Chapter 17: Lessons from the Edge
Disclaimer: No money made here. Unfortunately.
"What are you doing on Vulcan?"
Even as he says it, Spock realizes that to human sensibilities such a greeting sounds rude. His cousin Chris, however, isn't just any human. Instead of taking offense, he grins from the subspace transceiver screen. With one hand, he brushes his dark blonde hair from his eyes and says, "It's nice to see you, too."
"Where is my mother?" Spock asks, ignoring Chris' tweak. "Has something happened?"
"She's in the kitchen making tea. She said you call on Wednesdays, and since I haven't talked to you lately—"
"You haven't explained why you are there," Spock says, and this time he notes a shift in Chris' posture, a narrowing of his gaze. Annoyance—most likely at being interrupted, something humans dislike. Usually Spock is more careful to let someone stop talking before he jumps in.
His own annoyance making him impatient and irritable.
Inexcusable, really, to let his emotional state color his interactions with his family this way.
"Please forgive me," he says before Chris can respond. "The day has been…challenging."
At once Chris' expression softens and he says, "I know. That's why I asked Aunt Amanda if I could talk to you first."
Chris continues by explaining that he is on Vulcan for a medical conference—has been there, in fact, for much of the past week.
"We saw the newscast from Earth earlier," he says, and Spock has the distinct impression that Chris is watching him more closely than usual—the way he probably looks at his psychiatric patients.
"I am…okay," Spock says with a small nod, and Chris nods back and sits up, his unspoken question obviously answered. "Though I admit that the conclusion of the trial was unsatisfactory, particularly for Captain Pike."
The trial.
Unbidden, Spock sees again the images that have haunted his infrequent dreams for the past year—a terrorist attack when he was attending a conference in Leiden.
He recalls the terrorists, members of the xenophobic group Earth United, storming into the large conference room of the hotel—Captain Pike walking toward the three armed men, his hand raised as he spoke, the way Spock imagined he had once gentled horses on his farm in California.
Spock circling behind the attackers, rushing forward to disarm one with a nerve pinch while Captain Pike wrestled the firearm from another—and then the sickening whine of a sonic grenade counting down to detonation and Spock's decision to pick it up and carry it out of the crowded room.
His unshakable belief that what he was doing was fatal, necessary. The barrage of sorrow and regret at leaving his mother and father bereft, of losing any future with Nyota—and those feelings set aside by the stronger resolve to carry on.
His relief at surviving the ordeal with little more than scratches and shattered slumbers.
And then today, the trial of the three attackers at last—and their sudden change in plea to guilty.
The witnesses dismissed. The court disbanded.
This morning he had sat in a courtroom in Leiden with Captain Pike. This evening he sat—reluctantly so—with Captain Pike in a bar in San Francisco, barely avoiding getting caught up in a brawl with the locals.
Feeling so restless afterwards that he literally could not sit still—but paced around in his apartment talking on the comm with Nyota—in turn disappointed and resigned that she was already committed to working in the long-range sensor lab all evening. Tonight he would willingly have risked her coming to his apartment—or if she preferred, meeting her at the Anchor Hotel.
Instead he sat for a fruitless hour in front of his asenoi before calling home.
"So that's it?" Chris asks. "Nothing's going to happen to them?"
"The attackers will be sentenced," Spock says, "and incarcerated, probably in The Netherlands."
"But the group they belong to," Chris says, frowning. "Earth United. Nothing happens to them?"
Spock raises one eyebrow—his equivalent of a human shrug. Chris snorts loudly.
"Well, that's wrong," Chris says, and Spock says, "Indeed."
"It makes me angry," Chris says, and Spock tips down his chin but keeps his gaze on his cousin.
For a moment neither speaks, though as Spock watches, Chris' features twitch—a sure sign that he is rehearsing what to say. Beating back his impulse to hurry his cousin on, Spock folds his hands in front of him and waits.
At last Chris raises his eyes to Spock's.
"You know, it's okay if you're angry, too."
Spock's first inclination is to deny it. Irritation that the attackers have been hailed as martyrs by the public, yes. Frustration that the justice system can merely punish instead of rehabilitate the xenophobes, certainly.
But genuine anger?
He would need more time to meditate properly to know.
"You sound like my mother," Spock says.
Chris laughs. "I should," he says. "She's been telling me all kinds of stories about you."
"Exaggerations, I am sure," Spock says wryly.
"Not Aunt Amanda!"
"Perhaps you should tell me what she has been divulging to you—so I can judge her veracity for myself."
Chris grins and says, "Sit back. This may take awhile."
