Dwellers in the Crucible

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  "That the daughter of the Gifted One may be the first to try its worth," she said.

  T'Shael sat at the crafter's bench without speaking, positioned the ka'athyra, activated the resonancer, and began to play.

  Cleante listened. It was a fairly simple melody, if anything about Vulcan music could be considered simple, which she had heard T'Shael play before on her own ka'athyra, and she was struck by the difference in tone between the two instruments. T'Shael's ka'athyra had sounded pleasant enough in itself, but it paled beside the mellow richness of this instrument.

  It was obvious that T'Shael appreciated the difference as well. She stilled the strings with her hand and rested the fragile curving neck of the instrument against her shoulder for a long, contemplative moment.

  "It surpasses your best, venerable one," she said to T'Sehn, handing it back to her as if it were a living thing.

  "As with all my craftings, it is yours if you desire it," the ancient one said, and this was not formality.

  Again her ebony eyes sparkled with their strange light, which was almost a kind of affection. Cleante sensed a long and deep-running bond between these two and began to drift away, feigning absorption in the work transpiring around her that she might remove her intrusive human presence from the specialness of this encounter. She saw T'Shael refuse the proffered gift.

  "The performer must be worthy of the instrument," she said quietly, rising from the workbench. "I am not my father."

  For as long as the child T'Shael could remember the healers had come to the house.

  "Your father's sickness knows no cure," one of them said not unkindly, taking her aside in her seventh year. She was an adult by Vulcan standards and considered capable of accepting such information with maturity. That the plain-faced somber child already knew her father's fate, that it had become part of the fabric of her being, was neither within the healer's knowledge nor his jurisdiction. "It will weaken him over a period of years and inevitably bring about his death."

  "My gratitude for your aid, Healer," T'Shael answered carefully, bidding him farewell in her mother's stead—T'Pei the master scientist was attending an academic conference in the city of ShiKahr—in the visitors' foyer as was proper. The healer's skilled hand might have rested for a moment on the small dark head, though none witnessed it.

  Salet's affiction was still called by its ancient designation plak s'ran, "the blood killing." Its medical specification was leukokupricytosis, a progressive disorder in which hemocyanic blood cells became deformed and lost color. These color-stripped cells massed in major blood vessels and blocked the flow of oxygen, causing edema in the lungs. Bone marrow deterioration made the replacement of new cells inadequate, and as deformed cells accumulated in joints and spinal fluid, the victim's initial shortness of breath and chronic fatigue were replaced by severe joint pain, debility, wasting and death.

  L-Kc was genetically linked, but undetectable by the most sophisticated antigen scan. Offspring of its victims carried a 50 percent risk factor. Once contracted, the disease was always fatal.

  In ancient times it had been considered a form of retribution for certain transgressions of decorum, notably, overt emotionalism, whose rapid breathing and ensuing exhaustion mimicked the disease's symptoms. There were still those who could not deny some residual credence in this superstition.

  The victim was not offered sympathy, for that was not the Way of the Vulcan. Nor were inquiries made as to his health, for such was a breach of privacy. The sight of the healers coming and going with the transfusions which sometimes offered a temporary reprieve was enough to inform the curious.

  But Salet the Gifted One was a public figure, renowned not only on his home world but throughout the galaxy for his composition and performance on the ka'athyra and other instruments, though such notoriety did not carry the same weight on Vulcan as "fame" in human societies. To offer praise to the individual for innate gifts is illogical, though considerable honor attaches to one's use of such gifts. It is a fine distinction which few but the Vulcan understand. Though he was not a "celebrity" in the human sense of the word, Salet was known to many, as was his affliction.

  "His life might be prolonged if he were to desist from public performance," one of the healers said to T'Pei the musician's consort on another occasion, after a particularly harrowing night. "His auditors make excessive demands upon him, which he, as his duty, fulfills to the utmost. It drains him."

