Chapter Text
[1]
When I retreat into the Vulcan tongue while asking for directions on Betazed, my lover has been there to hear me. When I attempt to pack seven days of the food of my homeland for a trip seven days long, my lover has seen me. When I have difficulty turning my attention away from the vibration of the warp field, my lover has sat in meditation with me.
No wonder that it amuses her that, on this planet, I am seen as well-traveled – even cosmopolitan. She did not understand what the words were meant to imply. Indeed, at one time I did not understand it myself. The words being descriptively false, I thought them also illogical.
But the words are not descriptive; they are categorical. I am ‘well-traveled’ in that I am one of those who trods un-Vulcan paths, therefore I am become, in my lover’s language, ‘cosmopolitan’: a citizen of the cosmos.
Made foreign from the place where I still live – from the only place where I have ever wished to live.
Vulcan would prefer that I acknowledge that this is the outcome of a path of my own choosing. This I am unable to concede. Within the bounds of logic and custom, the critical turns were the only ones afforded to me. Put another way, I took the only path I learned from Vulcan.
Now, even here, I will only ever feel entirely at home when I am at rest in my lover’s arms.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
Since Vulcans did nothing by halves, the kahs-wan 'monitoring station' was in fact an ancient, palatial desert homestead. It was built into the side of a great gritstone bluff, offering a respectably defensible, fortified position on one side and dramatic views of the valley behind on the other.
It must have been at least a thousand years old.
The other two monitors noticed Christine gawking as their shuttle came up over the ridgeline, though – pointedly – they did not comment. They were another couple: S’Shon, a much older, very distant cousin of T’Pring, and his wife, T’ɬuk, who had married into the clan. As a pair, they were oddly matched. S’Shon was small-ish but whippet-thin, with a Vulcan bowl cut that had long since gone to gray; T’ɬuk was decades younger and much shorter, with a little more muscle on her frame. Christine didn’t know either of them beyond a casual greeting going into a clan event.
To bring the trialists out to the Forge, they’d needed an oversized, civilian-grade luxury transport shuttle. Christine’s only higher piloting qualification was a twelve-day Starfleet crash certification in lurching, all-power military ambulance craft (craft which she never again saw, in actual use, at any point during the war). This transport controlled less like one of those and more like a pre-grav river ferry. Still, she managed to settle it onto the cliffside docking pad with only a slight jerk.
Immediately, S’Shon said, “I will check the solar collectors for the reserve power system.”
T’ɬuk replied, “I will verify the automated horticultural facilities are functioning within tolerances.”
They were a little behind schedule, to be fair. T’Pring had insisted on checking each of the trialists’ gear before allowing them to go. There might even have been an additional moment of concern for V’Qol, the only one of them that Christine recognized. She stood out from the others quite literally, being eight centimeters taller than the next highest, very skinny, and composed largely of elbows and cheekbones.
You couldn’t call a Vulcan adolescent “angry,” but since V’Qol had a special tutor for archery, probably no one would object to “fierce.” For obvious reasons, she’d imprinted adorably on T’Pring. She commed the apartment sometimes with questions about T’Pring’s work that were well above the level of her studies, requested T’Pring for tutoring sessions, and even called T’Pring ezyet sometimes even though they were technically third cousins. She even sometimes gave Christine a polite greeting along the way, a “Doctor Chapel” with a determined air, as if to prove to T’Pring that she wasn’t scared of her ezyet’s human partner.
That was better than the rest of them. When she visited the main clan house, she’d see the rest of them, walking between activities in orderly double file. They would give her wide-eyed stares and then – worried she might engage – put their heads in their padds. They were on the verge of adulthood but they hadn’t quite made it yet.
T’Pring also had never expressed any interest in them either, until today – when she insisted on giving each of them one last check to make sure their gear was in adequate condition.
Even though it did make S’Shon and T’ɬuk raise their eyebrows.
