Chapter 4: McCoy's tale

"Well, you said wanted the beads and rattles story… Incidentally, this is also the story of how I became a sacred healer of the Moon Goddess..."

"As you know, after a few years of private practice in Georgia, Jocelyn and I finally had the sense to get a divorce, and I entered Starfleet. Strange new worlds, as far away as possible from Earth, was exactly what this doctor ordered for himself. After that one-year fast-track thing at the Academy that they make medical specialists go through, I finally got my commission and was sent out - all the way to the small, dull anthropological research station orbiting Eta Gamma Three."

"After the first week or so, things settled down into mind-boggling monotony. The anthropologists watched the planet, and I watched the anthropologists. The Starfleet crew mostly chatted with and monitored the few ships that passed by in the distance. I had really set my sights on a ship assignment: to get out to the frontier, meet and save new and exciting aliens, earn their undying gratitude, you know the song. But ensigns can't be choosers, as the Fleet saying goes." He shared a grin with the others.

"Now, there's nothing to say that ensigns can't be curmudgeons, bitterly huffing about the injustice of the universe, and that was a tradition that I was happy to propagate. I'm sure my general attitude wasn't helped by the fact that I felt both overqualified and underqualified at the same time. I was nervous and overconfident all at once. I had a few years, and lots of hands-on-experience, on most of my colleagues - but the fact that I hadn't gone to the Academy proper, meant that I wasn't quite used to all the military speak and routines of a Starfleet posting..."

"You know Bones, that might have been true then, but at some point that excuse is going to wear thin," laughed Kirk. "Did you ever learn proper Starfleet address to superior officers, for instance?"

"Sure I did, Jim," replied Bones with a grin, "you sprinkle in a random sir here and there, and train them to stay out of your sickbay. On this particular occasion, though, I would soon be wishing for a few senior officers…"

"Lieutenant Thomson, head honcho of our little group, was planning on an undercover fact-finding mission to the spring festival of one of the largest settlements. The Eta-Gammans were just entering the D phase of the Richter culture scale, and everyone was so excited about their new steamboats. I would have given anything to get off the station at that point, and a field trip to a spring festival sounded ideal. Spring festival - you can almost feel the booze, the food and the dances in the word, right? I bullied Thomson until she finally gave in, more from exhaustion than from my long and detailed arguments, I'm sure."

"They had us all surgically altered around the nose and forehead, and kitted out in these long sari-like garments - just length after length of cloth that was to be tied in very specific ways, and God, or rather the Moon Goddess, help you if you tucked the wrong bib here or had too long a train there. Vendettas and marriages have started for less, on Eta Gamma. We all had small anthro-tricorders disguised as scrolls and hidden in shoulder bags, and subdermal translators. I'd never been on an undercover mission before, and Thomson got me to solemnly swear that I'd be quiet as a mouse and still as a tombstone - or, as Thomson put it: pipe down, button it and shut your pie hole. You getting lost on the idioms yet, Spock?"

"Not at all." Spock replied with a raised eyebrow. "Though I generally find it most efficacious to only take note of every third word that you say, anyway, Doctor - any more attention rarely improves the intelligibility." The others chuckled, and McCoy decided to forego a counter-thrust. Spock had finished the plate of food the doctor had forced on him earlier, so he figured he could afford to be gracious. This time.

"Anyway, down we beamed. We had a few hours' walk to get accustomed to the atmosphere and to establish our cover story of having hiked in from a particularly far-off settlement. We started meeting more and more travellers on the road as we approached Sin-ta, and Thomson and her assistant chatted them up. I was dutifully quiet in the background, though I longed to bring out the tricorder from my emergency aid packet and get some close bio-data on our hosts. But I was good."

"How long did that last, Len?" Asked Uhura.

"Oh, several hours. All the way until the evening meal on the festival grounds - you'd have been proud of me, Nyota. Scanning and staying in the background. Finally I think even Thomson forgot about me, because the anthropologists were all dragged in various directions as their particular research fancies took them, and finally I found myself alone at our table. It was one of those long, low tables, cushions all around, braziers hanging from the trees around us. Incense in the air. Very spring festival-y."

"But then…" he took a swig of his beer and gave them a chagrined grimace, "Well, it was a communal table, so anyone could come and join me, and anyone did. Several anyones. They had these delicious little cakes, and spirits so strong it made my eyes water. And I couldn't not talk to them - I mean, that would have been unthinkably rude, right Jim?"

"Of course, Bones, of course."

