The Mirror Verses
Disclaimer: I own nothing, I just watch these characters (owned by Paramount) and write down what they do.
Beta: The wonderful, patient, SpockLikesCats. I fiddle-faddle after, therefore mistakes are my own.
Warnings: Abuse, murder, torture, major character deaths, truly evil Spock.
Summary: Experimental Mirror 'verse mini-story based on poetry, with some Shakespeare and The Bible too. Dark, but a tribute to the spirit, friendship, love and the resilience of the human body. Gentle reader, I beg do not judge this tale until the end, if you are kind enough to read that far. All poems are out-of-copyright and in the public domain.
1. Spock: Babel
On a desert planet, water is precious. Evolved to conserve fluid, his species' bodies are miserly with water. Their pores do not sweat, their intestines suck moisture from food, their urine is concentrated.
And tears do not flow from their eyes.
...
Living among humans the continual process of shielding taxes him. Each waking moment affords only constant mental assault experienced in Babel. Continual chatter emanates from their thin, weak skulls; a stream of emotional incontinence that swells to a river. Here, peace does not rule. Despite the outward military discipline, within the crew lives a writhing nest of untamed thoughts, from mundane to profound, and the discipline of his mental practice is barely enough to keep the cacophony at bay.
On occasion, he has cause to touch them, most often to extract information hidden deep inside their soft cortical matter. He must make contact to identify the owner of a thought. Rubbery skin presses cold and clammy to his dry fingertips. A fastidious man, Spock feels in such circumstances the urge to wipe his hand on the black fabric covering his thigh, all the while willing his diaphragm to stay level. A show of physical revulsion would be weak.
And the smell …they reek, of sweat, of decaying flesh, of bodily fluids and of pheromones. On rare women he detects the nauseating iron tang of dead menstrual blood, when those who wish to escape the ship by means of pregnancy neglect their ovulation suppressants. In each case, that decision leads to swift transport into space where the fragile tubes holding live blood rupture, their boiling contents spewing into cavities and voids within their feeble bodies. It is a beautiful death; he imagines the blood spreading, ink in water, until all is uniform red.
These beings begin to die the minute they are born. In his vivid mind he views cellular degeneration with microscopic precision each time he smells it.
Their sweet necrosis catches in his nostrils, and all their tears cannot wash out a trace of it.
...
But helpless pieces in the game He plays
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays,
Then one by one, back in the Closet lays.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
"The Rubáiyát," Omar Khayyám (1048–1131),
Translated by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859.
2. Spock: As if alive
Measured by the yardstick of the sexual intemperance of his crew, he is a monk. When he was green in his role as Captain – he allows an indulgent amount of amusement at the pun – they sent him a human woman, and he was young and curious.
The experiment is useful; he requires a control for comparison with his occasional use of T'Pring. He knows she has other lovers, but it is of no consequence; her beauty is unmatched, and she despises him enough to give their encounters the exhilarating quality of a combat to the death.
'Tis pity she's a whore.
The girl is confident, not one of the late Kirk's cast-offs but someone new, perhaps procured planet-side during a recent raid. Her eyes roam in approval about the captain's quarters and she stalks to the array of weapons on the wall, raising a hand to caress the smooth, ebony handle of a glittering blade, thumbing the rounded end.
Tight leggings encase strong legs, two wide leather straps pass over her breasts and a platinum braid falls over her shoulder blades. He asks her to undress.
Pale, thin skin covers the mechanism of her body and blue veins stand out on white breasts, whose too-pink nipples appear as sores. In horror, he sees she is without body hair; depilated, child-like and foetal. Anger drives him onwards; he tries to think only of himself, but her limbs become sweat-slicked and sickening. Combined with her lower body temperature, the sensations conspire to cause a repellent, psychotic hallucination. The slimy, hairless creature he penetrates becomes a foul gastropod, Deroceras Reticulatum. He disengages, and barely makes it to the head, where acrid bile bubbles up, scours his throat and splashes into the steel bowl.
On his return, she is still in his bed, smiling a concerned smile. It is her last.
The medical team can grow synthetic organs, but donor organs do not drain the ship's budget, and this species is so very prone to bodily failure. Resurrection of the fallen is more efficient than re-training a new drudge to his exacting standards, and it has an advantageous side effect; the pathetic loyalty of a serf clutching at a life thought lost.
Under the guise of caressing her cheek, although it causes his stomach to heave anew, he grasps her face and neck. Her blows rain down upon his shoulders; he thinks it an apt phrase, for they have no more effect on him than a soft drizzle. Soon it is over and he asks his guards to place her mindless body in stasis, marked 'human: organ bank'.
There she stands, blank-eyed behind frosty glass, looking as if she were alive.
...
Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.
"My Last Duchess," Robert Browning (1812-1899)
3. T'Pring: The partisan's tale
When she steps into the cell, she mistakes the dark stain behind the boy for his shadow.
It is not.
She knows the boot-print in the blood.
"Camera off." The instruction is common here; many activities are too repellent to record. He sits immobile and bowed, cross-legged on the deck, hands bound behind his back. He is so thin; the hard surface must feel agonising. Without his uniform shirt, each bump of his spinal column stands out in cadaverous relief, his body is a leaching hulled fruit; decaying but not quite dead.
One knee to the deck, she sinks down to his eye level and his head tips up on puppet strings, eyes as blank as any marionette's. How could she be so naïve about his pain? He feels nothing; no hard deck beneath the bones of his pelvis, no burn of cuffs on his wrists, no breeze of air as she whispers close to his face.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
In return he offers a tiny nod, but has a thousand-parsec stare. With the lightest touch, she holds his face in her hands – the sharp stubble is incompatible with his youth – covers his lips with hers, prises them open and pushes her tongue inside, tasting salt, iron and the sweet acetone tang of starvation. She probes between his bottom teeth and cheek, pushing away Oedipal thoughts, then withdraws.