So Christine said, “Sure. We’ll get your bags inside.”
Watching the other pair go, T’Pring said, “We should check you into the security system too, since you aren't a clan member.”
“The phase turret emplacements did seem like a bit much.” There were two retracted below the surface of the outer wall, still identifiable by their large metallic covers, and she had spotted another one on the roof as they were coming in. “Sure you all didn’t want to splurge on a full deflector shield?”
T’Pring snorted. “I assume they are in case of hostile wildlife, not intruders.”
[2]
Here is a contradiction:
Much of the orthodox doctrine about Surak’s journey across the Forge stretches credulity. The named locations are simply too far apart, the hazards too perilous. As orthodoxy it survives by its unwillingness to juxtapose itself against its context; heterodox efforts to reconcile it, which do introduce the context, are paradoxically feebler. Perhaps Surak had a means of transportation mentioned nowhere in the texts; perhaps the locations named in the texts do not correspond to the locations that now have those appellations; perhaps the texts use terms for ‘alone’ not to refer to Surak being alone but to suggest the isolation of his sect, and ‘Surak’ as metonymy for scouting parties sent out by his camp.
But these lack falsifiability, parsimony, and rhetorical clarity. Easier to stick by orthodoxy. After all, it is not impossible for him to have made these journeys across the Forge.
Emerging as an atomic-age figure, at a time for which there are many independent sources, Surak is – in comparative study – unusual (except civilizations in which pre-warp political leaders monopolized the science of longevity and installed themselves as immortal spiritual gurus of their worlds, see Sadler 2180, Ch. 6, “Modes of Fragility of Warp-Stage Collapse”).
The most directly comparable individual is likely Kahless, the Klingon emperor-prophet. Regrettably, little information about Kahless is currently available in Federation databases, and no comparative studies exist.
Certain modes of analysis are impossible in civilizations such as that of my lover’s planet, where the key spiritual figures predate deep record-keeping and are not well-attested historically (on the other hand, see the ethicist Kong Qiu). Scholars generally take their historical existence as likely, but are still compelled into a mythical mode by the absence of more specific lines of investigation.
(When asked about this, my lover’s eyes widened. She said, “I guess?” and she flapped her hand oddly.)
Researchers schooled in tu-Surak orthodoxy profess difficulty accepting such a mode. After all, Surak was renowned in his time as a philosopher, scientist, and ultimately a political leader. His biography can be subjected to more systematic methods.
Yet it rarely is. Vulcan has made much of the life of Surak also into a mythic tale.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
“Thank you for preparing dinner.” S’Shon set his spoon down next to the empty bowl. “Your tofu shur is correctly balanced.”
“Oh, you don’t have to flatter me,” said Christine. She was acutely aware that she was a little heavy-handed with the spices for Vulcan tastes.
“I would not ‘flatter you,’” said S’Shon drily. He looked at his wife. “Is it not similar to the preparation in T’Haal?”
T’ɬuk tilted her head. “There is a similarity.”
S’Shon said, “My wife is from T’Haal, though we have not returned in some time. It is pleasant to have the reminder.”
“Well, it was definitely accidental.” Christine paused. “If we’re done with dinner, we could take some wine out on the deck?”
S’Shon glanced at his wife, then nodded. “That would be acceptable.”
T’Pring stood to gather their empty bowls. “I wish to check the monitoring system again. I’ll join you in a moment.”
The deck offered a pristine view of the desert valley that stretched out behind the citadel and the mountain range beyond. The sun was going down to their right, so every mesa and butte imprinted a dramatic shadow across the expanse. The breeze was nice, though a little too warm to be refreshing. It was very quiet.
S’Shon twisted open the bottle of wine. “A reasonable vintage,” he said, with exactly the tone and language T’Pring had mockingly adopted for him when they had selected it at the store.
Christine pushed her glass over to invite him to pour. “Did you do your own kahs-wan here?”