  "What is the logic of a long life without purpose?" small T'Shael piped up, breaching two rules of etiquette—speaking unaddressed in the presence of her elders, one of whom was a guest in her parents' home, and interrupting a private conversation—in a single breath. "Is it not better to live a shorter life which is full of meaning?"

  T'Pei her mother froze her with a glance. Whatever else might be said of T'Pei—that she was among the most brilliant scientists in her field, that she was efficient, logical, in short a model Vulcan—it could also be said that she was as cold as she was beautiful. Plainly her offspring drew no resemblance from the maternal side.

  "Your rudeness is unaddressable," T'Pei said icily, her black eyes blazing. The child was old enough to know better! "You will go to your room and consider what atonement will expunge this disgrace to our household in the presence of a visitor!"

  "I ask forgiveness," T'Shael said, addressing the healer and not her mother. As a further disobedience, she went not to her own chamber but to her father's sickroom, though not before her sharp ears heard a final exchange between her mother and the healer.

  "It is not unlike the very words the Gifted One said to me," the healer said. "He knows his music kills him, yet his life is music. It is an irrefutable logic."

  "The child is offspring of the father," T'Pei said distantly, and T'Shael knew it unwise to linger further.

  She went to where her father lay pain-wracked and silent in the shuttered room, his lips drawn back from his perfect white teeth in a soundless grimace that was the only evidence of the agony his illness visited upon him. The extraordinarily gifted fingers which the night before had flown over the strings of the ka'athyra in the presence of thousands were now knotted with spasms into bundles of useless twigs. The cabinet tops were littered with transfusion paks and triox hypos; a gentle floral incense, which sometimes soothed the great musician, smoked softly in a brazier in one corner. The great musician himself, shivering silently and gasping for breath, was another bundle of twigs beneath a coverlet.

  T'Shael said nothing. She took a cloth from a basin on the bedstand, wrung it out in cool scented water, touching it to her father's temples and wrists in turn. She took a flagon of mineral water from the wall servitor and poured some into a cup which she held to his lips; when the acute phase of the sickness was at its worst it was the only sustenance he could take. In a day or two, when the transfusions had taken their temporary effect, Salet would be up and about, hobbling a little on painful knees, but pretending he could block the pain, resume his work, his passion, his music. For now, only his fever-glazed eyes moved, and they fixed upon his small daughter with a more than Vulcan fondness.

  "Your mother will be displeased," the musician managed to gasp. "She prefers you attend your studies."

  "I have completed my studies," T'Shael said softly, knowing he could not bear sounds above a whisper. She longed to sit beside him on his pallet, but knew the shifting of her small weight would add to his pain. Instead, she knelt on the thick carpet beside the sickbed. "And as she who is my mother is always displeased with me, there is no new reason for concern."

  Were her father not Vulcan, he might have smiled. As it was, he found himself better able to control the wracking pain in the presence of the small one. That she visited him with a different kind of pain—the knowledge that she too might one day succumb to his illness—he did not speak of.

  "Let us consider now," he began with mock solemnity, unable to untwist his fingers enough to count upon them. "You have completed your academic studies. And h
ave you practiced your music?"

  "Yes, my father." T'Shael held out her hands, already long and beautiful, to show him the newformed scars where the heavy strings of the ka'athyra had cut into the flesh of her as-yet-unhardened fingertips. "And I have been to the crafters' shop in your absence. Crafter T'Sehn assures me the new consignment progresses on time and to your specifications."

  The musician was gratified. How quietly animated this bright child was, before the events of her life began to envelop her in ever deepening levels of silence! Salet felt some of his elusive strength returning.

  "And your meditations, child?" he chided gently. "Surely you have not found the time to cross the path of Master Stimm this day?"

  "I have spent my required time with the Master, my father, and have just now returned," T'Shael replied dutifilly.

  "Have you opportunity to eat or sleep with all of this activity?" the musician wondered, teasing a little, as even a Vulcan father was permitted with the flower of his bleak existence.