X X X
As long as Spock could remember, his mother had an uncanny ability to slip past his shields and know when he was working hardest to dampen some emotion. Unlike his father, whose mind Spock could feel bumping up against his from time to time and then retreating if he sensed any resistance, his mother routinely advised him to own up to his feelings.
"It's okay to feel what you are feeling," she would say when he struggled not to flinch as she removed a splinter from his finger, or when his stomach rumbled in hunger. "You don't have to hide how you feel from me."
But of course he did. When a meal was particularly filling or tasty, he rarely told her. When she sent away to Earth for a longed-for specimen kit that included several varieties of salamander larvae, he accepted the gift with stonefaced thanks.
"It's okay to be happy," she nudged, and he recognized her comment for what it really was, a reminder to exhibit human niceties as a way to show gratitude.
"I don't understand this Vulcan taboo about admitting what you feel," he heard his mother complaining one night to his father, but his father's rumbled response was too soft and low for him to make out.
Most of the time his mother's reassurance was just that—motherly reassurance that he could safely ignore—or at least pay lip service to.
"It's okay to be anxious," she said the first time he packed his clothes for a trip to the chess conference in Gol with his instructor, Truvik.
"I am not anxious," he said. Spock had already learned the futility of denying anything to his mother. As a way of heading off her inevitable interrogation, he added, "But if I were, I would be…okay."
As he grew older he realized that his mother's comments about emotion were more pronounced when they traveled to Earth or when her family visited them on Vulcan, perhaps because she was more attentive to emotions in general when other humans were nearby. More than once she called him away from his cousins to say something like, "If you are feeling overwhelmed by all this noise, you can go to your room for awhile," or "It's fine if you don't want to try the ice cream Cecilia is serving. It will be far too sweet for you."
His Aunt Cecilia and her family were visiting when Skon, Sarek's father, finally succumbed to the Bendii's Syndrome that robbed him of his emotional control. For years Skon had gradually retreated into solitude, partly out of shame and partly because his friends and most of his family stayed at a distance, unwilling to tolerate the emotions he inadvertently projected onto those around him.
Only Sarek's mother, T'Aara, stayed with him, using the strength of their bond to keep Skon from becoming too agitated and unruly.
As he deteriorated, Amanda sometimes stepped in for a few hours to give T'Aara respite care—and when she did, Spock went with her and sat in the corner of the darkened room, watching his mother soothe his grandfather with songs and stories from Earth—the more unusual the better for keeping the elderly Vulcan relatively quiet.
Eventually, however, Skon would begin to thrash and call out for T'Aara, and in those moments, Spock felt something akin to revulsion. This was what Vulcans looked like when they gave in to the emotions his mother was always foisting on him. This. He felt his face heat up with shame.
The last time he saw his grandfather, his Aunt Cecilia offered to come with Amanda to sit with him, and because Chris wanted to go, Spock came, too. At first the boys wandered around in his grandparents' garden while his aunt and his mother sat with Skon. Unlike his mother's garden, this one had no orderly rows or delineated patches for particular crops but was organized by some principle that eluded him. Plomeek shoots grew between large feathery plants and huge succulents; rocks and even boulders seemed randomly placed; willowy trees crowded one edge of a shallow pond. A typical Vulcan garden—and Spock realized that his mother's mind did not work like that of the Vulcans he knew. It was a startling revelation.
Chris was skipping stones across the pond when Spock heard his aunt calling for him.
"I'll be there in a minute," Chris replied, picking up a flat red stone.
"No!" Cecilia called. "I need you now! Hurry!"
Dropping his stone, Chris headed back inside, Spock in tow. To his surprise, Skon was standing in the hallway, his white robe disheveled, his thin hair plastered to his skull with sweat.
"Help me get him back to bed," Cecilia said to Chris, and Spock saw his mother hovering behind Skon, one hand reaching out to take his arm.
"Please, Father-in-law," she said, trying to catch his attention, "you must come with us. It isn't safe for you here."
Skon's eyes were wild and unseeing. Flailing his arms, he took one step toward Spock and let his hand fall to his shoulder.
Instantly Spock was terrified.
"Who are you?" the old man shouted, bobbing his head close to Spock's own.
Years later a human classmate would ask Spock if he ever had dreams about being paralyzed.
"It's common for humans," the classmate said matter-of-factly. "I think those dreams keep us from wiggling around too much while we sleep."
"Vulcans dream very rarely," Spock told him—which wasn't a lie. What he didn't tell him was a larger truth—that in his dreams he often relived the moment when his grandfather leaned close to his face and asked the question Spock asked of himself: Who are you?
