Star Trek: Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Steady!” Mironova said, phaser pulled from her belt and set on stun just in case. “We don’t know how big that thing can get or what its intentions are.”

  “‘Intentions’?” Saavik repeated, but then she remembered how many species of interactive plants had been cataloged in the Alpha Quadrant alone. The spores of Omicron Ceti III, among others …

  She was setting her tricorder to analyze the phenomenon when Mikal cried out in pain.

  The plant had sent a particularly long tendril out

  to lash at him, as if it did indeed have intentions. Something—unseen spines or perhaps a toxin—had raised a series of angry welts on his arm, almost like second-degree burns. His dignity was damaged as well. Mironova, small as she was, had shoved him aside and fired at the vine. The phaser blast distracted it enough to make it release Mikal’s wrist, but neither damaged it nor slowed it down.

  Mikal scrambled out of the way just as the twining branches reached the shelter and began weaving their way around the support struts, pulling it down.

  “Transporter!” Mironova was shouting. “Get us out of here!”

  By the time Mikal was released from sickbay, his burns healed but his ego still bruised, all of the anomalies, from the tame little portulaca to the killer vine, had disappeared. Repeated scans showed nothing growing on the surface that they hadn’t already identified and cataloged. Only the crushed and mangled shelter, the churned-up soil around it, and the single moss rose specimen languishing in one of the ship’s labs confirmed that they’d been there at all.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Mikal said when he and Saavik had returned to the surface to survey the damage. “Spores traveling through space. One variety I might believe, but not two.”

  “Portulaca reproduce by placental seed, not unicellular spores,” Saavik mused. “Doubtful they could survive extremes of temperature in deep space.”

  Mikal stared at her in amazement. “Are you serious? I wasn’t talking about the portulaca. What about that … that thing that sprouted out of the ground in seconds? It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, anywhere, and now it’s just gone.”

  “Indeed,” Saavik said, studying what was left of the shelter. Despite the reassurance of numerous tricorder readings, she wondered if the ground beneath them might open suddenly and produce other untoward and potentially dangerous phenomena. It was an all-too-familiar feeling.

  “Damn shame Mironova didn’t let me get a piece of that thing before she pulled us back to the ship!”

  “To all appearances,” Saavik said dryly, “‘that thing’ was attempting to get a piece of you.”

  Together they surveyed the spot where the twining plant had first emerged from the cleft in the rock. Surface scans to deep-core scans showed no root system, no water source that might have nurtured something that could grow that fast, nothing. More puzzled than ever, they moved on to Biome 2.

  Biome 2 was a temperate, forested region farther south of the planet’s equator, replete with morning mists and warm midday sunlight filtered through the canopy. Ferns and mosses were particularly plentiful; it was in fact difficult to find a patch of soil that wasn’t blanketed with a soft layer of moss, though it made natural flooring for their newly arrived shelter.

  “It’s like a Japanese garden,” Cheung remarked, impressed for once.

  “Several variant species, though well within the norm for this sector,” Saavik was saying, studying her tricorder rather than the landscape, until Mikal reached across and flicked it off.

  Before she could object, he said, “Just look at them with your eyes for a moment. Breathe the air, listen to the sound of the leaves.”

  “It is quite aesthetically pleasing,” she admitted after a moment.

  Mikal still had his hand over the tricorder screen. He gestured toward everything around them. “More of that, less of this,” he ordered her as the team fanned out to begin their gathering.

  There were a surprising number of flowering species despite the tree cover, and some seemed to have luminescent qualities.

  “Love to spend the night and see if they really do glow in the dark,” Mikal mused.

  “We can as easily ascertain that under laboratory conditions,” Saavik countered as the sunlight began to fade and the rest of the team gathered at the beam-up point.

  “Ah, but where’s the fun in that?” Mikal wanted to know.

  He suggested as much to Mironova, who thought it was a splendid idea, though “only until the end of beta shift, and only in the interests of scientific observation. If none of you are eaten by carnivorous vines, we may expand the practice for shore leave once you’ve gathered all your specimens.”

  Deema III was moonless, and night at this latitude was immediate; the stars seemed close enough to touch. Almost as quickly, small pools of light began to dot the landscape. The flowers that had absorbed the light during the day now emitted it like multicolored fairy lights. It could hardly be called “darkness” when everywhere one looked there was light.

  “It’s been three hours, and they show no sign of dimming,” Mikal observed almost breathlessly, lying back against the trunk of a tree, peering across an open glade he’d scouted in the daylight for this very purpose. The landing party had set tricorders at intervals around the glade to scan for anomalies, but nothing odd had appeared so far. The others had chosen observation points around the glade, turning ship’s rations into a picnic, speaking in whispers if they spoke at all.

  “They must start to wane at some point,” Jaoui murmured. “Or do they store the light indefinitely?”

  No one knew the answer, and no one really cared. They’d already brought samples to the labs for analysis. End of shift came far too fast, and the landing party straggled together reluctantly, beaming up by twos. When only Saavik and Mikal were left, Saavik’s communicator beeped.

