Small Talk

By

Pat Foley

Chapter 4

The next day was blast off day. I was going to break loose of Vulcan ties at least for a few days and return to a life of freedom, sans husband or child.

I had left my husband detailed instructions, broken down hour by hour and day by day: where Spock could be found at any time, either lesson, or practice or tutor, what times he was supposed to rise, eat, and sleep, and what he would eat.

I had also left prepared meals for each day numbered in the stasis unit. A simple numerical and chronological association seemed best suited to my husband's logical mind. All Sarek had to do was follow the dates and numbers on the list and at least they wouldn't starve.

Sarek looked at my instructions, detailed for even the least experienced of fathers, the barest of understandings. His eyes bulged as he scanned the closely printed pages. "Spock knows all this, does he not?"

I hesitated at saying the truth, which was that Spock's knowing it was hardly the point. My son had taken an obstinate set against my going away, refusing to reconcile himself. Before he'd left for school he hadn't even wanted to say goodbye to me. I suspected his behavior was calculated to try and guilt me into changing my mind and staying. I had no idea how easy, or hard, Spock was going to make Sarek's temporary management of both parental roles. I had left instructions with Spock's school and his tutors to keep a special eye on him, just in case. They had been perfectly polite, but had given me the distinct impression they regarded me as engaging in needless human worry, reminding me of their excellent staffing and security setup which made any extra precautions entirely unnecessary.

"He does know it," I temporized, "But he might need some … supervision."

"I trust not," Sarek flicked a brow in perfect Vulcan confidence, ending that discussion.

Sighing, I gave up the cause as lost. I had warned him. I had made the lists. The ball was in his court.

I looked around, but it seemed everything I needed to do had been done. I had completed my shopping yesterday. My cases were lovingly packed and had been standing ready by the door since the night before. Sarek was going to take time off from Council to deliver me to the spaceport this morning. I'd like to think the latter was out of some sense of affection, but I had a sneaking suspicion he just wanted to be sure I got on the right shuttle.

Still I was confident I had planned every detail with the fervor of General Patton going up against Rommel. Unfortunately I hadn't reckoned on my own particular Desert Fox - or fox cub. The first intimations of doom came as we were having a last cup of tea before leaving. I was reiterating, for good measure, Spock's itinerary for the day with Sarek.

Sarek listened with half an ear, paying more attention to triple checking my return tickets. It was frustrating, but hard for me to do more than suggest that he really needed to attend to this. That Spock might take a little more supervision than he expected. Still, I didn't want to say it too plainly, or jinx what I hoped would be an uneventful, peaceful transition of power from one head of state to the next, and that the civil population in question wouldn't rise up in anarchy. But before I could get a quarter of the way through it, Sarek received a priority call and went off to his office to take it.

When he didn't return in a few minutes, I followed him there to see what the hold-up was.

"Sarek, I'm gong to be late," I said, pointing to my watch.

He looked up from the comm. "Spock has disappeared from school."

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but I was. In fact my mind froze into a sort of existential babble. Why wouldn't he choose today to skip school? After all, there's no time like the present; a stitch in time saves nine; why put off till tomorrow what you can do today and of course a rolling stone gathers no moss. Not to mention all my best laid plans now lost, lost, lost. I swallowed hard and tried to pull my overloaded brain into some sort of rational functioning.

"How? Where?" I asked stupidly. But in spite of myself, my brain had reactivated into some sort of keen analysis. The ratio of teachers to pupils at Spock's prestigious school ran at a low of three to one and a high of five to one. He was delivered there by a Council guardsman. The school itself had a security system worthy of Fort Knox - as I had just been so haughtily reminded. Of all places, I would have thought his ability to vanish from there would be akin to the likelihood of him stepping through a looking glass into Wonderland. "How could he have disappeared?" I asked with some heat. "Did he turn himself into a rabbit and fall down a hole? Darn it, I warned them to watch him!"

The literary allusions went right over Sarek's head, if he even noticed them. "With Spock, I would not dare to speculate. I am told he was present in morning assembly, then disappeared before his first class."

"Is someone even looking for him?"

"Everyone. He does not answer on his personal comm. It is to be surmised he left it behind, lest it be used to triangulate on him. They do not believe he was kidnapped."

