Vulcan

2421

He stood alone, as he had always done, in quiet peace & solitude. His hands were clasped before him, hidden deep in the folds of his robe. The wind was the only sound to be heard as it whistled through the rocks of the desert below. The sun was almost gone now, and the first stars of the evening could be seen overhead in the cloudless sky. The reddish tones of the rocks around him deepened in the growing twilight. Already he could feel the day's heat fading, the chill of the desert's night beginning to fall.

He came here often now, to this place of his choosing, a place for peaceful meditation and quiet reflection. A place where he knew he would never be disturbed, where he was free to let his mind reflect on a lifetime of memories, of faces and voices now long silent.

He thought often of his mother, and still tended the garden she had once loved. Her hands had worked the soil here for decades, removing the smallest of rocks as she tenderly planted tiny bulbs and seedlings. There were times he could swear he felt the faintest echo of her mind when his own hands were deep in the earth of her garden, just a flicker of her, a wisp of thought or emotion. These fleeting moments were a rare source of pleasure for him, and he occasionally tended the garden whether it needed it or not.

As a child, he had been fascinated by his mother's devotion to her garden. She would often journey for kilometers out into the forbidding desert plains, searching for a specific type or color of the soil. She spent hours looking for stones of just the right size, shape, and texture. He often helped her carefully unearth unique and interesting forms of plant life to be relocated to the garden. She taught him the names of the different plants, their unique characteristics & properties, and which ones were safe to eat. He learned which ones grew well in the sunlight, and which ones preferred the shade.

She would hold for him in graceful hands the tiny creatures of the desert: reptiles, insects, small mammals. Occasionally one would find itself a resident of her garden if its presence would prove a benefit. Later in life, he realized that these experiences were a major factor in his developing a keen interest in the sciences- geology, biology, botany, and many others.

He was not aware of it at the time, but it must have been overwhelming for her at first. This was not her world, and the flora and fauna here were completely unknown to her. He realized now that as she showed him the living things of the desert that she herself was also learning and it must have been as new for her as it was for him. The bond grew strong between them as they discovered things together, and as a young child was unaware that this sort of thing was very much not the norm on this world.

He had shown her things as well. She had been in awe of his sensitive hearing, which was far more refined than her own. He could hear the heartbeats of the tiny creatures in the desert around them, or the sound of insects as they burrowed into the soil of the garden. Once he had alerted her to the presence of a prowling desert cat, having heard its nearly silent footfalls in the soft desert soil.

The wind had died down and was now almost silent. His hearing now was not what it once was, for he was very old, even for a Vulcan. Regardless, he treasured the silence of the desert. The absolute absence of noise was something he had not been exposed to very often in his adult life. Much of that life had been spent aboard ship, where it was never totally silent: the ever-present background noises of the engines, atmospheric pumps, and equipment had been his near-constant companions for decades.

The path to true peace was silence, he thought. Silence allowed the complete and total focus of thought and produced clarity of reason that he found most refreshing. He often meditated for hours on end and relished the fact that he now had the opportunity to do so. His retirement had been a long time coming indeed, and was, he felt, justly deserved. He had given a lifetime of service, of selfless dedication to duty and to the Federation.

He often found amusement in the reverence now attributed by some to the actions and events of his long career. His presence at a diplomatic summit or scientific conference never failed to generate a chorus of whispers, of wide-eyed and impossibly young cadets who had grown up hearing tales of the voyages of a ship whose very name had become a legend.

His thoughts drifted, as they always did, eventually, to the ship. His home for many, many years, he had traveled undeterminable distances in her, to a thousand different worlds. She still existed; she was and would always be an orbiting museum though it had been many years since he had been aboard her. Of course, she was not the original vessel, and her replacement was very different now than her predecessor had been at first. She had been refit many times, and over the years had been continuously upgraded with the latest technology. Gone were the striking colors her interior had once carried, as was the old external sensor dish. Very different indeed.

Different, and in many ways better, but not the same. Now that he had nothing but time in which to do so, he had found himself reflecting back often on his early days in Starfleet. He remembered a time in which his duties had centered around the sciences he had studied for so long, and there was always something astonishingly new and different to study and learn about. He had never tired of this, and would have been content to spend the rest of his career that way, but it was not to be. Diplomacy and politics replaced biology and physics and had not proved nearly as satisfying….

He remembered the first time he had ever stood upon a completely new and unknown alien world, as part of an exploratory landing party. Every detail of this moment was forever etched in his mind: the slight change in atmospheric pressure he felt as soon as the transport was complete, the odd odor of the air around him, smelling like clean fresh earth and vegetation, so different from the sterilized and processed air of the ship. The gravity, too, had been different, and he had felt oddly light on his feet. The ground gave slightly under his feet, but was spongy in texture and immediately returned to its original state as he walked; there were no footprints here.