"So we talked, and everything was good for a while, until we had a new beast appear at our watering hole. She was undeniably one of the warrior caste, could probably break me in half with one hand. She was also, equally undeniably, hitting on one of the young girls, this lovely creature with short brown hair and curves in all the right places. I didn't like that one bit. I was a little bit jealous, which was stupid because even I knew that I couldn't let anything happen between me and a local, anyway. And, well, since this little exercise of ours seem to require some soul baring... maybe there was a bit of ageism involved as well - the girl was in her early twenties, but the warrior must have been in her fifties - practically ancient! Couldn't be right!"

Jim laughed, "Yeah, that's one kind of bigotry that inevitably comes back to bite you, isn't it. Doesn't seem like such a horrible age difference from this side of the fence, does it Bones?"

"I clearly had no idea of what I was talking about. But I think, and hope, that the main reason that I got all irritated was that she claimed to be some sort of field medic, and started trying to impress the girl with her brave battlefield rescues. I'm okay with some exaggeration in the service of a good tale, but it quickly became clear that she was inventing things left and right. For lack of something to do up on the station, I'd spent quite some time studying what we knew of their medical science and bio-physiology, and she was inventing things out of thin air. It annoyed me. So I started to… ask pointed questions and challenge some of her claims. Yeah, Nyota, I can see what you're thinking, and yes, pretty soon I was revealing far too deep of a level of knowledge of Eta-Gamman biology, and maybe, just maybe, bragging a bit of my own."

"I don't know at what point the warrior, (her name was Tav or Kav, something like that) became more interested in me than the girl - ha, no, not like that, Scotty, this isn't one of those tales - but suddenly I was getting the third degree. At this point I realized that I was being dragged out of the shallows and approaching the shark-infested deeps of a true Prime Directive breach…"

"I was about to try to extricate myself when she clamped down on my shoulder - grip like a vise! - and said in a voice that brooked no argument, 'You are a healer from the Goddess's temple.' I answered something non-committal, looking desperately around for a superior officer, or anyone with any kind of previous undercover experience, really."

"But Kav wouldn't take no for an answer, and was hauling me up. 'Come,' she said, 'my brother is badly wounded. You must join the circle of healers.' And then she dragged me off, over my protests - firm and vicious, but muted, since I couldn't draw any more attention to myself. We went straight across the festival green to a large brown canopy erected down by the river. There was no way I could reach my hidden communicator without her seeing…"

"Inside the tent there was a circle of onlookers, mainly from the warrior caste, and inside that circle was the circle of healers, standing around a raised dais where a middle-aged male was lying. His long hair had started falling out. That's a sure sign of approaching systems failure in Eta-Gammans. And he was sweating like, well, like whatever the Eta-Gamman equivalent of a pig is. I'm a doctor, not a zoologist."

"As I got closer - and I got closer because Kav was dragging me through the onlooker circle up to the healer circle - I could see that he had a partly healed wound in his stomach. Kav introduced me as a healer, and said that I would join the circle. The medicine man in charge - really, they might have invented the steam engine, but medically speaking they were still tasting urine and using leeches - grunted and held out a long, carved stick at me and said "this is a Prince of the blood. You will take the death-promise with me to help him."

"Death promise?" Asked Scotty. "I can't say I like the sound of that."

"Yeah. Pretty common for societies where the medical arts are at such a low level that it's often just as well to call a priest as a healer, and sometimes better. By making a death promise, you show that you're not just another charlatan – if the patient dies, you die."

"Well, now I was up the creek with no paddle. I should just have said no, and tried to run away, and if that failed I should have refused to speak another word, and just hoped that the others would be able to extricate me somehow. But chances were that the warriors would kill me for doing any of that when their Prince was dying. Also, the Prince was dying. I'd made some pretty stupid mistakes in the last hour or so, but I wasn't about to crown them by so blatantly betraying my Oath. I couldn't step away, not if there was a chance that I could do something.." McCoy sought the others' gazes.

"Of course you could not," said Spock.

"Really?" Said Kirk, pursing his lips in thought, "One man's life against possible planetary upheaval, a Prime Directive breach. I'm not saying it's an easy choice - Lord knows that I've made both good ones and bad ones when it comes to this kind of situation myself - I'm just saying I'm not sure that this is an of coursesituation."

"You misunderstand me. I meant that of course Doctor McCoy could not." The calm words could have been be interpreted as a slight, but there was no condemnation in the Vulcan's eyes, but rather acceptance and support. We are what and who we are.

