“Mother,” I said softly. “I’m here.”
Her eyelids fluttered open. She seemed, for a moment, to look past me, and then she focused and smiled. “Spock…”
It was not as if she had given up, I thought, more that she had started to look beyond us. She was no longer entirely present. I could see, now, why people spoke of “passing on”. She was passing on from us; she was going elsewhere; she was already almost gone. I did the only thing I could think of in the circumstances. I summoned Bones.
He arrived at our home in the mountains early one morning, sweating and cursing this damn planet and every single damn inhabitant of the whole damn place. He gave me a brusque nod, and said, “Where is she?” About an hour later, he came to find me by the fountain, and told me what I already knew.
“Well, what can I say, Spock? We know what’s wrong with her.”
“She is only ninety-one. The condition has been controlled—”
“Yes, but she’s lived on Vulcan for over sixty years. Sixty! We don’t have much information about how living somewhere that long that might affect human physiology—”
“I sincerely hope, doctor, that you are not saying that living on Vulcan has killed my mother.”
“You know damn well I’m not saying that!”
I lifted my forefinger to signal my apology. What he had said was not untrue.
“Sometimes people don’t come back from a brush with their own mortality, Spock.” He eyed me thoughtfully. “I mean, not you, obviously. Can’t keep you dead. But I’ve seen it before with people who have always been very healthy. They get sick badly for the first time, and the shock of realizing that they’re mortal does something to them. Sets off the aging process. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s genetics, maybe it really is the case that this place wasn’t, in the end, any damn good for her. I wish I could do something, Spock, but I can’t. And I don’t think she wants me to.” He looked away, at the fountain. “How much does your father know?”
“He most certainly knows that she is not well.”
“But he’s not come back?”
On that score, at least, my mother had been completely clear. My father was not to be disturbed in his current work; he was to return only when his task was complete. “She has told him not to come back.”
“I see,” he said, and sighed. “Well, that’s between him and your mother, I guess. But if I were you, Spock, I’d let your father know he’s not got months and he might not even have weeks. If he wants to see her again—he should think about coming home now.”
There was some considerable doubt in my mind as to whether or not my father wanted to see my mother in her present condition. I sent a message to him nevertheless which stated in the clearest possible terms that time was running out and I urged him to return as quickly as he possibly could. In his reply, he told me that it was impossible for him to leave the negotiations at this delicate time, and that he was sure that I had everything in hand to ensure her comfort and happiness. And I did, with the help of Saavik and Bones, and although I was not him, it was quickly clear to me that she did not want him to see her like this, and he did not want to see her like this. I began to think that I would have to accept that he would not return in time. Had they agreed this between them? He would not want to see her die, surely, and she would not want to see him anguished. Perhaps this was what they both wanted. They were so very often opaque to me.
For the first week or so, my mother still wanted to sit outside. She liked to watch the sun rise. I would sit and read to her until she slept. I read books from my childhood, that she had read to me, and then to me and Michael. Sometimes we listened to music, from Earth. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. When I was tired, I left her in the company of Saavik or Bones. She liked to hold Saavik’s hand—thinking, perhaps, of the adopted daughter she had lost. Bones sometimes raised a laugh. Towards the end of the second week of my time there, she no longer asked to go outside, and remained in her room, which looked out across the mountains, steep and stark and silent. She liked to look at these, but mostly she slept, and I sat at her bedside, watching her. She seemed to be turning translucent before my eyes.
Sometimes, waking up from a doze, I would see that she was awake, staring out at the mountains, her face suffused with happiness. One morning, very early, I woke to find her looking at me. “I love you so much,” she said. “I have been so very happy here.” Later that morning, she died.
My father arrived back at the house two days later, and the funeral took place on the third day. To my surprise, he did not insist on any Vulcan rites for her. She was buried very simply, with a humanist ceremony, in the memorial garden of our family home there in the L’langon Mountains, the place on Vulcan which she had loved best.
My mother was gone. All that remained of our family now was my father and myself.
* * *
After the funeral, Bones stayed on for several more weeks before returning to Earth. Saavik left shortly afterward for her ship. I remained at the house in the mountains with my father for several months. I have never seen a man so lost. He simply did not seem to know what he should do without her. Although he moved sedately through the world, there had always been purpose about him. Now I would find him standing in the garden, looking around as if he had forgotten what had brought him there. I know that he struggled to meditate at this time. In all this there was very little that I could do other than be there, and while I was no replacement for my mother, I would like to think that my presence was some consolation. In time, he would come and sit with me, and we would play long games of kal’toh, as we had only a short while before, when we were working together to make our peace treaty a reality. He had lost the taste for competitive play completely, and I was in no mood to play against someone whose mind was almost entirely elsewhere. At first, his attention would often lapse. Slowly, he began to come back to himself. We spent many hours together at the board, bringing order to the chaos.