He poured for each of them without responding. Only once he had settled in, pulling his chair up to the table, did he reply. “I did.” He peered over at a patch of rocky foothills on one side of their vista. “Right there. This station was not in use then, of course.”
She didn’t really have a sense of how old S’Shon was. Vulcans aged gracefully. A Vulcan male of a hundred and fifty could look much the same as one in his eighties. “But it went well?”
He sniffed at his wineglass. “Very uneventfully. I was able to create a condensation trap and forage for supplies without difficulty. It was primarily a test of discipline.”
“Mine was more eventful,” T’ɬuk said. “I found myself near a territorial sehlat mother. I was able to convince it that I was a subordinate adult female, after which it allowed me to share the leavings of its hunts.” She paused, then confided, as if Christine wouldn’t already know, “It is considered acceptable to eat meat in a survival scenario.”
T’Pring rejoined them from indoors. It was starting to actually darken outside, and the automated exterior lights snapped on.
Christine poured her a glass. “You checked the monitoring equipment?”
“Yes.” T’Pring sat in the remaining chair. “There is a small weather anomaly in the northeast of our range.”
“We were just discussing our own experiences of the kahs-wan,” said T’ɬuk.
“Ah.” T’Pring swirled her wine for a moment. “Do you have any similar experience in your background, be’shal?”
Christine caught the deflection – you had to learn to catch deflections, if you were going to love a Vulcan, and this one was particularly obvious. She also knew well enough by now that a deflection was to be honored when in the presence of company. She said: “Ah, no, we don’t have a tradition like that. I did run away from home for like a week once, but… it wasn’t anything like this. Scared the life out of my parents.”
Aware of the two other participants in the conversation, she tried not to respond too much to the way T’Pring’s eyes locked onto her. She had never told T’Pring about that, of course. She hadn’t been hiding it, it just wasn’t relevant. Everything that was relevant to her life now had happened so much more recently.
S’Shon asked, “If I may, what happened?”
“Oh. Nothing happened. I was a smart, hormonal, lonely teenager. I was bored of waiting for something to happen to me and I got caught up in feeling that way until I thought the only way to deal with it was to run away. But, you know, it was Earth. I got an open capsule in the city, I ate at cafes for a few days. Eventually I got bored and tried to sneak onto a ship at the spaceport, and they took me back to my parents.”
“Fascinating,” said S’Shon, with a slightly patronizing note.
She shut her mouth against when I learned survival it was in the war.
[3]
To live today on Vulcan, as on any of the core Federation worlds, is to live in safety. This is, of course, desirable. Each of these planetary partners endured millennia of strife before finally creating equitable, fair communities.
Most of the core worlds bear some suspicion toward Starfleet. Even a resident of Earth, where that suspicion is least strongly felt, would not tolerate the dangers that a member of Starfleet voluntarily endures in peacetime. Accidents occur with some regularity. The warp nacelles – held at as far a distance as the warp bubble makes practicable – emit more radiation than would be permitted near any population center, and pose a risk of catastrophic failure. This is to say nothing of the inertial dampeners.
For a time, my lover chose that life. She found something in it that she valued. Then she chose to leave it.
For a Vulcan the instinct is to nod in validation. Few of us choose that lifestyle, and her choice to leave – having seen all that it had to offer – shows that we were right.
But keep in mind that the choice to escape safety, for a time, is not alien to us.
No adult Vulcan, unless they choose it deliberately, will face the need to struggle physically for their survival. Yet they cannot become an adult without learning to survive the Forge.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
When Christine found her the next morning, T’Pring was already checking the monitoring consoles.
“I brought you tea and krei’la.”
T’Pring started.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, be’shal.” She looked at the tray in Christine’s hands and finally realized what Christine had been saying. “Thank you. Set it down. I was just rearranging sentences in my head.”
