Work Text:
Art by Signe Landon.
A wayfarer
Perceiving the road to truth
Was struck with astonishment.
“Ha,” he said.
“I see that none have passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a solitary knife…
Stephan Crane
“Stardate 6041.3, Ship's Log, Commander Spock recording. We are entering the orbit of Omega Alpha X to contact and aid, if necessary, a Federation Scientific Outpost. Their current progress report is 3.26 months overdue and they do not respond to sub-space radio calls. The scientists were investigating the possibility that Omega Alpha X possesses a variety of planet-wide consciousness. Their last summary of test results reached no definite conclusion.”
Finishing the log report, he did not turn as he heard the elevator door assuming it was the captain. Kirk preferred to be on the bridge at such times. But he stiffened imperceptibly at the sound of the footsteps coming toward him. He knew those steps. Not the captain, then.
“Spock.”
“Doctor,” he said neutrally. He waited.
The presence Spock refused to glance at turned to face the central viewscreen, hands clasped behind back. The silence waited.
“The crew's annual physical will be coming up in about four months,” McCoy said finally. His voice was pitched to carry no further than the seat beside him, “At that time, unless something happens to change the present-- situation--I'm going to have to recommend that you be given a medical discharge from the service.”
Spock froze. The words were so totally unexpected--. With a pause which he was curiously unable to ease, he asked, even-toned, “On what grounds, doctor?” Somehow, far beneath his logic, there was even astonishment.
He knew the eyes, blue scalpels, probing at him analytically. He would not acknowledge them.
“Suicidal tendencies,” McCoy said deliberately.
Spock sat very, very still.
“Spock--your cycle is too unpredictable. You know it. God knows I know it. But you just crawl right back into that titanium-plated shell and set about forgetting the whole--” he stopped, took a deep, calming breath before continuing. The quiet words hammered relentlessly at him. “When will you learn, Spock? You are a Vulcan. Take a leave. Go back to Vulcan. Find somebody.”
“Get married, Spock.”
If he were very, very quiet and did not move at all maybe it would go away, something whispered to him traitorously…
Kirk did enter, then. Spock released the com to him with expressionless gratitude, turned immediately to his own station. Submerging himself in normality, he could ignore the doctor propped in the usual if unmilitary position at the captain's left elbow. He could ignore him.
“Lt. Uhura,” the captain asked, settling into his chair. “Have you been able to reach the outpost yet?”
“Negative, sir--wait a moment.” She bent over her board. “I'm picking up something now. It seems to be an automated distress signal, at an extremely weak intensity. We've just come within range.”
“Helm, bring us over that signal. Uhura--”.
“I have something now, sir.” She put it on audio, and there was a sudden babble of sounds invading the bridge. Spock could distinguish two voices, one male repeating hysterically, “They're here! They came!” another female cutting in to shout “Get L’Urrou”, all underneath a heavy blanket of static.
“Lieutenant, if I could be of--”.
“No, I almost have it, Mr. Spock.” After a minute, “There. I've got visual, Captain.”
“Very good. Put it on the main screen.” A picture appeared, wavered once, then steadied. The features of a Caitian became visible, in a makeshift cubicle deep within what appeared to be a cave. “Livingssston, I pressume,” he hissed wearily.
“This is the Starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk commanding. You are outpost chief L'Urrou? Is your situation immediately critical?”
“No--no…” His tail, fluffed end up near his right ear, waved a tired negation. “We have injured, but we are sssafe here for t'e moment. T'e interference--I am sssending up all informasssion we have on the phenomena by sssquirt--”.
“Receiving it here, Captain,” Uhura reported.
“--blockss the carrier wave of a transsporter quite effectively, and a shuttle craft would not be ssafe at all.”
“Explain. L'Urrou...” The picture was fading, static growing. “Uhura, I thought you had that fixed.”
“The interference pattern has shifted, sir,” Uhura said, tracing lightning pathways through her controls. “I can't explain it. It doesn't seem to be a random process.” She caught the audio band for another five seconds, then lost it. In that time they heard:
“--you ssee, the planet iss alive--and it doesn't like vissitorsss…”
Static filled the bridge.
