Star Trek: Unspoken Truth

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  Ordinarily matters like the spatial rifts surrounding the Deema system were batted around at Starfleet Command for weeks or months or longer. The speed with which the order had come down this time seemed to Mikal almost to be mocking him. He didn’t usually subscribe to pathetic fallacy—the belief that the universe ordered itself solely to make him miserable—but in this instance he was strongly tempted.

  So here were Chaffee’s new orders. She was to return to Deema III, reopen the rifts and observe, send unmanned probes into the larger ones to gather data in an attempt to determine point or points of origin and to what extent the exchange of minerals and plant life from point or points unknown had affected the evolution and culture of the Deemanot. They were to leave immediately, and stay for however long it took. Months? A year or more? That was for the universe to decide.

  Mikal set the padd down on Mironova’s desk none too gently. The look in his eyes was bleak.

  “If I could just get some word from her …” he said.

  Mironova sighed. Mikal was difficult at the best of times, but he would be useless to her and the mission if he didn’t pull himself together.

  “Ordinarily you’d be ecstatic at being allowed to go back and finish what we started,” she reminded him.

  “This is not ‘ordinarily’!” he said crossly.

  “Well? And so what if it isn’t?” Mironova said with an edge to her voice. “Officially, Lieutenant Saavik is on medical rest leave. You saw her into the care of Ambassador Sarek. She’s with family, she’s under the best of care, there isn’t anything for you to do except possibly get back to work.”

  “There’s more to it than we’ve been led to believe. I feel it.”

  “Ah, well, in that case. Nothing like a solid scientific hypothesis based strictly on the evidence.”

  He glowered at her. A silent Mikal was even more perturbing than a vociferous one.

  “I promise you we’ll try to get word through diplomatic channels, if not through Command,” she said with more than a little tenderness. “If there’s any news …”

  He wasn’t even looking at her now, just hunkered down in his chair, arms folded, staring off into space. Were those tears? Not just another fling, then, but the real thing?

  “Right!” she went on. Let him pout; it wasn’t her job to baby him. “Back to business. Just so you know, I’ve put in a request for another telepath—a Vulcan or a Betazoid, if we can manage it—in order to maintain direct communication with the Deemanot. I don’t intend to waste that opportunity while we’re prowling around in orbit gathering data, but I’ll also want you in charge of any landing parties, since Worm and the others have already established a rapport with you—”

  “Whatever!” he said, on his way toward the door. “Three days to departure? I’ll be there. But I won’t be happy about it!”

  You were happy, weren’t you? Mironova thought to his departing back. For a few days, anyway. Best most of us can hope for sometimes, isn’t it?

  Twelve

  No one was prepared for what happened next.

  James T. Kirk was a changed man. Perhaps it was being demoted to captain again and realizing how much he’d missed the center seat that had rendered him not contemplative, exactly, but more contemplative for him—more observant, more sensitized to the moods of those around him. Then again, any of the after-effects of recent events, not least of which was an inability to mourn the son he’d barely known before losing him forever, might have made him that much more determined to hold on to those who were important to him. Whatever the reason, he had become a tuning fork for every nuance of Spock’s behavior.

  The reintegration of so complex a mind by a technique all but lost to ancient history had not been without its rough spots—some of them amusing, if there hadn’t been so much at stake—and even so many months afterward, there were still gaps and hiccups. With a touch of the old impatience that required him to have answers, and answers now, Kirk managed to find a way to check up on Spock at least once a day off shift, “to make sure he’s all right.”

  Most of it was healthy—a game of chess, some casual conversation—if one ignored the barely disguised expression of anxiety behind the captain’s eyes.

  “Stop hovering, Jim!” McCoy barked at him. “Leave the man to his thoughts!”

  “Easy for you to say,” Kirk joked, but McCoy wasn’t playing.

  “Does it occur to you he might heal faster if you weren’t waiting in the wings with a pop quiz every day? Believe me, it’s all there. You said yourself it would come back to him.”

  “The technical expertise, yes. It’s the personality that concerns me.”

  “You trusted him to calibrate a Klingon vessel for time travel in order to save Earth, and you’re worried about his personality? Godalmighty, Jim, will you listen to yourself? It’s a different file drawer in his brain, but he hasn’t lost it. He just needs some time to reconnect the neurons.”

  Nevertheless, on this particular evening, after he’d left the bridge in Uhura’s capable hands, an antique two-dimensional chessboard in a fine teakwood case—the latest addition to his collection—tucked under one arm, he made his way down the at once new and yet familiar corridors. (“Never lose you—never!” What was it that he’d meant? Not the deck plates and Jefferies tubes and warp engines that were Scotty’s bailiwick, though it had all but torn his heart out to watch her burn like a meteor across the sky, but the essence of her—her katra, for want of a better word—was contained in the minds and spirits of those who manned her, not least of whom was his first officer and his friend.) He was aware as soon as he crossed the threshold that something was different.