Christine set the tray down, glancing at the display. It was just a geographic projection with indicators for each of the twelve adolescents, flickering through a time lapse of the last several hours. All the labels were the constant shade of faded pink Vulcans used analogously to Terran green. “I’m sure there would be an alert if any of the indicators changed, it doesn’t need to be monitored like this.”
“There would be.”
“Ah.” Something was up with T’Pring; something had been up since they had departed, but Christine didn’t want to push too hard on it. “Do we get more detail than this?”
T’Pring touched one of the indicators, bringing up a contextual menu to illustrate. “We can shift to more active monitoring if necessary. We are encouraged not to…” She paused. Her mouth twisted. “…overparent.”
“Hm. Do they know they’re being monitored?”
“They are not told directly. The smarter ones have likely realized. Some never will.”
Christine had some half-formed opinions about the whole kahs-wan. She had a sense that close monitoring of the kahs-wan (if leaving four adults and one civilian shuttle in an empty homestead on generally the same part of the continent even counted as close monitoring) was fairly new in cultural terms, and possibly that one or two of the clans still didn’t follow the protocol very rigorously. But the kahs-wan was one of those Vulcan cultural forms for which specific practices were kept hidden behind interlocking layers of bureaucracy, so she didn’t know for sure.
Of course, she didn’t mention any of her half-formed opinions. Vulcans clung to ritualistic practices more than logic maybe strictly dictated, but they had their heads on their shoulders.
Instead, she gestured to a faded orange shape in the far upper right of the display, a long way from any of them. It was rotating noticeably over the time-lapsed hours – and possibly growing slightly. “That’s the weather anomaly you mentioned before?”
T’Pring’s mouth was firmly around one of the krei’la biscuits, but she grunted affirmatively.
Christine pointed at a small cluster of unlabeled grey square dots located perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the storm. “What are those? Another group doing the kahs-wan?”
T’Pring paused mid-chew, glanced up at the display, and blinked. It took her a moment to swallow her bite. “Those must be archaeological research outposts. They’re the only permanent habitation in this region.”
“Well, they’re probably adequately sheltered for local weather, then.”
T’Pring kept looking at the screen.
“S’Shon’s done this a few times, right? We could ask him.”
[4]
Due to the scar over my own experience of the kahs-wan, the clan only extended the invitation to monitor it once before – during my previous betrothal, as part of assessing my suitability for parenthood. My lover’s medical training, however, moved us up the list. Likely - though this I did not say - they also extended the invitation to signal openness to one day formally inducting her into the clan.
My lover gave me the peering look she often gives me about Vulcan practices – curiosity tempered by care. That twisted something in my logic. She knows that I love this world, and she would not wish to push me away from something I love. But she also knows that this world has hurt me many times – that it has hurt me often enough that any unturned stone might conceal evidence of yet another wound.
The Forge is a wound.
Most Vulcans go to the Forge exactly once. I have been there more often than that, as its archaeological digs and monasteries are of great cultural interest. But it is my first visit that looms largest now.
Here is the truth as I told it to her: we bring our children here still because we believe that the Forge speaks to a piece of Vulcan that is concealed but inerrantly true. If so – if the Forge is a piece of our wounded heart – then I wanted her to see it for herself.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
“Grazhiv-what?” Christine asked. “I’ve never heard that before… ‘dust lens?’”
S’Shon – who apparently acted as a monitor most years, and therefore had the most experience – said, “An electromagnetic spiral sandstorm. The conditions of the Forge can lead to suspended dust clouds that, rarely, self-organize into a storm, like…” He paused, struggling for a comparison.
T’Pring, on the other hand, had spent some evenings reading about Earth’s precipitation hazards before her trip there. “Like an Earth tropical cyclone.”
Christine looked at the yellowish blob on the screen, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. “That’s an electrically charged sand typhoon?”
“No,” said S’Shon. “A grazhiv-gelek is rare. The entire continent averages just over one per year. But there is a small risk that it could develop into one.”