Kirk motioned to Uhura and she closed the circuit. He asked, “Did you finish recording the information L'Urrou sent up before the interference began again?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give it to Spock. Keep trying to raise them; you might see if--”.
“--tying in the coding section of the computer would help? Yes, sir, I've already done so.” She turned back to her board.
“Spock, see if you can--”.
“--find a way to bring the carrier beam through. Yes, sir.” He fed the tape into his terminal and started examining the information. Behind him he heard Kirk sigh.
“Obviously not one of my more necessary days on the bridge,” the captain remarked sotto-voce to McCoy.
“What do you want from me, condolences or agreement?” the doctor shot back.
Spock turned his attention away.
The mathematical task required--involving n-dimensional wave analysis, a Fourier transform, fifty or so tenth degree differential equations and 1000 by 1000 by 1000 matrix--was really rather routine, though lacking both the necessary computational facilities and one of Vulcan blood to use them, the outpost could not have done it. The inner courts of his mind were free to consider, to think.
He had four months. It was enough. Vulcan--he shut his mind away from the memory of wind chimes, red sky, gong, “Kali-fee!”--the whole bloody business T'Pring had wished on him. That was past. This time his father would not be handpicking a bride for him. There was time in which to weigh the alternatives, calculate the probabilities, make a logical decision…. No. He was a free agent. He had choices open to him. Vulcan--was one possibility. There were others.
There had to be others.
He had four months.
Finishing his computations, he taped the resulting equations and turned to inform the captain. Uhura had succeeded in opening communications again; L'Urrou was on the screen. Kirk glanced at the precis and nodded.
“L'Urrou, we'll be able to start beaming your people up now, one at a time, using the communication beam as a guide. If you could start bringing your injured to within a three meter radius of the console?”
“Si-ssa, it iss done.” The Caitian's tail was flicking a command even as Kirk told Spock, “Lay the equations into the main transporter panel and get down there yourself, but keep a channel open to the bridge.”
“Aye, sir.”
Leaving the bridge, he heard only a snatch of speech, but it was enough for him to fit the key pieces together. L'Urrou's exhausted hoarseness, “T'e eart' fault t'at killed Ssevet, five mont's ago, it wass t'e firsst. Hind eyes are sharp--t'en it sseemed only--”.
Accident? Mischance? he completed the sentence in his mind. But if such accidents are repeated, on a strictly non-chance level, then life and intelligence must be postulated. The Zhubar definition slipped through his brain, well-worn and bright as a rosary bead. “Life is, above all, non-random. Intelligence, arising by chance, acts consistently contrary to chance processes…”
Moving from the turbo-elevator to the transporter room, he thought with some sorrow of the planetary intelligence below them. It must have been unaware of the scientists, fleas crawling across its great skin, for the first months of the survey. Only gradually becoming aware of interlopers, of the shattering presence of others, its inevitable, first rage-fear response--was to destroy.
Omega Alpha X would probably be placed under quarantine, monitored by automatic satellites until the planet itself signified willingness for increased commerce. Well enough, he supposed.
Must every hesitant step upward leave bloodstains in its wake?....
The medical team arrived on his heels, ready for any type of injury from radiation burns to barbed arrows. They, as he, had encountered both and all the range between in Starfleet. It was the widest ranging Service his race and theirs had ever known. Freedom. He had learned it here, come to know it as Vulcan's circumscribed round of existence would never have allowed. Adjusting the beam parameters to split-second and nanometer delicacy, he though fleetingly of the computer-aided sketches he had made a month ago, after Sarpeidon, now guarded by his warrior maiden bronze. The delicately lined portraits of Zarabeth.... She was gone, long dead, buried beneath the snows. But somehow she had come to represent for him, in the freedom of the stars, a chance that could still exist--the chance for love....
He thought: With her, I was free, and I was happy, and I could love. I was allowed--to love . Someday, there has to be...