A few moments later Skon dropped his hand and allowed Cecilia and his mother to lead him back to the bedroom, docile, like someone who had run a long distance.
"It's okay to be scared," his mother said to Spock and Chris that afternoon on their way home. "It's scary to see someone you care about suffer that way."
In the back seat of the flitter, Spock was silent. Skon's shouted question and not any helplessness Spock might feel in the face of his grandfather's suffering was the source of his terror. Dimly he was aware that his mother would think him selfish, self-absorbed, if she knew this. When he and Chris were alone, he confessed as much and was relieved that Chris admitted to feeling the "heebie jeebies" when Skon had stood and shouted in the hall.
When Skon died a few days later, Spock was astonished at the sorrow his mother felt, at the relief his father projected.
His own feelings were mixed—a nascent sympathy for his mother, and a sense of solidarity with father—but something else, too, harder to define; a feeling of wonderment that someone could be alive and then not. Despite his father's assurances that Skon's katra lived on, Spock wasn't sure.
More to the point, was it possible that he himself had no such future? No katra, oddity that he was?
He refused to consider how this applied to his mother.
Skon's death was not the first one he witnessed, but it was the first time he had known a sentient being to die. Only a few months before he had been swinging an ahn-woon, an ancient weapon made from a long strip of weighted material, in the open area beyond his mother's garden when he had the sudden inspiration of using it to launch pebbles in the air. Tucking a small rock in the fold, he whipped the ahn-woon over his head and let one end go, turning the rock into a projectile.
This could be useful during his upcoming kahs-wan, he thought. He picked up a larger rock and placed it in the ahn-woon, letting it swing like a pendulum. At that moment a blue-feathered lara flew to a nearby i'su'ke bush and settled on a top branch, using its thin beak to extract moisture from the berries that were in season.
Without conscious thought, Spock whirled the ahn-woon over his head and released the rock. To his astonishment, he saw a puff of feathers as the rock hit the lara, tumbling it to the ground.
Jubilation at his success, and then a growing uneasiness as he crossed the distance and saw the unmoving lara, its eyes still open.
Gently Spock picked it up and turned it over in his hand. To his horror he realized that it was alive, its chest moving rapidly, its black eyes slowly turning glassy. There was no consciousness, no sense of self-awareness from the lara when Spock ran his finger over its body, but that didn't diminish his sense of wrongness when the lara's breathing slowed and finally stopped.
Looking up, Spock saw his mother making her way across the yard and he knew that she must have been summoned by his distress.
Wordlessly she noted the dead lara in one hand, the ahn-woon in the other.
Why did you do this? he felt her ask, but he had no words to explain what he had done.
Nor to articulate what he felt. Disgust at himself for taking a life—for celebrating his prowess at doing so, yes. But more. Incomprehension at how fragile life was—how the living and the dead were separated by little more than a twitch, a blink.
"It's okay to be upset," his mother said out loud, and with a rush he showed her the thoughts he had been holding back, like a boy pulling his finger from the dike.
"Oh, Spock," his mother said, leaning down and placing her arms around him, something she had stopped doing in the past few years. He did not push her away.
Sometimes his mother's assurances were embarrassing; sometimes surprising. More often than not he found himself resisting her or flatly contradicting her, such as when they waited in the foyer of the Vulcan Science Academy for his second round of interviews.
Most candidates were accepted after a single round of what Amanda dubbed interrogations—tests and formal defenses before a panel of inquisitors. That he was subjected to a second round was disconcerting at best, something he tried unsuccessfully to hide from his mother.
"There's no need to be anxious," she said, fidgeting with one edge of his collar. "You'll do fine."
Spock heard past the words to her meaning.
It's okay if you are anxious. Your feelings will not hinder your performance.
His reaction was automatic and untrue.
"I am hardly anxious, Mother."
The lie hovered between them and he felt compelled to say something that was true instead.
"And fine has variable definitions. Fine is unacceptable."
The night before he left for Starfleet Academy, she told him he would do fine there, too—her choice of adjective deliberate, mischievous.
"It's okay if you are scared," she added, and he checked his impulse to contradict her and merely nodded instead.
Even after he was settled in San Francisco as an instructor at the Academy, his mother would occasionally tell him that was okay to feel something, as if saying so conferred on him some needed permission.
Which, he thought later, it probably did, though he never told her directly. One day he would.
X X X
A loud hiss of static forces him back from the subspace transceiver.
"What was that?" Chris asks, and Spock says, "Unknown. Sol may be experiencing flare activity, or larger ships entering or leaving orbit emit ion trails that interfere with subspace transmissions. If it continues, I can call again after it subsides."
