6. Sulu: The trick is to keep breathing
One small flame partnered by one tall stick of incense, its smoke spiralling to the overhead in a cabin warm with the scent of plum-blossom.
In the wink of an eye he watched the puppy grow into a beaten, dull-eyed dog, and he is confused by how time could appear so static when the evidence of its passing, until recently, stood before him.
Since an arrow in flight is not seen to move during any single instant, it cannot possibly be moving at all.
An unstable particle, if observed continually, will never decay.
Chapel's vigil is not his way. To observe continually is to give up hope, hope that those bodies will ever be at rest and made dust. At night he dreams of the undead wandering the halls, and a Russian boy's sweet face, grey and inanimate. As long as their organs remain viable, after their brains are long extinguished, some small part of them is alive. Can they pass into their next state of being?
Once, he knew nothing of his ancestors' teachings, but death as a constant companion manhandles him towards their philosophies. His physicist's rationality rails against it, but when he has looked for answers everywhere, there is only this one stone left to peer beneath.
Concentrating on the flame, his mind long beyond emptying, he begins his habitual meditation and computation, his only means of separation from his existence.
Breathe in; his nostrils are filled with sweet, heavy floral notes and he steps outside his body to observe. From a distance of a meter, ten to the zero, he watches a slim, dark-haired man cross-legged on a bamboo mat.
Breathe out; ten to the one, ten meters away, a ship's quarters, sparse, tidy, shoes at the door, freighted with absence.
Breathe in; ten to the three, one kilometre away, a ship, its hard shell the only protection from the vacuum of space, both lifeboat and prison.
Breathe out; ten to the four; ten kilometres away, the ship is an ellipse in dark space, surrounded by stars.
Breathe in; ten to the seven, ten thousand kilometres away, a green planet.
Breathe out; ten to the thirteen; ten million kilometres away, a solar system comes into view.
Breathe in; ten to the twenty-one, at one-hundred thousand light years now, a galaxy.
Breathe out; ten to the twenty-two; from a distance of one million light years, collections of galaxies swirl like starlings.
Breathe in; ten to the twenty-four, one hundred million light years, the galaxies are points of light.
...
It will be nothing to the universe if he doesn't keep breathing.
But he will.
...
To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops
Shaken from a crane's bill.
"Impermanence," Eithei Dogen, (1200 – 1253)
Title taken from the novel of the same name, a book of madness and loss, by Janice Galloway.
7. McCoy: The word well-weighed, the practised smile
He holds so many thin and brittle secrets in his hands, one single slip could shatter them.
Three hundred and eighty-one living souls remain of the original four hundred and thirty crew. Fifteen lie dormant in an icy crypt, waiting for their gradual embalming. Orderlies will remove their organs in increments until the bodies are mummified. Instead of a burial within a shining limestone-clad pyramid, he will consign those bodies to the disintegrator, and Sulu will recycle their ash to fertilise the arboretum. Five so far are spread upon its ground.
Seventeen crew exited through the airlocks, jettisoned or jumped, and an even dozen evaporated in light. In manoeuvres favoured by dictatorships, they were present one moment, then gone, and the terror of not knowing their fate tears at their friends and family, until the rending grief is audible.
Except the doctor does know.
In the Captain's quarters a device is set into the wall, a trophy procured in a raiding party to the Tantalus colony. Nobody knows how it works – the technology is alien to them – and T'Pring's most covert examinations, reported to Scotty, revealed nothing.
By observation and deduction, McCoy has come to believe Spock has fathomed the workings of the machine. Kirk never used it, and after his death the new captain operated it on twelve occasions, time increasing between each use until all use stopped. T'Pring's hours of practice in shielding her thoughts from Spock mean she is unable to enter his, and so the doctor's suspicions remain unconfirmed, that their captain is afraid of the device.
First Officer T'Pring: how can he describe her? Boudiccan warrior, mistress of moral duplicity, leader, lover and friend. On the rare nights he is able to visit her, due to a fortunate combination of clear corridors and synchronised shifts, all his descriptions are inadequate. These nights are reduced to bare emotion and action, desperate, exquisite, fierce and furious.
Only he and she know what they have done, and if they are caught, the consequences will be severe. His inability to block out his terror at the thought of her death shames him; she has troubles enough. Discovery by Spock is unlikely as the captain has never visited his first officer's quarters.
The Vulcan summons, he does not seek.
...
Life has dark secrets; and the hearts are few
That treasure not some sorrow from the world-
A sorrow silent, gloomy, and unknown,
Yet colouring the future from the past.
We see the eye subdued, the practised smile,
The word well weighed before it pass the lip,
And know not of the misery within:
Yet there it works incessantly, and fears
The time to come; for time is terrible,
Avenging, and betraying.