The labels for the adolescents, all stubbornly pink, were a long way away from the storm – Christine thought. She had no way of evaluating how quickly it might eventually move, but it was the better part of a thousand kilometers. The unlabeled dots representing research stations were much closer. “Can their environmental shielding stand up to that?”
S’Shon started to respond, then glanced at his wife, who had superior engineering training. She shook her head. “Doubtful.”
“We should contact them to offer assistance, right?”
“I concur,” said T’ɬuk. “I will have to submit a request to Central Communications to open a channel to them. It may take several minutes.”
That seemed like a cue to break up their little conference, so Christine grabbed T’Pring’s breakfast tray and took it back to the kitchen.
Almost every room she had seen was decorated with enormous windows, and they were connected more often by patios and verandas than by interior hallways. From there, there was no indication of any bad weather. Indeed, Vulcan rarely gave the impression of ‘weather’ as a Terran would understand it. In most of the heavily inhabited regions, the heat was cut by cool, dry breezes; in the evenings, the heat could give way to bruising cold. But one day was much the same as another.
It gave life on the planet a sense of timelessness and smallness, qualities that Christine treasured even though thinking them made her realize that she was still, and might always be, a tourist.
She hadn’t realized someone had followed her out until she heard the clearing throat. It was S’Shon.
“Doctor Chapel,” he said. “That was… well-spotted.”
Banal, solicitous compliments were a normal Vulcan way to begin a conversation. She said, “Sure.”
“I do not mean to seem overly forward, but I wished to clarify something from your background brief.”
“Background brief?”
He paused, his grey eyebrows furrowing. “Yes. I already know T’Pring and, of course, my wife. Not knowing you, I requested a briefing about your skills and experience.”
Christine went to fill the kettle for another round of tea.
S’Shon stepped closer to be heard over the water. “I wanted to clarify that you have not actually received a medical doctorate.”
Oh. That complaint. “That’s accurate.”
“Will you elaborate?”
Christine busied her hands with finding clean mugs. She didn’t think he was trying to be rude. “Starfleet gives mandatory emergency nursing training to life sciences personnel. Then I joined the combat nursing program during the war.”
“So, you’re –”
She turned back to him abruptly. “Afterwards, I suspended my epigenetics research and completed Starfleet’s full in-service medical certification while logging several years of experience practicing medicine under field conditions. But it's true that I do not have an MD. Will that be a problem?”
He clasped his hands behind his back and blinked at her, seeming to realize he had given offense. “I was simply attempting to assess the degree of medical care we would be able to provide independently.”
“Uh-huh.”
S’Shon – both shorter and skinnier than she – peered up at her. He had the kind of eyes that gave the impression of wearing glasses. He said, “Doctor Chapel, I am aware that my honored cousin holds some ill will toward me. I hope you will not allow that to color your judgment.”
“Your honored cousin? You mean T’Pring? Sorry, T’Pring what?”
He pointed past her. “The water is boiling.”
She glanced back at it, and by the time she’d turned back around he was already retreating back toward the monitoring consoles.
[5]
Until there were comparisons available, Vulcans did not know that we inhabited a hot, dry planet. The pre-warp Vulcans wrote often, “How different are those who live on the great gneiss expanses near the glacial caps from those who live in the salt pans of long-vanished oceans; indeed, how different are each of them from those who traverse the sand dunes and those who carved cities into cliffsides?”
Even T’Khut was no counterexample.
Then we discovered that people – more people than live on Vulcan – live on whole planets of ice, or even of that most precious thing, clean liquid water. We discovered that people could live beside flora with individual fronds larger than a Vulcan’s body.
Within one generation, our language for our own geography changed. We became a desert people. And it is not a lie that we are a desert people.
My lover’s birth planet has the most diverse climate of the major Federation planets. Its hydrosphere alone could make a Vulcan resort to their meditation mantras, to say nothing of its active tectonics, its tides, or its complex system of prevailing winds.
