words almost instantly. “Our Betazoid has been instrumental in helping you communicate with Worm and the others. You might thank him for that at least.”
He might have, if the first attempt to form a three-way link with Worm and through hir to the entirety of the species hadn’t begun with Worm’s asking, Saavik is not among you?
Gwailim Loth, the Betazoid, had greeted Worm on his first visit to the surface by allowing hir to twine about him and cover him with slime as Saavik had done the first time. The two had communed for what seemed a small eternity while Mikal stood by and fidgeted. He’d disliked the overtall, spindly, slightly walleyed Loth from their first encounter and wished more than ever that he had even the smallest amount of esper ability so that this interloper need not be part of his expedition.
Much to his surprise, when Loth at last opened his eyes and reached out one hand, indicating that Mikal was to take it and join the link he had established, the Tiburonian discovered that he did, in fact, have esper abilities he had never recognized before. The touch of the Betazoid’s hand was like an electric shock coursing through him, and he barely had time to brace himself before he heard what could only be Worm’s voice in his mind, as distinctly as if the being had spoken aloud, Saavik is not among you?
He’d recoiled then, his hand slipping out of Loth’s from the slime, as he scrambled inelegantly away from all of them.
“No!” he half shouted, his voice shaking. “No, she’s not. She was … called away … a family matter … Oh, explain it, will you?” he ordered Loth gruffly, though Loth had no idea. Mikal had stormed off without another word, feeling like a fool.
So, yes, his latent esper skills had been awakened, but not at all under the circumstances he might have desired. In time he managed to recover his equilibrium and join with Loth and the Deemanot as they struggled to build a language that nontelepaths could understand, feeling like a toddler learning to speak. In some respects it was exhilarating, an experience he could not have imagined before … before Saavik. But at the same time he was aware that it would never have occurred without his joining with Saavik, and her not being here seemed so profoundly unfair, to everyone.
“I think he’s tragic,” Cheung remarked wistfully, watching Mikal striding Chaffee’s corridors whenever he wasn’t coordinating starcharts with the ever-changing rifts or puttering about on the surface cataloging whatever new specimens appeared there. He seemed to have given up sleeping, or allowing himself to be alone. “Like something out of a play. He was obviously in love with her.”
“There’s dubious wisdom in falling in love with a Vulcan,” Palousek suggested. Older and somewhat wiser following an ex-wife or two, he could afford to be cynical. “Might as well develop an infatuation with a chronometer.”
“Just because you’re bitter, old man—!” Cheung snapped, then went back to mooning over Mikal.
“Rebound syndrome,” Jaoui, watching all of this, observed. “I wouldn’t if I were you.”
“Too late!” Cheung told her. “I’ve already tried. It was like I wasn’t even in the room.”
Days were for sleeping, how ever fitfully, first making a paste of mud from the sand and the brackish water and coating oneself with it, even working it into the roots of one’s hair, to protect against insect bites and ward off the sun. Nights were for watching, waiting, and whatever meditation she could not have accomplished in the company of others at the shrine.
With sufficient deprivation, there is a fine line between meditation and hallucination. She was not surprised that Spock appeared to her, more real than the bats availing themselves of the cactus fruit in the air above her, but rather at the manner in which he appeared.
The last time she had seen him, he had been wearing the white robe of the fal-tor-pan. Now he appeared to her in a manner she had never seen him, wearing the gray and dun robes of Kolinahr. She knew enough of psychology to realize this was a projection of her own subconscious, wanting the kind of peace that Spock had sought but been denied.
Vanity! was her first thought. As if you could be more worthy of such an achievement than he!
But the vision was not real in the corporeal sense. What harm was there in indulging it?
“My mentor,” she said aloud, “Speak to me of Kolinahr.”
“What is it that you wish to know?” the vision answered at once.
“How do you vanquish the anger?”
“Each one’s anger is his or her own, Saavik-kam.”
“That is a nonanswer!” She challenged him as she had when she was a child.