  “Landing party …” Mironova’s voice was half swallowed by static. “Some sort of interference at this end. Running a diagnostic. Stand by.”

  “Affirmative, Captain.”

  She could hear Mironova cursing in several languages, then, “Looks like a bloody ion storm!” she sputtered. “Snuck up on us … transporter lock unstable … breaking orbit … ride it out … sit tight … hear from us …”

  Saavik knew the drill. The ship would break orbit, retreat to a safe distance and ride out the storm, whether it took hours or days, then come back and retrieve them. Why then the quickening of her heart rate, a sensation a human might term panic? The last time she had lost contact with her ship—

  “Saavik to Grissom … come in, please …”

  —had been an anomaly. She would not think of the last time. Ion storms were commonplace; she could expect to experience many in the course of her career. There were rations and sleeping bags in the shelter, luxuries her last planetary stranding hadn’t afforded. Even though the temperature in this sector dropped considerably at night, and a sly little wind fluttered the shelter canopy as they settled in beneath it, this was hardly a crisis situation.

  “They know where to find us,” Mikal said, unrolling the sleeping bags to make a soft place to sit inside the shelter, rummaging through the food packs with a kind of glee. “And if they never come back because they’ve been sold into slavery by the Ferengi or eaten by a gigantic intergalactic squid, we’ll live off the land, hitchhike to the nearest Deemanot settlement—watching out for attack vines, of course—and make first contact, though no one will ever know.”

  He was talking more than usual. Was he disturbed by their being stranded here as well?

  “We’ll go native, learn to ingest and egest soil as they do and become productive members of society, emulate their mating rituals if they have any, grow old together … that is, if I remembered to pack the raktajino. Can’t function without my morning raktajino. Saavik? You didn’t by any chance drink the last of the—?”

  She had been standing outside the shelter, ignoring his rambling, staring absently at the
swirling pattern of the communicator, as if willing it to respond. When Mikal touched her shoulder, she flinched and whirled on him without thinking. He recoiled even before he saw the knife in her hand.

  “Was it something I said?” He tried to joke, keeping his distance just the same. “Fight off many ion storms with that?” Saavik seemed frozen in place and did not respond. “Suppose I should be grateful you didn’t go for your phaser, but seriously, this is getting to be a habit—a bad one.”

  She was staring at the knife as if it were alive and might turn on her. Recovering herself at last, she slipped it back into her boot, and stalked off to the edge of the clearing to collect herself. Mikal followed her.

  “What is it?” he pleaded. “It’s more than just being stuck here for a few hours. You’re trained for situations like this. Saavik, talk to me!”

  “I did not have the knife with me on Genesis,” she said, more to herself than to him, looking off into the forest and not at him. “If I had …”

  Genesis. He understood at once. “I wondered if that was you. But there’s no reason to think this is anything like—”

  “I am aware of that!” she cried, turning on him, cornered, angry, frightened, and more than a little ashamed. She hadn’t even realized she had the knife with her until it was in her hand. If she had had it with her on Genesis, it might have saved David’s life. Ever since, she had weighed its necessity wherever she went and usually kept it in her quarters but close to hand. Why had she brought it with her this night?

  Did she see Mikal as some sort of enemy? Or had Tolek’s reappearance in her life, the reminders of Hellguard and his newfound obsession, triggered some primeval need to protect herself? Everything she had not allowed herself to feel on Genesis, with Spock’s life in the balance, she was feeling now.

  And what of Tolek? He was aware of the complexities of sending subspace messages at this distance. If Chaffee did not return for days, or longer, and she could not reply to his messages … even if she could, why had he come to her? What did he expect her to do?

  Mikal had a point. As a trained Starfleet officer, she should have gone for her phaser. What was happening to her? It was as if she was reverting to her former feral self …

  She strode past him to the shelter, retreating into a far corner, reminding herself that he was not the enemy, that there was no enemy, that—

  “It’s more than Genesis,” he observed quietly, sitting on his heels in the doorway, trying to make himself as nonthreatening as possible. The luminescence from the flowers accentuated the paleness of his skin, the contrast of the swirling tattoos across his brow, over the hairless dome of his head, curling under his great bejangled ears, disappearing down his neck into the collar of his field suit, reappearing again on the backs of his surprisingly delicate hands. “Just as you and I quarrel so much for more than ordinary reasons. Tell me what I can do.”

  Leave me alone! she wanted to scream. You and your need to watch the night-blooming plants are the reason we are trapped here!

  But while she might have lost Spock forever, she possessed him still. Vulcan logic, Vulcan calm, slowly reasserted themselves, and she drew herself out of the dark corners of her own mind to see the stricken look on Mikal’s face, the liquid greenish-brown eyes glowing with concern. And, as he said, there was more behind his look than this moment, some kinship, some recognition.

  Was there a Hellguard in his past as well?

  “Tell me what I can do,” he’d said to her.

  Slowing her breathing, she cast about for something that was not of the moment, not about her or this place or this mission or the inchoate fears that defied logic, and said, “Tell me … about a scientist … offspring of a race of scientists, who abandoned his world and never returned—”

  “My world!” Mikal snorted in disgust. “It was never mine to abandon. It abandoned me generations before I was born.”

