“I see,” he said. “Would it suffice, then, for you to know the cause of your death in the other timeline?”
“Yes, I think it would,” McCoy said enthusiastically, buoyed by the implication that Spock had thought of a possible solution to his dilemma.
“Such information may exist and may be accessible,” Spock said. “I took tricorder readings of the Guardian while it displayed both our own, unaltered timeline, and the altered timeline caused by your saving Edith Keeler. Those recorded readings may still exist.”
“They ‘may’ still exist?” McCoy asked, disappointed by the conditional nature of Spock’s claim.
“It is my understanding that the original recordings were stored at the Einstein research facility,” he said, and McCoy felt immediately deflated. Station Einstein had been destroyed at the very end of the Enterprise’s five-year mission, when the Klingons had been on the verge of discovering and taking control of the Guardian. “It would seem likely, though, that Starfleet would have kept at least one other copy of those recordings in a separate location.”
That made sense to McCoy, but the classified nature of everything surrounding the Guardian concerned him. “Do you think they’ll allow me to review them?” he asked.
“Considering that you took part in those events and that you have a high security clearance,” Spock said, “I believe they will.”
“Who do you think I should approach about it?” McCoy asked, understanding that he would not simply be able to walk into Starfleet Headquarters, find an open terminal, and access the information he sought.
“I believe that copies of those tricorder readings would probably fall under the aegis of Starfleet Intelligence,” Spock said. “I’m aware of at least one officer within that organization that you know quite well.”
And that officer, McCoy knew, had just spent the afternoon reminiscing with them in Jim’s apartment: “Uhura.”
“Commander Uhura,” Spock confirmed.
McCoy smiled nervously, hopeful that he would get the answers he needed, but reluctant to count on it until it happened. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Spock replied.
On the short flight back to Riverside, McCoy told Spock that he would be traveling from Atlanta to San Francisco a few more times in order to finish dealing with Jim’s estate. He would make sure to deliver the books Jim had bequeathed to him, and that Spock had left behind in the Russian Hill Tower apartment. The Vulcan thanked him.
At the transporter station in Riverside, Spock stepped up onto the platform. McCoy said good-bye and thanked him for listening and for his help, particularly at such a trying time. Spock nodded but said nothing, and the fact of his extreme reserve throughout the day recurred to the doctor. He had noted more than once how uncommunicative his friend had been today, something he’d naturally attributed to the mourning process. He had been too involved with his own grief and his own troubles to give the observation much thought, but now, as the transporter operator worked her console, McCoy worried about Spock. Despite the Vulcan’s apparent acceptance of his human side over the years, McCoy had no idea what level of emotional control—or lack of control—that implied, or how easy or difficult it would be for him to deal with such a powerful loss.
As the whine of the transporter rose and a coruscation of white light formed atop the platform, McCoy could only hope that Spock would be all right.
The incense burned with the aroma of the desert, dry and rough, demanding. Enveloped by the parched odor and with his eyes closed, Spock envisioned the Forge, the vast, barren landscape steeped in Vulcan history. Home to bone and ash and sandfire, the arid wastes had been the site, eighteen hundred years ago, of Surak’s great pilgrimage, which had ushered in the Time of Awakening. More recently, just a century and a half past, the broken land had also been where the Syrrannites had made their determined stand, out of which had sprung the modern Reformation.
In his mind, Spock saw the desolate terrain, the uneven rocks, the fractured ground. The phrase hot as Vulcan had become a part of the vernacular throughout the Federation, and the Forge gave it truth. Air burned in the stark setting, flesh melted, blood boiled.
Spock sought refuge in the mental re-creation, utilizing it as a focal point upon which to concentrate. He let go of thoughts as they occurred to him, going back again and again to the severe cerebral tracts. Gradually, distractions fell away, leaving only the stillness of the sere Vulcan wilderness.
And then, unaccountably, motion interrupted the dead calm of the scene. In the distance of the imagined geography, in the foothills of the L-langon Mountains that bordered the Forge, Spock saw a lithe, moving form. Stealing among the rocks, the large predatory quadruped could not entirely hide the distinctive geometric markings on its back and tail, bright yellow shapes gilding its green hide. The le-matya’s head darted to and fro as it stalked whatever prey it had scented.
Perhaps pursuing a sehlat, Spock thought errantly, his meditative state faltering. His eyes still shut, he brought his clasped hands to his forehead and made an effort to center his mind by discarding the disruptive visualization. He turned his inner sight from the mountains and out across the cracked plain. He would not think of the le-matya, he would not think of the sehlat.
In his conjured vista, Spock allowed his gaze to follow the fissures jagging across the desert floor. Deep and dark, the widest of the earthen rifts pulled his attention into it and down, as though his mind’s eye had become subject to gravity. He set his consciousness adrift as his interior view took him plunging past the steep walls, tracing their linear contours. Below hung a lifeless chasm, still and silent, like a bottomless grave waiting for the next victim of the relentless Forge.