“Or an unspoken truth,” he countered as quickly, and she was suffused with memories of that early time, when everything had seemed so serious, but that in retrospect had been simplicity itself compared to what she had encountered since. “Consider, Saavik. Of what purpose is undifferentiated advice on how to manage one’s own individual anger? Such answers cannot be given; they must be earned.”
The answer made her angry; she had already known it before she asked. At the same time it filled her with what seemed an inconsolable sorrow at the thought that they might never have such conversations again. The emptiness without him, the bewilderment in his face when she spoke to him aboard Bounty, the mix of disappointment, shame, and relief all at once, but most of all sorrow.
Lost in that memory of him, addressing her as “Lieutenant,” looking at her as if at a stranger, she did not notice the vision fade until it was gone completely, and for some reason that startled her more than its appearance. How far was she from the nearest sentient being, and what did distance matter? There was a science that said that all matter was interconnected all the time, in ways that could not yet be understood or measured. Had she been any more or less alone on Hellguard? Had she simply not known enough then to be frightened?
You chose this, she reminded herself. You cannot change your mind now. Anyway, it will be ended soon.
She found herself tracing shapes in the sand with one filthy finger, mandalas out of a thousand cultures that reminded her of the Deemanot cities, and again there was sorrow, but of a different sort. Mikal. Such a brief moment, with no guarantee of other, future moments, but might she not have been permitted a few moments more?
Last, she grieved for Tolek, beginning and end of all of this, his katra gone somewhere she could not follow.
Silent tears made tracks in the grime rubbed into her face, and her shoulders shook with sobs she would not voice. Somehow she knew that he was watching.
When it was time, she gathered herself, physically and spiritually. Usually she waited until almost sunrise to bathe in the brackish pool and coat herself with a new layer of mud, because nightfall signaled hunting, and if the previous morning’s mud cracked and crumbled off her as she moved, it did not matter. But this evening, as the last rays of 40 Eridani stretched long shadows over the sands before winking out over the horizon, she altered her routine.
Stripping off the ragged remnants of the dun-colored garment in which she had left the shrine, she stepped into the water—ankle-deep, knee-deep, up to her shoulders, slipping under the surface to feel the individual grains of fine sand work their way out of the roots of her hair and float away. When she was as clean as such primitive ablutions could render her, she stepped out onto the shore, the silty water sliding off her limbs as, with a Vulcan’s disdain for human shame about the body one had been born into, she allowed the rising night breeze to dry her skin before seeking out the spare robe she had secreted with her that night so many nights ago, and put it on.
It was wrinkled from having been crammed in haste into a small carry bag, but the wrinkles would shake out in time, and the sheer cleanness of it against her skin was palpable after so many weeks of filth; she imagined she could feel the individual threads in the weave wherever fabric touched flesh and suppressed a small shudder against the sheer luxury of it.
She had saved her sandals against the wear of desert travel, and now slipped them on to feet hardened yet at the same time smoothed by barefoot traverse across weeks of time and a variety of sand and stone, and slipped her oldest companion, the knife she had salvaged from Hellguard, into her sash. As for her hair …
Logically, she ought to have cut it short when she’d first come to the shrine, as a symbol, perhaps, of her having chosen a new way of life. Barring that, she ought at least to have hacked off the sun-scorched, tangled length of it as she made her way across the desert. It was now frowzed and matted beyond redemption; she could not so much as run her fingers through it at the scalp. No matter. She would not let so minor a thing detract from what little dignity the Elements had allowed her thus far.
Remembering that dignity, she pulled the mass of hair back into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, straightened her spine, reseated herself on the flat rock wherefrom she had been drawing out the history of the universe in the sand, and waited.
Suddenly, he was there.
Thirteen
At first glance, a Vulcan. No brow ridges, none of the characteristic hauteur one expected of the distant cousins, at least in her limited experience. She had heard no vehicle approach, so he must have concealed it and walked a distance, though his boots still retained some of their shine against the ubiquitous scouring sand, so it could not have been that far. Wisely he had waited for nightfall, so that not only was he spared the day’s heat, but he had not been visible through the heat shimmer from a distance but was simply there.