Bones cleared his throat. "No. No, I couldn't. So I took the stick and repeated the oath after the medicine man, and the moment I fell silent someone thrust this big rattle in my hands, and Kav shoved me towards the line of healers." He made his voice lighter on purpose. "It was rattlin' time! We healers started moving around the Prince in a circle, shaking our rattles, and starting up what fortunately turned out to be a very simple repeating chant to the Moon Goddess. I went along as best as I could, rattling and dancing, though I did get a few nasty looks when I stepped on the other's feet. Someone somewhere started a drum beat, which helped."

"As I got closer to the Prince, I saw that the wound had festered. Such a stupid waste of a life! Something that could be cleared up in half a minute with a lucial sanitizer, and then the wound could be closed with the dermal regenerator. And here a man was dying from it. I swear, there are days I think the Prime Directive isn't worth the pixels it is written with - all that suffering…"

"But back to the story. So there I was, swaying, chanting, rattling my rattle along with the best of them, half a meter from my patient, with no chance of helping him. I decided that I had to do something radical, so I threw up my hands and shouted 'I must pray', and quickly turned from the circle, grabbed my bag, fell to my knees and started praying loudly as I rummaged around in it."

"The Prince, the dais and the ground were covered with these big, dried, red seed-pods. I knew that they were seen as a symbol of luck and happiness - Eta-Gammans would place little gifts inside them and give to those they courted. I grabbed one of them, reconfigured my little first-aid med tricorder to look for inflamed tissue and set it to vibrate, and tried to insert it inside the pod. The first pod broke in pieces, and so did the second one, and by this time I was getting some nasty looks from the onlookers. I figured I didn't have much time before my 'praying' would get interrupted and I'd be pulled back to the conga line. Finally it worked, and now I'd gotten the hang of it and managed to get my sanitizer inserted in another one. Both the tricorder and the sanitizer work by radiation waves, of course, so the thin walls of the pods wouldn't interfere with them."

"Gingerly I pulled them out, one in each hand, and went back to the circle dance, swaying with them for half a turn before breaking the circle and going up to the dais. I'd seen a few of the others do this from time to time, so I figured it was okay. I then started chanting at random, waving the pods over the Prince, feeling my way over the wound. It worked surprisingly well, and I'd just managed to sanitize most of the tissue, when I heard a loud explosion nearby, and then everything went black…"

"I woke up aboard the station, with a horrible stun hang-over, to the face of a furious Thomson. They'd finally found out what I was doing, had repositioned the station defense phaser battery towards the planet, and then stunned everyone in the field to extract me. Anthropologists hate using the 'miracles' and 'acts of god' excuse to cover up a botched field maneuver, and Thomson was spitting fire. It was well deserved, so I tried to be as meek as possible - the hang-over was making the meek part fairly easy."

"There's a point when you can't continue scolding someone who agrees with you, so eventually she wound down, and I realized that apart from being scared to death of the cultural contamination, and my safety, she was also pretty sure she was going to lose her position. She'd been the one responsible. She'd let me come down when she probably shouldn't. She'd left me - clearly an incompetent fool – alone. She'd failed to extract me in a subtle manner."

"I spent the next few hours writing a report that exonerated her as much as possible. I then called up some of my friends on Earth, including Jenna, who was the assistant Surgeon General, thinking that they might have some pull with Starfleet. I even called Rear-Admiral Moss, he was sector commander at that time, and asked to make an addition to my report - a report he hadn't even seen at that time. He dragged the story out of me, and then he shouted at me for some time, but finally agreed that it was more my fault than Thomson's.

I'll never know exactly happened behind the scenes there - I think Jenna clinched with Moss about the Hippocratic Oath, and the imperative to heal, and in the end both me and Thomson ended up with demerits and another scolding, this time from the head of Starfleet Anthropology Division himself… But we kept our jobs. Thomson got to stay over at Eta-Gamma, and after a few years she even spoke to me again. I'd call us good acquaintances, though not friends. We had dinner in San Fran just two months ago. They did transfer me off the research station rather fast, into the inoculation research labs working on Dramia II, and, well, you all know the story of that little hell hole…"

"We do, Len," said Uhura. "You saved a lot of people there, too."

"What happened to the Prince?" Asked Chekov, and for a moment he seemed far younger than he was.

