by Diane Duane
“Very well,” said Shath, breaking Jim’s train of thought in a sharp tone of voice that no one,no one, used on a starship captain, as far as Jim was concerned. “You will be at the Halls of the Voice at point three, two days from today, for your declarations. You may bring reference materials with you if you need them.” The look in his eyes made it clear what Shath thought of anyone who needed to use notes for anything whatever. “That is all.”
Jim opened his mouth to give the insolent creature a piece of his mind, but McCoy beat him to it. “Shath,” he said, “do you practicecthia?”
The look on Shath’s face was that of someone asked an embarrassing question by a parrot: annoyance, and scorn. “I do.”
“But not the part about courtesy to guests, I suspect,” Bones said, very calm.
Shath’s eyes blazed.“Cthia does not apply totviokh,” he said. “Nor, soon, to any creatures of your sort. That will be all.”
“That’s not all by a long sight,” McCoy said, drawling a bit, but still quite calm.“Tviokh, huh? You are arude little son, and you not past fifty yet. But you’re still old enough to have some manners. Good thing I have too much to do this afternoon to be bothered tanning your hide.” He stood up. “Come on, Jim, let’s leave this spoiled brat to his paper-pushing.”
There was something so outrageously provocative about Bones’s tone of voice that Jim held in his initial reaction to it. “Shath,” he said, and lifted his hand, parted, “long life and prosperity. Doctor,” he said, and they went out together into the outer office.
Bones did not stop but went straight out of the office into the corridor that led down to the ’tween-floors transporters. “Now what wasthat?” Jim said under his breath.
“Wait till we get outside,” McCoy said, and would say nothing until they were out in the plaza in front of the building.
They found a simple stone bench under several of the prickly willows and sat down. McCoy blew out a breath, looked at Jim. “That lad up there,” he said. “You recognize him?”
“No.”
“Well, you were busy at the time, as I recall. He was at Spock’s ‘wedding.’ ”
Jim digested this. “He was?”
“Sure enough. Just one of the crowd, but nonetheless, I recognized him. It was the blond hair: it caught me by surprise, that first time.”
“He certainly was rude, though.” Jim shook his head. “He hated us. No, it wasn’t hate. Contempt. We were dirt to him.”
“Correct. Hatred requires some personal knowledge of the hated. He had none. And I didn’t want him to realize that I recognized him,” Bones said, “so I made something of a point of acting the way he was expecting me to act, and hoped you wouldn’t do the same and attract attention to yourself. Which you picked up very neatly on and acted like a Vulcan, which probably made him even madder than he was and distracted him more.” McCoy leaned back against the tree, then said “Ooch!” and bent forward again, rubbing his back: the tree had its own ideas about people leaning on it, and the ideas took the form of spines about an inch and a half long. “Anyway,” he said, “no question, buthe meant what he said.”
“That much even I got,” Jim said. After a moment he asked, “What’s atviokh?”
“Tvee’okh,”McCoy corrected him. “More of an ‘e’ sound. It’s a pejorative. ‘Auslander.’ ‘Gringo.’ ‘White-eyes.’ ” He looked a little resigned. “Actually, it means ‘neighbor.’ Which tells you something. It’s not a nice word. It implies that the person may live over on the next piece of land, but you would prefer them to be under it rather than on it.”
“Charming. But you think that it was just Terrans he felt contemptuous of, rather than us in particular?”
“I’m pretty sure.” McCoy leaned back again, more cautiously this time. “Remember, Jim, I’ve had a long time to study Spock’s kinesics. Even though he’s half Earth-human, and his mother’s body language has influenced his somewhat, the influence of his father’s side is still quite strong, since everyone else in Spock’s life while young was exhibiting Vulcan kinesics. They tend to wash out the Earth influence somewhat, in fact; which is why you’ll notice that when new crew join us on mission, their own body language will be stiff around Spock’s for a few weeks. It takes them that long to realize that just because he’s not making the proper kinesic responses to their own body-language cues, he’s not snubbing them. He’s just different. Once they realize that, their own language smooths out.”
