Sarek had been staring at the wall for some time. Fixing his eyes on the open expanse of the smooth concrete focused him, and he needed focus. He was going back to Earth. He did not wish to return to Earth.
The Vulcan High Council had informed him of their decision hours before, citing it as "prudent." Given the circumstances, it was prudent, yet he could not reconcile his unease.
It was illogical to consider this reassignment punishment, but equally illogical to imagine it was any kind of promotion. He had already served as ambassador to Earth. It was a problem for which there would be no resolution. The Vulcan High Council had requested that he would go, and he would obey.
"I come to serve," he thought, tamping the wryness in his mood.
His knees ached from kneeling on the floor, but the sensation was irrelevant. His mind was as clear as it could be, so he stood, drew his cloak around himself, and left the empty meditation room.
Since he could not clear his mind through meditation, he decided to analyze his situation with logic. He was the most reasonable choice for the assignment following the death of Ambassador Sulak. He was well-versed in Earth and Federation politics: he had spent more than half his life in service to Vulcan, negotiating treaties on Vulcan's behalf with other Federation planets before taking up permanent residence on Earth while serving as diplomatic attaché to the Vulcan consulate. Several years after his initial posting, he had been appointed ambassador following Selden's retirement and had held the post for more than a decade.
When he had returned home to marry T'Rea, he had simply assumed his diplomatic career was behind him, neatly tucked away as a past chapter of his life. Truthfully, politics had always been his father's pursuit, but Sarek had proved a highly competent diplomat, and his service honored his father and his family.
Though Sarek had been done with politics, but politics had not been done with him. Shortly after his marriage, a crisis had emerged between the Rigelians and Coridans over trade routes and the Federation Council had asked him to intervene. He had asked his new bride to accompany him, but she had refused.
T'Rea had her faith and it was held firmly on Vulcan, and Sarek had his duties, which were not so firmly fixed on their home planet. So he went to Rigel to initiate an agreement between the two planets and it took the better part of a year, but mining freighters had been peacefully passing through that sector of space ever since.
T'Rea hadn't been the same when he returned, but he was unsure what measure of sameness he had been seeking. Like most Vulcan children, they had been bonded at a young age, but their bond had never been a strong one and their match had deeper roots in allying their families than in genuine affection. It had been easy to blame religion and diplomacy, but Sarek had long suspected there was another male with whom she shared a deeper connection. He'd never questioned her about it, and she had respected him enough to preserve an admirable degree of discreetness over her affair.
He had been back on Rigel when his father died. Skon had held considerable influence throughout Vulcan, and instead of his father's death providing an excuse to remove himself from politics altogether, Sarek found that the void his father left only drew him further in. He had returned briefly for the funeral and to put his father's affairs in order, and he had not seen T'Rea during that visit.
It was not surprising when he finally returned home several weeks ago and his wife told him she was pregnant with another man's child. She had been careless. Legally he had two options. He could engage the man in ritual combat, but neither outcome would be optimal. Killing the father of her child was unlikely to make T'Rea love him, and being dead himself wouldn't strengthen her affections either.
Were his father still alive, he would have chosen the second option, which would be to raise the child as his own and put the whole business behind them. Most Vulcans not in the throes of ponn farr would have opted for this more reasonable course. Vulcan was full of open secrets that were never discussed in any forum, public or private. Yet with Skon deceased, Sarek no longer felt an urge to preserve the decorum that permeated every level of the Vulcan experience. So he chose a third option.
It was not logical to remain bound to a partner with whom one shared nothing. Furthermore, he suspected T'Rea and the child's father would prefer to be together. He didn't know anything about the man and understood that knowing wouldn't change the situation. So Sarek made the decision for all of them. He divorced her.