"Little they know," I said bitterly. "If they don't know where he is." I knew, instinctively, that he had done this in an attempt to keep me from leaving. But I was only ninety percent sure of it. And that didn't mean he couldn't get into real trouble just the same. And there was the remote, panicky possibility that he had been kidnapped. A trace of fear chilled me, raised goose bumps on my arms in spite of the warm Vulcan air.

"We've got to find him," I said. "Let's go."

"He is being sought by all proper authorities. I will search for him myself as soon as I deliver you to the spaceport."

"You can't imagine I'd leave not knowing what's happened to him?" I asked. "No way."

"Nothing will happen to him." Sarek countered tersely. "I will see to that."

"You can't be sure until we find him. And there isn't time to argue. Let's go."

In spite of my telling him to ignore them, Sarek took my bags. My tickets and passport were already in a folder in my jacket. But at the moment I could have cared less. The pages from my carefully contrived list, left haphazardly on the table as we rushed out the door, were scattered by the breeze of our passage and blew away down the hall. Only a few of them would be found by the household staff, who seeing the English words, would put them carefully on the desk in my office where I would find them when I returned. Sarek, the person for whom they'd been so carefully compiled, never would.

But our eyes now were only for Spock. We started by swooping low over his favorite hide outs and play areas on the Forge, me straining my eyes for his foreshortened figure while Sarek checked infrared scanners. Time was growing short and the futility of our efforts was beginning to hit me. On a desert the size of the Forge, Spock could hide out for days and not be found. I had resigned myself into missing my trip – I wouldn't go off planet with my child missing, even if it was most likely he had stubbornly secreted himself in some hidey hole just for that purpose. My thoughts on finding him, which had first ranged to giving him a good spanking in return for the scare he'd given us, now shifted to wanting only to clutch him close in thankfulness for finding him. Why did Vulcan have to be such a huge, dangerous planet? Why did my Vulcans have to be such continual trials? Why did I ever marry a Vulcan in the first place? The jury was still out but I feared when they returned the verdict would be clear. Stockholm would have been affirmed in their recent rejection, exactly as my son had feared. This girl was just not Nobel Laureate material.

"He could die out here," I muttered.

"He's been fully desert trained," Sarek reminded me. "He has passed his Kahs Wan."

"Oh, that's crap," I said, impatiently consigning five thousand years of Vulcan tradition to the recycler.

Sarek glanced at me, but wisely did not comment.

Then we got a call, from the Terran Embassy of all places. Spock had been there seeking a Terran passport. He'd been refused on grounds of not being of age, and told to wait while his parents were contacted. Unfortunately, the Embassy staff, doubly leery about the diplomatic dangers of laying hands on a Vulcan or being accused of holding a Vulcan citizen hostage, had only asked him to remain. They were reluctant to detain him. We could hardly blame them, since legally they didn't have the right. Spock had ducked out the door while they impotently watched.

We nabbed him sauntering down the street not five blocks away from the Embassy. He seemed careless of the fact that half the security staff on the planet were searching for him and his potential kidnappers, looking for all the world as if he were out for a stroll, except that he had his school rucksack on his back, stuffed with it seemed like more than its usual contents. With minutes to spare before the starship shuttle was due to depart. Sarek didn't bother to land, he swooped down over our son, hovering about about four inches from his nose, opened the hatch and growled the Vulcan equivalent of, "Get in."

Spock looked from left to right, as if wondering where his potential rescuers were when he needed them. But then he succumbed to the inevitabile and climbed in with all the composure of a prince ascending - whether to the throne or the guillotine was still moot.

"Oh, Spock, how could you?" I said. "Didn't you promise me you were going to be good?"

"I thought you should have someone to accompany you," he replied calmly. "And since Father is too busy, I was the next logical choice. I wanted to go to the shuttle boarding dock, but when I got to the spaceport they told me I couldn't go through security without a passport." He eyed Sarek warily. "So I went to the Embassy to get one."

"Why did you go to the Terran one?" Sarek asked in his most even, controlled voice.

Spock gave him a look. "I could hardly go to the Vulcan one, could I?"

Seeing Sarek was struck dumb enough that he was not about to immediately immolate his only son, Spock added, with a trace of injury. "They had no right to tell on me. I told them I have diplomatic immunity. That's why I went to them. These people have no sense of confidential negotiations. I don't know how Father can work with them."

