Star Trek: Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “At least, that was Preltam’s defense when she stood before the tribunal. I’ve read the transcripts. She argued eloquently. But when you compare what she said with the conditions in the camps where these tribes were housed, when you realize they didn’t even bother sterilizing the instruments they used, eloquence does not justify her.

  “So when she was remanded to the penal colony, she lost all connection to her family. Her spouse divorced her, changed his name and those of their children, but that was not enough. People knew. As the former spouse of a criminal, he was forbidden to go offworld—Tiburon likes to keep its dirty laundry self-contained—and he soon found himself out of work, through guilt by association.

  “Thus my many-times great-grandfather signed the Document of Recantation, abandoning the sciences and becoming an itinerant merchant. Whenever the whispers about his identity began in town, he and the children would move somewhere else. The children were denied schooling. They followed in their father’s footsteps. Their children and their children’s children were not even taught to read.

  “Within a generation or two, their identities blurred and the acute pain of the past was forgotten. Preltam’s grandchildren might have been quietly enrolled in schools, but past bitterness for everything they had lost gnawed at their parents’ souls, and they refused.

  “Thus, inhabiting the dark corners of the cities, among the remnants of the ‘subject tribes’ who could not adapt but who instead squander their lives in chemically induced dreams (some purportedly provided by the very society that once subjugated them), move the unlettered beggars and tinkers of Tiburon, kept out of sight of the outworlders who flock to the planet’s renowned medical conferences. No world is completely free of secrets.”

  Mindful of Romulans, of Hellguard, and of Vulcan, Saavik wondered which of “her” worlds had claim to the most unspoken truths.

  “Have you ever gone days, even weeks, without bathing, and then washed at a cold water pump in a public square whose source is suspect?” Mikal was no longer speaking to her, was no longer even present so much as lost in his own reverie.

  Saavik thought of pools of stagnant water, if there was water at all.

  “Have you ever lived for weeks on the spoiled food left over in the family’s caravan when the power’s failed and no one will buy it and your father and your uncles haven’t enough credits between them to buy anything else until the next consignment comes in? Do you know what it’s like to own not a single garment that someone else hasn’t worn before, often until it’s in rags?”

  Indeed, Saavik thought. Her eyes, reflecting the light of the flowers, glowed with a light of their own, catching Mikal’s attention in the dark. Their intensity made him stop, as if he were listening to her thoughts.

  “I’m not saying it was always thus. There were flush times, times we even stayed in one place for more than a season, and some of those places were posh. There was an inn with featherbeds, I recall, and the innkeeper’s middle daughter taught me things a boy of ten could hardly be expected to learn on his own.

  “But that was the real hardship, don’t you see? I was forbidden to learn. Oh, I was taught to tap out numbers on a dataslate to add up sales, and to scan any road signs in the rural areas that hadn’t yet learned to talk to the slate. But my ignorance was so profound, I didn’t even know that there was more.

  “So here I am one wretched cold morning before dawn, shoved out of the warm funk of the caravan to make deliveries for my father, wiping snot off my lip with my sleeve, rags wrapped around my feet in the snow—don’t ask me why after those experiences, but I still love snow, maybe only because it kept the lice down.”

  He paused, as if something else had just occurred to him.

  “In my … in Tiburon culture there is a custom. During the first snowfall of the season, lovers stop whatever they’re doing and walk with each other in the snow. It’s a beautiful sight, couples of all ages holding hands and strolling day or night through ordinary streets made magical by the falling snow. When the snow stops, everyone goes back inside and resumes their very important scientific work. Except for the pariahs, who returned to our scraps and scrounging. When I was a boy, I wondered if I would ever have the privilege.”

  He shook off the reverie and looked at Saavik as if seeing her for the first time. “I don’t know what made me remember that just now. It never occurred to me at the time that even a pariah can enjoy the snow …”

  “It’s snow! Snow in the same sector. Fantastic!”

  Saavik, who had to that point never experienced snow, had observed its properties on Grissom’s monitors with the same curiosity with which she examined any new thing and, while she could understand David’s surprise at the rapidity of the climatological changes occurring over such a small region of the Genesis planet, she heard something else in his voice and wondered what all the fuss was about. Until they’d beamed down to Genesis and she felt it crunch beneath her boots and blow cold against her face, its crystalline nature was nothing more than an intriguing scientific phenomenon.

  “No two snowflakes are alike, Saavik,” David said as they pushed against the wind, following what sounded like the cry of a frightened child. “Did you know that?”

  Its unexpected presence in what had been designed as a temperate zone undergoing late spring to early summer, its effect on the naked child she and David found hypothermic and shivering, mere hours from death if they had not happened along, had threatened her sense of wonder at this first encounter.

  Yet it was beautiful. Under ideal circumstances, she might have walked in it for hours, watching it reshape and soften everything it touched, cupping it in her hands, letting a few of the supposedly unique crystals touch her tongue as she’d seen David do when he thought she wasn’t watching, as they tracked the source of the unexplained tricorder reading making child-sized footprints where there should be none.

