Chapter 20 - Tutor

Kirk received more files. They were attached to his orders and came in separate from his allotted communication time. The files had full details, places, names. He stood hunched by the unneeded light beside the door to his tiny cabin, reading the lists, ranks, decorations, roles: technical engineers, gunners, pilots, medics, already divvied up into two teams. Beside each was a chip shaped icon that linked to each of their records.

Kirk rubbed his forehead and sat on the bed with his hardened little padd in brown and gray leaf camouflage in his lap. He pulled up each personnel record in alphabetical order, studied every word twice over. There were video snippets attached to half of them. A segment of the crewmember or officer talking about themselves from a script of prompts, an optional addition Kirk hadn't seen before. It was more useful to him than the rest of the record. He wished it were required.

He started the first video again. A pale skinned, pale haired man with a square face stood staring at the ground, rubbing his jaw. He looked up, cringed, shifted his boots.

"Name's Hungren. Hun, usually. Like the barbarians." He spoke with a friendly smile that tried to shift to tough. "Not like what you'd call your spouse if you'd been together too long."

Kirk propped a pillow behind himself, settled in to get to know his new people.


"I have obtained a copy of your transcript. A ranking of sixteenth is an insufficient placement, Spock."

Spock took hold of the back of a chair but resisted leaning on it. The tea room was sunny today, cheery in contrast to his father's sharpened features.

"I estimate that I am balancing the high demands and extra opportunity of the advanced course against my core classes as effectively as is possible."

"According to your transcript it is not your core technical courses that are at issue. It is the softer arts in which you are well behind your top peers." Sarek sat with his hands resting face down on the table, not laced together as if willing to compose and bank his force of will. "I expect you to improve your ranking by the end of the term. I expect you to be first, as befits your innate skills and disciplined ability to apply those skills. I will accept fourth. If I must. But I will not be pleased, only not displeased."

Spock dropped his gaze. "Yes, father."

"Toward that end, I have made rather difficult arrangements with the foremost Vulcan scholar of earth literature. He is widely published in the Federation core in literary critique in the Standard language."

Spock wanted to say that seemed illogically excessive, but to state that was to insult his father and his father's ideals about his family. He said nothing.

"He lives alone in the earth desert east of here. He has been on earth for a great while, more than a hundred years, so I expect he can assist with bridging your understanding."

Spock bowed his acceptance of this.

"You will give Shutan proper deference. Do you understand?"

"Of course, father."

Sarek raised his chin. "You have not always done as such with your tutors. And Shutan is more revered as a scholar of earth and near colony literature than your poetics tradition instructor last year was of his art."

Spock bowed his head. He recalled the tutor's impatience, his displeasure of having to instruct Spock. At the time Spock had not understood the politics of poetic sponsorship by Vulcan's elite families, and had assumed it was entirely Spock's lack of worthiness that motivated his treatment. In retrospect, Spock should have classified the poor treatment as unimportant, as he had done with Chief Ping. But he had been too unskilled in his disciplines to manage it.

"I apologize for any past difficulties I caused with my tutors, father. I do not expect to be any more adept a student of literature than I was of poetics, but I will always remain deferential. I understand better that I am representing you."

"I stated as much at the time, as you will recall."

Spock nodded. "I do recall."

"I will give you his coordinates. Shutan insisted on setting a first meeting time and not knowing your schedule otherwise than this afternoon, I informed him you would meet with him in half an hour. Do you require an introduction? I can send you with Sgroud."

"I do not require one. Unless you believe Shutan expects it."

"He tends strongly toward reclusivity. So, no. Keep that in mind as well. Take your personal interaction cues from him and remain silent otherwise. Your goal for this first meeting is to retain him as a tutor." Sarek gestured at the table, which was set already with cakes. "But first, sit and eat. Your mother insisted I feed you. She worries you are not eating well now that James is absent."

Spock sat down, took the closest three cakes. "It is true that I often become enmeshed in a difficult mental task and, having put all physical concerns aside, do not notice I am in need of sustenance."

Spock swallowed his last cake and wiped his hands and stood up. "I should depart with extra time, father, just in case."

Sarek looked up. "As deferential as you can be, Spock."

"Yes, father."


Shutan lived in a long adobe house in the Nevada desert surrounded by astringent scented scrub and broadly domed rocky surfaces with gray dust blowing across them. There was no other visible habitation besides the low house with its power and communications dome atop one corner of the knee-high wall. Spock spent the extra time standing in the wonderfully warm afternoon sunlight.

Lizards scattered at Spock's approach to the house. The scent of Vulcan twig tea wafted toward him. Spock realized only then that he should have put on a fine set of robes instead of his cadet uniform.

The wall was low enough to step over, but the gate swung open as Spock approached. Along the inside of the wall were planted Vulcan fat vine, nettle branch, spike cover, none of them considered decorative on Vulcan.

Shutan's great stooped figure shuffled into view as Spock stepped under the overhang lining the south wall of the house. Spock felt his inner eyelid snapping back in the dim light, something that rarely happened in San Francisco.

"You are Spock."

Spock bowed, gave a properly long formal greeting, received a cursory one in return as one might give a young child. Shutan was well over 200 so Spock probably seemed a young child.

Shutan led the way inside along the windowed front of the house past full shelving stacked back to back, mostly printed, but two shelves were stacked with an archive of electronic readers and the one below with digital media.

"I have been away from Vulcan a long time," Shutan said. "Sit."

The low chairs were broad and soft and human. Shutan sank into one, tipped his exquisitely wrinkled face back and stared along his nose at Spock.

Spock waited for his elder to speak with easy calm, spending the long minutes taking in the view outside, the low wall, the Vulcan plantings, the low gray hills streaked with rusty red rock and seams of struggling green-black shrubs.

