Star Trek Rambling: Fan Fiction: Moments At Gol

Moments At Gol

Aconitum Napellus

2009-2014

(Rated: PG)

This is a non-profit work of fan fiction. No monies are being made. This story is based on and uses elements from Star Trek, which is trademarked by Paramount Pictures and CBS. I do not claim ownership of Star Trek or any associated characters or the universe of Star Trek. All other elements are my own.

Table of Contents

1. Kirk

2. Saavik

3. McCoy

4. Amanda

5. Chapel

6. Sarek

7. Uhura

8. Chekov

9. Scott

10. Sulu

Kirk

Jim was scared to see Spock. He had never been scared to see Spock before. The Vulcan had been apprehensive of facing him, perhaps; when he had spoken of pon farr, so very long ago it seemed; whenever he had some kind of emotional or physical problem to which he did not want to admit. But Jim Kirk had never in his life been afraid to face Spock.

Actually, that was not quite true.

As Spock had turned round to him in the warp chamber. Then he had been afraid. And when he first saw his living body on Genesis, living, but with no mind, or at least none of the warm, intelligent, shrewd Vulcan that Kirk had grown to love. Then he had been afraid.

And this time… This time, when he knew that Spock’s mind and Spock’s body were rejoined, albeit loosely enough for the present. This time, when all of the Vulcan’s thoughts and memories were jostling about in his mind as if a life had been newly formed, in an instant, and injected into his head. This time, what would he find?

He had fought tooth and nail for this meeting. They had tried to stop him. All of those emotionless, tight-faced Vulcan adepts had tried to stop him. But then Sarek, Ambassador of all Vulcan, prime disapprover of Spock’s entry into Starfleet and his long career there, had argued his case; and, as was usual with Sarek, he had won.

He did not know what to think when he entered that room. Less of a room, and more of a chamber hollowed from the rock at Gol. There was no more in it than a bed, and the chair that Spock sat in. It was an attempt not to overwhelm him, apparently. But when, Kirk wondered, had a Vulcan last been joined in body and spirit by Fal-Tor-Pan? What precedent was there for how to treat him?

Spock sat on the chair in his all-encompassing white robe. It was perhaps all that he possessed at this moment in time. Kirk did not doubt that certain trinkets and treasured possessions still lingered in his parents’ home. For all the width of the rift between him and his father, Spock still had his childhood room there. But right now, this was all that Spock was. His body, so freshly renewed but looking so old – and this one white robe that covered him to the wrists, to the ankles. It would not have surprised Jim if he were naked underneath it.

‘Spock,’ he said finally.

Spock looked up. He still had that look in his eyes; the confused look, the slightly fearful look of an aged animal. The eyes of one with dementia.

‘Spock, it’s me,’ he said, taking a step forward. Surely the Vulcan had not forgotten him again, so soon? ‘It’s me, – ’

He had not yet begun to form his name, but, ‘Jim,’ Spock said, rising slowly from the chair – rising as if it were not an accustomed action for him.

In some ways, Spock’s life so far had consisted of nothing but crouching on a planet that was tearing itself apart, and of lying as if in trance on a bunk in the Klingon ship. In some ways – but in other ways –

Oh…

Spock had such a rich and varied life behind him. So many jewels of knowledge and insight had resided in that mind. Was everything lost?

No, not everything. For Spock looked at him again, and said again, ‘You are Jim. I remember this much…’

‘Yes, you do,’ Jim said, coming forward to him with a sudden, rich smile.

Spock flinched a little as Kirk lifted his arms towards him, as if he was not sure what this person was about to do.

‘You remember that much,’ Kirk nodded, putting his hands on Spock’s arms. ‘I’m Jim. Your friend, Jim.’

‘I – communicate – like this,’ Spock said hesitantly, reaching his hand tentatively towards Kirk’s face.

Jim wanted to flinch away. He did not know what to do. Rejecting Spock was unthinkable. But what would the adepts say? He very much doubted that they would approve of Spock melding so soon; and melding, at that, with an emotional human, a human who had just lost his son, who had just regained the best friend he had ever had. Jim was the first to admit that his emotions were uncertain at this moment.

And how much memory did Spock retain of the techniques of melding? He had mentioned often in the past...

Oh, Spock… Oh, that Spock of the past, how I miss you…

So often he had said how dangerous melding could be, how joining with an unbalanced mind could upset the balance of one’s own. And they were both unbalanced at the moment. There was no doubt about that.

Spock, oh, Spock, how I miss you…

And without conscious impulse he was stepping forward to the Vulcan, and Spock’s oh-so-familiar fingers were touching his face, burning onto his skin with typical Vulcan intensity. And startling, out of the maelstrom of echoes and memories and thoughts that circled in his head, Spock said again, <I communicate like this.>

<Yes, Spock. You communicate like this.>

<Oh, my friend…>

The urge to weep almost overcame him. This was too much. Too much… The loss of David, the loss of Spock. My child, my friend…

He regained control of himself.

<No, Spock. Don’t ever leave again.>

Love. A swirling vortex of undefined emotions. Colours and feelings and scents and memories jostling one another, erasing and effacing one another, confusing the mind.

<It is not logical,> Jim agreed. <But it exists. You cannot deny it.>

It was not quite a question, not quite a statement…

Images burst in Spock’s mind, blurred and tired. Droxine, Christine, Leila. Other women, that Spock could recognise but Kirk could not. He thought, spontaneously and humour-full, <I didn’t realise you’d had such a varied past, Spock.>

Nor I myself. That last was so Spock that Kirk almost cried.

<And no, it is not sexual,> Kirk confirmed. <We love each other, as – >

<Brothers, friends, family, t’hy’la.>

The words were like flowers unfolding, like crystals growing in Spock’s mind. Unlocking doors, sparking memories, unfolding the pages of forgotten books.

<Yes, Spock. Brothers, friends, family, t’hy’la.> Kirk repeated. <You are mine, and I am yours. I came back for you, because you belong to me, and I need you by my side.>

<And – you are my Jim,> Spock said.

His hand fell from Kirk’s face. He stared at his fingertips, registering tears.

‘Your face is wet,’ he said, and his forehead creased in puzzlement, as if those words had been pulled from a time long passed.

‘Yes, it is, Spock,’ Kirk said without shame. ‘It is wet because I am happy.’

Spock stared at him, still with that haunted, bewildered look in his eyes. And then he said, ‘Humans are illogical.’

‘Indeed we are, Spock,’ Kirk said, with the most illogical smile he had ever worn on his face. ‘Indeed we are.’

Saavik

Saavik hovered outside the chamber, caught in illogical nervousness. How to react as a Vulcan should to this meeting? How to react as a logical being, not as a child torn from an illogical world, as one come late to the mind rules, as one to whom Spock was so – so very vital?

Always, during these dilemmas, she had applied to Spock, and Spock had instructed her. Spock’s steadying influence had calmed her. Spock had teased the tangles from her ill-formed logic and shown her how it should lie in her mind.