  "Not while you are ill, my father," T'Shael said with fervor, and her eyes burned into his.

  Salet was humbled by her intensity.

  "Then we must remedy at least part of that, my child," he said, and though it cost him considerable pain he extended his arm to her, indicating that she was to lie beside him on the pallet and rest her head upon his shoulder.

  "I cannot, my father. My mother has instructed me to remain in my room. I have committed a serious breach of etiquette which—"

  "I shall heal the rift between your mother and you," Salet promised. His breath came shorter now; he could not block the pain forever. "Your presence soothes me. Would you deny me that measure of comfort?"

  "Never, my father!" T'Shael cried, and lay beside him, curling herself up as small as possible so as not to jar him.

  She barely rested her head upon his shoulder, determined to add no pressure to his inflamed joints, though it made her neck ache to remain in so unnatural a position. But the incense and her father's labored breathing, the safety of his embrace lulled her, and soon she was asleep.

  As her daughter had predicted, T'Pei was not pleased. She stood in the doorway of her husband's sickroom, hands on her hips, surveying the scene with cold lips pressed hard together.

  "You indulge the child, husband," was all she said.

  While the small one was deep in slumber, the musician would not sleep as long as his sickness raged. Nevertheless, the small burden resting on his thin shoulder was of comfort to him.

  "Perhaps someone should, my wife," Salet gasped.

  T'Pei turned on her heel and left them, father and daughter, to each other's companionship. Within the month, such casual intimacy would be forbidden them, forever.

  Within the month, T'Shael was formally betrothed to the handsome, arrogant Stalek by standard prearrangement with his parents, and all her child's ways were put behind her. While she might tend her father in his sickness, she was henceforth forbidden to touch any male relative except in ritual circumstance.

  On the day following the betrothal ceremony, T'Pei the master scientist departed as science officer on the maiden voyage of the first all-Vulcan Federation starship, whose name in Standard was Intrepid. As the best in her field, she had been recruited by Starfleet to oversee the operation of what at that time was the most sophisticated computer system aboard a starship. As a premiere scientist among a race of scientists, she understood the value of such a position, and accepted it with alacrity.

  "Your plans have come to fruition, my wife," Salet said with some color to his voice on the morning of her departure.

  He was at the synthesizer console in his studio, harmonizing certain arrangements he had composed in his head months ago but had lacked the strength to complete until now. Were this not Vulcan music, it could be called melancholy. Salet in his heart of hearts had dedicated it to his daughter, whose plain face he had been unable to watch as she dutifully went through the motions of yesterday's betrothal ceremony.

  "Do you truly think this prideful boy a suitable match for our quiet one?"

  "Two of such quietness would bore each other to death, husband," T'Pei said with a touch of impatience. Her shuttle departed in a matter of minutes; she had hoped this leave-taking would be brief. "That would be illogical. Stalek is of good family and has already been accepted into the Academy of Engineers. I know not what else you expect. Further, his people carry no trace of the sickness as far back as any reckoning." T'Pei let this sink in, not cruelly, but to emphasize that his affliction was stamped on his daughter's genes as well. "If she intends offspring, our quiet one may come to thank me for that."

  Salet let the melodies die away and switched off the console that he might devote full attention to his wife. Today was one of his strong days; nevertheless, his breathing was labored.

  "I sometimes question the logic of keeping to the old ways in everything," he mused. "One has only to consider a marriage such as ours to wonder at the betrothal of unconsenting children. We are so unlike, my wife."

  "And what would you have preferred? Another quivering aesthete like yourself? With all respect for your gifts, husband, you did well to acquire a pragmatic mate, or if nothing else, you would have starved to death." T'Pei drew on her travel cloak to signal her departure. "You spend too much time among outworlders. It has made you unorthodox."

  Salet gave no answer. That his musicianship had led him to study many cultures and to make the acquaintance of many from other worlds was not, to him, a disadvantage. But to T'Pei, the Vulcan was the only way, and her spouse lacked the stamina to debate her on this occasion. He only looked at her steadily, unblinkingly, his eyes burning a little, not unlike his daughter's.