Jim nodded. “So you read Shath as just generally angry about humans.”
“Angry is exactly correct. Angry enough not to show the proper courtesies even when he knows we could complain and possibly get him fired for it…or at least reprimanded. He apparently is very sure of the vote going for secession, in which case nothing we’ve done will or can matter.”
Jim sighed. “How many more of them are like that, out of all the Vulcans who’ll vote? Bones, this is beginning to scare me.”
“Just now? I’ve been scared bloodless since I realized that my testimony might actuallyaffect this outcome somehow.”
They sat quiet on the bench for a few moments. “Well,” Jim said at last, “I guess we’ve just got to pull ourselves together and do this the best we can. Still—” He shook his head. “I’m not used to running into that kind of thing from a Vulcan. They’re always so controlled and polite. The thought of what a whole bunch of angry Vulcans would be like if they let go—”
“That thought scared them too, some time back,” said McCoy, “and it looks like that’s the only thing that’s kept them here this long.”
“Which reminds me,” Jim said, “my translator didn’t do anything with that word. Do you suppose the thing’s on the blink again? You just replaced my intradermal transponder a couple of weeks ago.”
“No,” McCoy said, and looked a little guilty. “I took a second-level RNA language series while I was on leave. I must confess I was worried about exactly this situation coming to pass—I was watching the news—and so I stayed at home and did the course.”
“Instead of going to Bali?”
Bones shrugged. Jim looked at him in astonishment. Not many people chose to learn languages by chemical means anymore: though a course of messenger RNA gave a very complete knowledge of a language, it tended to wear off with time, and made the person who took it extremely sick for days. Most people preferred simply to use the universal translator in one of its portable forms, and update its data when necessary. The RNA series did have advantages, though. Fluency was immediate and conscious—you could choose words for effect, and make puns, in those languages that had them—and there was no fear of a complete breakdown in communications if your translator should break down, or if you found yourself in a place not served by a translator transmission with the right protocol for your receiver. Jim was impressed. “Was it a listening course, or speaking-and-listening?”
“Hwath ta-jevehih tak rehelh kutukk’sheih nei ya ’ch’euvh,”McCoy said, and then coughed and rubbed his throat. “Damn fricatives,” he said, “they’re worse than Gaelic. My accent isn’t worth much. I asked for a native north-continent accent, but instead I got RNA from some Vulcan who’d been first to Cambridge and then to UCLA.” He rolled his eyes. “The native clones are more expensive, though…. ”
“Didn’t you charge this to Fleet?”
Bones looked wry. “You kidding? You know how long it would have taken to process the requisition order, and the voucher, and the departmental approval, and the authorization draft? Vulcan would have seceded by the time the paperwork sorted itself out. I did it on my own nickel.”
Jim made an amused face. Shortly Spock came across the plaza to them and paused in front of them. “Was there some problem, Captain?” he said. “You seemed to spend very little time in the consulate.”
“We did the business we had to do,” Jim said. “No problem…. You missed McCoy tanning one of your people’s hides, though.”
McCoy stretched lazily while Spock looked at him in total
noncomprehension. “Vulcans do not tan,” Spock said.
“Depends on what you soak the pelt in after you get it off,” McCoy said, and grinned.
Spock shook his head. “I must confess that I do not understand you.”
“He’ elef ka hij,”McCoy said, and Jim’s translator rendered it clearly as, “Oh yes you do.”
Spock blinked.
“Come on,” Bones said, getting up, “I want to do some shopping, and we’ll tell you the whole thing as we go.”
“Fascinating,” was the only thing Spock found to say as they headed off into the hot, bright afternoon.