  Spock was just terminating a subspace message on his screen, though not before Kirk noted the Vulcan call signal.

  “Greetings from home?” he presumed, knowing Amanda checked up on her son almost as often as he did. “Lady Amanda is well?”

  “She is,” Spock said vaguely, as if his mind were elsewhere, as it frequently was even so many months following the re-fusion.

  “You should have given me a chance to say hello,” Kirk said, making polite conversation while he opened the teakwood case and started setting up the board.

  “My apologies,” Spock said, taking him seriously. “Unfortunately my mother was … somewhat preoccupied.”

  “I hope everything’s all right.” Kirk was still making small talk but, all the chessmen now in place, he chanced to notice the length of the silence and Spock’s continued preoccupation. Despite hearing McCoy’s disapproval nagging at the back of his mind, he blundered on. “Spock?”

  “There has been a … situation.”

  It was the term Sarek had used when the savants contacted him. The privacy of Amorak’s pilgrims was for the most part sacrosanct. But there were occasions when it was necessary to notify next of kin.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked, seeing a bleakness in his eyes, a hurriedness to his pace as he terminated the message and announced that he must leave for a few days.

  She’d expected it was some offworld crisis, but the brevity of the journey suggested something more local. What possible trouble could there be within their own system that required the ambassador’s immediate attention?

  She was startled when he said, “It is Saavik. There has been a … situation at the shrine.”

  “What sort of ‘situation’?” Amanda followed her husband down the hall to their sleeping quarters. “She’s not ill, is she?”

  “She was … physically whole at the time she took her leave,” Sarek said carefully, in full diplomatic mode, which ordinarily made Amanda furious but this time told her just how serious the situation was.

  “She’s left the shrine? Why? She seemed to have found peace there at first.”

  “Seeming is not always being, my wife.” Sarek was removing garments from their cabinets in his deliberate way. Amanda found herself doing the same, preparing to pack and accompany him.

  “Where has she gone? And what ca
n I do?”

  Sarek stopped his rummaging and took her hands, gently but with just enough firmness to suggest that she stop what she was doing and hear him out.

  “She was last seen walking off into the desert, alone. None followed her. More than that cannot be said until I speak with the savants in person. And before thee asks, no. Thee cannot accompany me. This is a Vulcan matter.”

  Amanda’s impulse was to blurt out, “She’s my daughter too!” but over the years she had learned when to negotiate, when to stand her ground, and when, as now, to yield. This was not to say she was content. Sarek saw it in her all-too-human face.

  “My wife,” he said tenderly, releasing her hands, extending the first two fingers of his right hand as Amanda reciprocated, joining her fingers with his in their familiar gesture of affection. “I will speak with you as soon as I know more. Worry not. Such matters are rarely as they seem. And as we know our daughter …”

  “… we must trust that she is not so changed by recent events that her true self has not survived.” Amanda turned away and began closing cabinet doors now that it was clear she would not be traveling. Whatever else she might have wanted to say, she only added, “Journey safely, husband.”

  She waited until the purr of the air car faded into the distance before she took action. She had her own sources of information, not as extensive perhaps as the master diplomat’s, but they would serve.

  What information they yielded only deepened her concern.

  The Enterprise family had been aware of Saavik’s abrupt departure from Earth several weeks ago in Sarek’s care. One could hardly expect a scenario played out in the Command HQ tram station to remain secret for long. Despite the inevitable chatter, to date the only official word was that Spock’s young protégé had been granted medical rest leave on Vulcan, which surprised no one who knew even a portion of what she’d gone through on Genesis. Kirk hadn’t inquired further until now, but …

  “I have to ask. Saavik?”

  “Indeed.”

  “She certainly never asked for the hand she was dealt.” Kirk settled himself in his usual chair on one side of the chessboard. “How much are you able to tell me?”

  Spock seemed to be contemplating his opening gambit. “Only that she has … I believe the expression is ‘gone off the grid’ …”

  Even Vulcans are not immune to gossip. Not everyone in residence at the shrine was a permanent member of the community. Some stayed for a brief time, others never left. There were stories from ancient times of brigands seeking sanctuary among the first savants and more often than not being converted to the ways of peace, but some had proved incorrigible. Nevertheless, not in the memory of anyone at Amorak in these times had there been such a scene. And some who were in residence only temporarily took the story with them in their departure.

  “The more often an event is described, the more easily the details are distorted in the telling,” Spock said, his voice devoid of emotion, his gaze very far away. “Therefore it is difficult to know for certain what is truth, what is exaggeration, and what has been left unspoken.”

  “Rashomon,” Kirk suggested.

  “A film by Akira Kurasawa, based upon the short story ‘In a Grove’ by Ry?nosuke Akutagawa, describing a single crime from the point of view of several witnesses, each of whom sees something entirely different,” Spock said, and Kirk suppressed a smile. It would come back to him, indeed. “What is known is this: There was an altercation. About what is unclear. What is certain is that Saavik initiated it. It escalated beyond words, and several at the shrine were injured. One, it is said, an elder named Simar who tried to intervene, may even be near death. In the event, having violated the peace of the shrine, Saavik was obliged to leave.”

