Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  He orbited the serving table. It gleamed with an array of bottles. He picked one up, paying little attention to what it was, and filled another glass. McCoy and Scott had spent all day preparing for the wake. The synthesizer had tried to keep up with their programming, but it was badly overloaded. Ethyl alcohol was a simple enough chemical, but the congeners any decent liquor required were foreign to the ship’s data banks. Everything smelled the same: strong and rough.

  Montgomery Scott beetled toward McCoy, stopped, and gazed blankly at the table full of half-emptied bottles. McCoy picked one at random and handed it to the ship’s chief engineer.

  “That’s scotch,” he said. “Or anyway, close enough.”

  Scott’s eyes were glazed with exhaustion and grief.

  “I recall a time, when the lad was nobbut a bairn, that he…” Scott stopped, unable to continue the story. “I recall a time when Mister Spock…” He stopped again and drank straight from the bottle, choking on the first gulp, but swallowing and swallowing again. Obsession and compulsion drove him. He and McCoy had planned the wake and insisted on holding it, though it was foreign to the traditions of most of the people on board and quite alien to the traditions of one of its subjects.

  “This isna helping, Doctor,” Scotty said. “I canna bear it any longer.”

  McCoy climbed onto a chair. Looking down, he hesitated. The deck lay ridiculously far away and at a strange angle, as if the artificial gravity had gone on the blink. McCoy steadied himself and stepped up on the table, placing his feet carefully between bottles bright with amber. Then he remembered an alien liquor called “amber” by Earth people. He had not ordered it from the synthesizer because it required the inclusion of an alien insect to bring out its fullest flavor, like the worm in tequila. McCoy felt vaguely sick.

  His foot brushed one of the bottles—quite gently, he thought—and the bottle crashed onto its side. It spun around and its contents gurgled out, spilling across the table, splashing on the floor. McCoy ignored it.

  “This is a wake, not a funeral!” he said, then stopped, confused. Somehow that sounded wrong. He started again. “We’re here to celebrate the lives of our friends—not to mourn their deaths!” Everyone was looking at him. That bothered him until he thought, Why did you get up on the table, if you didn’t want everyone to look at you?

  “Grief,” McCoy said slowly, “is not logical.”

  “Bones,” Jim Kirk said from below and slightly behind him, “come down from there.”

  Even in his odd mental state, McCoy could hear the edge in Kirk’s voice. Twenty years of friendship, and Kirk was still perfectly capable of pulling rank. McCoy turned and staggered. Jim grabbed his forearm and tightened his grip more than necessary.

  “Whatever possessed you to say such a thing?” Kirk said angrily. Even the anger was insufficient to hide the pain.

  “Don’t know what you mean,” McCoy said. Permitting Admiral Kirk to help him, he stepped down from the table with careful dignity.

  David Marcus had inherited his mother’s tolerance for alcohol. He had drunk several shots of some concoction as powerful and as tasteless as Everclear. Despite a certain remoteness to his perceptions, he felt desperately sober. His hands remained rock-steady, and his step was sure.

  McCoy and Scott had insisted, cajoled, ordered, and bullied until nearly the whole ship’s company congregated in the recreation hall for this ridiculous wake. Alone or in pairs, people stood scattered throughout the enormous chamber. Across the room, Doctor McCoy and Admiral Kirk exchanged words. Kirk looked both angry and concerned. McCoy adopted a belligerent air.

  They’re both completely pickled, David thought. Fixed like microscope slides. James T. Kirk, hero of the galaxy, is drunk. My illegitimate father is drunk.

  David had not yet quite come to terms with the recent revelation of his parentage.

  “Doctor Marcus—”

  David started. He had been so deep in thought that he had not noticed Commander Sulu’s approach.

  “It’d probably be easier if everybody just called me David,” he said.

  “David, then,” Sulu said. “I understand that I owe you some thanks.”

  David looked at him blankly.