"Secrets," Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802 - 1838)
8. Kyle: We carry our hearts
This is a twisted parody of some historic world, where bladed weapons, no more evolved than in the Bronze Age, are scabbarded in leather boots. Communications are conveyed on pressed wood-pulp scratched with points of graphite. This tyranny has pushed us back in time, turned us into Luddites wary of technology, and with good reason.
Each push of a button, or request for information echoes as a shout throughout the decks, so the parchments and papyri of our ancient worlds serve us now, immolated in flames masquerading as aids to meditation. They are letters from the front, sent only to one's own platoon, each one of us dreaming of a time when we will lie in green meadows with our love, reaching for drifting dragonflies.
Within the folds of our uniforms, we carry our hearts. What loathsome mind constructed our control? The Agonizer is inelegant, stubby-winged and bulbous, but its efficiency lies in specificity. The evil scarab knows only its owner and, pressed against another's ribs, lies dormant. The smallest transgression causes a punishment swift and ravaging, and with each chastisement, the resistance grows ever stronger. Fractured groups assemble in dark alcoves, passing time until they can go over the top.
We sit together on the fire-step, Scotty and I, awaiting our moment to rise, about-face and meet the fusillade. While we plan our advance in murmurs, there is a magnesium flash –
...
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
"In Memoriam," Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
*Fire-step: a wooden box in WW1 trenches that allows a gunner to step-up and fire over the trench
9. Uhura: Containment
Most mornings she wakes from fitful sleep, and for some seconds, forgets. Somehow, her body knows before her mind, clenching her gut and speeding up her heart rate. Then she remembers; John Winston Kyle is gone. My husband is gone.
During work hours, she thinks I must tell John about that, then catches herself. In the evening, she looks up to say something to him, seated at his desk, a copper curl dangling over his forehead, but the chair is empty. For weeks, in stubborn denial, she sets out two teacups. When will this half-life end? A life where you reach for part of you – partner, she likes that word better now – only to stumble into the blackest void, falling and full of shame that for one snap of time, you let reality recede.
Who will mock her anger now, and make it seem funny? Who will tell her worrying is pointless? Who will recite Keats in the velvet hour of ship's night? Who will read her reports and tell her where her rage and despair are bleeding through? Who will be her ballast? Who will love her as much as he?
She knows she is fire, but he was not her ice.
He was her containment and her hearth, and it has grown so cold, with embers died to ash.
...
No one so much as you
Loves this my clay,
Or would lament as you
Its dying day.
You know me through and through
Though I have not told,
And though with what you know
You are not bold.
None ever was so fair
As I thought you:
Not a word can I bear
Spoken against you.
"No-one So Much as You," Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
10. Gaila: Lest my ornaments prove too dangerous
Standard has a cadence unlike Orion. For her, its pitch, rise and rhythms are tricky, but she had a good language teacher who used to say, 'Stop concentrating on the words and their meanings, just feel the tempo.' In class, they sang nonsense poems, to develop confidence and help their tongues twist around the words. At night those words, persistent worms embedded in her brain, burrow at the verges of her memory. At first their frequencies are far away, then come into focus as the debris of the day drifts away.
Beside her, cold from her nightly pilgrimage, lies Christine with her cheek soft against Gaila's breast and a tremor running through her. Gaila massages the nurse's bad hip, willing her to sleep. Since Chekov's death, some of the fight has gone out of Christine, as though the onion-skin layers of her resolve are peeling away. Gaila is dismayed; all she wants to do is pound the Vulcan's face into the deck plating until it shines wet and dark as emeralds, while gripping his most precious parts in the jaws of one of Scotty's bench-vices.
Visions of brutal revenge entertain her; the crack of bone or the slither and slop of intestines spilling from an abdominal slit. They allow her to put one foot in front of the other and yes, she is aware of how violence is never the answer, except sometimes it is.
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, and wear my dagger with the braver grace.¹
Gaila sings a quiet tune to one of the nonsense poems, hoping her impromptu lullaby will cause sleep to claim Christine after so many weeks of wandering the passageways, a pale spectre with space-white skin, on her fretful night watch.
A few verses in and Christine is asleep, in a coma of exhaustion. At last her brain has taken the decision her body can't and instigated a full systems shutdown. Even in repose, tiny lines form between her eyebrows, but the eyes behind her blue-veined lids, mercifully, are still. Gaila, stiff as a sentry, fears any movement will wake her companion. She will look after Christine until she can't, for she must keep busy. It is essential to nurture her hope, to feel the rage, and the living skin beneath her hands.
She is surprised to hear the crack in her voice as the song's words turn to a lament in her mouth. She is surprised to taste her own tears as they trickle down her face and between her lips. She is surprised, after all this time, by the question that forces its way into her mind.
If I sink beneath, who will pull me out?
...
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!'
They called aloud, 'Our Sieve aren't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
"The Jumblies," Edward Lear (1812-1888)
¹Portia, The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Next: Uhura, Scotty, Chapel