  “Her name was Preltam,” he began. “You’ll never have heard of her, but I’m certain you’ll have heard of her mentor, Zora. A confluence of circumstance once placed her in a position to stop a genocide, and she failed …”

  Seven

  Someone once said that the true definition of power is to have one’s name remembered long after one is dead. Kill or heal, the reason does not matter. No one remembers the names of those you choose to save or slay, but your name is remembered. The fact that Tiburon, a beneficent world, famous for its scientific advancements, produced only two beings whose crimes spread their fame beyond their homeworld made those two all the more noteworthy. When the full extent of Sevrin’s crimes came to light, some on Tiburon were almost relieved. The theory was that some might forget Zora because of him. That hope was short-lived. Sevrin’s crimes were minor by comparison, limited mostly to the deaths of those who followed him willingly, but Zora …

  Every schoolchild knows the one-line answer to who Zora was: “Zora, who experimented with the body chemistry of subject tribes on Tiburon.” How many step back and say, “‘Subject tribes’? What does that mean, exactly?”

  Strictly speaking, there were no subject tribes on Tiburon by the time it joined the Federation. The governing body might call itself a council of tribes, but the populace have not been tribal, in the sense of living in small interconnected families, clans and septs, in many centuries. The remnant of those who survived Zora’s atrocities were absorbed rather abruptly into mainstream society. Some adapted, some did not.

  But back to Zora. Some tried to claim that she wasn’t even a Tiburonian, that she came from offworld, but in fact no one really knew. By the time she became provincial governor, she had already destroyed the paper trail that led her there, and one of her first acts as governor was to eliminate anyone who might say she was anything other than what she claimed to be. And her experiments did not occur in a vacuum. They were carried out with the full knowledge and approval of—some historians said even at the suggestion of—her superiors, though of course they denied it later.

  And she had a lot of help, from lesser scientists hoping to make names for themselves, or perhaps naïve enough to accept what became known as Zora’s Equation, that if the drugs she developed worked on the subject peoples, they would save millions of more “evolved” citizens, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it?

  Was the difference between a clinical trial, in which a thousand patients were given an experimental drug and a thousand more given placebo, and the same drug administered to ten thousand unlettered natives anything more than one of scale? Surely if these aboriginals could read a consent form, they would sign it, wouldn’t they? Half the educated people who gave consent had no idea of the possible side effects of an experimental drug, or they’d never consent. Was this any different?

  “Her name was Preltam,” Mikal said. “She was my many-times great-grandmother. She began as a lowly lab assistant, no more skilled than the robot that collects used beakers and stacks them in an autoclave—less, in fact, because a robot’s sensors recognize the residues in the beakers and make sure not to mix the volatile ones together. But Zora took a shine to her, taught her, groomed her, and made her a member of the inner circle, one of the Bringers of Medicines to the remote villagers who had no access to the news feeds and didn’t realize what was going on. It is both because and in spite of her that I am what I am today …”

  Tiburon went through a dark phase after Zora’s party was overthrown. Long after the toxins had been destroyed, the killing fields covered over with flowers and monuments, the promises that this would never happen again broadcast into everyone’s ears planetwide, there persisted a state of fear. It was as if science itself had become the enemy, and the backlash would last for generations in some regions. Sevrin’s Eden Movement had many predecessors, all sprung out of that fear.

  Eventually society as a whole would recover, and Tiburon would become known for its scientific and technological achievement, frequent host of the conference of the Interspecies Medical Exchange. But that recovery was har
d-won and a long time in coming.

  In the short term, there was anger and retribution, against not only the perpetrators but also anyone with any connection to them. Friends, acquaintances, and especially kin were, if they were fortunate, rounded up, questioned, and usually released. If they were less fortunate, they were simply dragged out of their houses in the middle of the night and dispatched, as if the four-year-old grandchild of a scientist somehow contained the “bad seed” that would bloom into another. But every society has its witch trials, does it not?

  Only by “recanting”—promising to abandon the pursuit of science in perpetuity—could one be spared.

  Some refused, and those who survived the purges became the next generation of scientists who would get the culture back on track. But others, Preltam’s survivors among them, were only too eager to abandon not only science but all learning.

  “I am the descendant of sixteen generations of illiterates,” Mikal said quietly.

  Saavik did not know what to say.

  “Zora herself had no kin, which may have been one of the reasons she lost her way, forgot that her ‘subjects’ were sentient beings, though that is only conjecture. Her experiments were benign at first, but competition for the revenue she needed to continue was fierce, and at first all she did was cut corners, fiddle her results, exaggerate her findings …”

  The wind ruffled the flexible sides of the shelter, sending waves of color rippling through the phosphorescing flowers. Saavik tried not to think of David and of protomatter.

  “But that was in the beginning. At some point her treatments became less expedient and more toxic. Yet her defenders argued that sometimes a cure may seem like a kill. In ancient times, before gene therapies and anti-inflammatory therapies, cancers were literally burned away with chemicals and radiation. Were those doctors criminals because some of their patients died?