It had been finalized the previous morning. A number of colleagues and mentors had strongly urged him to reconsider. Divorce was rare among their people, and rarer still among older political families. She had seemed uncertain at first but had agreed. There were often annulments and broken engagements but people didn't end a marriage of more than five years when there were children to consider. In his view, it seemed contradictory to have such a provision in the law if social pressure would forbid the exercise of it. In hindsight, perhaps it had been rash to do something so radical, but it was too late for that. He wouldn't question his decision further.
That morning the undersecretary to the Vulcan High Council had summoned him to a meeting to discuss an urgent new appointment. Earth, they had said, and to Earth he would go. He was given a week to pack his household and endure the days of tedious entrance briefs to become informed of the current Terran situation. He looked around his father's former home, his home, imagining it sitting completely empty for the first time in nearly three centuries.
It was just as well: there was nothing tethering him to Vulcan anymore.
Amanda shook her foot, distracted by her thoughts. "He's going to be late," she thought, glancing down at her PADD and watching the seconds click upward toward 1300 hours.
With the precision of a shuttle launch, John cruised around the corner and sat in the pub chair across from her exactly on the hour, smiling and nodding as he continued a conversation on his PADD. She had to admit she found his punctuality a bit annoying, but it was nevertheless impressive. She had to give him some credit: being a politician kept him on a pretty tight schedule.
Unfortunately for John, she planned to break up with him.
She'd met John Molineaux at a formal embassy luncheon several weeks after she had moved to the area. She had immediately considered him the most handsome man in the room, and he seemed to like her too, and that made them a match from superficial heaven. He was a junior congressman in the United Earth government and though he had only been elected two terms ago, he was already vying for the position of speaker.
Amanda had never had much interest in politics, but she certainly had considered John a catch when she met him. He was the sort of man her mother approved of – dripping with responsibility, connections, and good looks. She realized she was the sort of woman voters approved of – a schoolteacher with a good education, a pristine past, and a subdued and appropriate level of aesthetic beauty.
These facts added another level of authenticity to their relationship, but did little to make Amanda feel like she cared for him. She had only met him two months ago and figured most people didn't fall passionately in love at first glance. After all, soul mates were a thing for fairy tales. And after observing the collapse of her own parents' marriage, she had learned love was a thing that was best grown over time for best results, but even still, she'd become convinced this was never going to work.
She stared at the table, allowing her thoughts to drift back to work. It was Saturday and she'd spent most of the morning in the basement of the United Embassies working on Project Rosetta. Rosetta was half the reason she had moved to San Francisco four months ago from her home in New Chicago after graduating from among the top in her class in theoretical xenolinguistics at the American Language Institute.
Universal translators had been around for more than a century, but "translator" wasn't the most precise term. "Universal interpreters" was more correct. Rosetta was a nearly decade-long endeavor to enhance processing time and create a standard translation matrix capable of integration across every Federation computing platform. For the first time, programmers were attempting to incorporate kinesthetic analysis and anthropologists were streamlining various sociological and contextual referents.
She worked on the project only part time as a volunteer, perusing the linguistic databases for errors and assisting with grammar analysis and syntax generation of the Tellarite and Vulcanoid languages, but she was proud to be only 24 years old and able to put her name to such a monumental achievement in interstellar communication.
The main reason she had upended her life and moved across the country was the school. She had met the senior human resources clerk of the United Embassies at a career fair at the end of her final semester of graduate school, and two formal interviews later, she had packed her cat and her scant belongings and found herself in San Francisco teaching a small class of diplomats' children that included four humans, two Tellarites, and a bright young Ithenite girl. Her students were such a joy to teach.
Her thoughts drifted from Monday morning's lesson plan to John's fingers. He was still talking on his PADD to a man with a deep voice about raising poll numbers throughout next week, but his hands were occupied in arranging the place settings into parallel and perpendicular lines with points of reference Amanda could not identify. Obsessive-compulsive disorder was another of his peculiar habits that she found mildly irritating.