  No two snowflakes were alike? How was it possible to know? Had some Earth scientist cataloged every snowflake in a given storm to verify this statement? Did the hypothesis apply only to that storm, so that the multiplicity of shapes was reincarnated, in a sense, in the next storm, or had no two snowflakes ever been alike since the universe was formed? Even with advanced computer simulations, how was it possible to know?

  Humans made such statements as if they were proven hypotheses, then worked backward to verify them after the fact. This behavior had been what destroyed Genesis, nearly destroyed her, yet gave Spock back his life. Out of great harm had come great good, all overseen by coincidence. If Carol Marcus’s team had not created Genesis, if Spock’s tube had not been jettisoned at precisely the moment it was, if she and David had not noticed the anomalous reading on the planet surface, if Admiral Kirk hadn’t stolen the Enterprise and come looking for them, if, if, if …

  There had been no time to ask David how he knew about snowflakes. And in all this time, she had neglected to research it herself.

  “… but anyway, snow, me scratching at the lice, haven’t bathed since the warm season, trudging under a pack nearly as big as I was, a consignment I had to deliver to someone in town, and all I was thinking was, Will it be warm in the shop and will they let me stay until my feet stop stinging, or will they take the pack from me, fling the payment on the counter, and shove me back outside before I stink up the place? when I saw a light up ahead, a fire. Someone had made a fire in an old tin barrel and was warming his hands over it …”

  He’d been warned often enough not to talk to strangers, but the fire drew him like a moth. The boy crept up quietly, saw that there was just one man, elderly and unarmed. His smile was as welcoming as the fire and Mikal almost bolted, especially when he saw how well dressed the stranger was. Why would he be out before dawn in the cold unless he was one of those predators who preyed on vulnerable young boys, out in the cold alone?

  But the pack was heavy, and if he dropped it the retribution from his father and his uncles would be almost as dire as what a predator could
do to him, and anyway his feet were so numb he wasn’t certain he could outrun even an elderly man.

  He’d placed the pack at his feet and stood straddling it, ready to heave it back onto his shoulder and move once his hands were thawed. But he stood there in silence beside the stranger, warming himself until the sun came up and the stranger said simply, “It’s time,” and motioned to Mikal to follow him. For reasons he would never understand, he did.

  There was a food shop just opening. It was clear the staff knew the stranger from the way they welcomed him. He told them to bring “the usual” and the same for “my young friend here.”

  I’ll eat, Mikal thought, and by then my feet will be warm, and I can leave.

  But before he even had time to stow the pack under the table, the stranger had activated the screen in the center between them and began to read aloud.

  “It was only the day’s events, local news and gossip, global and offworld,” Mikal explained, “but I was so ignorant it took me I don’t know how many minutes to realize the squiggles in front of him on the screen were the source of the information and not something he was inventing as he went along. I asked him if he was a sorcerer, and could he teach me his magic too? He just laughed and told me he’d be here every day, no matter the weather. And so for the next however many days, I rushed to make the morning deliveries so I could meet him there whenever I could, and we’d continue reading.

  “Yes, I said ‘we,’ because some of those squiggles on the screen reshaped themselves into the words he was speaking, and it was a kind of sorcery, even a kind of alchemy. He had given me the greatest gift in all the worlds.

  “I was so ignorant, I never even asked his name, and a good thing too, after what happened next. And I’ll never know why he did it, though in thinking back, I realize he didn’t need to be standing by that fire on that first morning. Perhaps he’d watched me trudging past the food shop every morning and saw something, something that for all the science in the universe I cannot put a name to. But he gave me the gift of that universe, and then I almost forfeited it …”

  He’d slunk back to the caravan one night and something triggered a suspicion. Perhaps he looked too smug or only too well fed, perhaps the aromas from the food shop clung to his clothes, perhaps a member of the clan had seen him with the stranger, perhaps, with the whole family bundled together for warmth, he’d muttered something in his sleep. But one of his uncles was waiting for him behind the door and grabbed him by the ear so hard he tore three earrings loose, cuffed him on the side of the head, and began to curse him.

  “I know what you’ve been doing!” he kept shouting. “I know!”

  “We were just talking, I swear it!” the boy insisted, seeing it through his uncle’s eyes. No one gave anything for nothing. The man had to be a predator, plying him with food. What other reason could there be? “Just talking, that’s all!”

  As the blows rained down, he realized too late what his crime was. He had broken the family taboo. He had dared to learn.

  When his father returned late that night, he beat him a second time and locked him out in the snow. One of his aunts risked her own life to follow him, giving him a packet of dried meat and one of her bracelets to sell. Battered and confused, Mikal trudged back to the food shop, but it was locked for the night, and he had no idea where the stranger lived or even what his name was.

  He thought of waiting until the shop opened again at dawn, but if the wet snow seeping through the rags wrapped around his feet hadn’t dissuaded him, the thought of the constables or a true predator finding him did. It also occurred to him that his father and his uncles, while they usually kept family matters within the family, might exact retribution from the stranger if he led them to him.

  He didn’t even have the means to leave a note to thank the stranger and wish him well, but he did have the gift the stranger had given him, a knowledge of the larger world beyond the neighborhoods he’d prowled on his deliveries.