But then sound drew Spock’s notice, a bellow of animal fear. His internal perspective swept up and back to the foothills, where a large four-legged beast lumbered backward, the le-matya advancing toward it. Spock recognized the creature being hunted, with its brown fur and fifteen-centimeter fangs: as he’d suspected, a sehlat.
But not just any sehlat, Spock realized. I-Chaya. The pet he had kept so long ago.
The fearsome le-matya, with its poisonous claws and mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, lowered itself to the ground, its muscular legs poising to spring. Then it leaped forward.
No, Spock screamed within his own head, forfeiting the last vestige of serenity he still retained. He heard two voices echo his reaction. As the le-matya attacked I-Chaya, a child and an adult looked on—both of them Spock. The older Vulcan moved then, charging toward the deadly le-matya.
Too late, Spock knew. Too late.
He opened his eyes in his San Francisco apartment and pulled his clasped hands from against his forehead. His heartbeat had grown markedly faster and his respiration ragged, as though from strenuous physical activity—or from overpowering feeling. His attempt to level his emotions had failed utterly.
The death of Captain Kirk had significantly upset the balance Spock had for many years maintained between his Vulcan and human selves, the event bringing with it sorrow and an almost overwhelming guilt. His reaction had compelled him to abandon his professional obligations on Alonis, he had suffered nightly dreams filled with a depth of sentiment unfamiliar and discomfiting to him, and now his latest attempt to find peace within himself had instead dredged up memories of I-Chaya.
But also more than just memories of I-Chaya, Spock knew. The event surrounding the sehlat’s death—his second, revised death—bore directly on Spock’s remorse. Not because of the loss of the pet, but because of what it meant he had done to Jim.
Spock stood quickly from the low stool in the alcove that he’d set up for his meditation. He turned toward the wall, where he had hung an “infinity mirror”: a black octagonal frame held a perimeter of small lights between a transparent piece of glass and a mirror, causing a series of reflections in the mirror to resemble a tunnel of lights receding into the distance.
Spock put his fist through it.
> The front glass shattered and fell in shards to the floor, the pieces landing with a clash. The mirror splintered but remained relatively intact, only a single thin wedge falling free. The tunnel effect of the reflected lights vanished.
As Spock pulled back his hand, he saw lacerations in his flesh, his blood flowing green from them. He wrapped his other hand around his injured fist and fixated on the physical pain. He needed something—almost anything—to help him pull his emotions into check.
By degrees, Spock’s breathing calmed and his pulse slowed. Still holding one hand with the other, he walked into the refresher. After pulling a first-aid kit from the cabinet beneath the basin, he pushed his fist under the faucet and washed out his wounds. Using a protoplaser from the kit, he then healed his cuts.
Back in the main room, sparingly ornamented with Vulcan ceremonial trappings, the chronometer on the wall told Spock that he’d gotten back from his visit to Iowa little more than an hour ago. When he’d first returned to his apartment, he had with conscious intention given much thought to the predicament besetting McCoy. Curious about what the doctor would find if permitted to review the tricorder readings of the Guardian of Forever, Spock had striven to theorize some means by which memories of McCoy’s life in one timeline might be accessible in another. Before long, though, he’d found that he could no longer keep his own problems at bay. The doctor’s revelation that he’d been experiencing restless sleep and disturbing dreams had highlighted for Spock the truth of his own troubled nights, as well as his inability to adequately control his emotions.
“I am a Vulcan,” Spock said, the words sounding less like a statement of fact and more like an attempt to convince himself of their content. The tenets of Vulcan philosophy provided for facing personal loss with equanimity, by employing logic to maintain emotional control and an overall state of quietude. Further, Spock had been taught by his father that the lives of the dead were to be mourned only when those lives had been wasted. Surely Captain Kirk’s had not been wasted, even as it had ended, in an act that had preserved the lives of the crew and passengers of the endangered Enterprise.
But Spock had no control. He had no quietude. And he did mourn.
As he stood alone in his apartment, he felt as lost as he ever had. His strong emotions reminded him of when he and Dr. McCoy had traveled five thousand years backward in time on the planet Sarpeidon, when Spock’s very nature had begun to devolve into that of the barbaric, passionate Vulcans of that period. He also recalled the polywater contaminant at Psi 2000 that had effected him in similar ways, depressing his powers of judgment and self-control.
But nothing physical caused the deterioration of his mental discipline now. He understood the logic of the situation, but logic failed him. Emotion alone drove him.
And the time had come for him to do something about it.