When he had first come to her studio apartment, he had moved her couch to sit at a perfect right angle to the old-style fireplace and put the various knickknacks that resided on her bookshelf into a military-style formation. She was unsure if it was controlling or simply just one of his oddities. Vera, her upstairs neighbor and one of the few friends Amanda had made since the move, called him uptight.
"I'm so sorry, Amanda," he said, pointing to his PADD. "Work: you know how it is. Anyway, how has your day been?"
"Fine," Amanda replied, trying to find a good segue into the speech that went, "it's not you it's me."
"It's got to be better than 'fine'. We found time to be together," he grinned.
Her mind went blank as she struggled to think of something to say, but the waitress mercifully rescued her. She ordered a salad and endured a bit of teasing over her vegetarian diet, and he got the salmon and what looked like a casual wink from the waitress.
Yes, she was definitely flirting with him, and John was just being himself and flirting right back. Perhaps flirting wasn't the right word, but he was always on display, always making a presentation, and people lapped it right up. People were dumb.
The waitress eventually excused herself and they talked over the election, and she did her best to feign interest and felt like she gave a passable performance. The key was to listen and repeat short phrases as questions. It was just linguistics, and it made people feel important.
He liked feeling important. In fact, he loved it. Yet she never felt important around him. "John, I think-"
"Oh, I meant to ask the other day, how's your dad doing?"
"My dad?" she blinked, trying to readjust her train of thought.
She hadn't talked to her father in a couple of weeks, but they had never communicated regularly. They had the sort of relationship where they went months without speaking and then picked up right where they had left off with ease. He was a rare elements surveyor and was often away from home for months or years at a time. Her mother had grown tired of that very quickly and they had divorced when she was six.
"He's... great. I guess. But John-"
"You said he was an asteroid miner," he interrupted. "What's that like?"
"I did?"
Amanda couldn't recall having ever talked about her father with John, aside from mentioning that her parents were no longer together.
"Yeah, I could swear it was a few weeks ago."
"He's actually a surveyor, not a miner. I don't remember where he was the last time we spoke, but-"
She stopped. Why was he asking these things? All she wanted to do was break it off with him and instead he wanted talk about her dad?
"John, we need to-"
He held his finger to his lips, looking at his PADD, and then offered an apologetic smile.
"Sorry to run, love, but I just got a message about getting a live spot on the holos in 30 minutes. If I take the shuttle I can get there in time. Here's my card for the food. We're still on for this weekend, right?"
She managed to turn her grimace into a smile before he noticed. They were supposed to attend an interplanetary conference at the nearby Science Observatory. She frowned and didn't even get the chance to respond before he was gone. As if on cue, the server came back with their entrees.
"I'm sorry to bother you, but is that John Molineaux with you?" she asked Amanda.
"Yeah, uh, yes, he had to go," she explained. "In fact, I'm not really even hungry; would it be a bother to ask you to box it up?"
The waitress left and she sat there, feeling conflicted. The waitress came back with a to-go bag and John's card. She thanked her and stood to leave when the waitress called out, "You're lucky. He's quite a catch!"
"Yeah," Amanda thought glumly.
What was the saying? There were plenty of fish in the sea? Federation Standard was still littered with a vast number of expressions and idioms. The language itself was widely regarded as the easiest to learn, but from a cultural perspective, the overwhelming amount of vernacular and proverbs flowing through it occasionally stumped even native speakers, particularly since it had become a nexus of more than a dozen planets that made up the Federation.
It was a short walk back to her apartment. Her stomach churned at the thought of the salmon but at least her cat Euclid would like it. As she rustled through her shoulder bag to find her access card, a familiar face peeked over the upstairs balcony.
"Hey neighbor!"
"Hi Vera," Amanda replied with a smile.
"Hold the door; I'm coming over," Vera called.