I have wondered, sometimes, whether my mother, knowing that she would die first, and that this would leave my father and myself alone together, chose in part to leave us when Sarek and I were the closest we had ever been. Bones would scoff at this, I am sure, telling me that she couldn’t choose death in this way, and I never voiced this thought to him. Perhaps it is illogical to speak this way, but then I was never wholly logical when it came to my mother. And I do believe that if there had still been some rift between me and Sarek, if my father and I had not had some kind of rapprochement, then my mother would have remained doggedly with us for as long as it took for that to happen. And now, there we were, father and son: the triumph of our treaty having brought us together; the absence of the one we both loved keeping us together.
We did not talk about my mother, of course, and, at first, he did not want to speak about anything at all. Throughout this whole time, I had continued working, at a distance, on details arising from the recent treaty with the Klingons, finding a very able associate in a young diplomat named Curzon Dax, a joined Trill who brought considerable energy to this work, and was a great aid throughout this difficult period. My father first began to show some of his usual interest in the outside world when I began to discuss with him my communications with Dax. For my part, I was naturally curious about the diplomatic mission that had kept him away from my mother’s side, knowing nothing more than that he had been close to the border with Romulan space. Eventually, he began to open up about this. I was glad that he had begun to speak again about anything at all.
The Federation and the Romulan Empire had, according to the account my father gave me at this time, come very close to war. The revelation that their ambassador to the Federation, Nanclus, had been a significant part of the plot to assassinate Gorkon had triggered numerous purges of high-level officials back in the Empire. In an attempt to save face, and in customary Romulan fashion, their replacements had implied that Nanclus had been tricked by those Starfleet admirals who had been involved in the plot. This could, they su
ggested, be considered an act of war. This was the reason given for their sudden withdrawal from the Khitomer conference and my father’s subsequent mission. I was naturally curious to hear more about his close encounters with the Romulans during these last months. He was the very opposite of complimentary.
“When I first learned about our common history, Spock,” he said, “I was shocked, as I believe most Vulcans were. But almost immediately, I hoped that this revelation would lead to some kind of closer connection between our two civilizations. There is so much shared history, after all. But now…” He stopped. These days, I noticed, he tended to let sentences go unfinished, as if his thoughts drifted more often. That had most certainly not happened in the past, when every statement had been carefully considered before it was voiced.
“But now?” I prompted. “Now you are less optimistic?”
“I am both less optimistic and less willing for any such rapprochement to take place,” he replied.
This seemed unusually harsh, even for my father. “How so?”
“I have come to the conclusion that the differences between us are what makes us Vulcan,” he said. “That closer ties, or reunification, or whatever the aim might be, would necessitate us moving toward them to some degree. That we would need to change not only how we act, but how we think. And I do not wish this for us, Spock. Having had the chance to observe them closely, now, I would not want that. They are consumed by their preoccupation with secrecy. They are unable to speak without in some way misdirecting. They may be persuaded to act in a certain direction and say that this is their intention for the future—but one cannot rely on that remaining the case. They do not trust each other. How, then, can they begin to trust us? Without trust, there can be no friendship. To draw closer to them, we could have to become more like them. No.” He shook his head. “Not for Vulcan. The best we can ever hope for is not to be at war.”
I listened with great interest to all that he had to say, and, despite my mother’s warning that this would be his thinking, I was still surprised. My father’s life, after all, had been lived with absolute commitment to the possibilities of diplomacy, and his achievements in this sphere were considerable. To hear him openly voice a belief that diplomacy had limits—this was most unlike him. At the time, I was inclined to think that his thinking here was affected in some way by the fact that his recent interactions with the Romulans were so closely bound up with the circumstances of my mother’s death. That if, perhaps, he had returned home sooner, he might have persuaded her to remain with us longer. This was, of course, something that I would never have said to him, implying as it did that his perspective was based upon emotion, not reason or logic. He had, after all, performed his duties as immaculately as ever; relations between our two governments were at the most cordial they had been in some time. But he plainly thought this was unlikely to last.
To some extent, he was correct—although the Romulan turnabout was many years into the future. Their attack on the Klingon colony of Narendra III, in which the Enterprise-C played such a significant part, and which drew the Federation and the Klingons even closer as allies, was several decades away. When I heard the news about this attack, I recalled this conversation with my father and how these events seemed to bear out his pessimism. But at the time I was surprised, to say the least, to hear such defeatism voiced by Sarek of Vulcan. I sensed that something about the whole issue exhausted my father; that the enormity of the task of working to move closer to the Romulans was too much even for him to think about. I cannot blame him for this. I remain profoundly grateful that he discussed this so freely with me. This time, after my mother’s death, was perhaps the closest that my father and I had ever been—a bittersweet aspect of this tragic year, in which I lost both her and Jim Kirk. Not long after this conversation, knowing that I could not remain on Vulcan indefinitely, I told my father that I would soon have to return to Earth. My father closed the house in the mountains and returned to the house in ShiKahr. I left him there, alone, and with some trepidation, and traveled on to Earth to resume my diplomatic duties. The house in the mountains has remained closed to this day. Whenever I have been on Vulcan, I have made my home in ShiKahr.