Four months.
He had opened a channel to the bridge, as directed, before commencing the exacting work of altering the transporter's carrier beam to fit specifications. L'Urrou's murmuring hiss and the multifarious sounds of the bridge in action formed a backdrop for his thoughts; he could see the evacuation procedure on the viewscreen when he glanced up from his hands and the circuitry. He heard the brief scuffle on the planet's surface, the pained, “Pam! What the”, but it was the word “Vulcans” that alerted him to listen more closely.
Kirk's voice came clearly, puzzled but polite, “We have only one Vulcan aboard at the present, ma'am. Mr. Spock, our science officer.”
“ Spock? The unbonded one?” Spock's head came up sharply. He handed the tools to the technician beside him and got to his feet as the voice continued, “May I speak to him?”
“Of course. Spock?”
He saw her on the screen, a Vulcan, female, somewhat flushed. He noted curiously that her hand on the console was trembling. She spoke in high Vulcan, in bursts too fast for the translators to handle. “I am alone here…my husband died...five months ago. If bond-mates of our people were involved I would ask to be left, but...Spock--I yearn.”
And time had just run out.
He knew the silence stretched. He could not help it, or make his voice anything other than dead. “Wait until the end to beam up.” He heard her gasp of assent as she slipped away from the screen. I never actually saw her face, he thought. “Doctor--” there were--matters--to be arranged “--I may require four or five days sick-leave.”
“Granted,” the words came back with the merest, exacerbating, pause. The technician was at his elbow. Her name was--he couldn't remember.
“Sir? it's finished.”
“Very well,” he said mechanically. “Begin to beam up the injured.” He assisted one humanoid bundle take form on the platform, and saw it hurried away, another, a third. He did not keep count. There was just one chance, he--prayed. If his human genes were only strong enough...
“Only one more to beam up, sir.”
“Proceed, ensign.”
She flickered into being. Neither of them moved. Spock drew a long, cautious breath. Perhaps, just perhaps--. Then the scent of bitter almonds came to him, and he knew that, once again, his father's blood had betrayed him.
Without a word, he turned and left the transporter room for his quarters. She followed, three steps behind him.
In the elevator, he meditated, as well as he could over the rising fever in his blood, on the subject of pheromones.
‘(Oxford dictionary, 2183) Phe-ro-mone, n. Substance secreted and released by animals for detection and response by another of the same species.’ Vulcan had been a harsh world to their species. The relentless requirements of survival demanded that every female find a mate during her brief, widely separated periods of fertility. The scent of bitter almonds spread on the mountain winds; kilometers away males lifted their heads, startled by need.... The bonding evolved along with intelligence, eliminating the nastier aspects of 'Survival of the fittest'; the female sitting calmly on the sidelines, waiting for the male that emerged from the battle of rivals alive.... But when a female was unbonded or suddenly widowed, then older instincts held sway, and--he moved the clipboard a little downward, shame beating thickly through him. He was a fine upstanding Vulcan, he was.
His blood was molten jade. He strode gigantically through the corridors, every step slowed and thunderous, his cabin an ever-retreating mirage of refuge. His eyes were flame, his bones glowed, white-hot. His mind counselled that this was acceptable and right--the 'logical' thing to do. His body burned to possess her, yearned to shade his burning need with her darkness, to consume and be consumed.
And something in him wept, for the choice he never had.
Inside his cabin she stripped quickly, he slowly, neatly. His stomach and pelvic muscles were jerking spastically, wanting--; he couldn't seem to feel his fingers. His body's need was insistent, non-directional--frightening. Her eyes were on a level with his, waiting raggedly...pinning him, like a copper butterfly, and there was no escape... Her breaths shook her whole body. He half-realized that his own respiratory system had gone wild.
“Are you--virgin?” she asked.
To pon farr--“Yes.”
“I will--try--to remember. Oh, come to me! Come.” Wailing soundlessly deep inside him, he went to her.