And now, what was Spock? She had let him go. She had grieved, and released him, as a Vulcan should. She had accepted his loss, and moved on; and now she was turning back to a shell of what he had been. Everything had changed.

Oh, how everything had changed. She had felt that the first time he had been shaken by his time on Genesis, ripped like Adam from his empty innocence. When he had turned to her in naked bewilderment, his body lithe and young, younger even than she remembered him from so long ago, knowing nothing but what biology urged him to do.

And she had shown him the form and the process. She had given him a careful framework to hold the fever that racked him, and had willingly offered the only logical solution. And she, Saavik of Vulcan, protégé of Spock, had burned in response to those eager hands and that young body that had no mind and only wanted biological satiety.

Spock, how things have changed.

She saw him now, and it was like looking back through an album of photographs. She saw the Spock who had rescued her and protected her from the hell of her childhood; as she had rescued and protected him from his childhood on Genesis. She saw the Spock that he had been before she had ever met him; the lanky, teenage Spock, the vital young man. She had seen it all on Genesis. He had grown up before her eyes, and clung to her, and lusted for her, and finally slipped into catatonic silence. And she had seen him anew.

She did not even know if he remembered.

She did not know if he remembered what she had been to him on Genesis. She was uncertain if he even remembered what he had been to her in the past. She had been very important to him for a long time, it was true, but most of her post-rescue years she had spent in the home of his parents, her communication with him only through the filter of subspace transmissions, with none of the bond-building mental familiarity that came with physical proximity. Would he even know who she was?

Illogical. Illogical, she told herself fiercely. Standing out here will not alter Spock’s memory. I must –

She lifted a hand to the door, and it swung open silently under her touch. He sat there on the single chair, his hands buried in the sleeves of his robe, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall as if he could learn something from the striations in the rock.

She began to speak, but her voice faltered.

He looked up.

Something lit deep in his bewildered eyes, almost – almost – a smile moving onto his face, and then flitting away again. He rose from his chair, one hand extending towards her. Illogical as the thought may be, he seemed to have been struck with sunlight.

‘Saavikam,’ he said, and he took a step closer.

She flinched. How stupid of her to flinch. But – this was Spock anew, Spock with all of his confident wisdom stripped from him. He was a child, seeking out guidance and reassurance. How did she approach this?

She inhaled, calming herself. She gave a small flitting smile to match his, and walked forward. He held a hand out, uncertainly, and then dropped it again, looking away, his gaze seeming to curl in on itself as he scoured his mind.

‘Spock,’ she said, stepping forward again and holding out her hands to his. Most unVulcan to touch in this way, but what was Vulcan about this meeting? What was logical here?

He reached out that tentative, uncertain hand again, and touched hers, bending down two fingers, leaving two extended, stroking haltingly at her own.

‘This – is inappropriate,’ she said with great control.

He looked up at her, startled, his forehead creasing.

‘Yes… It is inappropriate. But – somewhere in my mind…’

She inhaled deeply, and let the breath out slowly. How did she explain what happened on Genesis? He had touched her mind there, even if there had been very little of his mind for her to touch.

The truth. Had Spock not always taught her that the truth was paramount?

‘Spock, are you aware of your regeneration on Genesis?’ she asked.

His forehead furrowed again.

‘Accelerated growth,’ he said slowly. ‘Renewal. Years in minutes…’

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘And what must come to all Vulcans…’

He looked down, his mind working. Then he looked up at her, startled, stepping back a little.

‘You – became my bond-mate,’ he said cautiously. ‘You, Saavikam, became my bond-mate. Is this true?’

She was improperly relieved that she had not had to say it.

‘Yes, this is true,’ she nodded.

He looked her up and down, with an appearance of sudden preternatural knowledge in his eyes, as if he were seeing straight through her clothing.

‘Yes,’ he echoed. ‘It is true.’

She nodded, simply.

‘It – may be awkward,’ he said.

Saavik’s eyebrow quirked. ‘Understatement is a very useful facet of language,’ she commented.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, staring downward again, reading unknown thoughts in his own mind. ‘It may be awkward. But – it is not unacceptable.’

Saavik let tension go suddenly, that she had not realised she had been holding.

‘No,’ she realised, looking straight into those intelligent, bewildered eyes. ‘It is not unacceptable. In fact, it is logical.’

‘Logical, yes…’

He looked about the room, and then back at her face, seeming to be recalling the basics of hospitality. Every shard of knowledge he recaptured seemed to momentarily frighten him, before he processed it and put it in its proper place.

He looked back at the room. There was only one chair. He looked towards his bed, and gestured towards it uncertainly.

‘You must sit,’ he said, and walked with her to the bed, and sat beside her. They both sat, eyes on the wall opposite, reminding Saavik very much of awkward human teenage couples she had seen, or of people waiting for a shuttle.

Finally, Spock looked left, towards her, and she turned her head to meet his eyes.

‘It is not logical to regret a person’s passing,’ she said, never taking her eyes from those eyes that she trusted so deeply. ‘But – I am very glad to have you back.’

McCoy

The doctor had seen Spock in many guises. He had seen him unconscious, injured, delirious with fever, blind; even insane. But he had no frame of reference for seeing Spock as he was now. He had encountered brain-damaged patients before. Perhaps that was the closest approximation to the way Spock was now. But Spock was not technically brain-damaged. He was not damaged at all, medically. He was like the custodian of a huge library whose keys had been jumbled and mixed until he could open none of the rooms. Everything that made Spock who he was was there, in his head, but by Jim’s account the Vulcan was struggling to access it. He was, in Kirk’s words, like a man searching for himself in a dark room.

McCoy was struck briefly with the thought that perhaps right now he knew Spock better than Spock knew himself. He had carried Spock’s consciousness in his head. He had felt Spock’s impulses and desires and thought processes, taking over his own. He had been privileged with a deeper insight into Spock’s soul than any person had ever been allowed.

How ironic, he thought with a twisted smile. Spock, my old friend. Spock, my sparring partner. I’ve spent my life fighting you, and now I know what you thought when you looked back at me, better than you do yourself.

He steeled himself, finding himself pulling his top straight with his hands, almost laughing aloud when he realised that that very motion was just another echo that Spock had left in his head. If Spock was dark to his light, or rationality to his emotion, or whichever flipside to whichever coin the doctor chose to be, then he could at least have the courage to face him. Perhaps on facing him he could begin to unweave the intimate grasp that the Vulcan’s mind seemed to have on his.

McCoy stepped into the room with apprehension flooding through his veins. Spock was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the opposite wall. He did not even turn his head until he heard the noise of the door closing. Then he regarded McCoy without query or emotion. McCoy had seen prisoners like that, so numbed by their captivity that they had no protest against it. They were always the hardest to bring back.

Spock continued to stare at him. Finally the doctor’s impatience broke through.

