The Autobiography of Mr. Spock

by Una McCormack

  These encounters certainly broadened my horizons but becoming better acquainted with my grandparents was naturally what I cherished most about these visits. There was nothing more my grandparents liked than to sit in conversation with each other, and often I would find them outside on the deck as the sun went down and the light disappeared, still chewing amiably over whatever crossed their well-stocked minds. This could never be predicted. Typical subjects might include: the paintings of Marc Chagall; the works of Thomas Mann; the works of Douglas Adams; the philosophy of later Wittgenstein; the philosophy of early Surak; pulp fiction from the pre-Atomic age; pulp fiction from the era of first contact; the dissolution of the monasteries; feminist separatist utopias from across five centuries; Beethoven’s late style; the concept of “late style”; how to boil an egg to perfection (they never agreed on this); why to boil an egg to perfection; whether boiled eggs are preferable to scrambled eggs; and did you remember to turn off the oven, love…?

  All this might be covered in one evening. You may imagine what a month in their company was like. I would be instructed to pull up a chair and join them. Hours might pass in this way, until one of them would say, “Well, I suppose we won’t get to the bottom of this one today either…”, yawn, stand, and head upstairs to bed. My grandparents were endlessly inquisitive, collaborative, and fair-minded in debate, profoundly humanist in outlook, and they loved me very much. I fitted seamlessly into their way of life. In their company, and through their example, my sense of my human heritage was transformed from an unfortunate impediment into a source of creativity and curiosity. There were no great emotions at stake, unless one counted wonder, delight, and joy. I sensed that their daughter’s marriage remained a puzzle to them—but there was no doubt about their happiness in me. They were easily among my best friends at this time—and if this was unusual for a young man at college, then, once again, I can only be grateful for my eccentricity. “Fascinating…” my grandmother would say, when presented with some new information. I had acquired this from my cousin Andrew; now I knew the source.

  * * *

  Thus passed my career at the academy—one of the most critical periods of my life, and yet, on reflection, over extremely quickly. Did I take from it everything that I could? I know many who talk about their time there as a blur of study and social engagements. When I observed the high spirits and boisterousness of many of the command track cadets, I sometimes wondered whether I was attending an entirely different institution.

  I will not present myself as the life and soul of the party at the academy. Given my long lifespan, very few of the people who attended the academy with me are still alive to offer an alternative account, but any such claim would hardly be persuasive. The fact that my father was not pleased with my decision to attend Starfleet Academy meant that I had to ensure that my career there was successful. By necessity, then, as much as by nature, I worked and studied extremely hard. I took many advanced classes, and many extra classes. My leisure pursuits were somewhat solitary and tended toward the intellectual. My circle of friends was comparatively small, but each one was deeply valued and carefully cultivated. I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents, whom I loved deeply, and while this was perhaps unusual for a young man in his late teens and early twenties, I do not regret a single second that I spent with these gentle, curious, and loving people.

  I do not wish anyone who may in future read this account of my time at Starfleet Academy to believe that I left without achieving some form of notoriety. There is a tradition among the outgoing year group to perform some prank that should, if it is successful, have each of the main perpetrators hauled in front of the president of the academy. Toward the end of my second year, I was approached by my old lab partner, Louis Maher, and a group of his friends about their plans for this prank. They intended to break into the offices of the senior staff and, in their words, “redecorate”. They wanted my help with accessing security codes. I listened to their plans and promptly declined their offer to participate. I thought that their scheme was juvenile. I had learned enough by this point not to say this to them, but I think that Maher knew. When he and his friends left, not long after my rejection, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, “I thought you got it. Well, I thought you were getting it. Never mind.”

  Over the summer break, I pondered this exchange. I was not, I thought, in principle against this tradition. I simply thought that the plans put to me were not worthy of us. When we returned to campus to begin our final year, and to his frank astonishment, I approached Louie Maher and suggested an alternative.

  “You’re joking,” he said, after I outlined my scheme.

  “Mr. Maher,” I said. “Have you ever known me to make a joke?”

  “We can’t do this!”

  “We can,” I said, “and we shall.”

  “Well,” he said to me, a new respect in his eyes, “now we know what goes in the yearbook. ‘Most Likely to Turn Out to Be a Criminal Mastermind.’”

  Let us pass over the intricacies of the kind of espionage and technological knowhow that might be required to build cloaking technology sufficiently advanced to spirit away the graduation hall for two hours the morning before the ceremony was due to commence. Let us simply say that the presence of both myself, Mr. Maher, and a small number of co-conspirators (it is always best to keep a conspiracy small) was requested not only by the president of the academy, but also a highly interested deputation from Starfleet Intelligence, who recruited Louie Maher on the spot. I learned from my future correspondence with him that the work we did that semester later formed the basis of being able to track cloaked ships more successfully. Speaking for myself, I was more than content with our project, which I would suggest went well beyond the merely technically excellent. I declined a similar offer given me to join Starfleet Intelligence: I had been offered a posting on the Enterprise, which I had accepted with alacrity. I had no need to dabble further in espionage. I wished to explore. I wished to see the wonders of the universe.