Let me be merciful as well as just.
Her thumb strokes his jaw then presses down and she feels a yielding pop as the capsule's casing breaks to release its toxic contents through the thin mucous membrane of his mouth.
"Just like the salt-burst of caviar, Milyi. You will not feel pain, I promise." She wraps her arms around his soon-to-be remains, burying her grief in the crook of his neck. He sinks, diminished, within her grasp, a cue to lower his bird-frame to the floor, cradling his head at her breast. A threadbare cover from the hard, narrow bunk serves as his shroud, and it takes all her training and discipline to rise from the deck and leave him, cold and alone. For a respectful moment she stands at attention, her hot skull is inflating and feels as though it might spray its ripe contents over this fatal scene. "I am sorry, Milyi, I was unable to take your pain until now, vas. He hath stolen away the brightest jewel of our crown today."
Stooping, she reaches below the stiff mattress and yanks out a heavy metal strut. Over and over she twists and bends the steel in her rage, until it is too hot to touch. They will think she used it to beat him.
One day, this Vulcan will release her sorrow.
At the threshold of the brig, she reports to the guard: "Our traitor is dead. I have alerted Medical. Two orderlies will remove it to ascertain if its organs can be used."
...
Let us be merciful as well as just;
This passing traveller, who hath stolen away
The brightest jewel of my crown to-day,
Shall of himself the precious gem restore;
By giving it, I make it mine once more.
Over those fatal footprints I will throw
My ermine mantle like another snow
"The Student's Tale," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Milyi: Russian for 'pretty one'
vas: Vulcan for 'relief', thank you VLD
4. T'Pring: The face of all the world is changed / 1C 13:4
A rib, a dip, a hip, a thigh, the crook of a knee. Such is the landscape of my love, move still, oh still beside me.
His love is patient, his love is kind. It does not boast, it has no envy, it is not arrogant. At night, when we are sleepless, he strokes my skin and calls me 'warrior.' Never has he asked after my other lover, accepting it as a necessary, occasional horror required to maintain our subterfuge. His love is tidal, flowing over to soothe, ebbing when I sink beneath suffocating human emotion. Tonight my mind is flayed and rubbed with salt. I have abandoned my fallen comrade on the deck, caused the faraway light in his eyes to gutter, and die.
As we lie entwined, I know he fears for my sanity, worries over my constant meditation, but only I can stop the spoiled psyche of a mind turned putrid.
Eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six. These are the hours I have spent in practice. One firepot, one flame, one focus. I cannot move a mountain, but I must move a man.
...
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
caught up into love,
And taught the whole of life in a new rhythm.
"Sonnets from the Portuguese, VII," Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 -1861)
5. Chapel: It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence
So many here in stasis, too many: the dead, the damaged and the despoiled. Sapphire eyes stare through a film of frost as I tend the girl's glass coffin with covert care, each day aware those eyes could be my own.
Once I was young, naive and affected by the allure of power, strength and virility. Years ago, Spock was out of his mind with some Vulcan fire only female flesh could quench; I offered myself along with a bowl of soup.
He threw me and it against a bulkhead.
I rub the muscle over my hip. Even McCoy wasn't able to fix it, not completely, and the cold surrounding the stasis-chambers makes it twinge.
The Vulcan was not always our captain, and he was not always this way. A mission went awry and almost all the crew, even Vulcans, were affected by alien spores, turning us passive. Ideal Empire fodder one would think, but we became intractable too, and the only way to snap us out of it was to induce an extreme emotional response. Spock, provoked by Kirk into violence, killed his captain, and his love. Along with Kirk's life, Spock's human half flowed away like blood through a wound and, never wanting command, his self-inflicted position pushed him over the precipice. His emotions, directed inward, could not be contained. The shrapnel of his guilt and rage exploded though the ship, lacerating all our minds.
Two years back? It feels as twenty.
Time is distorted here; strain ages us at an accelerated rate, while days pass in a glacial cycle of oppression, overthrow, appropriation and destruction. All members of the cloaked resistance are in fear of revelation, of torture more than anything. The unbroken, on the brink of the welcoming arms of death, are placed in stasis and repaired by the nanos, just so he can begin the sequence of torment anew. Husks are re-hydrated so he can drain their life-fluid once more . When they gather their wits enough to know the truth, most go mad.
Exit through the first airlock on the left. Do not pause to collect a spacesuit.
Years of biological training enable me to see clearly within them, not in the psychological sense, but through the crust to the anatomical workings, past the dermis, epidermis and subcutaneous layers, to the kidneys and adrenal glands. In normal operation, human adrenal glands secrete thirty-five to forty milligrams of cortisol per day.
A moderate level of stress hormone is normal and motivating; it assists with decision making, alerts us. In my work, I see levels eight times normal. With my medical eye, I can spot a female resistance member by her shape. There is the soft pouch of stubborn cortisol-induced fat carried over the abdomen of a woman otherwise lithe of limb, and something in her walk that says 'keep your distance'. In order to keep together, we must stay steadfast and alone, connected only by the pang of separation. That final subtlety is lost on those who live by logic.
McCoy will not allow me within spitting distance of Chekov's stasis unit, or rather the unit that holds the collection of tissue and bone that once was Chekov. By the movements of his eyes alone, the doctor signals his treatment of the container as a casket, a shrine, a temple, within it a celestial divinity.
At ship's night, I sit among these static beings and pray my futile little prayers.
...
It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world
and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky.
It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence
all night, from star to star.
"The Pang of Separation," Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)
Coming next: Sulu, McCoy, Kyle and Uhura