‘Spock, don’t you recognise me?’ McCoy asked in a rough voice, coming closer. ‘You put your entire psyche in my head, you bastard. Don’t tell me you don’t recognise me.’

Spock’s eyebrow lifted, just a little, in a heart-breaking echo of his former self.

‘I recognise you,’ he said steadily. ‘Better than some. Your mind is – fractured with illogic.’

The doctor laughed suddenly, and Spock reacted as if he had heard an explosion somewhere far away.

‘Spock, you son-of-a-bitch,’ McCoy said, coming over to sit by him on the bed. He brought himself close to Spock’s face, staring into those strange, confused eyes that contained just a glimmer of the Vulcan’s former self. ‘Dammit, you are in there, aren’t you? I was afraid they’d left something behind with all that mumbo-jumbo.’

‘You are referring to – Fal-Tor-Pan?’ Spock asked him, looking sideways. ‘The reunification of mind and spirit.’

‘I’m referring to Fal-Tor-Pan,’ the doctor nodded. ‘Spock, I carried your soul for – God, for far too long. I didn’t even know you were in there at first. I thought I was going mad! Hell, everyone else thought I was going mad!’

Spock continued to regard him.

‘I don’t remember the thought processes that led me to trust you with my Katra,’ he admitted finally. ‘They must have been – fascinating.’

McCoy snorted, and saw Spock flinch again at the emotional display.

‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘I have no doubt that you would have given it to Jim, if you’d had the chance. But I don’t think you had a choice. You knew what you were going to do, Spock. You knew you were going – to die. I was there, trying to stop you. I was – convenient,’ he finished with a very slight hint of bitterness in his voice.

Spock stared at him, seeming to read memories in the lines of McCoy’s face, his thoughts gradually catching fire and growing with each second.

‘Dr McCoy,’ he said with certainty – and that in itself was a breakthrough, since there was no guarantee that he would remember the doctor’s name. ‘You were – my colleague. And my friend. We served together. You saved my life on many occasions.’

‘Not that time,’ McCoy said bitterly. ‘There you were, and there was nothing I could do…’

‘But I am alive,’ Spock pointed out, with puzzlement in his voice.

‘No thanks to me.’

Spock’s forehead creased in thought.

‘Without you, I – everything that creates what I am – would be lost forever. There would have been no Katra to return. You are a friend, McCoy. I remember that much. You are a very good friend.’

There it was still – the puzzlement in his voice. There was none of the assurance of the Spock that McCoy knew. Everything was a question. He was constantly searching for outside assurance. Again, he reminded McCoy of a prisoner who had been confined and controlled for so long that he could do nothing without permission – even think for himself. The idea of leaving him here to be coaxed out of himself by no one but Vulcans horrified him. Someone would need to coax the human bits back. McCoy renewed his determination to make sure he was able to visit Spock throughout the slow process of regaining himself. He was still, at least, Spock’s physician. Even brief death had not changed that. McCoy had never had the heart to erase the Vulcan from his records.

‘Yes, you green-blooded bastard,’ McCoy grinned, realising that Spock was awaiting confirmation of his supposition. ‘I’ve been your friend for a long time.’

Spock stared at him.

‘You are my friend – yet you continue to use profanity in regard to me. The word ‘bastard’ – denotes a child of unmarried parents. I believed that my parents were – ’

‘Your parents are very married, Spock,’ McCoy assured him.

‘Can there be degrees of marriage?’ Spock asked in puzzlement.

The doctor rubbed a hand over his face in exasperation. He and Spock had played this game for many years, but now he suspected that it was no game.

‘It’s a figure of speech, Spock,’ he said with an air of great patience. ‘And I use profanity with you because – well – I’m not quite sure why,’ he admitted. ‘It’s – something you expect from me.’

Spock shook his head. ‘I expect very little of you.’

McCoy arched an eyebrow. ‘Nothing much has changed then, Spock.’

‘A – joke?’

‘Perhaps,’ the doctor smiled.

Spock stared at him.

‘I understand very little about you, Doctor. I – have a feeling that that is something that has not changed, either.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ McCoy shrugged. ‘I suspect that we each understand the other better than we’d care to admit. And when we don’t – well, Jim’s there to interpret.’

‘Jim,’ Spock said slowly, as if just the word in itself was a security blanket.

‘Yes, Spock,’ McCoy said with a grin. ‘Jim. That’s the way it’s always been. You, and Jim, and me, keeping each other alive.’

‘Traditions,’ Spock said slowly, ‘are sometimes best kept alive. For the good of the many.’

‘And the one,’ McCoy smiled.

Spock looked at him suddenly as if he had been struck by an inspiration.

‘Dumas,’ he said, apparently irrelevantly. ‘The Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all.’

This time McCoy laughed heartily. Apparently Spock had discovered the key to a very specific chamber in his mind, which held an ancient tome of literature that he had once read. That fact was beautiful to McCoy. In his head he could see a representation of the brain, of synapses firing, forging new paths, recreating Spock with every tiny burst of electricity. It was proof that being here and talking to him would help to rebuild him, and it fired his determination to fight tooth and nail with anyone who tried to stop him from being involved in the Vulcan’s recovery.

‘That’s it, Spock,’ he nodded, startling the Vulcan yet again as he clapped an arm about his shoulders. You, me and Jim. The Three Musketeers. And nothing’s going to change it.’

Amanda

It was Amanda’s seventh visit to Spock at Gol. Each time so far she had found him sitting in that featureless room, his hands arranged before him as a focus, apparently trying to find something within himself. As she entered the room today he was sitting again in the same position, in the same chair, with his hands in a classic meditation position. He appeared to be staring intently at his fingertips, but his eyes were focussed far beyond them.

‘Spock,’ she said.

After a moment he looked at her.

‘Yes, mother,’ he said in that steady, strange voice, evincing no surprise or joy or displeasure at her unexpected arrival.

She smiled tolerantly. Was he calling her mother because he knew her to be the woman who had bore him and nurtured him and cherished him through the most difficult years of his life, or because he had been told that she was his mother? Vulcans, it seemed, had an inbuilt love of correct processes, regardless of training or memory. Spock showed the same yearning desire to be correct now as he had as a two year old, when he had lined up objects in order with small, soft hands, and insisted on the correct bedtime procedure and always wanted his keev’la juice in the small blue cup.

He was looking at her still, with polite, confused enquiry in his eyes. How long would it be, she wondered, before he lost that air of always being confused? Her own mother had had that look in her final years, but it had grown worse, not better. Spock, at least, knew her a little better each time she visited, instead of slipping away by degrees.

‘I wanted to see you, Spock,’ she began. ‘I should have let you know I was coming, but – ’

‘Is there something you wished to discuss?’ he asked, staring unblinkingly at her face.

‘No, Spock,’ she said patiently. ‘I wanted to see you because I’m your mother, and you’re my son.’

