Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (42 page)

“He spoke of your friendship.”

Jim could not tell if Sarek uttered words or communicated through the mental link. Likewise he could not be sure if he himself replied aloud, or in silence.

“Yes…”

“He asked you not to grieve…”

“Yes…”

“The needs of the many outweigh…”

“…the needs of the few—”

“Or the one.”

The image of Sarek faded from Jim’s mind. Spock appeared, horribly burned and dying.

“Spock…” Jim said.

“I have been…and always shall be…your friend,” Spock said. “Live long…and prosper.”

“No!” Jim shouted, as if by force of will he could twist the dictates of the universe and mortality to his wishes.

The illusion drained away like a spent wave, leaving Jim soaked and shaken. He experienced one last, hopeless thought from Sarek: What I thought destroyed, my son’s body, is found; but his soul is irrevocably lost.

He broke the contact between them.

Jim’s knees buckled. Sarek caught and supported him. Jim pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, trying to drive back the sharpened memories.

“Forgive me,” Sarek said. “It is not here. I assumed he had melded his mind with yours. It is the Vulcan way, when the body’s end is near.”

“But he couldn’t touch me! We were separated!”

“Yes,” Sarek said. “I see, and I understand.” He turned away, weariness—even age—apparent in the set of his shoulders. “Everything that he was, everything that he knew, is lost. I must return to Vulcan, empty-handed. I will join Amanda. We will mourn our son. We will mourn for the loss of his life, we will mourn for the loss of his soul.” Without a word of farewell, he started toward the door.

“Wait!” Kirk cried. “Please…wait.” Like a man trying to scale a crumbling cliff he clutched at fragile branches, and they pulled loose from the rock.

“Sarek, surely he would have found a way! If there was so much at stake, Spock
would have found a way!
”

Sarek strode toward the door and Kirk feared he would sweep out of the room without a backward glance, hinting at possibilities, abandoning them.

Sarek slowed, hesitated, turned. “What are you saying, Kirk?”

“What if he melded his mind with someone else?”

The flight recorder from the
Enterprise
lay under seal and under guard. Even Admiral James T. Kirk had to do some fast talking and some throwing around of his authority to see it, much less to bring in an outside observer. Though Sarek knew all there was for any diplomat to know about Genesis and about the last voyage of the
Enterprise,
whoever had cleared him for those reports had not thought to include the flight recorder. This caused what seemed to Kirk like an endless delay. However esteemed Sarek might be within the Federation, he was not a member of Starfleet. Then, when the ambassador finally received special clearance to view the data, Kirk was absolutely refused permission to transmit the recording anywhere outside the records storage center. He and Sarek had to go to it.

Kirk arrived at the center chafing under the limitations of surface travel. He found it incredibly frustrating to be forced actually to traverse the distance from one point to another, rather than to have a convenient transporter beam at his beck and call.

Finally all the distance had been covered, all the permissions had been granted, all the forms had been signed and sealed and retina-printed, and he and Sarek entered a viewing cubicle that would display data from the
Enterprise
’s flight recorder.

Ordinarily the recorder would lie essentially suppressed, quiescently tracking only the routine mechanical functions of the ship. An alert increased its powers of observation and set it to making a permanent record of the ship’s crucial areas. The engine room monitor had watched Khan’s attack and Spock’s last moments of life.

Jim Kirk had already relived Spock’s death once today, in an all too realistic fashion. He wondered, as he keyed into the player the star date he wished to observe, why he had fought so hard to be permitted to see it again. He could leave Sarek alone with it and let the Vulcan make of it what he would. But in the end Kirk could not abandon his responsibilities to Spock or—if his suspicions proved true—to McCoy.

“Engine room, flight recorder, visual,” the computer voice announced. “Star date 8128 point seven eight.” It froze at the decimal he had chosen. “Point seven eight…point seven eight…”

On the screen, Spock lay dying against the glass of the radiation enclosure, frozen in time.

“Back!” Kirk snapped. “Point seven seven.”

The random access search skipped to the last words between James Kirk and Spock.

“Back! Point six seven.”

“Flight recorder, visual. Star date 8128 point six seven, point six seven—” The tape had reached the point before Kirk left the bridge, before Spock entered the radiation chamber, a time when the
Enterprise
was still in imminent danger of being caught up in Khan Singh’s detonation of the Genesis device. Spock was poised in freeze-frame at the radiation chamber control console.