  “Just leave?” Kirk asked carefully, rubbing his chest absently, hearing the singing of a blade through the air, feeling the razor’s edge against his skin as he struggled to breathe in the thin air, mindful at firsthand of the anger of a Vulcan aroused. Add Romulan ancestry to that mix, and the survival instincts of a once feral child, and … “There must have been some penalty.”

  “Jim, the desert surrounding the shrine is penalty enough.”

  Kirk tried to picture it, then wished he hadn’t. His last encounter with Saavik—highly intelligent if a little too serious, poised, beautiful, soft-spoken, disciplined, impeccable—didn’t mesh with the image of some maddened, wild-eyed creature lashing out at those around her, being driven off into a wilderness that, even to a Vulcan, alone and unassisted, inevitably meant death.

  “Lord knows we’ve all had our moments of madness,” he managed finally. “McCoy’s attempt to use the Vulcan neck pinch on that security guard in his favorite bar has become legend in some circles. As for you and me, between spores, transporter accidents, and general mayhem …”

  “Indeed.”

  “There must be something we can do.”

  “My father has already repaired to the shrine.”

  “And?”

  “The savants allow no technology other than a single comm unit in the prefect’s cell with which to communicate with families when there is a death or … something untoward such as this. Had they wished to track Saavik once she left the shrine, they would not have had the equipment to do so, even if their precepts did not forbid it. Once the wind swept the sand across her trail, she was no more.”

  Kirk’s impulse was to protest, to offer some reckless suggestion about mounting a rescue mission. A younger Kirk might have done exactly that. But this was the post-Genesis, contemplative Kirk, and what he heard in his old friend’s voice said, Let it alone. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do except … nothing.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Sometimes, Jim, no words are necessary.”

  The first time she killed a lizard, she apologized.

  Forgive me, little one. I would not do this if I did not have to.

  Crouched over her kill, she had bitten off the head, trying unsuccessfully to fight the gag reflex spasming in her throat. It had been so long since she had eaten animal flesh. She managed to brace herself against the ground with one hand without losing her grip on the small dun-scaled body, whose blood oozed from the severed neck and ran over her other hand, dripping into the sand, where it was immediately swarmed over by small, voracious insects, but the retching had caused her to spit the head out into the sand, and the insects claimed that too. When the retching finally stopped, she reclaimed her prize, fighting off the stings of the ants, brushing as much sand off the morsel as she could before crunching it between her molars, grit and all, making a mental note not to be so careless again.

  She had kept track of the nights and days since the evening she strode off with the shrine at her back, deliberately heading into the light of the setting sun, lest anyone be foolhardy enough to follow her after what she had done.

  Simar, Elder, I never meant you harm. Your spirit knows this. I have violated the peace of this ancient place and will never come this way again.

  The stark desert wind had erased her footprints even as she made them. By the time the sun made her shadow long before her the next morning, she was well out of sight of the shrine, and it of her. She never once looked back.

  Her inner time sense told her that that had been forty days and forty nights ago. At first she had survived on the fruits of the desert, following the animal trails that led to clumps of cactus and other succulents swollen with sap derived from water sources deep underground and the rare desert rains. Every plant had some portion that was edible, though many were poisonous as well. Ironically, many were akin to the sparse vegetation on Hellguard, and her early experiences held her in good stead.

  But under these conditions, she could not live on vegetation alone, and so she had to resort once more to killing. Eventually she remembered how to bite off a reptile’s head without gagging, how to overturn a rock and devour everything that squirmed in the shade beneath before it got away, which parts of a snake’s body t
o eat first and which to save for later.

  She also could not stay in one place very long, and there were stretches of sand so barren that not even animals ventured there. No telltale tracks or sand shifts that meant snakes in their sidewinding traverse or overflights of predator birds homing in on food or even the tiny disturbances that meant reptiles dug into the sand awaiting nightfall, their eyes alone above the surface, indistinguishable from the pebbles surrounding them unless one happened to see the occasional blink.

  Across those barren places, she neither ate nor drank, but walked with the night, listening for predators, though even a le-matya would not waste its time here where there was no food, seeking shelter behind rock croppings or even burrowing into the sand like the lizards for protection from the sun in the daytime. Plumes of steam—indistinguishable in daylight from the mirages that plague desert dwellers everywhere (once an entire ancient city rose to greet her, its crenellated walls as new as the day they were constructed, the bronze shields of its warriors displayed along the battlements, throwing the sun back into her eyes; it had lingered the day long—she could even see the sentries walking the battlements in clockwork regimentation—then shimmered away, whether into time or space she would never know, with nightfall)—became real beneath the starlight, signaling hot springs and some respite from the sweat that made the sand cling to her and rub her skin raw, but they were few and far between and, again, she could not linger.

  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.