He joggles the subspace controls and the static wavers temporarily. In a moment it is louder than before and on the screen, Spock sees Chris covering his ears.
"That's awful!" Chris says over the noise. "Let me go get your mother so you can talk to her."
Waving his hand, Spock says, "No. I will call again tomorrow. I have a simulation to run in the morning, but I'll try after that. Whatever is causing the interference will in all likelihood have stopped by that time."
"I'll probably miss you, then," Chris says, lowering his hands. "I'm catching a shuttle in the—"
A sudden escalation in the static drowns out Chris' words, and with a barely suppressed sigh, Spock cuts the connection.
0218. Nyota will still be on duty in the long-range sensor lab. He should probably go to the simulation room and tweak the upgrades to the Kobayashi Maru test scheduled for 0800.
On the other hand, if Cadet Farlijah-Endef is working on the program, she might take offense if he shows up now.
"Commander," she told him recently, "you're undermining my confidence by hovering over me."
"I am not hovering," Spock said with the same kind of automatic denial he often made in conversations with his mother. "I am merely…satisfying…myself that your work is adequate."
"That's what I mean," the Orion said, frowning. "You don't trust me."
But he does, to a certain extent. Still, he trusts himself more, and if that means he sometimes has to hover—
The odds are high that she isn't working on the simulation at all tonight, that the sociable, gregarious young woman has other plans far removed from anything to do with the Kobayashi Maru.
At least that's what he thinks until ten hours later when he turns to Jim Kirk and says, "Cadet Kirk, you somehow managed to install and activate a subroutine in the programming code, thereby changing the conditions of the test," and all the tumblers fall into place.
Of course.
Sociable and gregarious. What had Jim Kirk told Gaila Farlijah-Endef to get her cooperation? Or had he deceived her as well?
And then in slow motion Spock sees Admiral Barnett flick his eyes up from a communiqué PADD, hears him ordering the cadets to the hangar deck for assignments. Spock's task—matching the available slots to personnel, drawing on his knowledge of captains and ships—their temperaments and capabilities, who is best equipped for search, who for rescue, who for active engagement in hostilities.
Nyota's name among hundreds—a momentary hesitation before listing her as a member of the Farragut's crew—Thom McEwan a sober, careful captain with a ship too small to be on the front lines.
A logical selection. He makes it and moves on.
Until she is suddenly in his field of vision—his about-face a necessary surrender moments later.
The way his fear ratchets up knowing she is onboard the Enterprise, and the paradoxical relief that knowledge brings.
Not until he is changed into his science blues and is finishing his pre-launch checklist does Spock have time to reach out through his family bond to his parents. On the short turbolift ride from engineering to the bridge, he cants his head and searches for them. There is his father, an undercurrent of controlled concern at the odd atmospheric flashes and unexplained subspace distortions; his mother's fear is brighter, clearer, more acute.
Before he can respond, the lift doors open and he is consumed with purpose—first getting the ship successfully out of Spacedock, then sorting through the confusion of Cadet Kirk's appearance on the bridge.
Avoiding calamity as the Enterprise navigates through the space debris that used to be the fleet. The baffling words of the Romulan, Nero. Captain Pike's hurried departure. The away team's improbable mission.
"Minutes, sir," the young Russian navigator says, "minutes."
And he's there, in the katric ark, urging the elders to leave, beckoning to his mother, taking her hand and almost pulling her off her feet.
Calling the ship, feeling the ground shift, smelling sulphur and dust, the wind whipping grit and sand into his eyes—
His mother turning to him as the transporter disassembles the molecules of his hair, his outstretched fingers—
It's okay to be scared, she says with silent words, her expression full of grief and fear and sorrow.
Grief and fear and sorrow as she realizes that she is leaving him—that he will have to go forward without her to remind him that he is human—that secret, private answer to his grandfather's question all those years ago.
As she knows this, he does, too.
And then, with a single cry, she is gone.
"Mother!" he calls to the universe.
But the universe does not reply.
A/N: The movie script has Amanda actually saying "It's okay to be scared," as she and Spock wait for the transporter rescue. I don't think she means that what is happening to Vulcan isn't terrifying. It is. Rather, I think she's still giving him advice on how to live in the future, this time without her.
The terrorist attack and the trial comes up in several other fics, including "The Interview." Chapter 10 of "Crossing the Equator" describes in more detail the aftermath of the trial and the almost-fight Spock and Pike had with the locals.
Thanks to everyone who takes time to leave a review. Your notes mean more than you can know.
One more chapter.