‘Ahh.’

‘Spock, it’s a beautiful, clear day outside,’ she told him, gesturing to the door. ‘Would you come for a walk with me?’

His forehead furrowed. ‘The adepts do not advise it,’ he said, turning his head back and lifting his hands into the meditation posture again.

‘Damn the adepts!’ she snapped, grasping his hand in hers, her long-learnt patience slipping for a moment. ‘Your mother advises it.’

Spock looked first at his hand, held in her smaller, more aged fingers, as if he was very consciously connecting the sight of those hands with the sensations in his skin. If there was any mental connection in the touch she was unaware of it, but he looked up at her again with a new degree of recognition in his eyes. He let her hold on for a few more seconds, then very deliberately removed his hand from her grasp, and got to his feet.

‘I am ready,’ he said, gesturing towards the door.

She almost laughed at the absurdly self-evident statement. Almost all that Spock owned in this room was the white robe he wore. There was no finding of coats or searching for shoes as there would be on any normal, any human, expedition. His robe and his bare feet were all that he needed.

The transition from the shaded rock-hewn chambers to the brilliance of outside was as abrupt as it ever was on Vulcan. Even Spock’s eyes took a few moments to adjust to the change in light. He gave the area a cursory glance, then turned his attention back to his mother.

‘Where do you wish to go?’ he asked.

‘Oh – anywhere,’ she shrugged.

Spock looked at her, but did not give voice to the perplexity that was evident on his face. So much of life perplexed him at the moment. He could not possibly question everything, particularly those odd vagaries of his human companions. He began to follow his mother’s lead along one of the flat, well-worn paths of Gol.

She glanced up at him, and saw his flat acceptance slowly piquing into a general fascination. Spock undoubtedly held layers of information about his surroundings buried in his mind, ranging from personal experience, through cultural and religious history and a myriad varied branches of scientific knowledge. The longer they walked, the more she could see focus and intrigue crystallising in his eyes, and the more firmly she believed that she was correct to bring him outside, despite what the Vulcan adepts might say to her later.

‘This place is familiar,’ he said finally, scanning his eyes over the vast panorama of rock that was tinted in all shades of orange and brown. ‘I – have lived here.’

She looked at him. He had chosen to push aside every scientific, detached observation that he could possibly make on the place, and raise the one subject that she had been praying for him to forget.

‘You spent a long time here once, Spock,’ she told him honestly, after a moment of deliberation.

Spock looked directly at her. ‘I don’t remember specifics,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said slowly.

She had never liked to talk about that time, even after Spock had renounced kolinahr. She had never felt so distant from her son even when he was travelling the farthest stars as she had when he had cloistered himself in Gol, giving a reason to no one for his choice.

He was staring at her still, with an intelligent perception that survived despite his memory loss.

‘There is something you do not wish to say – about the time I spent at Gol,’ he said.

‘You – decided to take the kolinahr,’ she said after a moment of hesitation, looking down at her own clasped hands. ‘You never told me why. I – can’t tell you anything about your time here, Spock. You never told me yourself.’

Spock blinked as an eddy of hot wind blew dust across his face, and then turned slowly, taking in the contours and strata of the rocks as if he was trying to coax memory from them.

‘Kolinahr – is emptiness,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps I have achieved it now.’

She held tears back just a millimetre from the surface, and took his hand in hers. She stroked her thumb over the back of his hand, remembering how soft and trusting those hands had been once, clutching at hers as if she were the only thing between him and the unknown danger of the world.

‘You – have not achieved emptiness, Spock,’ she said with effort, looking up into his dark eyes. ‘You are not empty. Everything that you were is there, in your mind. You’re trying to find it this time, not to parcel it away like so much unwanted goods.’

He caught the bitterness that had edged into her voice, despite her effort to hide it.

‘Mother,’ he said, and she heard in his voice that tone that he had always used when her humanness had bewildered and distressed him. It was a wonderful thing to hear, and she smiled brilliantly through the starting tears.

‘Spock, you are going to come back to me,’ she said firmly, holding both of his hands in hers. ‘Your father and I will help you find yourself.’

‘That may take some considerable time,’ Spock warned her seriously, looking down at her, still with that air of hesitancy in his face.

‘I have that time,’ she promised. ‘I will always have that time.’

Chapel

The woman standing in the doorway was tall, blue-eyed, with dark hair scraped back into a severe bun on the back of her head. She was wearing the uniform of a member of Starfleet Medical, and her face was anxious and tired-looking. Her hands were twisting together in front of her body. She was obviously human, and obviously distracted with nervousness.

Spock narrowed his eyes. He recognised her. He was certain of that. But – there was something wrong.

‘I – came in on the overnight from Earth,’ she began hesitantly. ‘I – don’t quite know why. But I had to see you… I’m so glad you’re alive…’

Her voice began to dissolve in tears and Spock rose to his feet, instinctively knowing that tears had to be countered with comfort. He held out a hand towards her face and was suddenly assailed by a memory that seemed to envelop him so closely that he couldn’t see it. He stopped in his tracks, shaking his head, trying to grasp the ephemeral thoughts in his head. This was like being half-blind, surrounded by ghosts and glimpses of a life he could barely remember.

‘I’m sorry, Spock,’ she began, pushing away the tears with her own hands. ‘I shouldn’t have come, really, but – ’

Spock stared at her, his hand still outstretched towards her cheek, and saw suddenly a much younger woman standing before him with blonde hair and blue eyes, crying at the uselessness of her presence, at her inability to help. But the hair colour… In his fragmented memory he could not think of a reason for that to change, other than to grey. And yet – the proportions of the face, the voice, the bearing – they were all the same. A name crept into his mind.

He hesitated, then asked, ‘Christine?’

Her face broke into a smile that was like the sun bursting from behind a cloud.

‘Christine…’ he repeated, clutching on to that name and trying to gain more from it. ‘Nurse…’

‘Doctor, now,’ she told him, still with that joyful smile. ‘It’s been doctor for – oh – almost ten years.’

‘Doctor, of course,’ Spock nodded.

He had a vague memory of that, of scanning through some kind of listing on a screen, and noticing a change from nurse to doctor, and having a brief moment of illogical pleasure at the news. But still, no context, no surname… He stared at her without apology, trying to read memories out of the lines and proportions of her face.

Remembrance assailed him in flashes. Lying in a bed under bright orange covers, controlling pain or sickness; and this woman in a brief blue dress standing beside him, or touching his hand when she thought him to be unconscious. This woman capturing his hand in hers and saying something to him – something that slipped his mind… – with a sense of urgency and passion. Standing in a room draped in red – in his room, he remembered now – telling him –

‘We are bound for Vulcan,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll be there in just a few days.’

He looked up at her, surprised and confused by his memory, silently asking her to explain – but she stood motionless and silent.

‘It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures,’ he said, the words coming to him as if they were slipping into his mind from another place.

Her smile saddened.