  My father did not attend my graduation from Starfleet Academy. He was away at the time on a diplomatic trip to Alcestis Prime. I did not ask my mother how critical this mission was; presumably sufficiently so in my father’s mind that he could not reasonably defer the Alcestians in order to attend my graduation. He sent a brief message acknowledging my “many and manifest achievements” and congratulating me on receiving my chosen posting. He also wished me well, which I took to be a significant conciliatory move on his part.

  “He is happy for you, Spock,” my mother said, watching the message alongside me. Yet I suppose I might have wished he was happy with me.

  I was hardly alone on the day. The other side of my family—who had, after all, been such a crucial element of these years, assisting me, grounding me, providing me with a refuge when academy life became too intense—were all present. My mother, of course, was there, and Michael sent a loving message to her little brother. If I consider my father’s absence now, it is with regret for him, that even at this stage of his life, he was unable to resolve whatever ambiguities remained in his own mind about his half-human son, whatever tensions he still experienced between his love for me and his disapproval of the choices I had made. For me, while those tensions remained for some time, the process of their dissolution was already well underway. I do not overstate matters when I say that the academy saved both my life, and my sanity. Without the experiences there—which opened my eyes to possibilities beyond the Vulcan way of life—without the distance I had achieved from my home, what followed over the next few years might well have been enough to break me completely. After information comes knowledge—self-knowledge not least.

  PART TWO

  FAI-TUKH—KNOWLEDGE—2254—2293

  Angel

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN, TO WRITE A BOOK OF ONE’S LIFE? Which version of one’s life does one present? I have been son, brother, grandson, cadet, officer, commander, captain, ambassador. I have been clever, mistaken, logical, emotiona
l. I have been both wise and foolish; I remain both wise and foolish. I am always Vulcan, always human, yet never fully one or the other and always liminal, existing in the space between. I have at times experienced myself as fully integrated; at other times so fragmented that it seemed to me that the pieces of myself would never again cohere. You first met me as an old man; now in this book you meet me as a young man. The stories that I am telling will by necessity overlap and interweave—but such happens in our lives. People from our past become suddenly significant once again; we must confront old versions of ourselves to forge the new self that can move forward. The dead, sometimes, do not remain dead, and the stories of our lives, despite our best efforts to shape them into simple and satisfactory wholes, with straightforward narratives and linear progression, sometimes defy these efforts. You have borne with me thus far, Jean-Luc, and I hope you will bear with me further.

  The time which I shall now recount was perhaps the most difficult of my life (even returning from death did not involve such challenges). I was still a young man—and a clever one, and I embarked upon my Starfleet career confident that the bedrock of information—of ro’fori—to which I had hitherto been dedicated to accumulating was sufficient for all that lay ahead. I believed that I was the inheritor of a subtle, stable, and superior philosophy of life, and that whatever deficiencies my other heritage might bring, they could with effort be less than others made them. I was ready to progress with life, to bring all my training and information to the development of fai-tukh, the practical knowledge of the world. I was on the brink of entering that time in our lives when we begin to acquire experience, when, faced with each new challenge, we draw upon all that we have learned and begin to perceive deeper patterns in the world around us. I believed myself entirely prepared for this, and ready for the tests that lay ahead. In this view of myself and the world I was almost entirely wrong.

  There is a principle in Vulcan philosophy: chthia. This is not easily translated, and the most common rendering of the word into English is “reality-truth”. By this is meant, seeing the world as it really is, rather than the way we wish to see it. The latter is a mistake we all make at times during the course of our lives; some are more prone to it than others and some never step past the half-truths that they construct about the world. We may be inhabiting a world of self-delusion, and yet experience that as true, as coherent. The young man who set foot for the first time on board the Enterprise would, had you asked him, have said with confidence that he understood his own nature and the general nature of the universe entirely. Within a matter of years, he was falling apart: his sense of self shattered; his sense of reality disintegrated. That young officer was not, however much he had persuaded himself to the contrary, living in the world-as-it-is.

  Right now, writing at this moment, I experience myself as the most coherent I have ever been. I am clear about myself; I am clear about my purpose. As you have seen already, Jean-Luc, I have not always been this way—from my very earliest days, my sense of self was deeply affected by what I was convinced was an irreconcilable divide in my nature: the fact of my dual heritage. Over the years, I have come to understand that what I took to be irrefutable fact was in fact the false belief of others, but a perception so powerful and persuasive that I continued to accept it as “reality-truth” for many years. Ultimately, however, holding false beliefs about our own nature is not sustainable. We must start the process of coming to terms with our own reality-truth or suffer the consequences. Looking back, I can see clearly the truth of who I was at that time. I was a poorly crafted sculpture, barely covered by a veneer of Starfleet polish, and able to produce at command an impressive array of information that gave the impression of a whole and functioning man. In fact, not long after the start of my career in Starfleet, my false perception of myself began to crack. I, indeed, began to crack.