I suggest to her that this planet – the planet which she has adopted – might be, by comparison, less interestingly varied.
She scoffs. She looks at me as if I am a bright student being unexpectedly stupid. She explains, “That isn’t what that means.”
Then she shows me an image of an animal that looks perhaps a little familiar. She tells me it is the cliff-face lanka-gar, a keen-eyed avian which, unlike its relatives, can no longer fly long distances. Instead, it makes great swooping dives into stone canyons, captures young prey animals, then rides the buffeting fumaroles to recover their elevation. She shows me that this creature exists only in a single range on one continent of our planet, where conditions are exactly right.
My lover tells me that such variation appears everywhere, on every life-bearing world. She tells me that this is the nature of diversity.
She is correct, of course. There is nowhere else on Vulcan that is quite like the Forge.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
The research stations declined the offer of assistance “at this time.” Apparently it was much more common for a large dust storm to trigger a false alarm than for it to develop into something serious. Christine even cut in to offer to take fragile artifacts off their hands now, but they refused that too. She couldn’t take too much offense to that; she didn’t like people outside her field handling her samples either.
They at least agreed to leave the channel available for future communications, since the storm was still spiraling slowly in their direction.
S’Shon made it clear he didn’t want to elaborate on whatever he had been talking about before. She tried to ask T’Pring, but she had already retreated to her writing time, as indicated by turning the volume on her Vulcan experimental neo-electro-folk music way up.
So Christine put a pin in that for later and took the opportunity to finally get the layout of the homestead.
Although it looked like the entire citadel from the air, only a small portion of it had been fully renovated. Most of the deeper interior had been checked for structural issues but left functionally in ruin, lightly barricaded.
Even so, Vulcans liked space and airflow. They liked courtyards and archways. Out here, far from the cities, there was no reason not to give a station for temporary habitation for about four inhabitants – basically a vacation home with a handful of basic emergency facilities – more than enough space to stretch out in. The inhabited space was composed as much of porticos and peristyles as proper rooms, the better to feel the dry air on the way from one space to the next.
The automated greenhouses were adequate to supplement their backup food store with unpalatable root vegetables, but it was more pathways than plantings. T’ɬuk, having some kind of engineering training, had retreated to the electrical room to poke at wires or something. All the engineers Christine had ever known wanted to poke at the wires of every new place they went to. When she saw Christine exploring, she gave her a frank nod – about as friendly a gesture as it was possible to get from a Vulcan acquaintance – before going back to doing something involving a pair of pliers.
The infirmary was almost as large as the Enterprise’s medical bay, though much more sparsely stocked. Christine had brought in a few additional medical supplies with her bags, as well as a mobile workstation from her lab at the Science Academy. She hadn’t been able to justify bringing any of her actual specimens on the bumpy, crowded ride out for a working vacation, but she could at least catch up on messages from research assistants and review her co-authors’ drafts.
She always had plenty of that to catch up on. If only she wanted to.
[6]
Many readers misinterpret the purpose of Minister Sarek’s Humanity in Thought and Practice. Near its conclusion, he illuminates it quite clearly: “Eventually, one will come to understand living with humans as a process of self-study. They are other. They are quaint and passionate, intuitive and over-friendly – as we understand those terms. To truly respect them – to truly respect these differences – one will be required to learn more about oneself than one ever needed on Vulcan.”
Humanity in Thought and Practice did not receive much attention on Vulcan. It is perhaps Minister Sarek’s least-remarked work in mainstream discourse. However, I am told by a reliable source that it is now standard reading for Vulcan diplomats on long-term assignment on Earth, and that it is currently one of the most selected works of nonfiction for nonhumans aboard Starfleet vessels.
My lover has not read it. I attempted to persuade her to try it, but excerpts such as the above did not attract her interest. My lover said that sounded like he was talking about himself more than he was talking about humanity in either thought or practice.