‘That was a long time ago, Mr Spock,’ she said. ‘A lot has changed since then.’

‘Yes,’ he said slowly.

Flashes in his mind. The heat and yearning through his body. The shivering of fever. Standing in a room surrounded by red, with need cascading through him, with this woman in front of him. Kneeling in a jungle, on a planet fractured by its own energy, touching his fingers to fingers that matched the heat of his own. A lot had changed…

He straightened up, looking straight at her.

‘I am told that my memories will return,’ he said steadily. ‘But that it will be a lengthy process.’

He continued to stare at her, trying to read some lost message in the lines of her face, trying to see something beyond the obvious.

‘Were we lovers?’ he asked abruptly.

A pained expression came over her, and she shook her head.

‘Not in this life,’ she said, her eyes avoiding his face.

Spock’s forehead creased. Human complexities… Not in this life… He had experienced very little of this life so far. No. In this life he had experienced discomfort, and fear, and the yearning. He had experienced Saavik’s hot body, and he had experienced Jim’s overwhelming need to save his life, and he had experienced many days in this bare, answerless room.

He stared at her again, but it was obvious that she was not about to explain her meaning.

‘What happened to your hair?’ he asked her suddenly, his curiosity blatant in his voice. He remembered blonde hair, copper hair, silver hair, styled with a variety and skill that had made wonder blossom in his previous mind. Never, he was sure, had there been dull, tightly controlled brown, pulled away from her face as if she were ashamed to have hair.

‘Oh,’ she said, touching her hand to the side of her head self-consciously. ‘It’s been like this for a long time now, Mr Spock. Don’t you remember?’

His forehead creased as he tried again to pull elusive memories into reach. His years on the ship – on that bright, colourful ship of the past, before his retreat to Gol (something in itself that he hardly recalled) – were for some reason easier to remember than the more recent ones.

Memory failing him, he looked up again, and his eyes bored into hers.

‘That is not an answer.’

‘No,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘No, it’s not.’

Staring at her, he saw an image of Saavik hovering beside her – young, lithe, eager to serve and please and do right. Saavik’s eyes, that looked always to him for approval. What could he approve at the moment? He knew less of the world than she did. And his eyes moved back to this woman, almost as old as he, tightened with experience and pain, but with a certainty behind her emotional façade that gave a great reassurance to his faltering existence.

‘I’ll go,’ she said suddenly, beginning to turn, as if she had abruptly decided on the futility of her presence.

‘No,’ Spock said, almost before his mind had cogitated a response. ‘No,’ he repeated more steadily. He gestured towards the chair. ‘Sit. I – have a feeling – that we have much to discuss.’

Sarek

He had stood in the doorway for some time before his son noticed his presence.

Spock was sitting near the window – in this case a roughly square hole hewn out of the rock – with his hands held together before his face in a perfect attitude of meditation. The dying light of 40 Eridani (for so it would be in his space-faring son’s mind, not Nevasa, not the light-bringer) caught his face with a golden-red brilliance. The colour was streaked in a pure beam across his temple and cheek, highlighting the sparse contours of his face, highlighting the slight furrow between his brows that indicated that all was not calm in the mind beneath.

‘Spock,’ Sarek said flatly. No logic in such human devices as clearing the throat or shuffling the feet to announce his presence.

His son lowered his hands with the slowness of one remembering how to use his muscles. Sakak, Sarek thought. Sakak, who fell into a thousand year sleep under the spell of an angry sorcerer, and when he awoke had to relearn the thousand muscles and ways of moving. Perhaps the tales from the old time were relevant after all…

The son turned his head towards the father. The beam of light travelled over his face and was lost, casting his features into deeper shadow. There was the smallest narrowing of the eyes, the smallest deepening of the furrow between his brows, and then he said in a steady, but somewhat questioning, voice, ‘Sarek?’

‘Yes, Spock,’ he nodded, taking another step forward. ‘Sarek.’

‘He who is my father,’ Spock continued, his voice still suggesting a question, his wording the formal wording of the priestesses who had restored his Katra to his body.

‘I am your father,’ Sarek nodded directly.

Spock continued to stare at him, unwavering, and a brief moment of light passed through his eyes, as if a spark of knowledge had finally found its home. Sarek found himself wondering precisely what revelation his son had experienced, but he pushed that aside swiftly. The interior of Spock’s mind was his own again, for no one but him and the healers to question.

Spock held his eyes for a moment longer, then turned back to his hands, apparently examining the contours and creases of his fingers in their meditative position.

Sarek moved further into the room. He looked around, taking in the fact that there was only one chair, and sat on the bed, his back as erect as if he had been sitting on a posture stool. He regarded his son, unspeaking. Genesis had achieved a remarkable feat, apparently taking a speck of his son’s DNA from his decaying body, creating it anew, and accelerating his growth until it almost paralleled his age at his time of death. Strange it would be if he had been left decades younger, or decades older… But he had not. There was no logic in pondering that possibility, except in scientific curiosity. Fortuitously his son’s mind, when it was fully recovered, would have the precise sum of experience and knowledge that should reside in a body of that age.

He felt ill at ease. He had to admit that. He had taken a great part in his son’s learning as a child. He had helped to form his young mind. It had been a great shock when Spock had decided to reject all that he had learnt in order to study at Starfleet; more so because so much of what he had learnt had been of Sarek’s own teaching. And now Spock’s relearning was emphatically in the hands of the healers of Gol. Yes, it was – disquieting.

He realised that Spock’s eyes were still upon him, one eyebrow raised and his head slightly tilted in an attitude of query that reminded Sarek forcefully of his wife. Even Spock’s lips were pursed in an imitation of Amanda in possession of a wordless question.

‘Spock,’ he said, to break the silence. ‘It was suggested that a visit from a close relative would assist your recovery.’

That eyebrow moved upwards again, a minute amount, but it was perceptible to Sarek. A judgement. An unspoken judgement had passed through Spock’s mind.

‘Should old acquaintance be forgot…’ Spock said, as if he had pulled the phrase blindly from a velvet bag.

‘That is attributed to Robert Burns – a human poet,’ Sarek informed him.

‘Yes,’ Spock nodded gravely, as if he were in the process of solving an age old puzzle. ‘I am inclined to believe that old acquaintance should not be forgot.’

His eyes narrowed again.

‘Father,’ he said, then paused, as if tasting the word. ‘I – am uncertain as to the parameters of our relationship. I feel – a certain regard for you. I believe mother would term it fondness. And yet – ’

He trailed off, fixing those bird-of-prey eyes on his father again, missing nothing on the landscape of his face, but wholly blind to what might lie beneath the surface.

Sarek inhaled. No logic in prevarication.

‘There was – a rift between us, Spock,’ he said heavily. ‘Such as should never occur between father and son.’

‘And yet – I am told that you were the primum movens of the recovery of my body?’ Spock said, puzzlement clear in his voice.