"So," Shutan said with a huff of air. "Great grandson of T'Ruit, grandson of T'Pau has joined the space branch of human earth military service."

Spock fell back on Kirk's advice, less so his father's, and did not explain or excuse himself. "Yes."

Shutan revealed no indication of his thoughts.

"Your father did not explain why you needed to comprehend earth and near-earth literature, only exhorted me to take you on. You need to please your human instructors at this earth academy, I now estimate."

"Father did not mention to me that my dress may be at issue. I apologize if you have been misled in a displeasing manner."

Shutan squared his frail shoulders. He wore fine but very old robes that had grown thin and draped tent-like over his bones. "I encounter only the rare surprise in person. The few I get come in words. And many fewer of them now than fifty years ago. Perhaps there is nothing left unsaid as is frequently, flippishly posited." He looked Spock's uniform over again. "Yet you wear that."

Spock shifted his body. "The fittedness has taken some adapting."

"I wasn't speaking of the shape of the garment, but the symbol of it. Or are you intentionally misunderstanding for your own reasons?"

"I selected an interpretation that applies to me. The shape of the garment is very strange."

Shutan's brows lowered and he hmfed through his nose the way older Vulcans frequently did.

"I was taken aback by your father's mode. To be begged, I would estimate is a fair term, to take you on as a mentee." He looked out at the dry yard that reflected every ounce of sunlight in every direction, very much like Vulcan except for the color of the light. "The priests do not tend to honor us scholars." He spoke distantly, as if to himself. "Not typically."

"My father has long intended that I learn the sciences."

"That is not the same thing as a scholar." He turned back to Spock. "These divisions have truly escaped you so? Like the meaning of that uniform?"

Spock considered this. He could piece together memories of his father, his older cousins, prioritizing what knowledge was valued and which was not. But he had never considered the larger picture.

"I suppose I did not care to assimilate a general rule regarding a division of knowledge," Spock said.

Shutan's sagging, geologically pitted face shifted. "I do not teach literature. For one thing, it's not a thing to teach. It is a thing to expose others to in hopes they will find their way, and I assume that your human Academy instructor has already exposed you."

Spock steepled his fingers. "I am, in turn, doubtful I can learn. I continue to encounter a gulf between my experience with the material and what I observe others gaining from it. But I have been commanded to come. And I have been commanded to succeed at this."

A speckled left brow went up. "I hope you are accustomed to failure. I assume your father is not. Tell me about the books you have experienced already, and what your thoughts were of them."

Spock's eidetic memory related this. He added in some of the class discussion that had been most interesting to him. He finished, clasped his hands and waited.

Shutan watched Spock in silence for six and a half minutes. He reached beside him on a low table for a book, flipped it open with gnarled hands, filled his hollow chest with breath. "I have lived on earth for a hundred and twenty one years. I found a world inside a world that Vulcans for the most part cannot understand. Or cannot any longer. Perhaps our pre-reform ancestors could. At one time I spent a decade analyzing Romulan literature in an attempt to determine if they possess the proper intellect for this kind of storytelling, but I am still uncertain. Their current writing is pap."

He turned the open book to Spock. "An easy one. Heart of Darkness. Read it before?"

Spock shook his head. Shutan turned the book back to himself, read aloud in a surprisingly strong voice, "'Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!…The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.' Do you hear how I am reading it?"

Spock nodded.

Shutan turned it to Spock again. "I want you to read that way, if you can, into your mind. Allow it to have grandeur as it deserves it. Allow it to pull back into the ethereal as it deserves it. Sense it with more than your logical faculties. There are stories present at several levels." He sat back, appeared flat.

Spock closed the book. He expected to disappoint Shutan next session, but at least he had succeeded in retaining him as a tutor, the single goal he had been given for this meeting. He nodded deeply, and withstood another four minutes and twenty seconds of close examination before being led out.


Kirk removed everything from his duffel bag, laid out the contents in neat rows on the narrow bed. He folded and stuffed the large bathroom towel into one end of the bag, zipped it up. He carried it to the exercise room, packed it with hand weights equal to thirty-five kilos, packed an exercise room towel in on top.

He squirmed the drooping duffle onto his shoulders as a backpack and jumped up and down on his toes to settle the weights in the bottom. He configured and climbed onto the treadmill set to a three degree angle.

This was a degree and ten kilos more than his run the previous day. His limbs felt deadweight achy as the speed ramped up to the setting he'd given it. He made his limbs move more decisively, made his arms swing, felt the straps drag down on his shoulders over and over with each pounding step.

Kirk ran half an hour, stopped and stretched, walked the small space between machines, shaking his arms. He gave his smarting shoulders a break from the straps long enough to lull them into thinking they were getting a reprieve for the day. Then he hefted the bag back onto his back again.

Every time Kirk he longed to slow down, to walk for a bit, to bend over and rest his neck and back, he imagined one of his new crew, someone far more experienced but lower rank, having to slow down for him. Possibly putting himself and them at risk.

That was not going to happen. Kirk run until he couldn't draw in enough breath and his ribs felt compressed by the abuse. Thirty five minutes. He coughed, cleared his lungs, drank greedily from his canteen, water running back over his cheeks, down his neck, making his already sweaty shirt stick more heavily to his skin.

He breathed, willed his need for oxygen to normalize. He was starting to settle into the cold knowledge that he was taking on a lot. The trick was to not let it scoop him up and carry him away. Just do what worked. Be open to learning he didn't like, from any source. Let those around him learn as well, make mistakes, lead, let them take up roles that might challenge him. A good leader will eventually make himself incidental except for crises.

Kirk patted his face dry of sweat. He'd managed this before, but this time he'd have to do it while under fire from nearly day one.