He had walked slowly down a gentle incline to a quietly bubbling stream with a cool mist rising from it. It was early morning here, and the world's stars had not yet risen above the horizon. He was stricken by the absolute tranquility of his surroundings. There were no advanced life forms here, no industrial pollution or overpopulation to spoil the natural beauty of the world around him. The air was so clear that the brightest stars in the sky could be seen in full daylight. He knew that one of the reasons he and the rest of the landing party were here was to evaluate the world's potential as a candidate for colonization. It would be an ideal choice for this, but he had to admit a part of him (the human part, no doubt) hoped that this place would remain pristine and undisturbed. In his experience, colonization was very rarely beneficial to the world being colonized.

He stood at the edge of the stream, looking into the fantastically clear water at a multitude of tiny brightly colored fish swirling among the stones on the streambed. Aquatic life forms were especially interesting to him, for there were so few of them on Vulcan. Remembering that he was, in fact, supposed to be studying this world, he scanned the stream and its inhabitants with his tricorder. The water was absolutely pure, hydrogen, oxygen and nothing else. He noticed a small blue amphibious reptile perched on a stone, awaiting the first rays of the morning. It gazed at him, curious but not afraid. Perhaps it had no natural predators here, he mused.

He began to walk beside the stream, and as he walked he heard the sounds and calls of the various animals and birds beginning to stir as the first of the morning suns rose over the western horizon. He soon came to a bend in the stream, where the current had created a deeper basin. He could see larger fish near the bottom, and some type of bioluminescent creatures in the deep shadows of an overhanging rock. He saw a blur of motion to his left and saw a long, slender fish swimming away from him, ascending toward the surface of the stream. As it burst from the water in a shower of water droplets, it spread beautiful translucent wings and took flight, and in seconds, it had disappeared from sight. It was followed by a second, and then a third.

This is what I want to do, he thought. I want to learn about all of these things! How fascinating it would be to be allowed to study this world in detail! Just to be here, to be walking along a stream no one had ever walked along before-was staggering in its implications & possibilities. As he walked, he thought of Amanda, and of the endless delight she would find in a world such as this. She would have loved this place, the colors, sounds, & smells of a thousand different flowers and plants.

He thought also of his father. Sarek would have perhaps appreciated the setting as well, but would never have communicated it outwardly. He and his father had not spoken for some time, ever since Spock had politely but firmly refused entry into the Vulcan Science Academy. Sarek had always assumed his son would become a scientist, and there was no better place to begin such a career as the Academy. The disappointment was palpable in his eyes at he looked at his son, and Spock felt the void that had always been present between them widen once again.

As he looked around the beautiful world surrounding him, a part of him wanted to say "Look, father. Look at what I have become, at where I am standing. I am a scientist…" He knew, however, that he would never speak those words...

He ascended a small rise and descended into a grove of lush vegetation. Though the growth was dense, game trails were clearly defined, and he had no trouble moving deeper into the grove. As his tricorder continued to catalog and amass terraquads of data on this new world, he came upon a large tree with beautiful silver-blue leaves. His hypersensitive ears picked up an odd low-frequency trilling sound, which grew louder as he approached the tree.

He was surprised to discover that the leaves of the tree were themselves producing the sound, from a tiny vibrating membrane at the base of each leaf. It was a peaceful, soothing sensation, and he doubted his human companions would have been able to hear it at all.

He noticed that, although the other types of trees around him were populated by many types of birds, this one had none at all-perhaps the trilling sound was a deterrent, some sort of defense mechanism? Fascinated, he studied the tree for several minutes, and then moved on. Soon it would be time to rejoin the other members of the landing party and return to the ship. He looked forward to the days ahead, to the hours he would spend in the ship's various laboratories studying the many samples they had gathered here. He did not realize it at the time, but this was as close to perfect contentment as he had ever experienced in his lifetime.

There had been countless worlds since then that he had studied and walked upon, but he had never forgotten the first one. At that time in his life, the universe had been full of wonder and the promise of endless discoveries waiting to be made and new things to be learned. He had never considered that Starfleet would ever want him to be anything but a scientist and imagined a long career culminating in a teaching position at the Academy or a prestigious university. As a child, he had spent much of his time in solitude, for no one wanted to be associated with the half-breed boy. As a result, he was quite content to spend his off-duty time alone, for there were always books to read, experiments to conduct, and studies to be made. He had no need of friends or companions, for he was in many ways his father's son, whether he wished to be or not.

Of course, his life had had taken a different path indeed…