Sarek allowed just a hint of a smile to warm his face.

‘Spock,’ he said gently. ‘You are my son. There is a vast difference between a disagreement, and a desire to leave your body on an alien planet and your soul drifting, uncherished, in the void.’

‘Uncherished,’ Spock repeated, as if he was tasting the word. Another degree of light seemed to pass through his eyes. ‘A father will cherish the son,’ he said, looking down again, studying his hands again.

Sarek’s hint-of-a-smile grew by a tiny amount. Spock was quoting from the most ancient of Vulcan texts. Interesting what phrases chose to lodge in his fractured memory.

Spock’s eyes flicked from his own hands, to those of his father, comparing them silently.

‘A father will cherish the son,’ Sarek repeated, nodding his head. He recovered a measure of control even as he felt it slipping further. He steadied his expression, and said, ‘T’Khit, the First Book of Wisdom. Written before the time of Surak. Before the acceptance of logic, Spock.’

Spock’s eyes seemed to become veiled again, the lids lowering a little.

‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had gained another measure of understanding of his father.

This time Sarek knew precisely what had passed through his son’s mind. He bit back a welling sense of regret, a tired longing, and drew his barriers a little higher. He stood, straightening his jacket with the smallest of movements, and inclining his head in a formal nod.

‘Your meditation is vital, and I have disturbed it too long,’ he said, keeping his tone level and void of feeling. ‘I must take my leave.’

Spock lifted his eyes to him, and nodded. Then he turned his face back to the window, and the red-golden beam slanted across his features again, casting half of his face into apparent darkness in contrast with the light. He lifted his hands in a perfect posture of meditation, and Sarek stepped silently out of the room.

Uhura

He was sitting on his bed when Uhura entered the room, a padd in his hands and his eyes focussed intently on the writing on its surface.

But no. As she stepped forward she realised it was not a padd, but a real book, compact and dense and dark with age. She wondered briefly as she saw the Vulcan characters spread out on the page whether he was re-educating himself in the finer points of logic, or simply learning to read. She had little idea of what knowledge there was left in his damaged mind.

He looked up, his eyes hovering on her face with a look of enquiry in them. She was used to that penetrating gaze, but the level of uncertainty in it was a new thing to her. His eyes moved from her face to the ahrbat wood lyre she held in her arms, his curiosity naked on his face.

‘Uhura,’ she said, stepping forward. ‘Nyota Uhura.’

‘Yes,’ he said, laying the book down on the mattress. ‘I know you.’

She smiled, trying to stop tears from coming into her eyes. Just those three words were beautiful to her.

Her eyes flicked to the book beside him. She had enough knowledge of Vulcan to read the cover. Her ability with the language was growing day by day as she lived and worked on the planet. This enforced sabbatical was a linguist’s dream.

Steps in Logic, the cover read. Spock’s knowledge was perhaps hovering between that of a child and an adult.

‘I brought you something,’ she said, lifting the lyre a little.

He reached out a hand, but hesitated before touching it, his eyes searching the face of the instrument just as they had searched her own face.

‘Not mine?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘No, not yours. Yours was destroyed when the Enterprise – ’

An image ran through her head; an image that she saw in her dreams and in half her waking moments, of the Enterprise, once a graceful bird, fracturing into jagged pieces as fire burst throughout its decks. She watched it descending into the thickness of atmosphere, streaking like a meteorite across the face of Genesis with a hundred tiny pieces of itself following like Lucifer’s angels falling into hell.

She moved that vision aside into a hidden part of her mind, and smiled at the Vulcan, proffering the lyre in outstretched arms.

‘Not yours,’ she repeated. ‘But it is one of the classic era, made by T’Kaht in the ShiGahr workshops. It’s a little older than your lyre. It has a beautiful sound.’

His fingers moved over it, touching first the strings and then the polished wood that was reflective with the patina of centuries of touch.

‘This is for me?’ he asked, looking up at her with a depth of hesitancy in his eyes that brought sorrow into her chest.

‘Of course,’ she smiled.

Would he be able to play? Would this be worse than no lyre at all?

She watched his fingers moving as he settled the lyre into its proper position on his lap and began to tune the strings that she had deliberately left slack. The notes that shimmered from the sound-box wavered, and grew harmonious under his deft touch.

Relief sighed through her. He still understood the mechanics of the instrument. He still understood how the notes should sound. He still – of course – had perfect pitch.

As if he were moving in a dream he began to play. It was obvious that it was instinct and buried memory bringing the tune to the lyre. She recognised it and came in at the second verse, singing, ‘I'll be back though it takes forever. Forever is just a day. Forever is just another journey…’

Tears overwhelmed her at the apparent prophecy of the words, and her voice choked. Spock looked up at her, startled, his fingers stalling as his conscious mind overrode memory.

‘Really, Lieutenant,’ he said, half-chiding, an echo of the Spock she knew in his voice.

She laughed, conscious that she must be bewildering him with her flailing emotions.

‘It’s Commander now, Mr Spock,’ she reminded him, a feeling of mischievous joy overcoming the tears.

‘Commander. Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Your promotion was long overdue…’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ she said in mock sternness. ‘I certainly did.’

His brow furrowed as if he were trying to remember a wealth of knowledge that should be effortlessly accessible beneath his surface memories. Suddenly she remembered the emptiness that had inhabited her mind after Nomad, all those years ago. That strange probe, brain-damaged itself, had taken every thought from her as if it were a child emptying a jar of candy, and she had stared at the world like a new-born, waiting for her thoughts to come back to her.

‘I know how it feels,’ she said, finally sitting beside him. ‘Do you remember Nomad, Mr Spock?’

Again his brow furrowed. ‘V’Ger…’ he murmured.

She smiled. ‘History has a habit of repeating itself. Do you remember Nomad? It was 2268, I think. We beamed it on board the Enterprise. It – ’

‘It took Mr Scott’s life,’ Spock said suddenly.

‘And brought it back,’ she said.

She thanked God every day that Nomad could bring life back as easily as taking it away. She could not imagine life without Scotty’s warm charm.

‘Do you remember what it did to me?’ she asked.

Spock’s gaze seemed to internalise. ‘A mass of conflicting impulses,’ he said. ‘Its thinking is chaotic.’ He looked up, a sudden realisation brightening his eyes. ‘It absorbed your thoughts. Took your memory. You were re-educated…’

She nodded. ‘Re-educated, until my mind managed to remember what it was supposed to remember. Nomad hadn’t wiped my memory – he’d blocked my ability to access it.’

He appraised her with that piercing look.

‘One would not be able to tell,’ he said seriously.

‘I’m glad,’ she smiled. ‘It was a long time ago. I recovered. You will too.’

Spock nodded, his hands moving to the lyre again, picking out a melody with a little less certainty but with more conscious thought.

‘I will,’ he said, his eyes on his fingers as they touched the strings. ‘Thank you, Commander. Your gift is greatly appreciated.’