Chapter Eleven
The Ground of Our Beseeching
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
—T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, III
Twelve
2293
In his office on the fifteenth floor of the Palais de la Concorde, Federation President Ra-ghoratreii sat in an armchair with a sheaf of papers in his lap. Glancing up from his work, he peered over to the far side of the large room, at the grand piano situated on a raised platform two steps above the floor. He briefly considered walking over and playing a tune on the ornately crafted instrument, thinking that doing so might revive his flagging attention, but he knew that today, as with most days, he had a tight schedule to keep.
Ra-ghoratreii stretched, then adjusted his position in the chair. He’d hosted a reception for the Gorn consul last night at Le Jules Verne restaurant in La Tour Eiffel, at which he’d stayed far later than he’d anticipated. As a result, he felt tired right now, even though the time had yet to reach midday.
Returning to the report, Ra-ghoratreii ran his fingertips over the surface of the uppermost hard-copy page, reading it by touch. He preferred the feel of the paper to that of his tactile data slate, which utilized an acutely malleable metal on which it raised characters. Alternatively, he could have looked at an oversized print version of the information by using his spectacles, or he could have listened to a computer recite it for him, but he favored doing it like this. He’d first learned to read in this manner and he still found it most efficient for him, maximizing both his comprehension and retention.
The report had been prepared by one of the deputy directors of the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs. It provided an account and an analysis of the known political changes occurring within the new Klingon government. Since Azetbur had assumed the chancellorship after her father’s assassination, she had faced down repeated attempts by members of the High Council and others to have her removed from her position. Some of the resistance to the new leader, Ra-ghoratreii understood, came from simple prejudice, a sexist attitude held by some Klingon males that women should not sit on the council, let alone in the chancellorship. But Azetbur also faced genuine political opposition as well. Even after the destruction of their primary energy-production facility on Praxis, many Klingons still believed the acceptance of Federation aid to be an act of cowardice, and the pursuit of a peaceful coexistence between the two powers to be a betrayal of the empire’s honor and destiny.
Despite all of that, though, Azetbur had managed thus far to remain in office. According to observers, she had done so by several means. Federation aid, while distasteful to many Klingons, apparently paled when compared to the ignominy of living impoverished, hungry, and sick. Azetbur had also avoided the temptation to forcibly quell opposition views, instead engaging her adversaries in open debate. She had even accepted and implemented several of their proposals, effectively disarming them. Although she had won over to her cause only a handful of members on the High Council, those few wielded great influence.
Azetbur had also begun remaking her diplomatic corps. It surprised Ra-ghoratreii to read that Kamarag, Klingon ambassador to the Federation for more than a decade, had been recalled. His replacement would apparently be a man named Kage, whose record revealed virtually no political experience. In his youth, he’d been a soldier, but later in life, he had resigned the Klingon Defense Force to enroll in the Gorek Institute. There he’d studied civil engineering, a discipline he’d then practiced for twenty years before being recruited by Azetbur. Nothing obvious in Kage’s background particularly recommended him for the role of ambassador, but he had evidently performed some wo
rk on the infrastructure of the First City, the capital of Qo’noS. Ra-ghoratreii believed it likely that Gorkon and his family had at some point become aware of Kage, perhaps even befriending him. Based upon the Federation president’s dealings at Khitomer with the new chancellor, he suspected that Kage would turn out to be not some fawning toady, but an individual with a bright mind who shared Azetbur’s vision for the empire.
Ra-ghoratreii read through the remainder of the known changes in the Klingon government, his fingers skimming down one embossed line of text after another. When he’d finished the report, he reached beneath the silver moire fabric of his sleeve and touched the face of the chronometer he wore around his wrist. The numerals displayed in relief there told him he had a quarter of an hour before the next appointment on his agenda.
Without donning his spectacles—he had occupied this office for nearly five years and knew it well enough to navigate through it—Ra-ghoratreii walked over to his desk. He sat down behind it, his back to the gauzy white curtains that ran the width of the room and covered the tall windows in the outer wall. Even without his spectacles on, he detected the lack of bright light streaming through, telling him that the clouds covering Paris early this morning had yet to give way to the sun.
Ra-ghoratreii set down the report he’d just read, exchanging it for the dossier he’d had his secretary prepare for him. The collection of documents related to the person due in his office in just a few minutes: Ambassador Spock. He quickly reviewed it, refamiliarizing himself with the Vulcan’s background and record. His brief tenure as an ambassador had so far shown promise. Along with Ambassador Tremontaine, he had closed out negotiations with the Frunalians to allow the Federation to mine rubindium in their system, and then on his own had established a dialogue with the new colony on Archanis IV. He had then traveled to Alonis, where he had again joined Tremontaine, this time for talks seeking to establish a Federation starbase in the system. The proceedings had been going well, but Spock had departed Alonis to attend Captain Kirk’s memorial last week. Soon after the service, he had requested a short meeting with Ra-ghoratreii, for the purpose, the president assumed, of establishing a timetable for his return to his ambassadorial duties.
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