Rage ate his soul, as flames his body. He rammed into her, thrusting with savage force. He wanted to split her apart. But she took and took and took. Winding around him, clawing, biting, meeting every thrust, her violence met and matched his. And the tempest swept him ever onward, one surge rising as the last broke. There was nothing beyond his ravenous need and that dark will-o’-wisp of temporary respite which was her body and her eyes...
He retreated, finally, from the storm of physical sensation which he did not understand and could not accept. He tried to wall himself, to not-think, to be himself, untouched, inviolable. But even in his mind there was no escape, because she was there.
They were ‘married’ near the end of the second day, a brief telepathic procedure that left them permanently bonded to each other. Spock=T’Paemhla, T'Paemhla=Spock. It was both similar and different to his earlier bond to T'Pring. Both participants in this case were sexually mature adults; the tie was subsequently deeper, more overt, and for all practical purposes unbreakable. This was to the death.
In fact he was almost sure he saw them, in his detached, oddly hallucinatory awareness toward the end--steel chains, dangling from wrists and ankles... He embraced the beginnings of the post-coital coma, slid gratefully into the dark. If only ...his thoughts dissolving...he could wake up....before...
He awoke a day and a half later, groggy but fully conscious of the situation. He disentangled his limbs and stood with a careless disregard for her sleep, but T'Paemhla didn’t even change breathing pattern. He ran over what he knew in his mind, looking down at her numbly. The hormone took some little time to disappear in the female's bloodstream. There would be a second phase, longer and much less intense than the first, before it was entirely gone from her system. He could probably go back to work. In the meanwhile, however, there would be a lull, long enough for him to shower and get some food. He turned for the bathroom--oh, the blessed relief it would be to wash all traces of her from his body--stopped. It was 40° C in the room, but her metabolic state would be lowered--. Lips pressing tight in involuntary distaste, he got out a blanket for her nakedness before leaving the room.
It was--he checked his time-sense minutes later--late at night. The corridors were deserted. He thought the lounge was too, spotting McCoy's silent figure, hunched over a coffee cup, only after he was well inside the door. Something in Spock drew joyously taut. He circled to face the man, leaning over the table toward him. McCoy did not look up.
“Well, Doctor,” he said, barely surprised at the venom in his voice. “The omnipotent wishes of Starfleet's Medical branch have been met once more. I am married.”
Art by Signe Landon.
“Go to hell, Spock,” McCoy said without passion.
Spock's breath hissed inward between his teeth. “Doctor,” he said dangerously quiet, “if the incompetence of--”
“What the hell are you complaining about!” McCoy raged suddenly, on his feet and tensed toward him, a blue-eyed panther aching for the lunge. If Spock wanted a fight he was going to get one. “ You're riding the Milky Way to a pot of cream! That precious science officer console is yours for life, if you want it. And you have the gall --”.
“I assure you, Doctor,” Spock said distinctly. “Any other way would have been preferable.”
“You're alive, you're going to stay alive, and you don't give a shit. Death before marriage, is that the way it goes, Spock? Who the hell guaranteed you everything you wanted in life? I'd like to see that contract.”
“And so I am forced into another--contract, as you put it--with a stranger, without knowledge, without trust, without--” he faltered, went on, “love...”
“What does love have to do with it?” He slumped back in his chair, rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Love doesn't make the commitment any more likely to last, it just makes that particular commitment easier. Love is just as random and just as much a species imperative for humans as pon farr is for Vulcans, and you can get screwed by it just as bad.”
Art by Signe Landon.
“There is--no choice? But there has to be!”
“Who the hell said that? Ya got facts and fate and skill and luck--where the motherfucking hell does choice come into it!” He stopped, stilled in both body and mind. Lids flickered; his lips set and he turned his face away. “Sometimes there is no choice, Spock. No choice at all...” He crumpled the paper cup and walked out. Two junior nurses, entering, stepped aside quickly to let him pass. One commented:
“Better stay out of his way for a while.”
“Why? What happened with the last one?”