  He slept in a doorway until the pawnshops opened, traded the bracelet for a pair of secondhand boots, hitched a ride to the nearest teleport, found a lavatory and washed the blood off his face, hoping his tattoos would hide most of the bruises, snuck aboard a ferry to the nearest space hub, lied about his age, and for the next several years alternately stowed away or worked his passage on whatever ship of whatever registry would have him.

  He learned languages by osmosis and pestered his bunkmates and ships’ crews to teach him how things worked and tell him of the worlds they’d visited, acquiring a generalist’s knowledge in a variety of

  subjects. One fellow passenger was a botanist who taught him everything she knew, and not only about plants. In a roundabout way he found himself on Earth.

  • • •

  “I never looked back, I never went back. Sometimes it occurs to me to wonder what became of them. Is my father still alive? My mother? The uncle who beat me? The aunt who gave me her bracelet? Something stops me from finding out. Some scientist I am, eh?”

  “A scientist, self-taught, who made a decision that certain courses of inquiry are not worth pursuing,” Saavik said, though she wondered which of them she was speaking of. She remembered the question Mironova had asked during her interview, the question she hadn’t been able to answer. “You were not so much running from as running toward. I do not know that, given your path, I would have persevered.”

  “Yes you would,” Mikal contradicted her. “You’ve survived worse. I saw it the first time I looked at you.”

  No! she thought, wanting to bolt again. What you saw, what you said—

  “Oh, I know what I said …” Was he reading her thoughts? “But that was cover. Galina and I have a past. If she hasn’t told you—and knowing Galina, she has, if indirectly—you’ve intuited that. I could hardly tell you what I really felt while she was standing there. I also assumed, being a Vulcan, that you were already wed or at least betrothed.”

  “I am neither,” Saavik blurted before she could stop herself. Try as she might, she could not quantify what she was feeling right now, except that it was a feeling, and feelings were not Vulcan, therefore they must be from that other heritage, which was anathema and which—

  Stop it! she told herself, realizing that in the split second she had been trapped in that thought loop, Mikal’s expression had altered from the haunting of his past to something hopeful.

  “It is complicated,” she said, realizing this would only inspire more questions.

  “I see,” Mikal said, though clearly he didn’t. “I just assumed the subspace messages were from—”

  “An acquaintance … from my own past.”

  “A past that compels a Vulcan to travel with a knife in her boot? Tell me.”

  Reluctantly at first, she did.

  Aboard Chaffee, things were not going well. The little ship had been able to outrun the main brunt of the ion storm, but it was still being jounced about by the stray ripple, and the crew was in little better shape. Galina Mironova gripped the arms of the command chair

  and watched an unwary crewman pick himself up from the deck as the ship surfed over another incoming wave.

  “Report,” she said evenly, hoping her voice would be enough to calm the handful of new recruits, who were green in more ways than one.

  “Scanners and sensors still inoperative,” came from the helm. “Shields holding at seventy-nine percent.”

  “Hold your course.”

  “Nothing but static, sir,” comm volunteered before she even asked.

  “Keep trying.” Mironova hit the intraship toggle. “Engine room?”

  “Engines at eighty-five percent,” came her engineer’s voice on speakers. “Compensating for fluctuations, but I’d like to know how long we’re expected to—”

  “As long as it takes,” Mironova said, cutting the connection. There was a subliminal shake of the head around the bridge. Engineers! “Transporter room, stand by. Let me know when it’s clear enough to get a fix on those two on t
he surface.” She closed that connection as well, took a breath, and said, “Nav, come about forty-three degrees and stop engines.”

  The navigator turned and gaped at her.

  “You heard me. Riding over this thing isn’t working. We’re going to try sliding under it without rattling any more crockery.”

  As they made the shift from impulse to dead stop, Mironova looked hopefully toward comm, who shook her head.

  “Nothing from the surface, sir. Still hailing.”

  “Captain?” Helm sounded distinctly alarmed. “I think you need to see this!”

  As the forward screen cleared somewhat, they all looked.

  “Oh, bloody hell!” Mironova managed between clenched teeth before the screen snowed over with static again.

  The wind shook the shelter, and the flower lights showed Mikal’s eyes filled with tears. For the first time since Saavik had known him, he had no words. Gently he took her face in his hands, leaned forward, and kissed her—chastely, he thought, not knowing that between her upslanted eyebrows was one of her species’ erogenous zones—then released her, settling back into his corner of the shelter, as still and nonthreatening as he knew how to be.

  Outside, the fairy lights were beginning to dim. In this world devoid of forest creatures, birds, or even insects, there were no other sounds but the wind and their own breathing, and the occasional crackle of static from Saavik’s communicator, still open to the ship’s frequency but giving no indication that it was being heard. Could they remain like this, studying each other across a space of only a meter or so, until the sun came up?

  Mikal yawned. It brought them both to their senses.

  “Colder than I thought it would be,” he said, rubbing his arms briskly. “I’d imagine you feel it more than I do.”

  “I am well able to adapt …” she began, but he was busy opening two of the sleeping bags and joining them together as one.

  “I’m sure you are,” he said, settling himself in on one side and motioning for her to take the other, “but where’s the logic in it?”