I choked. Sarek and I traded a glance. I didn't have the emotional control to comment on this but I made a face at Sarek, warning him to keep his Vulcan cool. He just flicked a brow.

"I don't know where you came to such an erroneous opinion, but there is no time for this now. I assure you we will discuss this later," Sarek promised him.

"How did you plan to get on the ship?" I asked. "You don't even have a ticket."

He didn't answer, looking stubborn. I suddenly had a sinking suspicion he had planned to stowaway somehow. And had a mental fear of him attempting to follow Sarek and me wherever we went in the galaxy, now that the idea had entered his head. "Spock, you must promise never to try anything like this again."

"He won't," Sarek said. "I will see to that."

Spock slid his eyes to his father and looked away, without comment.

"Promise me you won't and your father will have nothing more to say to you about this," I said with a dash of inspiration. Sarek looked at me in surprise at this casual usurping of his authority. I threw up my hands in exasperation and excuse. "Look I don't want to worry about him coming after us every time we go off planet. Much as I would like to draw and quarter him myself, just as you would, I think it's a fair trade.

Sarek flicked a brow in some sort of concession. "Perhaps you have a point."

By this time, I had given up my trip as impossible, but Vulcans are capable of multitasking even in the face of potential personal catastrophe. And unlike humans, they have a time sense that lets them know precisely the amount of seconds remaining before a deadline. Even as we were arguing, Sarek was flying. By virtue of Council Emblazons, diplomatic immunity (in disregarding every traffic law), and having some of the guard swooping in ahead of us and clearing a path, Sarek broke every time record to the spaceport. I made my starship connection with moments to spare. I gave my Vulcans an abstracted farewell, more worried about my delinquent son than fond goodbyes.

"Try to be good," I adjured Spock. "And help your father." I was thinking more along the lines of him simply not getting into any more trouble. But I had forgotten you have to watch every word with Vulcans. Unbeknownst to me, Spock took this quite literally.

"I have already," he said. "And I've helped you to find your way home too."

"What do you mean?" I asked, half amused, half alarmed.

"Last call, Miss," said the shuttle attendant.

"Amanda," Sarek said, handing me my cases. I took them, thinking what a fiasco it would be to have walked off without them in this confusion.

Little did I know at this point that leaving the cases by the door last night had given Spock ample opportunity to already 'help' me. He had raided our library and lovingly added several star charts of the Rigillian and Eridani quadrants from his father's astrogation collection, priceless ancient documents from Vulcan's first Pre Reform spacefaring culture. Just possessing these treasures of Vulcan antiquity without authorization was grounds for me to spend the rest of my life in a very secure Vulcan lockup. For good measure he'd included an archaic copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" from my side of the library. Then he had added some contributions of his own, apparently purchased from the kind of tourist shops catering to outworlders on Vulcan: a copy of the Terry Tourist Guide to Vulcan. And a t-shirt printed with a map of the Milky Way galaxy with a large arrow and the legend "Vulcan is here" in a size large enough to dwarf even Sarek. To make room for all these guideposts to a safe return, carefully chosen to cover all cultural variances, he had removed both of the new suits I'd purchased, leaving me with a choice of evening wear or the oversized T-shirt. But I wouldn't find out any of this until I unpacked on the starship.

"Goodbye, be good," I said to them both as I boarded the shuttle. Both Sarek and I completely overlooked that Spock had failed to exactly deliver the promise we'd requested.

"Why did you wish to accompany her?" I heard Sarek ask Spock, before the pressure doors closed. "There was no logical necessity."

"But there is. And you were busy," Spock said reasonably. "Someone should go with her. She will never find her way home."

"She will," Sarek said.

Spock shook his head. "We are probably going to have to go and retrieve her, the way I do when she gets lost in the Fortress." He gave his father a sidelong glance. "You're always at work when it happens. You don't know. I always do it." He sighed a little. "I don't mind," he assured him, "But she never can find her way back. I do not understand how humans navigate starships through the galaxy. Although this time," he added thoughtfully, "I did give her a map."

The last glimpse I had of them before the shuttle doors closed was of Sarek looking pensive.

To be continued….