“Go.”

Spock’s image flowed into life. McCoy entered the picture, intercepting Spock before he reached the chamber. They argued in eerie silence. Spock guided McCoy’s attention toward Mister Scott, who lay half-conscious on the floor. As soon as McCoy turned his back, Spock felled him with a nerve pinch.

And then…Spock knelt down and pressed his hand to Doctor McCoy’s temple. Spock’s lips formed the silent word:

“Remember.”

“Hold,” Kirk said. The image froze. “Augment and repeat.” The scene scrolled smoothly back. The central image expanded. “Audio,” Kirk said.

Spock guided McCoy’s attention toward Mister Scott, who lay half-conscious on the floor. As soon as McCoy turned his back, Spock felled him with a nerve pinch.

Spock knelt down and pressed his hand to Doctor McCoy’s temple.

“Remember!” Spock said.

“Freeze!” Kirk said. He struggled against hope and excitement to retain his composure. “Bones…” Kirk said softly. All the doctor’s tortured behavior, his confusion—

“One alive, one not,” Sarek said. “Yet both in pain.”

“One going mad from pain,” Kirk said. “Why—
why
did Spock leave the wrong instructions?”

“Do you recall the precise words, Kirk?” Sarek cocked his eyebrow at Kirk and saw that he did not. He repeated a phrase from Spock’s will as he had plucked it from Kirk’s mind. “ ‘Failing a subsequent revision of this document, my remains are not to be returned to Vulcan—’ ” He paused. “Spock did not…did not believe that his unusual heritage would permit the transfer of his
katra.
He did leave the possibility open.”

“But he never made a revision. He left only—”

“—The good Doctor McCoy,” Sarek said. “Who, if the process had worked properly, would have known what to do. Perhaps Spock was correct. Perhaps he was unable to transfer…”

“He transferred
something!
And it’s driving McCoy insane!”

“Had Doctor McCoy ever experienced the mind-meld before?”

“A couple of times, in emergencies.”

“How did he react?”

“He didn’t like it. To put it mildly.”

Sarek raised his eyebrow again but forbore to remark upon the comment. “Did he become physically ill, afterwards?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t necessarily have said so if he did.”

“He is undergoing an allergic reaction.”

“What?”

“It is unusual, but not unprecedented. McCoy’s mind is rejecting what Spock gave to him.”

Kirk fought an impulse to laugh. He lost.

“You find this amusing?” Sarek said stiffly.

“No—yes, I’m sorry, Sarek, I can’t help it. McCoy would find it hilarious, if he were in any shape to appreciate it. Come to think of it, Spock would, too.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” Sarek said. “Since the result is that McCoy was unable to assimilate the new information even so far as to rescind the provision of Spock’s will that may now destroy both of them.” He shook his head. “It would have been better if Spock had been near another Vulcan when he died. He did not prepare well, Kirk. He left too many factors open to chance—”

“This is hardly the time to criticize Spock!” Kirk said angrily. “Or to deplore Murphy’s Law, for that matter.”

“What is ‘Murphy’s Law’?”

“ ‘Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.’ ”

“How apropos.”

“What do we do to make things right?”

“It may already be too late.”

“Sarek—!”

Sarek gazed at the frozen screen in silence.

“The fact that Doctor McCoy retains even a semblance of sanity gives me some cause for hope. You are fortunate that you failed in your plan to burn my son like a barbarian chieftain. Had it succeeded, McCoy would surely be lost to us by now. The mind and the body are not a duality, they are parts of a whole. If one is destroyed, the other must disintegrate. If they are separated…the greater the distance, the greater the strain, until it becomes intolerable.”

“The strain on McCoy, you mean.”

“Precisely.”

“What must I do?”

“You must recover Spock’s body from the Genesis world,” Sarek said. “You must bring it, and Doctor McCoy, to Mount Seleya, on Vulcan. Only there is the passage possible. Only there can both find peace.”

“What you ask,” Kirk said, “is difficult.”

“You will find a way, Kirk. If you honor them both, you must.”

Kirk glanced again at the frozen image of his two closest friends.

“I will,” he said. “I swear it.”

Even before Jim Kirk and Sarek had left the records storage center, the questions the ambassador had left unanswered began to trouble Jim.