Perhaps one does wonder how the Minister’s spouse appreciates being called “quaint and passionate.”
Perhaps one finds that the work is reductive in many places, though this is necessarily true of any early examination of a sufficiently complicated phenomenon.
Perhaps one sees in it a writer who has never before been an outsider, imagining that he is discovering a unique experience.
But I could not dismiss it entirely. I spent so much time in the citadels and monasteries of the culturally approved pathways of self-discovery. Not one taught me myself such as I learned from my lover.
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
The chime of her personal comm brought Christine out of her reverie. She had taken a plate of dry biscuits, and a draft chapter she was behind on revising, into the courtyard by the kitchen to enjoy the early evening breeze. Then she had just… lost focus. This planet could be hell on her productivity. It had been two days since they had finished settling in and she’d gotten absolutely nothing done.
The comm system chimed again. She glanced at the alert on her padd, grimaced slightly, and opened the channel.
“Hey,” she said.
“Christine, our writer is ignoring me again.” Ardan Curra, T’Pring’s literary agent, was a round-faced, always-smiling Betazoid. His benign confusion about friendly interpersonal boundaries and his tendency to wheedle might have disqualified him, had he not turned out to be surprisingly effective at promoting her rather esoteric writing as works of public interest. He said, “Will you tell her to answer my calls?”
“Sorry, Ardan. You know how she is when she’s writing.”
Ardan grumbled a little, then his eyes lit up on the little screen. “She’s writing? Tell me it’s not that essay about linguistic unification of pre-Surak counting systems.”
“No.” She gave it a beat just to tease him, picking up a biscuit and toying with it idly. “She said it’s something personal.”
He peered at her for a moment. Then, slowly, a huge grin broke out on his face. “Really?”
“Really.”
Ardan had been pressing her to write something more autobiographical – more accessible – for a while. He thought (as Christine thought) that her sudden emergence as a public figure spoke to something about her audience, that they recognized in her something about themselves that they needed her to articulate.
T’Pring had rejected the idea whenever he brought it up. She insisted that the interior life was a place for intimacy specifically because it was ultimately banal. Christine didn’t agree with that, but she didn't want to pressure her partner to make herself any more vulnerable in the public eye than she was comfortable with.
“Well… tell me more,” Ardan insisted.
“Sorry, that’s all I know.” That was true enough. It was all T’Pring had been willing to say about it. In fact, T’Pring had been unusually quiet about everything. When she wasn’t writing, she mostly hung out at the monitoring display. She had even refused to talk about whatever had happened with S’Shon – in her own words, until I understand how I wish to put it. That was at least a confirmation that something had happened. Now a cordial tension had settled in between her and S’Shon.
“Well!” said Ardan. “Never interrupt a writer in flow, that’s what I always say.”
Christine took a bite of the biscuit to muffle her snort.
There was a shuffle and a tapping noise behind her. T’ɬuk had come out into the courtyard without Christine noticing. She looked a little wrongfooted at having intruded on a conversation not conducted in Vulcan manners.
Shifting back into Vulcan, Christine said, “Can I be of assistance, T’ɬuk?”
“Forgive the intrusion, Doctor Chapel. An alert sounded on the monitoring feed. I was hoping for your advice.”
[7]
Planetary unification set off an unprecedented, multigenerational wave of global migration. Pre-unification practices were diasporic by necessity. These practices were immediately transformed or abandoned by the end of competition for resources (as well as by the impact of tu-Surak on them directly). Simultaneously, the use of atomic and early antimatter weapons devastated some regional climate systems, including that of the already resource-scarce Forge. We know much less about the Forge as it was in the time of our ancestors than the ruined citadels and dramatic holoprograms would imply.
One researcher tells me that no historical records preceding the Time of Awakening contain the term grazhiv-gelek.