  "Give my farewells to the quiet one when she returns from school," T'Pei said, drawing up the hood of her cloak. "No doubt you two will create better harmonies in my absence."

  She held out the first two fingers of her right hand, and Salet crossed them with his own. They would not see each other for five years, and in that amount of time Salet could well be dead. The thought seemed to trouble neither of them.

  * * *

  "What you're trying to say is that you can't be friend to anyone because someday you might get your father's sickness?" Cleante asked when at long last she and T'Shael left the crafters' shop.

  She could not believe it was already nightfall; the time had simply flown. It had been an incredible day, though tomorrow promised to rival it in incredibility, for tomorrow she, an outworlder, had been invited to attend one of the most sacred of Vulcan ceremonies.

  But that was tomorrow. Right now she must concentrate on getting a straight answer from her stoic companion.

  "You don't want to become too attached to anyone, or have anyone mourn you—is that it? T'Shael, that's not only absurd, it's illogical!"

  "It is one reason," was all T'Shael said.

  She could not be drawn out further no matter how Cleante challenged her, and finally the human gave up, thinking instead of everything she had learned this day, and of everything she was to experience on the morrow.

  "The reasons you gave me back on Vulcan don't make any sense now!" Cleante cried, on her knees at T'Shael's feet on the floor of the Klingon cage. "We may both die, T'Shael. No reason outweighs that!"

  The first of the ugly red suns peered over the horizon, slowly burning away the turgid morning mists. Another dreary day was beginning; for all either captive knew, it could be their last. Oh, why couldn't T'Shael do what she asked? Cleante wondered. For both of them!

  "The reasons I gave you on Vulcan are as nothing compared to the reason I cannot give you now!" T'Shael said.

  The Enterprise was on night cycle. Diurnals had dimmed, the helm and most other bridge stations were on automatic, the relief engineer had just reset her controls and gone to bed. The labs were empty; only an occasional monitor hummed or hissed or silently took its readings. In the herbarium, artificial moonlight shone on dormant leaves and tightly furled blossoms, t
he recorded sounds of night birds echoed distantly, and butterflies slumbered on the undersides of branches, their wings folded serenely.

  The corridors were quiet and all but deserted. Most ship's personnel, except for the insomniacs and the innately nocturnal, were asleep or recreating or doing whatever it was humanoids did when their time was their own. An occasional fragment of music or laughter or more intimate sound drifted out of the Rec Dec and some of the cabins. All was well.

  Quietest of all were the guest quarters. The delegation was returning to Earth after its abortive mission to the Praetor's Representative, and while none were guaranteed to be sleeping, all were quiet—whether brooding, praying, planning the next course of action or silently mourning. Here, all was not well, but it was quiet.

  On the bridge, only Sciences and Communications were occupied. Spock worked silently, engrossed in calculations of some unspecified nature. Uhura was at her post, weary and resigned, not because she had to be, but because she could think of nothing better to do.

  She had given up counting the days, had checked the relays to the special channel indicator a thousand times hoping to find a short that would explain its dogged unlit silence. She had stared at it so often and for so long she no longer saw it. That was why, when it finally did flicker and beep softly, she gave a little involuntary shriek and pounced on it, breaking several fingernails in her urgency.

  Spock glanced up from his console to see her holding her breath, listening with her entire being.

  "… Enterprise, come in Enterprise … Gamma 7 Floater calling Enterprise … come in, please …"

  The signal was faint, full of gaps and heavy with static, and the voice was not Sulu's. Uhura boosted and filtered as much as she could, prepared for the worst. She was unaware that Spock was watching her.

  "Enterprise here," she said crisply; she'd been playacting for the Rihannsu for so long it came naturally by now. "You're very faint, Gamma 7. Can you boost your gain? I can barely read you."