Hoshi Sato stared at the data PADD in front of her. It was all right there in plain sight and yet no one had ever put the pieces together. They had been so wrapped up in diplomacy, technology and their own agendas that they had never bothered to put all of the information together to make a coherent whole. "That's it!" she cried and jumped up from the table.
T'Pol, Trip and Malcolm looked at each other bewildered. The four of them had been having lunch in the mess hall. Trip and Malcolm had once more been bickering over weapons upgrades and power consumption while Hoshi and T'Pol had been discussing Vulcan history. "What's it?" Trip asked.
"Vulcans and Humans have had a communications problem for a while now and I've been trying to figure out what the basis of it is. I knew that some of it was cultural miscommunication, especially after I got to know you T'Pol," Hoshi nodded at the First Officer. "But it's been really bugging me for the last two months." No one needed to be told what had set Hoshi to wondering. The event of running into the 1701 had started a lot of speculation on a lot of subjects. Not to mention having turned the senior officers lives completely upside down. "I was present for some of the diplomatic talks when I was learning Vulcan. The body language never made sense to me, no matter how I looked at it. I knew that I was missing something. It was like they were having two different conversations rather than talking to each other."
"So what's the reason for the problem?" Malcolm asked, tugging her back into her seat.
"There are a couple of reasons but it boils down to history," Hoshi said. "It starts with The Time of Awakening on Vulcan, which was 2,000 years ago. That was when Surak converted the Vulcan people to logic. Up until then they were worse than a cross between the Klingons and the Andorians. That was during their atomic age. They had space flight with sub-light ships and had several small colonies by then. But they were destroying themselves with both major and minor wars between clans. They hadn't had a single day of peace for thousands of years.
"Now a bonded pair can have up to seven children if they survive long enough. But less than half of the children of the time survived to adulthood to have children of their own and few adults lived to have all seven children. Several times they came close to dropping their population below sustainable levels. It was during the last major war that Surak started to preach logic and pacifism. Now you need to pay attention to the amount of time involved. It took Surak over two centuries and several major; I mean cataclysmic, disasters to convert the majority of the surviving Vulcans. Even then he didn't convert everyone. Several of the surviving clans saw what was going on and left Vulcan never to return."
"You are speaking of the Sundering," T'Pol stated.
"Yes but my point is that it took Vulcan more than a thousand years before they ventured out of their territory again. Every successful race out here has gone through a similar situation unless they had alien help. And even those have taken a very long time before they ventured off their homeworlds."
"And they expect us to follow the same pattern," Malcolm said thoughtfully. "They expect us to have a major catastrophe and then take forever to learn from it once we figure out we have something we need to learn."
"Yes, but as a race we can't!" Hoshi said excitedly. "When you add in the factor that Humans act very similarly to Vulcan toddlers, many of the Vulcans who interact with Humans subconsciously treat us like children. They have never really interacted with Human children and teens. They don't understand our maturation process. They expect us to loose one of the very basic elements of our race. They expect us to 'mature' and loose the innate need to push our boundaries, to learn completely."
"You mean they expect us to become hide bound idiots?" Trip spluttered. Malcolm just looked horrified at the prospect.
"I do not understand the appellation," T'Pol said puzzled.
"Its slang for someone who is stuck in the past, who can not learn and move forward with new information," Hoshi explained. "One of the driving forces of Humans is the need to learn and explore. 'You learn something new everyday' is a very old saying and is considered to be fact for the most part. When a Human stops learning they stop living."
"And a Human learns best through experience," Trip pointed out.
T'Pol absorbed this information. It suddenly made something that had annoyed her for years make sense. "So when Humans continue to insist that all Henry Archer wanted to do was see his engine fly, they are referring to this need to learn?" she asked.
The Humans nodded solemnly. "Your people crushed him Honey," Trip said softly. "He was one of our best people and Vulcans destroyed him." They could see when the young Vulcan realized exactly what that meant. Not only had her people accidentally destroyed a man that they had great respect for but an entire generation of Humans had been prevented from learning in a way that they needed to as a species.
"By the very fact of your existence being common knowledge, many of our people were and still are consumed with a need to learn more about what is out here. There are so many new things to learn and the possibilities are endless," Malcolm said.