“Two days in stasis under a heal ray, one day in preparation and he loses her on the table, just--” he snapped his fingers, “like that... “
Going back to his cabin with the trays of food, he wondered, at first absently, then with a sharp anxiety, whether T'Paemhla was pregnant. That would tear it, to hell and gone. Slowly, swallowing the taste like aloes in his throat, he decided what he had to do.
She was gone from the bed when he entered; he had known for about fifteen minutes that she was awake, alerted by an indefinable change in their inflexible bond. He knew, similarly, when she came out of the bathroom in to the room he occupied--it was like a thrumming rubber band, unexpectedly loud and close, bruising his mind with her nearness. The sensation was alien to him. All could compare it to were the waves of his mother's world, the surge and flow of background thought a constant muttering crash.
“Food,” he said simply, not turning around. She nodded and drew up a chair, addressing the sustenance with interest. The waves sang on, bright peaked and waiting. He took the opportunity to study her--he never had gotten a good look at her, before.
She was tall, as he knew already, almost matching his own 182 centimeters.
Deep-breasted and wide-hipped, her bones were flat and strong, her face plain but with rich, lustrous eyes. She was twenty or twenty-five years older than he was; fully mature by Vulcan standards, while he himself would still be classified as a young adult.
“You're not eating, quaran sfay ?” she asked mildly. He hooded his eyes swiftly to conceal his surprise and applied himself to his soup. Quaran sfay - a small endearment, used in the family. It could be translated into English as 'little brother’.
Their meal finished, he stacked the dishes neatly, then stopped, he could not avoid it any longer. His back still to her, he asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
His mind grappled with the unexpected answer. Reprieve...? “It is probably my fault,” he stated absently, sitting down again. The gentle ebb and flow of feeling did not pause. He sensed a shrug in her eyebrows. He had heard humans call Vulcan faces inexpressive--they simply didn't know how to look.
“Perhaps. There will be many more opportunities before our individual cycles synchronize. We will have time.” He knew she meant, you will have time, to adjust to the sexual side of their relationship. But not even her mind said it. In sudden, shamed gratitude, he met her eyes for the first time since re-entering the room.
“It would be--easier--if I continue to work for another few months, until our course brings us back to Vulcan. I can resign then,” he offered. Her dark eyes watched him, giving nothing away. The mind-tide lapped soothingly around him. Relax, relax, it hummed, it is all right, there is no need, relax... //So tense, like a child revealing its most secret heart, risking all// slipped through. Relax, the mind-tide hummed.
“There is no need,” she said gently.
“I do not understand.” Indeed, he did not. His tired brain, baffled by too many sudden reversals, refused to consider the implications. //Patience, little brother. It will be all right...//
“I have instituted proceeding to join Starfleet and transfer aboard the Enterprise. There seem to be very few problems!”
He almost shook his head in weary disbelief, and knew she saw the abortive motion. He could not block the smile from his eyes, and could see it echoed warmly in hers. The tide between them flowed. “T Paemhla, what is your career?”
“I am a chemist, Spock.” She folded her hands demurely upon the table.
Suddenly, there was a rich wave of humor sparkling, a natural part of her being, he sensed, lighted by a few, very few, pale rays of hope. But it was too soon, too fast--
“You must be preparing for your pahra’te by now.” A Vulcan's pahra’te or second career, started once their basic obligation to society had been fulfilled, was a serious undertaking and usually required many years of training... But she was shaking her head, though a human would have missed it.
“Poetry. Quite portable.” Her eyes met his unwaveringly. Subtly, the tide changed, pulling at him, growing stronger. Faintly, he smelt bitter almonds. “Spock...”
He tread his way to her, carefully, placed fingers for the deep meld. Drawn inevitably aside, his eyes went past her, to the sketches underneath his warrior maiden. Time stretched into a quivering eternity--T'Paemhla leaning against his hands, starting to tremble in her need--the statue, staring in pitiless demand. He felt the self-inflicted amputation striking into the very marrow of his bones, an endlessly aching sense of loss, as he decided, “I will burn them tomorrow.”
Carefully, tentatively, Spock bent to kiss his wife.