She smiled, and briefly pressed her hand to his arm. With a glance to the door to be sure that they were alone, she abruptly kissed the Vulcan’s cheek. His hands faltered in the middle of a bar, and he fixed her with a look of surprise.

‘I’ll see you again soon, Mr Spock,’ she said, touching the place she had kissed him with quick fingers. ‘The adepts said I shouldn’t be too long. May – I come and see you again?’

‘Of course,’ he said in that deep, smooth voice, sounding a step closer to normal. ‘I require your musical instruction.’

The joy bubbled through her. I'll be back though it takes forever ran through her mind. Perhaps it would be more than just a day, but she was certain that one day Spock would be back with them, in his entirety. Fate had a habit of taking Spock away, but thank God, it also had a habit of bringing him back.

Chekov

He didn’t look like the man that Chekov knew. No, it was worse than that. Much worse. He did look like the man that Chekov knew, but like a doppelganger, like some kind of figment that crept in the corners of one’s vision. He wasn’t sure about going into the room, and for some minutes he hovered on the threshold, knowing that the old Spock would have turned and raised an elegant eyebrow long ago, asking what the young ensign wanted.

He laughed at that. He hadn’t been an ensign in a long time, but somehow when Spock was around he still saw himself as a green recruit with unmanageable hair, and Spock as the commander who knew everything. Now he himself was a commander, Spock a captain – if one could keep a rank through death and rebirth – and he knew that commanders did not know everything, just endeavoured to pretend that they did.

A little of the laugh escaped as a kind of dry cough, and at that Spock did raise his head, turn, and lift that elegant eyebrow. But there was something far different in his eyes to the old penetrating look. He seemed lost, somehow reaching for something to anchor upon.

‘This vas a mistake,’ Chekov murmured, and began to retreat.

Spock held up his hand. His palm was clean and wide and lined with age, and Chekov couldn’t help but be arrested by it. Just there, in his hand, it was as if Spock had never died.

‘Please,’ Spock said, and gestured toward a chair. He closed the book that he was reading and put it neatly on the table by his bed. No bookmark, Chekov noticed. No Vulcan would need a bookmark to remember the page.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ Chekov said, half smiling, opening his arms in a gesture of surrender. ‘I did not mean to disturb you.’

‘Very little disturbs me,’ Spock said.

Chekov stood for a moment before taking a seat. Spock’s eyes followed him as if they were magnetised and Chekov suddenly wondered if the Vulcan knew who he was.

‘Commander Chekov, sir,’ he said a little awkwardly. ‘Ve served – ’

‘On the Enterprise, yes,’ Spock nodded. ‘I have fully examined the crew compliment of my former vessel.’

At that something stabbed inside Chekov’s chest. The Enterprise was not just Spock’s former vessel; it was a former vessel itself, existing only in memories. How it existed in Spock’s fragmented memory, he could not imagine. At least his own memories were crisp and vivid.

‘Then – you remember me, sir?’ Chekov asked.

Spock regarded him for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. ‘Pavel Chekov. You hold an enduring belief that everything of note was invented in Russia. Am I correct?’

‘Vell, er – ’ Chekov scratched at his ear, and then shrugged, ‘Vell, everything of note vas invented in Russia.’

Again Spock’s eyebrow rose, and it seemed that he was about to prepare a long rebuttal of that statement. But then he shook his head, and a sigh escaped from his lips.

‘I have to thank you, Mr Chekov, for your part in the recovery of my body,’ he said.

‘Oh, vell, I – ’ Chekov began, disconcerted by that phrase. People just weren’t supposed to come back to life. It didn’t happen, even in this day and age.

Spock rose to his feet, folding his robe more closely around himself and holding it there with his hands.

‘Would you walk with me, Commander?’ he asked. ‘I have been – cautioned – about leaving my room alone.’

There Chekov thought he saw a spark of the old Spock; the Spock who would logically and efficiently get himself out of any confinement as soon as possible. He wondered if he had been caught wandering about the corridors here by the Vulcan equivalent of wardens, and escorted quietly back to his room. The Vulcans at Gol did not seem over-endowed with the spirit of adventure.

‘Oh, yes, of course, sir,’ he nodded, getting to his feet hastily. ‘Vhere vould you like to go?’

Spock looked at him with a striking moment of clarity.

‘I have no idea, Ensign,’ he said.

Chekov let the sudden demotion pass, and led the way out of the room.

Outside the sun was as hot as ever, and Chekov was forced to squint against the reddish light. He wasn’t made for climates like this. Thank God for tri-ox, he found himself thinking, and thank God for the fact that Gol was raised high up above the plains. There was, at least, a slight breeze up here, as strong as the thin air would allow.

Chekov hesitated at the entrance to the facility where Spock was confined. The place couldn’t exactly be termed a hospital – Gol was not used to tending to the sick – but it was a place for special meditation, and close one-to-one guidance for those with troubled minds. Again, the uniqueness of Spock’s situation struck him. He had done some reading on this subject since their unexpected exile on Vulcan. No one had expected a Katra to be re-fused with a body. There were no contingencies in place for bodies that had come back to life and souls that needed to regain their old home; not in this modern time. The idea had been viewed almost as a myth.

Three paths led away from where they stood and Chekov looked up at the Vulcan, expecting him to take the lead. But Spock simply looked back at the Commander impassively, so Chekov shrugged and took the left hand path.

‘Fascinating…’ Spock murmured after a while.

They had come to a curious expanse where ancient, towering statues stood, where the ground was interlaced with geometric patterns, and a hot spring deposited minerals as a crust about the edge of a pool.

‘You – er – you know this place, sir?’ Chekov asked tentatively.

‘I do believe so,’ Spock nodded. ‘Here on these sands, our fore bearers cast out their animal passions,’ he murmured, his eyes distant and his hands open. ‘Here our race was saved by the first attainment of Kolinahr.’

‘I – don’t understand,’ Chekov said, hesitant to speak at all.

Spock seemed to have been transported to another time. He knelt slowly, as if his knees were troubled with pain, and put his palm flat on the patterned floor. And then, slowly, he looked up, his narrowed eyes seeking out the sun, the sky, and perhaps something else that only he could see.

‘I have made my choice,’ he murmured, his eyes fixed on the sky.

Despite the heat, the evening was drawing on. The ground reflected warmth like the floor of an oven, but at the very azimuth of the sky darkness was beginning to push away the red haze of the thin air. One single star could be seen up there, its light pushing faintly against the planet’s atmosphere.

Then Spock stood and looked at Chekov, his gaze seeming to burn holes through the other man’s skull.

‘The needs of the many – and the needs of the one – are often intertwined,’ he said.

‘Er – yes, of course, sir,’ Chekov nodded, hiding his bewilderment behind a smart military stance.

‘You are outfitting a ship for return to Earth, Commander?’ Spock asked.