They spent a cheerful while walking around the city, looking in shop windows, admiring architecture, and sitting down late to a dinner of what McCoy described happily as “better lasagna than they make at the Vatican.” The day was cool and pleasant by Vulcan standards, no more than about a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. All the same, Jim was glad he had had the stores computer supply him with some hot-weather pattern uniforms, the ones interwoven with the heat-sink fiber that radiated heat away from the wearer as fast as it developed. Even in the shade, at their table in the courtyard of the little restaurant, the breath of the failing day was hot, and Jim was drinking a lot of the cold, clear water that came bubbling up from the restaurant’s own spring, in the middle of the courtyard.
McCoy was gazing at the spring reflectively as he sipped at his wine. “You know,” he said, “for such a dry place, you people have a lot of fountains.”
“We conserve our water very carefully,” Spock said, “but there are places and times in which conservation comes close to meanness of soul. The spirit must be refreshed, as well as the body.”
McCoy pushed his wineglass away. “There was a time,” he said, “when I would have been astonished to hear you say something like that.”
“It would have been a time when you did not know me as well as you do now,” said Spock. He turned his glass idly around on the table. “But times change. Let us hope they change for Vulcan as well.”
McCoy nodded, then said, “I have to ask you something. There’s something I don’t understand about the language—”
“The accent, for one thing,” Spock said, sounding drily amused.
“You leave that out of it. You know how RNA transfers work: you get the context behind the word as well as the definition and the usage.”
“Yes.”
“Well, there are a couple words whose contexts seem to have gone missing, though they translate well enough.a’Tha, for example.”
Spock said nothing, merely tilted his head and looked at McCoy.
“If it’s something I shouldn’t be asking about,” McCoy said hastily, “just forget it. I understand about the Rule of Silences, but I’m not always sure where the privacy taboo starts, if you know what I mean.”
Spock shook his head. “No, Doctor, this is not a taboo subject. It would be taboo to ask about particulars—the way it affected a particular person. But you are asking in the abstract.”
He folded his hands, steepled the fingers. “There is no context in your translation because it is probably the one concept in the language that must be continually reexperienced to be valid. You cannot freeze it into one form, any more than you would want to repeat the same breath over and over all your life. One must experiencea’Tha differently every second. But that is not a tradition or a stricture imposed by people—merely a function of the structure of the universe. Your position in spacetime constantly changes:a’Tha must change as well.”
Jim shook his head. “I’m missing something.”
“I think not,” Spock said. “I think most human languages would render the concept as ‘immanence,’ or something similar.a’Tha is the direct experience of the being or force responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Universe.”
“God,” Jim said, incredulous.
“Are you using the word in the exclamatory mode, or the descriptive?” Spock said. “In either case, ‘God’ is as good a name for it as any. Vulcans experience that presence directly and constantly. They always have, to varying degrees. The word is one of the oldest known, one of the first ever found written, and is the same in almost all of the ancient languages.”
McCoy looked at Spock curiously. “You’re telling me,” he said, “that the piece of information that most species spend most of their time searching for and complaining about and having wars over—and can never achieve certainty about—is the one piece of information you just happen to have.All of you.”
“Yes,” Spock said, “that is an accurate summation.”
Jim sat quiet for a moment, absorbing it. It would certainly explain the uncanny—un-Earthly—calm and serenity of many of the Vulcans he had met: they all seemed to carry some certainty around with them that everything was all right. If this was the root of it, he understood at least some of that serenity, at last. But there were problems still. “Spock,” he said, “in the light of this, how do you explain someone like Shath?”
Spock looked a little somber. “Captain,” he said, “I think I can understand your viewpoint. Humans have no innate certainty on this subject and therefore must think it would solve a great deal. In some ways it does. But there are many, many questions that this certainty still leaves unresolved, and more that it raises. Granted that God exists: why then does evil do so? Why is there entropy? Is the force that made the Universe one that we would term good? What is good? And if it is, why is pain permitted? You see,” he said, for McCoy was nodding, “they are all the same questions that humans ask, and no more answered by a sense of the existence of God than of His nonexistence. Some of the answers become frightening. If God exists, and pain and evil exist, while God still seems to care for creation—for that sense is also part of the experience—then are we effectively ‘on our own’in a universe run out of the control of its creator? Such a view of the world leaves much room for anger and aggression. We spent millennia at war, Captain, Doctor, despite the fact that almost every Vulcan born knew that a Force then extant had created the Universe, and now maintained it, from second to second. It takes more than the mere sense of God to create peace. One must decide what to do with the information.”