“Sarek,” he said, “if I succeed in what you ask…will Spock know? I mean—will he be aware of himself? Will he retain his individuality?”

“He will not be as you knew him,” Sarek said.

“I understand that!” Kirk said. The lessons of the mind-meld remained fresh in his consciousness. “That wasn’t my question.”

“Your question is one that cannot be answered in a few simple words, Kirk. There is no time—”

“I’ll take the time!”

Sarek regarded him coolly. “Will you take ten years of your life? First you must learn to speak Vulcan, and then you must dedicate yourself to study. In ten years you might approach the simplest questions of this philosophy…and the question you have asked is far from the simplest.”

“Ambassador, with all due respect—that explanation is getting pretty stale! ‘I cannot answer your question because humans are too immature to understand. Humans are too uncivilized—’ ”

“I said nothing against humans. Do you forget that Spock’s mother is human? She has studied the discipline of ancient thought these many years. She has earned a place among the adepts and the teachers. Granted, she is extraordinary. But even you might reach a moderate level of comprehension—”

“I get the picture,” Kirk said, irritated. “It still comes down to, ‘None of your business.’ Is that what I’m supposed to say to Harry Morrow, when I ask him to bend regulations into the fourth dimension?”

“You must say what you think best,” Sarek said, without irony.

Hikaru Sulu leaned forward in his leather armchair.

“Admiral, I—”

“No!” Kirk said sharply. “Don’t answer me now. I want you to think it over first.”

The image of James Kirk faded abruptly from the ’phone screen.

On the surface, what Kirk had asked Sulu to do was not very difficult. A volunteer mission, a few days out, a few days back. But if worse came to worst, the consequences could be grave. Kirk had not softpedaled the most severe of the possibilities.

Kirk’s intensity troubled Hikaru. It was Kirk who had first commented on the crew’s obsession with the death of Spock, and now he himself seemed obsessed and driven. What he hoped to accomplish was not entirely clear to Hikaru—who had the definite impression that Kirk was not clear on the details, either.

But it was certain that Kirk felt responsible for Spock’s death, and that he could not accept it. Hikaru believed Kirk had taken on this mission to expiate the guilt he felt, and he understood Kirk well enough to know that he would never be free of the guilt, or of his grief, until he completed what he had sworn to do.

Cold rain skittered against the window. Hikaru sat in the dark for an hour, thrashing questions around in his mind.

He admitted to himself that he feared for James Kirk’s sanity.

The house was very quiet. He shared it with four other people, but tonight he was the only one home. He was, in fact, the lone member of the household on Earth. Only rarely was everyone home at the same time, but even more rarely was everyone else gone.

I shouldn’t be home, either,
he thought.
Dammit!

He got up and went out the back door into the garden. Without his noticing, the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared. The full moon was risen halfway to its zenith. The wet lawn felt cold against his bare feet and the air was ozone-washed. In the near distance, the sea rushed against the shore and away.

His mind chased itself around in circles. He needed to think about something else for a while, or better yet to think of nothing at all. He began to move in a
bo
routine,
bo-no-ikkyo,
though his
bo,
his wooden staff, was back in the house along with his
gi,
and the black belt and
hakama
he had only recently earned when he passed his
shodan
test.

Tsuki,
deflect,
tsuki, yokomen, yokomen—

Over the years he had studied a number of martial arts. He was an excellent fencer, and he had progressed to the first of the several degrees of brown belts in judo. But his interest in judo had always had more to do with the fact that he was learning it from Mandala Flynn (he believed she had the same feeling about fencing, which he had taught her). Aikido was different. It was a martial art dedicated to non-violence, to demonstrating to one’s opponent the futility of violence. He had been training for some years now. The thrill of being promoted to
shodan,
of putting on for the first tune the black belt and the
hakama,
the long wide pleated black trousers, was just as intense as what he had felt when he received the orders giving him command of
Excelsior.

Yokomen, kakushibo,
sweep, reverse, thrust,
dogiri
—

Usually he could lose himself in the motions, but tonight the question he had been asked and the decision he had still to make remained uppermost in his mind, spoiling the flow and the peace of the routine.

James Kirk planned to return to Genesis, whether he got help and the
Enterprise
from Starfleet, or merely a blind eye turned when he departed.

If he was denied permission, or expressly forbidden to go…