"Ah, you mean King Sen, supreme ruler of the lowlands? Oh, he's still alive and kicking. Took the general fainting of his attendants, and his own miraculous healing, as a sign of the Goddess' approval. He is some sort of warrior-priest-king now. Yeah, no luck with hoping our interference wouldn't have any cultural effect. Luckily he's one of a hundred warlords, and it'll be at least a century before anyone can manage to unify continents, let alone the planet, so at least I didn't cause a planetwide change so far." McCoy smiled. "You know, I wonder how many of Earth's own stories of people being abducted and medically experimented on, came from bumbling aliens trying to study our pots and pans or whatnot…"

"Not by the Vulcan observers," said Spock drily. "Humans were generally not deemed to be particularly interesting."

"Oh really? Took your Vulcan ancestors a thousand years to go from D to E on the Richter scale – took your human ancestors about a hundred..."

"Technological advancement that is mainly channelled into war and oppression is neither true advancement nor particularly noteworthy."

As McCoy and Spock leaned into their argument, Chekov heard the door buzzer go off. Kirk glanced over at it and then asked the younger man, casually. "Would you get that? It's probably the caterers coming to clean up."

Chekov smiled, but was a little put out at being sent to open the door. He tried to push that feeling down, but was not feeling particularly gracious when he pressed the lock button.

The door opened to reveal a grinning Sulu, a large bottle in one hand, a force field umbrella in the other.

"Hikaru!" The two friends embraced. "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be up obsessing over your ship?"

Sulu laughed and pressed the bottle at him, snapping off the umbrella and tossing the stick with careless precision into an umbrella rack on the side. "Oh, no, don't you jinx it, Pavel. Not my ship yet, not by a long stretch. But, yes, I'm helping out with the oversight." He nodded at Kirk, almost a small bow, who had come up to the door to join them, clearly quite pleased with the surprise. "The Excelsior is a real beauty, Admiral. I'm very grateful for your recommendation."

"You've earned it, Hikaru. Come in, I'm happy that you could get away – though not as happy as Pavel is, I wager."

Chekov grinned and dragged his friends over to the sofa group by the fire. Deep space was dark, exciting and sometimes fatal. It was hard to explain to civilians, no matter how dear they were, what the night before shipping out was like. That's when you wanted your 'Fleet family beside you – people who understood the terror and the excitement, the knowledge that you might never come back, or that you might be the first to find something so amazing that it changed the universe. And this night would have felt wrong without Sulu here.

McCoy and Spock called a temporary cease-fire, and the humans embraced or shook hands with the newcomer. Spock only nodded at Sulu, but then said something in a low voice that made the human laugh out loud. Many in the 'Fleet suspected that Spock did in fact, contrary to common belief, have a (very dry, dead-pan) sense of humor – but it was only to a select few he would reveal it so openly. Most of those were in this room tonight.

Uhura and Chekov filled Sulu in on the evening's tales as he devoured the leftovers with the hunger of someone who had lived off of 'Fleet rations for several weeks. Kirk noted that risks had become greater, enemies scarier, and victories grander, already in this second retelling. He wondered what would happen once the stories inevitably got loose among the cadets. Spock had told him that a group of nervous computational track cadets had approached him just the other day and asked him if he had really, truly, built a computer out of bearskins and stone knives... The Vulcan had, of course, refused to answer, and instead ordered them to write a ten page essay on how such a thing might be accomplished. Kirk looked forward to reading it.

Sulu was listening to Chekov's version of McCoy's story – the Russian was waving the doctor's attempts at corrections away, saying that you should never weaken a good story with facts. Sulu laughed and shook his head, "Gods, those undercover missions...!" He turned to Uhura, "actually, if we're telling stories about undercover missions and princes, you have to finally spill the beans about what really happened with that very young prince on Piri V. There are all kinds of rumors going around about why you got those demerits... You always manage to weasel out of telling that one."

Uhura tried to protest, but was quickly overruled, and eventually gave in with a laugh. "Alright! Alright, you win. Yes, there was a prince during a certain mission on Piri V. And yes, a young prince. But, and I wish to state this for the record, gentlemen, not too young. I checked. Admittedly, I checked afterwards, but I was actually a hundred percent sure that he was a legal adult even at the time. After all – it was his wedding night..."

Author's note: Next up is Uhura (unofficial working title "a Kirkian solution"), then Chekov ("Irina's Academy Revolution"), Sulu ("Biggles!") and finally Spock ("How to train your AI").

DelJewell and WeirdLittleStories did a superlative job with the beta reading as usual – I'm very grateful for all their help.

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