Her upstairs neighbor was a little strange but a lot of fun. In the three months she had known her, Vera had a new hair color approximately once a week, and never once had it rotated through a natural shade. Currently it was a peculiar hue of deep lilac, though Vera insisted it was really more of a violet. Amanda couldn't see the point in splitting hairs, no pun intended, because she was certain it would probably be green before next Tuesday.
Vera wore heavy makeup in a way that was more ironic than tacky. Tiny holes dotted her face where she exchanged various pieces of facial jewelry daily: today she was sporting a series of zirconia studs along her eyebrows.
It had taken Amanda a month to get a grip on her neighbor. A long time ago San Francisco had been something of a hub for free-spirited people, rule breakers, and goofy, technologically inclined people, but in the last century it had been somewhat tamed thanks to the presence of Starfleet headquarters and the various offices of the Federation. Most of the city's former hipster crowd had either evolved with the times, moved away, or died, but there was a smattering of the most devoted who had remained, and Amanda counted Vera among them.
She wasn't even exactly sure what Vera did. Amanda imagined she had a job because she was rarely home at night, but for some reason she felt too afraid to pry deeply. Vera was that sort of person who had a personality so strong it practically had its own gravitational field; Amanda couldn't help but like her. She was honest to the point of occasionally being mean, but her advice was solid.
At first Amanda had suspected her of being a freeloader because she often entered Amanda's apartment like she lived there, eating the food and even trying on her clothes. She soon caught on to the idea that Vera was almost insulted that Amanda didn't do likewise, asking after a few weeks why she was always having to come over to Amanda's place, and wondering why Amanda never came over to hers.
They entered her apartment and Vera flopped down on the couch to pet her cat Euclid and Amanda went into the kitchen to make tea.
"So how is he?" Vera probed.
"John?" Amanda mused.
"Yeah, the clown that thinks he's going to take on the Federation."
Amanda pursed her lips and dropped the tea bag into the mug as she waited for the water to boil. Using a teakettle on a stove was so old-fashioned, but Amanda liked the process of tea almost as much as drinking it.
"I'm breaking up with him."
"Bravo. Don't get me wrong. He's attractive. He has good hair. But he's a useless-"
The kettle began to scream, drowning out Vera's string of obscenities. Amanda smiled and removed it from the induction burner.
"I had no idea you were so passionate about politics," Amanda said with raised eyebrows and a half smile. "I've always known you were never fond of John, but-"
"I want the best for you. And our planet. This stuff matters, you know?"
"I do," Amanda said, feigning seriousness.
Vera smirked and stared at her expectantly, waiting for a real answer on the status of her relationship with John. Amanda sighed and shifted her weight onto her other foot.
"The truth is, he's annoying, tedious, boring, obsessive..."
"Xenophobic?" Vera suggested.
Amanda rolled her eyes. She supposed it was true. John often spoke approvingly about the Earth First Movement and the Autonomy Party, and while he never spoke badly about other species, she always got the sense that he disapproved of them. It was a major reason she wanted to break things off.
Sometimes she wondered what he saw in her, teaching alien children and being able to communicate in five Federation languages. He had never mentioned it, but then again, they so rarely talked about Amanda's life. Everything was always about John.
She stared at Vera. "I guess he's just the kind of man my mother has always dreamed of."
"I'll find you a guy. Someone proper you can take home to mom. Speaking of which, I have a date with a Denobulan in..." she checked the clock on the side wall, "... 30 minutes. Any chance you could teach me something fun to say?"
"I don't speak a word of Denobulan," Amanda protested.
"Then why did you spend so long in school getting all those fancy degrees? Why do you spend all your free time working on this fancy translator?"
"So that one day people like you can whisper sweet nothings into the ears, or whatever counts for ears, of species all over the galaxy without the need for human translation," Amanda replied in a sing song voice.
"Well, I really can't stay. I'm going to go wash my armpits for this date," Vera said, getting up.
Amanda stared at her, mouth open and shaking her head in disbelief.
"Just kidding. I'm going to shower. It is Sunday you know. My bath day. But seriously, congratulations on ditching that loser," she said.