  * * *

  Vulcans consider honesty, consistency with chthia, a great virtue in itself, and a t’san a’lat above all should adhere to this principle. In part, this is to honor the recipient, the reader, that one offers them only the truth, but above all it is a logical necessity of a wisdom book. Why undertake such a daunting project if only to tell oneself lies? What would be the purpose of such an endeavor? I say this now, Jean-Luc, because I am about to recount a part of my life which has, for various reasons, hitherto been cloaked in secrecy. By that I do not mean the usual kinds of secrets that all families keep—the private griefs and regrets that are their business and theirs alone. I mean events and people about whom I was explicitly ordered not to speak. I have obeyed these orders for many decades.

  But here I reach an impasse. The t’san a’lat requires honesty. You, my friend, deserve honesty. A wisdom book is not truly wise if the author conceals; wisdom cannot be imparted if the account offered is partial. The events I outline now occurred more than a century ago—a hundred and thirty years, indeed!—and almost everyone involved is either dead or gone beyond—well beyond the reach of any of us. Not to speak of these events would be a betrayal of my sister; speaking of these events will also, perhaps, make my current decision more explicable. What occurred was complicated, and for much of the time—as you will see—I was struggling to keep my mind in the present. But I will tell as much as I can of what transpired—and leave you, Jean-Luc, to be the judge of what is best to do with this account.

  A few years into my time on board the Enterprise, I began to have bad dreams. Not an unusual occurrence for me: bad dreams had occurred throughout my childhood, prompting those images of yon’tislak that I so regularly created. During my later adolescence, these nightmares largely disappeared: perhaps my mind was too full of all that I was learning. So the reemergence of these dreams concerned me, for a variety of reasons, signaling to me some interior disturbance. Looking back over my personal logs from this time, I see a note of quiet distress entering early, but also a refusal, initially, to admit what was happening: that these were not simply bad dreams. Rather, the visions I had received as a child were returning, and that I could not, through any rational means, explain them. You will recall that as a boy I saw what I called a “Red Angel”, who guided my parents to my sister, thereby helping us save her life. After this, I continued to experience what seemed like aftershocks, strong images of red bursts of light, dotted throughout space.

  This Red Angel was the figure now passing once again through my dreams, with a force so strong that it seemed less imagination than premonition. Yet how could this be true? I was, logically, set against such mystical notions: these were a product of disorderly thinking, evidence of some weakness, and they must be controlled. I practiced meditation; I attempted to discipline my mind so that the Red Angel would depart. But this dogged refusal—this denial of what I was experiencing—did not help. The dreams became more powerful, to the extent that they crowded my thoughts during my waking hours. This was clearly unsustainable, not least because it ran the risk of causing serious harm both to myself and my fellow crewmembers. I asked for, and received, an extended period of leave. I did not specify the reason for this request, but the lengthy mission which we had recently undertaken had exhausted us all, and I had several months of accumulated leave. This was not, on the surface, an unreasonable request, and I was able to depart without any hint of the psychological distress that I was undergoing. I remain deeply grateful to my captain, Christopher Pike, for this understanding on his part, as I remain grateful for his actions during all that followed.

  At first, I was uncertain how I should proceed. The logical course would be to return to Vulcan, to sequester myself, and continue the attempt to discipline my mind until the visions were gone. They were increasingly powerful, and extremely frightening. I wanted them gone; I wanted once more to be in command of myself. I should go home, enter a retreat, and banish these delusions entirely. Yet some instinct told me that this was not the best choice. I recalled how, as a child, how my father—when I told my parents where Michael was to be found—praised the logic by wh
ich I must have worked out her location. And yet I knew—I knew, but do not ask me how—that the Angel was real and had guided me to her. There was something to be learned here—but this course of action terrified me. To follow the Angel wherever she led—to indulge these delusions—might I lose my mind? From very early in my life, perhaps as a result of my brother’s claim that he had seen Sha Ka Ree and the distress that this had caused my parents, I feared a breakdown, that I would in some way lose conscious control of myself and fall prey to baser instinct or lose all coherent sense of self. This was by far the most horrifying outcome that I could imagine. And yet—this was the path I chose. I followed the Angel—and I fell apart.

  Much of what I know about the following period I have gathered from what my mother subsequently told me. I, personally, recall this time as hallucinatory, incoherent. My sense of self, and of the normal progression of time, was completely disturbed. I know from my personal log—which tracked my ship’s log—that I traveled to an unnamed planet. There I encountered—believed I had encountered—the Red Angel once again, and our minds melded. My overwhelming memory of this was the isolation—the desolation—which the Angel felt, which evoked in me a deep sense of pity. My recognition of this in her, my acknowledgment of this, assisted her—I felt that in her, and felt her gratitude. In return, she gave me what seemed at the time a questionable gift, to say the least. She let me see the future. This was an overwhelmingly distressing experience: a vision of Hell, where my brother had seen Paradise. I witnessed the destruction of Andor, of Tellar, of Earth—and of Vulcan. After this, my connection to reality became even less stable: time seemed to be out of joint. I traveled to Starbase 5, where I committed myself to psychiatric care. I instructed Starfleet not to inform my family. I could not bear the thought of either my mother or my father seeing me in this condition, if for very different reasons.