  “For saving my life?” Sulu said, with a bit of a smile.

  David blushed. He automatically glanced at Sulu’s hands, which had been badly seared by the electrical shock from which David had revived him. The artificial skin covering the burns glistened slightly.

  Sulu turned his hands palm-up. “This comes off in a couple of days—there won’t even be any scars.”

  “I almost killed you,” David said.

  “What?”

  “It’s true I did resuscitation on you. It’s also true that I did it wrong. I’d never done it before. I’m not a medical doctor, I’m only a biochemist.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m alive because of what you did. Whether you erred or not, you kept me from death or brain damage.”

  “I still screwed up.” Like I may have screwed up everything I’ve done for the last two years, David thought

  “It might not matter to you,” Sulu said. “But it makes some difference to me.” He turned away.

  David blushed again, realizing how churlish and self-centered he had sounded. “Commander…uh…” He had no idea how to apologize.

  Sulu stopped and faced David again.

  “David,” he said, carefully and kindly, “I want to give you some advice. When we get back to Earth, you and your mother are going to be the center of some very concentrated attention. Some of it will be critical, some of it will be flattering. At first you’ll think the abuse is the hardest thing to take. But after a while, you’ll see that handling compliments gracefully is an order of magnitude more difficult.” He paused.

  David looked at the floor, then raised his head and met Sulu’s gaze.

  “But I need to learn to do it?” David asked.

  “Yes,” Sulu said. “You do.”

  “I’m sorry,” David said. “I really am glad you’re okay. I didn’t mean to sound indifferent. After they took you to sickbay I realized I’d done the procedure wrong. I didn’t know if you’d make it.”

  “Doctor Chapel assures me that I’ll make it.”

  David noticed that Sulu avoided mentioning McCoy, but thought better of saying so. He had stuck his foot in his mouth far enough for one day.

  “I’m glad I could do something,” David said.

  Sulu nodded and walked away. David had not noticed if Sulu drank during the toasts, but the commander appeared to be completely sober.

  He might be the only sober person on the ship right now, David thought.

  But then David saw Lieutenant Saavik, all alone, watching the party without expression. He watched her, in turn, for several minutes. Back on Regulus I, she had told him that Spock was the most important influence in her life. He had rescued her from the short, brutal life that a halfbreed child on an abandoned Romulan colony world could look forward to. Spock had overseen her education. He had nominated her to a place in the Starfleet Academy. He was, David supposed, the nearest thing she had to a family. That was a delicate subject. She seldom discussed how the cross that produced her must have come about.

  David walked up quietly behind her.

  “Hello, David,” she said, without turning, as he opened his mouth to speak.

  “Hi,” he said, trying to pretend she had not startled him with her preternatural senses. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No. I never drink alcohol.”

  “Why not?”

  “It has an unfortunate effect on me.”

  “But that’s the whole point. It would help you loosen up. It would help you forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Grief. Sadness. Mister Spock’s death.”

  “I am a Vulcan. I experience neither grief nor sadness.”

  “You’re not all Vulcan.”

  She ignored the comment. “In order to forget Mister Spock�
��s death, David, I would have to forget Mister Spock. That, I cannot do. I do not wish to. Memories of him are all around me. At times it is as if he—” She stopped. “I will not forget him,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean you should try. I just meant that a drink might make you feel better.”

  “As I explained, its effects on me are not salutary.”

  “What happens?”

  “You do not want to know.”

  “Sure I do. I’m a scientist, remember? Always on the lookout for something to investigate.”

  She looked him in the eye and said, straight-faced, “It causes me to regress. It permits the Romulan elements of my character to predominate.”

  David grinned. “Oh, yeah? Sounds interesting to me.”

  “You would not like it.”

  “Never know until you try.”

  “Have you ever met a Romulan?”

  “Nope.”

  “You are,” she said drily, “quite fortunate.”