She had made a point of establishing her camp with a maximal view toward the horizon at all turns of the compass, but the same cacti that provided sustenance for her and the small creatures she subsisted on did have a tendency to clump, providing cover for someone trained in desert concealment, especially at night. Nevertheless, his arrival did not startle her. The bats’ hypersonic chittering had stilled suddenly while he was yet more than a kilometer away. It was credit to her survival skills that the night wings had become so accustomed to her presence after the first few days that they’d ceased to notice her.
Startled or not, she would not have let him see it.
How had she been so certain he would come? For that matter, how had she known her stalker would be a single individual, and “he”? It was not something logic could answer.
He stood there in the open, hands tucked fastidiously into his belt. Dark clothing, she noted, including a traditional Vulcan travel cloak, all of good quality, all designed to render one inconspicuous in urban settings, but he’d have stood out markedly against the sand in daylight. An interesting choice, if not necessarily a wise one. Perhaps he’d never been to the desert before. That might prove useful. She also assumed that there was an Honor Blade concealed somewhere on his person—wearing it openly would have given him away—but she was reasonably certain he carried no phaser or other advanced weaponry. Also useful.
He waited without speaking, boots planted firmly, an air of confidence about him, as if he was certain this half-mad desert creature crouched protectively over the designs she drew in the sand would not attack him outright or, if she did, the attack would be random and unorganized and he could defend himself. A small sarcastic smile seemed to be trying to work its way onto his otherwise sensuous lips. The way the shadows fell, she could not see his eyes.
She let him wait.
“It took you long enough,” she said finally, when an almost imperceptible shift in his stance told her she had gotten her point across. If her own voice, raspy with disuse, seemed alien to her, she gave no sign.
“I had to make certain you were alone.”
His voice was not unpleasant but a touch impatient, as if he feigned a Vulcan’s deliberation of speech with difficulty and perhaps had a tendency to become shrill when he was angry. She would test that soon enough. As for his statement, she dismissed it with a gesture that marked it as ridiculous. Surely he had pinpointed her location with some manner of scanner—the strictures set forth by an ancient Vulcan shrine would have no hold on him—and knew she had been alone from the moment she left the shrine. Could he see the arch of her eyebrow beneath the grime?
“Because you find me so formidable an opponent, or simply to leave no witnesses?”
That made him laugh, as she’d known it would. She found she could anticipate his every gesture, almost write his dialogue for him. He must have claimed his other victims unawares. Surely if they had exchanged a single word with him, they’d have see
n him for the fraud he was. After all she had put herself through to lure him here, was this part to be so easy?
“‘Formidable’? Can you see yourself? Bedraggled, half starved, virtually unarmed?”
As you and your kind abandoned me the first time! she wanted to shout but held her anger back. Do not let him get to you from the outset, or all is lost!
“Have you a name?” she asked calmly. If nothing else, she had played a Vulcan far longer than he, and she would not let him see through the veneer. “I presume you know mine, unless you lack the courage to know whom it is you kill.”
“I am not here to kill you. I am here to talk. In fact, if the outcome of our talk is fruitful, I need not kill again.”
Again she made him wait, continuing to trace mystic figures in the sand, which the night breeze almost as quickly blew away. In ancient times, she’d read somewhere, the shamans had written prayers in the sand, interpreting the wind as the breath of gods taking the prayers with them as they moved.
Would he ask her permission to enter her camp, such as it was, or would he cross the invisible line separating their two worlds without bothering to ask? Without looking up, she saw his boots shift in the sand again. He had not a Vulcan’s patience. This was useful.
“So, not quite as mad as you pretend to be,” he observed, trying to sound conversational, but she heard the note of strain. “Quite a scene you made at the shrine. Did you really kill the old man?”
“You know all that you will know from me.”
“A complete character transformation, and in such a short amount of time. Had I a suspicious nature, I’d wonder if it weren’t all a trap.”
She did look up at him now, under a stray lock of hair she did not bother sweeping out of her eyes.
“Have you a suspicious nature?”
Again he laughed. “I am Romulan. What do you think?”
“I think you have not yet told me your name.”
Star Trek: TOS - Unspoken Truth Page 19