McCoy nodded. “And I suspect you’re going to add that not all Vulcans experiencea’Tha to the same extent.”
“Indeed they do not, for the simple reason that they occupy different positions in spacetime,” Spock said, “but there are doubtless many other influencing factors as well.”
He fell silent. McCoy’s eyes were on him, but the doctor said nothing, only reached out to his glass and had another drink of wine.
“You would like to ask how I perceivea’Tha, or whether I do at all,” Spock said. His glance was dry, but humorous. “I think I may safely break the privacy taboo from my side and tell you that I do. But whether the degree in which I experience it is greater or lesser than normal, I could not tell you. It is indeed one of the matters involved in the Silences, the code of privacy which is part of Surak’s guidelines regardingcthia. However, in my life as in most of my people’s,a’Tha raises more questions than it answers…. I will admit,” he added, “that I have wondered how it feels to be a human, andnot to know that certainty, that presence. At any rate, Doctor, have I answered your question?”
“Mostly.”
“That’s good,” Jim said, glancing at his chrono, “because we’re running late. We have to get back to the ship and change for the reception. Where did Sarek say it was? The Academy?”
“Yes,” Spock said as they got up.
“Great,” Bones said, picking up his purchases from beside the table. “Another cocktail party in the school auditorium.”
Spock put up one eyebrow and said nothing.
Later, in the transporter room, they spent no more than a few moments inspecting one another’s dress uniforms before they got up onto the pads. Jim was mildly surprised to see that to his other rank tags and decorations, McCoy had added a small, understate
d IDIC. “If I didn’t know you better,” he said, “I’d think you were going native. When did you get that?”
“Today in the gift shop, when you were looking at the snowball paperweights with Mount Seleya in them. Tackiest things I ever saw.”
“Yes,” Spock said; “they were imported from Earth.”
“You be quiet. We can’t let these people leave the Federation, Jim. At least not until they teach us how to make tasteful souvenirs.”
Jim groaned. “Energize,” he said to the transporter technician.
The world dissolved and re-formed itself into a dusky landscape, all sand and stone, over which stretched a tawny darkness filled with stars. The sunset was now almost completely faded down from an earlier splendor that must have been enough to blind the eyes of anyone not Vulcan. They were standing in a great open space outside the walls of the Academy itself. The expanse of silvery sand ran featureless from where the three of them stood nearly to the horizon, where a range of low hills lay silhouetted against the crimson and golden glory of the sky. The air was hot but still, and from far over the sand came the cry of something alien but sweet-voiced and distant and sad.
“The place really does grow on you,” Jim said,
McCoy nudged Jim to get him to turn around. “You don’t know the half of it.”
Jim turned away from the horizon and the sunset and actually took a step back from the massive pile of stone that stood, limned sharply as a cutout, against the rising bulk of T’Khut. It was a castle, or looked like one: but no castle so large had ever been even thought of on Earth. It looked to have been carved out of a whole mountain.
“It was a fortress once,” Spock said, “when this was the only place for thousands of miles where water sprang from the stone. Wars were fought for possession of Pelasht, even when the winner might only possess it for a day. Then Surak came…and when the fighting stopped, and the Academy grew up here, Pelasht became its ceremonial house and banqueting hall. Shall we go in?”
They did. Jim half expected a brassy cry of trumpets as they went up the switch-back stair that led to the main gates. He would have welcomed a fanfare or two, to milk for the delay: a steep climb in this atmosphere was not exactly what he had in mind. But he had had McCoy give him a time-release TriOx before they left the ship, and a couple of treatments to increase his lungs’ ability to extract oxygen from the air. He would be all right.Just so long as no one challenges me to any duels, he thought ruefully.