"He's not ditched just yet. I still have plans to go to a conference with him this weekend," Amanda groaned.
"Back out of it," Vera said, waving goodbye and closing the door.
Amanda wanted to back out of it – rubbing elbows with dignitaries was so uncomfortable. It seemed like a new planet entered the Federation every year and it was such a hassle keeping up with various customs and courtesies. She had eventually just settled on committing to memory all of the gestures and phrases that were considered appallingly rude and did her best to avoid them. She had learned the hard way that Tellarites considered politeness, particularly among strangers, to be a peculiar breach of etiquette.
In the short time she had worked at the embassy, she had also learned a whole database of cultural idiosyncrasies. It was fascinating to read about and helped improve her language skills, but putting them to practice required compensating for a lifetime of mindless mannerisms. In graduate school she had attended a seminar on practical interspecies communication and cooperation, and had been given access to hundreds of pamphlets with basic manners of dozens of frequently encountered cultures.
Never show both palms outstretched to an Andorian. Always smile but never shake hands when greeting a Denobulan. Never smile or shake hands when greeting a Vulcan. Do ask about a Rigelian's family. Do not wave at a Coridian.
Dozens and dozens of pages of rules she had attempted to commit to memory, but no matter how hard she studied, no pamphlet explained what to do when encountering a mixed group. She imagined herself putting on a strange pantomime in which she pretended like she had about seven personalities at the same time.
She wanted to send John a message and back out of her commitment. What she really wanted to do was send a message explaining she no longer wanted a relationship, but that seemed so mean and petty to do through text. He stayed so busy, and she couldn't imagine finding another opportunity to see or call him before Friday.
She felt stuck.
On the other hand, she'd wanted to go to the Science Observatory ever since she had moved to San Francisco, but it was so often closed for dignitaries, and being a teacher at a diplomatic school didn't quite qualify as important enough to warrant general admission.
Euclid jumped up on the counter and began rubbing his face on her arm. She took another sip of her tea, silently cursing her situation. She just had to get through this weekend. As much as she dreaded committing any of a thousand faux pas, maybe she would actually meet some interesting people at this function.
Maybe she'd find someone else. She instantly felt guilty even considering dating someone else given she was still technically dating John, but smirked at what her mother would say.
From the moment she had told her mother about him, she had gushed and swooned at the idea of her daughter being involved with such an important person. If she was going to get rid of him she'd need someone better lined up to take his place as far as her mother was concerned. Who else could she go for? What was better by Jana Grayson's standards?
She knew the Terran president was single... and about 70. She laughed out loud, scaring the cat from the counter.
Better yet, the Federation president was also single. Granted, he was Andorian, which caused her to take perverse delight in the thought of explaining to her conservative mother that her grandchildren would have antennae. She laughed until tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and she began to hiccup.
She flopped down on her couch and stared at the mantel of the fireplace at the flickering digital photoframes that John had organized into perfectly parallel rows and wondered if she was happy.
Perhaps she was, but she could be happier. She stood up and turned the photoframe of her and John at a beach in Big Sur on its face. It should be easier to find a guy, she thought, especially considering the pool of available men hadn't been confined to just Earth for more than a century. Yet somehow even with her options increased twenty-fold the future seemed bleak.
She was only 24 and found herself forgetting she was an adult most of the time. So often she felt like a little girl playing around in her mommy's clothes pretending at things like bills and jobs and love lives. Yet just last month her mother was already bringing up the topic of grandchildren and she began to feel overwhelmed.
She moved toward her desk and began adjusting the following week's lesson plans, ate her leftover dinner from her date at the restaurant, and tried to go to sleep. The bright lights of the San Francisco cityscape laughed at her attempt.
"San Francisco is full of people," she mused. "I have time."
Moments later, she was startled when her cat Euclid jumped on the bed and lay down on her chest. At least she would never be alone.