  Carol Marcus felt very much alone at Mister Spock’s wake. She sat on the arm of a couch, concealed by the subdued light and shadows of a corner of the room. She felt grateful for the translucent wall that alcohol put between her and the other people, between her and her own emotions. She knew that the purpose of a wake was to release emotions, but she held her grief in tight check. If she loosed it, she was afraid she would go mad.

  The pitiful gathering insulted the memory of her friends more than exalting it. Perhaps Mister Scott and Doctor McCoy believed it adequate for Captain Spock and Mister Scott’s young nephew. But the mourning of a few veteran Starfleet members and a surreptitiously drunken class of cadets, barely more than children, gave Carol no comfort for the loss of her friends on the Spacelab team. She kept expecting to hear Del March’s cheerful profanity, or Zinaida Chitirih-Ra-Payjh’s soft and musical laugh. She expected Jedda Adzhin-Dall to stride past, cloaked in the glow of a Deltan’s unavoidable sexual attraction. And she expected at every moment to hear Vance Madison’s low, beautiful voice, or to glance across the room and meet his gaze, or to reach out and touch his gentle hand.

  None of those things would ever happen again. Her collaborators, her friends, were dead, murdered in vengeance for someone else’s error.

  Jim Kirk managed to get McCoy down from the table and away from the center of attention before the doctor had made too much of a fuss, and, Kirk hoped, without making a fool of either of them.

  “I think you’ve drunk too much, Bones,” he said.

  “Me?” McCoy said. “I haven’t had nearly enough.”

  Kirk tried to restrain his anger at McCoy’s juvenile behavior. “Why don’t you get some sleep? You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I’ll feel awful in the morning, Jim-boy. And the morning after that, and—”

  “You’ll feel worse if you have to deal with a hangover and the results of a big mouth.”

  McCoy frowned at him blearily, obviously not understanding. Kirk felt a twinge of unease. McCoy generally made sense, even when he had had a few too many. In fact, his usual reaction to tipsiness was to become more direct and pithier. Kirk glanced around, seeking Chris Chapel. He hoped that between them they might get McCoy either sobered up or asleep. Chapel was nowhere to be seen. He could hardly blame her for avoiding the wake. He wished he were somewhere else himself. He had come only because McCoy insisted. Jim supposed Chris had decided that the hard time McCoy and Scotty would give her for absenting herself would be less unpleasant than attending. Jim suspected she was right.

  “Come on, Bones,” he said. Back in sick bay, the doctor might be persuaded to prescribe himself a hangover remedy and go to bed.

  “Not going anywhere,” McCoy said. He shrugged his arm from Kirk’s grasp. “Going over there.” He walked slowly and carefully to an armchair and settled into it as if he planned to remain till dawn. Getting him to his cabin now would create a major scene. On the other hand, McCoy no longer looked in the mood to make proclamations. Jim sighed and left him where he was.

  Jim wandered over to Carol. She was alone, surrounded by shadows. They had barely had time to talk since meeting again. Jim was not altogether sure she wanted to talk to him. He did want to talk to her, though, about her life since they last had seen each other, twenty years ago. But mostly he wanted to talk to her about David. Jim was getting used to the idea of having a grown son. He was beginning to like the idea of coming to know the young man.

  “Hi, Carol,” he said.

  “Jim.”

  Her voice was calm and controlled. He remembered that she had always been able to drink everybody under the table and never even show it.

  “I was thinking about Spacelab,” she said. “And the people I left behind. Especially—”

  “You did fantastic work there, you and David.”

  “It wasn’t just us, it was the whole team. I never worked with such an incredible group before. We got intoxicated on each other’s ideas. I could guide it, but Vance was the catalyst. He was extraordinary—”

  “Spock spoke highly of them all,” Jim said. It surprised him, to be able to say his friend’s name so easily.

  “Vance was the only one who could keep his partner from going off the deep end. He had a sort of inner stillness and calm that—”

  “They were the ones who designed computer games on the side? A couple of the cadets were talking about them.”