This is not proof that there were none. Perhaps spiral dust-storms were once so common that the grazhiv-gelek, the most severe of them, did not merit a specific name. Perhaps our ancestors’ migratory practices took them reliably out of the paths of the storms.
But it is possible. The scale of the weapons that were used – their capacity to reshape the land and even the air – commands that possibility. We live on the planet that we made in our childhood; our adult rehabilitations do not erase the past, they are simply more history. And what else do the great conflicts of our long-distant pasts do, but create the storms that ravage one’s memory?
- discarded fragment from Pilgrimage, by thol’veh T’Pring
It was the only one Christine recognized – V’Qol. On the display, her indicator had shifted from safe pink to basic alarm white, with a short medical alert displayed next to it. None of the others had changed. The storm still swirled idly in place - perhaps a little faster, but no closer.
“I can’t evaluate her based on just this alert,” she told T’ɬuk. “I’m going to task the surveillance probe to a more active posture. If that’s okay.”
T’ɬuk stared at her. Christine realized abruptly how young T’ɬuk was – not just much younger than S’Shon, but possibly younger than Christine herself. She had been looking to T’ɬuk for guidance, not realizing that T’ɬuk had come to her for the same thing.
So she did what she usually did when someone younger came to her for advice, and put on her best teaching assistant voice. “While I look into this, why don’t you fetch T’Pring?”
T’ɬuk nodded and departed eagerly.
It took a few seconds for the probe to reposition to a lower altitude and bring up a basic visual display. It was hard to tell much. V’Qol was prone on the ground, but shifting around. There didn’t seem to be any large animals in the immediate vicinity. The greater detail from the medical scans was more illuminating.
“What’s happened?” interrupted T’Pring, storming in with T’ɬuk on her heels.
“I’m not sure exactly. Something in the throat and chest. She’s still conscious. She might have consumed contaminated food. I’m going to—”
“V’Qol?”
“V’Qol. I need to take the probe in close enough to really look. Maybe close enough that she’ll see. Is that okay?”
“Yes,” T’Pring said immediately.
Christine saw S’Shon had entered behind them. She glanced at him, and he nodded. T’Pring’s lips thinned.
They stood in silence, gathered around the console, while she took the probe in closer. V’Qol was lying on the ground. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Part of her survival uniform, near the neck and shoulder, had been destroyed, as well as one of her sleeves below the elbow where she might have tried to shield herself. She was holding her throat.
Without looking away from her scans, Christine said, “T’ɬuk, will you start loading the back of the transport with my medical bag, and the grav harness and cot from the infirmary?”
“What is it?” asked T’Pring urgently.
Christine double-checked the readings. “A significant burn, likely a chemical burn. If she inhaled a dangerous chemical, there could well be internal injuries as well. I know it’ll ruin her kahs-wan, but I really have to examine her.”
“Wait,” said S’Shon.
Christine turned in her seat. T’ɬuk had already gone, but T’Pring and S’Shon were looking at each other.”
He continued: “The alert indicates that the burn is not an urgent threat to her life, correct?”
That was strictly true – white was the most moderate of the three alert colors. “You can’t treat it like that. The alert is a preliminary reading, there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us. There’s no way of knowing if she risks more exposure. And if she’s disabled out there, the heat and predators are serious dangers.”
“Doctor Chapel, I understand.” He did not sound like he had considered her opinion at all. “However, the kahs-wan is a test of resilience. This is why she received training in, for example, treating burn wounds. If possible, V’Qol must have the opportunity to understand her own self-sufficiency.”
Christine couldn’t believe he would be flippant about a life under his charge like that. She turned to T’Pring, who hadn’t intervened. “T’Pring, she’s… I have to examine her.”
T’Pring looked at the image of V’Qol on the screen. The girl was still conscious, shifting on the ground in distress. Her hands were still claws around her own throat. T’Pring looked at S’Shon, then back at the screen. Then she said something very strange.
She said, “Perhaps we can wait a few hours – to see if she recovers?”