"Soval must have this information immediately," T'Pol said as she picked up her dishes and left the mess hall. The Humans were sorry for their friend's distress but the possibility that such a fundamental misunderstanding could be cleared up was wonderful.
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T'Pau was a junior member of the Vulcan High Council, having taken her Clan's seat on the Council some 25 years before. It was rare for one so young to be given a seat on the Council. Most were not given that sort of responsibility until their second century but she had an uncanny knack for politics that had shown itself from the time she was a young child. She had returned to her office after reviewing the information Captain Sopek had delivered to the Council. It was as disturbing as the rumors being circulated by the High Command that her younger sister T'Pol had become a deviant and had actually married a Human crewmember of the ship she was serving on. She was in need of meditation.
Instead of finding a peaceful place to meditate, she found her mother who had been missing for almost two months. "Mother, your unexplained absence has had many concerned," she said as she hurried into the room.
"The High Command did not wish to allow me to attend your sister T'Pol's wedding to her bondmate," T'Les explained. "I was forced to travel in secret."
"You approve of her marriage to a Human?" T'Pau said, shocked. She could find no logical reason for this.
T'Les arched her brow. "I see no way that I can disapprove of her marriage to one she shares a Pudvel-tor katelau tel with," she chided gently. She did not ask how T'Pau came to have knowledge of just who her youngest sister had married. Not only did she sit on the High Council, the Ni'Var had been delayed by no less than four diversions. Each of the diversions had dealt with a genuine emergency but the delay was suspicious to T'Les.
"A Pudvel-tor katelau tel?" T'Pau asked shocked. "I must meditate. I have had several shocks in the last few hours and must integrate the new information."
"Of course daughter," T'Les said calmly. "I too was forced to meditate for many hours when I was given this information. When you have regained your balance, I have a recording of the first ceremony you may view." T'Les got up to leave but paused for a moment to say over her shoulder. "T'Pol and her new husband also plan to have a Vulcan ceremony here on Vulcan as soon as they are given leave." With that she left.
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The Vahklas' engines were shot. Trip looked over them and shook his head in disgust. The Vulcan ship's captain, a male Vulcan named Tavin, had asked for help in repairing his ship's engines and life support. Captain Archer had sent him and a few of his team over to help while Enterprise mapped the Arachnid Nebula. Most of the crew of the Vahklas was over on Enterprise because Trip had shut down most of the life support systems. They were shot too.
"Kov, I don't know how you've managed to keep this old girl running, I really don't." It wasn't just that the systems hadn't been maintained properly, which they hadn't although he could tell that Kov had been doing his best to do so. There was only so much an engineer could do with a trashed engine and no repair facilities. The entire ship had probably been falling apart at the seams when Tavin had bought the ship and taken it out into space. "It's going to take at least three or four days to get everything up and running again the way it should be. My captain says that's not a problem. The Vahklas will just tag along with us as Enterprise maps the nebula."
The two Engineers spent all day working on the ailing ship's engines before finally deciding to stop for a meal. They went back to Enterprise only to find the mess hall mostly empty. Among the other occupants were two Vulcans, T'Pol and another Vulcan Kov identified as Tolaris. The moment Trip saw the two he realized that his intention of introducing T'Pol to the young Vulcan Engineer would have to wait. He could see that she was involved in an intense debate with Tolaris and rather than interrupt he steered Kov to the other side of the mess hall. He had the good sense to know that nothing upset his wife faster than having a good discussion curtailed.
Kov couldn't help but notice. "You don't get along with your first officer?" he asked.
Trip laughed, "Nah, we get along great but I know better than to get between her and one of her targets. She's either ripping apart his argument or committing it to memory." What he didn't say was that from the look on T'Pol's face he thought she would love to rip Tolaris a new one but someone, probably Captain Archer, had told her to play nice. He turned his attention back to Kov and the young man's endless questions about Humans; but not without keeping an eye on his wife and Tolaris. Even without having a lot of experience with Vulcan body language aside from T'Pol's, he knew that Tolaris was far too interested in T'Pol for his comfort.