  “…that affected us all.”

  “David and our Lieutenant Saavik seem to be hitting it off pretty well,” Jim said. David and Saavik stood together on the other side of the recreation hall, talking quietly.

  “I suppose so,” Carol said without expression.

  “She has a lot of promise—Spock had great confidence in her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I had to meet David—and you and I had to meet again—in such unhappy circumstances,” he said

  The look in her eyes was cold and bitter and full of pain.

  “That’s one way to put it,” she said

  “Carol—”

  “I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly. She stood up and strode out of the recreation room.

  Jim followed her. “I’ll walk you to your cabin,” he said. He took her silence for acquiescence.

  With some curiosity, Saavik watched Admiral Kirk and Doctor Marcus leave together. Of course she knew that they had been intimate many years before. She wondered if they intended to resume their relationship. She had observed the customs of younger humans, students, while she was in the Academy, however, and she now noted the absence of any indication of strong attraction between Marcus and Kirk. Perhaps older humans observed different customs, or perhaps these individuals were simply shy. Mister Spock had told her that she must learn to understand human beings. As a project for her continuing education in their comprehension, she resolved to study the admiral and the doctor closely and see what transpired.

  After Doctor Marcus and the admiral left the recreation hall, Saavik returned her attention to the gathering as a whole. She wondered if there was something in particular she was supposed to do. Keeping her own customs after the deaths of Mister Spock and Peter Preston, she had watched over their bodies the night before Mister Spock’s funeral. Only yesterday morning she stood with the rest of the ship’s company and sent his coffin accelerating toward the Genesis planet. She wished she could have sent young Peter’s body into space, too. He had loved the stars, and Saavik believed it would have pleased him to become star-stuff. But his body was the responsibility of Chief Engineer Scott, who had decreed he must be taken back to Earth and buried in the family plot.

  Everyone assumed Captain Spock’s casket would burn up in the outer atmosphere of the Genesis world. So Admiral Kirk had intended. But Saavik had disobeyed his order. Instead, she programmed a course that intersected the last fading resonance of the Genesis effect. When the coffin encountered the edge of the wave, matter had exploded into energy. Within the wave, the energy that had been S
pock’s body coalesced into sub-quarkian particles, thence, in almost immeasurable fractions of a second, to normal atomic matter. He was now a part of that distant world. He was gone. She would never see him again.

  She wondered how long she would be affected by the persistent, illogical certainty that he remained nearby.

  “David,” she said suddenly, “what is the purpose of this gathering?”

  David hesitated, wondering if he understood it well enough to explain it to anyone else. “It’s a tradition,” he said. “It’s like Doctor McCoy said a while ago, it’s to celebrate the lives of people who have died.”

  “Would it not make more sense to celebrate while a person is still living?”

  “How would you know when to have the celebration?”

  “You would have it whenever you liked. Then no death would be necessary. The person being celebrated could attend the party, and no one would have to feel sad.”

  David wondered if she was pulling his leg. He decided that was an unworthy suspicion. Besides, he could see her point.

  “The thing is,” he said, “the funeral yesterday, and the wake today…they aren’t really for the people who died.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “They’re for the people who are left behind. People—humans, I mean—need to express their feelings. Otherwise we bottle them up inside and they make us sick.”

  This sounded like the purest hocus-pocus to Saavik, who had spent half her life learning to control her emotions.

  “You mean,” she said, “this procedure is meant to make people feel better?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why does everyone look so unhappy?”

  David could not help it. He laughed.

  The door to Carol’s cabin sensed her and slid open. She stopped. Jim stopped. Carol said nothing. Jim tried to decide on exactly the right words.

  “Carol—”

  “Good night Jim.”

  “But—”

  “Leave me alone!” she said. The evenness of her voice dissolved in anger.

  “I thought…”

  “What? That you could come along after twenty years and pick up again right where you left off?”