There are, when I look back now, many ironies to this conversation with my father, not least when I reflect upon the nature of our later dispute over Federation-Cardassian relations. But, chiefly, I am struck by how poignant it is that the question of reunification ultimately became the dominating concern of my later years. Looking back on my correspondence at the time, I see how my early diplomatic career was primarily concerned with securing the new peace with the Klingons and handling the delicate issue of providing aid after the Praxis disaster. I would have said, surely, that my part in the Khitomer Accords would be the diplomatic achievement for which I would be remembered, and not for any matter related to the Romulan Star Empire. But even as I read back through my letters from these early years, I see how the Romulan question was always there, at the back of my mind—like a thread running through the story of my life, waiting to be picked up and woven into the whole. The connections I made at the Khitomer conference, at the very start of my career in diplomacy, were to play a significant part in this.
* * *
You will recall Pardek, of course, Jean-Luc. He was much younger when I first met him, at the Khitomer conference, but already he had polished his genial surface to a great shine. He did not change much over the years. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign, that the face which he presented to me was one of many masks he had at his disposal. I think of the fascinating and treacherous Vanauka, Goddess of Faces, whom I am sure you have encountered. Of course, we can only know such things with the benefit of hindsight. I do not believe that I present a significantly changed face to the world either, but I would venture to suggest there is a closer correspondence between surface and interior.
At the time, at Khitomer, I was not unhappy to deal with someone so cordial; the purpose of treaty talks is, after all, to turn that cordiality into lasting friendship. I responded to his geniality with an open heart and mind. Pardek was there as an aide to the Romulan ambassador Nanclus, and when his superior’s involvement in the plot was revealed, and before the Romulan contingent withdrew entirely from proceedings, he was at great pains to impress upon me that he had not been involved in any way. I understood even at the time that Pardek was trying to distance himself as quickly as possible from Nanclus, who, presumably, had been his patron, in order to save his life. I have no illusions that, had the plot been successful, he would have been equally eager to tell all at home of the significant part that he played. I have no idea of the truth of the matter. I suspect that eventually Pardek had no idea of the truth either. It was sufficient to persuade himself, as quickly as possible, of whatever was necessary to save his life, and continue the advancement of his political career.
Knowing as I do now that our long acquaintanceship ended ultimately in him betraying me, and having observed at first-hand and extensively the treacheries, deceits, and opacities that are so characteristic of Romulan politics, it is impossible for me to say now whether or not Pardek ever entered into correspondence with me in good faith. I am sure that he would say that he did, and I am sure that he would believe himself while he said this. Nevertheless, a lengthy correspondence ensued. I continued to find him genial, equable, likeable, extremely well informed about Vulcan culture and society, and, more pertinently, he seemed to have a fondness for our world. He often expressed his desire to visit; I am sure that he meant this sentiment entirely as he was putting it on the page. He wrote to me in dorli’lakh, the written dialect used for communication between peers on Vulcan, which makes extensive use of transparative verbal moods, and, over the years and with my guidance—for which he had explicitly asked—he became fluent. I, in turn, wrote to him in at’sotzah, the most commonly used respectable Romulan dialect, and gladly received his tutorship. I remain unsure how fluent I became. I began, out of interest, to explore other Rom
ulan dialects at this time, which were less easily learned through texts, being considerably more vernacular than this rather affected written mode. When I came to live, at last, on Romulus, my accent and the many mistakes I made caused much enjoyment among my friends and acquaintances. I am better now, but I would not call myself fluent.
Pardek and I made a point of sharing, in turn, relevant works of Romulan and Vulcan literature, poetry, and philosophy. (He had already read Surak, although he wished for a more contemporary translation.) Returning to these letters, as I did to prepare this account, I see that discussion of these formed the chief substance of our communications. He liked everything that I sent to him, or found something to like. He also asked incisive questions. He learned from me a great deal about Vulcan; I learned from him a great deal more about Romulus than perhaps he ever realized. I watched his political career and ascendance through the ranks with great interest. I am sure he watched my diplomatic career with similar interest. After the failure of the Romulan attack on Narendra, and the cooling of diplomatic relations between the Romulans and the Klingons, and thus, by extension, with the Federation, Pardek went silent for many years. I was not surprised. A close connection to a Federation diplomat—and a Vulcan, no less—would have done him no good in that political climate.
But my appetite for knowledge about Romulan society, culture, and affairs had been considerably whetted, and I wished to learn more. Saavik proved to be of valuable assistance here. She had informed herself about the Romulan way of life and also taken many missions along the border. She was connected to various Romulan émigré communities and put me in touch with these. Courageous people, mostly living in fear that a sudden change in policy at the top might find them facing an assassin at any moment. But they were willing to communicate with me, and meet me, and from them I was reminded of that early lesson I received from T’Kel—that whatever face a civilization presents to the outside, closer study and careful scrutiny will always reveal its complexity and variety, its many faces, indeed. When, after almost two decades of silence, Pardek—by now a very high-ranking senator—contacted me again, he found me considerably better informed about Romulan affairs than he left me. I was also certainly most interested in talking to him about the possibilities that might arise from serious consideration of the matter of reunification. I did not believe for one second that his interest in reunification would outlast any political expediency it offered at any given time. But he was most certainly a useful route into Romulan space—where you found me, Jean-Luc.
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock Page 17