‘Er – ’ Chekov faltered again. He had been warned against talking with Spock about the Enterprise and its destruction, or about the threat of a trial for violations of Starfleet regulations, which was as dry a term for a cocktail of theft, assault, sabotage, and conspiracy as he had ever heard. The Vulcans would never suggest that such a discussion could affect Spock emotionally, but they had cautioned him against disturbing Spock with unnecessary mention of certain current events.

‘You are outfitting a ship for return to Earth,’ Spock repeated, and now it was no longer a question.

‘Yes, sir. The Klingon ship,’ Chekov nodded.

Spock’s nose wrinkled the smallest amount, as if reacting to a remembered smell. Then he nodded, and turned back to the path down which they had just come.

‘Thank you, Ensign,’ he nodded. ‘That is all that I wanted to know.’

Scott

Montgomery Scott was the first to admit that he was too well-insulated for Vulcan. Even if he had chosen to recline on the sand in no more than bathing trunks, something he would never inflict on the Vulcan population, there was just too much of him for this heat. And since all of the Vulcan clothing stores catered for more moderate figures – after all, obesity was quite illogical – he was pretty much stuck with the clothes that he had landed here in. There were some outfits remaining on the bird of prey but he wasn’t going to strut around in a Klingon uniform, not even if someone paid him.

The best that he could say was that due to the aridity of the Vulcan atmosphere, sweat did not stick around for long, and at least it was somewhat cooler here in the carved out rooms of Gol than it was on the exposed rock around.

Waiting to see Spock, though, was enough to make anyone perspire. He had been prepared through the word of his colleagues for what he might encounter, but he could not quite imagine it. He had seen Spock last when he had walked away from his Fal-Tor-Pan, bewildered and empty and just reaching towards a hint of memory. He had heard that he was getting better, but he still did not know what he might find. He preferred mechanics to minds. Give him an engine in a thousand pieces and he could have it put back together by the end of the day. A mind in crisis, though, was a different thing entirely.

He looked cautiously through the half open door and saw the Vulcan there, sitting on a chair, apparently accessing data on a Vulcan-designed padd. He seemed to be engrossed in some kind of multiple choice quiz, and Scotty half-smiled at the sight. He had never thought to see Spock doing something like that.

He cleared his throat and Spock looked up.

‘Aye, lad, I thought it was high time I paid ye a visit,’ he said rather awkwardly, coming into the room.

‘Mr – Scott,’ Spock said, with just the smallest degree of hesitation. ‘Do you characterise me as a lad?’ he asked curiously.

‘Well, just a wee figure of speech,’ Scott said, and Spock half-frowned.

‘Your linguistic choices are significantly different from my other human visitors’,’ he remarked.

‘Well, I spent a lot o’ ma life in Aberdeen, Mr Spock,’ Scotty told him in a confidential tone.

Spock regarded him with a rather blank expression.

‘Oh, it’s a wee town up in Scotland, Mr Spock,’ Scott shrugged. ‘It doesnae matter.’

He looked about the room briefly and then took a seat on the bed. The mattress creaked gently as he stretched his legs out over the smooth stone floor.

‘How are ye, Mr Spock?’ he asked solicitously.

Spock regarded him with a steady gaze. ‘I am physically well,’ he said, but there was something searching behind his eyes.

‘Aye, but – ’ Scotty tapped his finger against the side of his own head.

Spock tilted his head quizzically. ‘You refer to my mental capacity?’ he asked with a directness that was rather disconcerting.

‘Aye, well – that, yes,’ Scott mumbled.

‘I am told that my progress is encouraging,’ Spock said, but it seemed unlike Spock to not know the precise degree of his own progress.

‘What have y’got there on the padd?’ Scotty asked curiously, and Spock passed it over. The text was in English, he was relieved to see, and was testing Spock on his knowledge of advanced warp theory. Scott carefully saved the test progress and took the padd back to its main screen. It was connected to the planet-wide information service, and he opened a browser and brought an image up on the screen. Turning it to Spock, he waited to see what his reaction might be.

Spock took the padd with an almost reverential hesitation.

‘It is the Enterprise,’ he said, his long fingers cradling the padd as if he were afraid he might drop it.

‘Aye,’ Scott nodded, his voice rich with pleasure. ‘The original Enterprise too, as it was back in our day. Clean as a swan and just as pretty.’

Spock shot him a quizzical look, looked back at the picture, then at Scott again. ‘Swans. An aquatic Earth fowl. Not generally regarded to be exceptionally clean, they are known to carry the avian influenza virus.’

‘Mr Spock, I thought ye might like t’have a look at the ship and jog yer memory perhaps,’ Scotty said with careful patience. ‘I’m sure those automatons in charge here haven’t taken ye down that particular memory lane.’

‘Mr Scott, I am not in the care of automatons,’ Spock said very seriously.

He looked back at the image, then began to navigate through the layers with sure fingers, zooming in on the schematics of the bridge, hesitating, and then accessing the details of the science console.

‘I remember this,’ he said in a tone of fascination, his gaze seeming to sharpen. Scott was heartened to see something of the old Spock in his eyes.

‘Aye, well ye sat there for hours at a time for two decades or more,’ Scott told him with a smile. ‘Look,’ he said, leaning in and touching his finger to the screen. ‘There’s the communications console, Uhura’s place, ye know. And engineering, environmental, defence, and weapons. And helm – ’

‘Mr Sulu,’ Spock interrupted. ‘Ensign Chekov at navigation. And there – ’

‘Aye, that’s where Jim Kirk sat,’ Scott nodded, brimming with happiness. ‘Sat there a few times myself, and so did you. Och, I remember the smell of that chair. Wood and faux-leather. Creaked a little every time ye turned in it. They didn’t make it quite the same after the refit.’

‘No,’ Spock said musingly. ‘Things are rarely re-made the same.’

He put the padd down and stood abruptly, frowning. He moved over to the window and looked out at the sun-struck plateau, then angled his gaze upward to the vibrant red sky as if searching for something that was not there.

‘I have been told that the ship was destroyed entirely,’ he said.

‘Aye, that it was,’ Scotty said with a sigh, coming to stand behind the Vulcan. His heart ached more for that ship than it had ever ached for anything. He would have lost his most dear possessions on it a thousand times over before losing the ship itself.

‘It was destroyed by – Khan Noonien Singh?’ Spock asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Scott said. ‘He tried his best, but you – you saved everyone, Spock. Almost everyone.’

Pain welled in him as he remembered his own nephew dying on the Enterprise because of Khan and his thirst for revenge. Peter and Spock, both destroyed by radiation burns because of one man’s vendetta. He had stood holding Peter in his arms, not knowing that blow was about to be followed by another, by Spock sacrificing himself for everyone else on board. Peter’s coffin had not fallen to the Genesis planet. Instead they had followed his wishes and brought his body home. If they hadn’t, perhaps they would have found him alongside Spock, regenerated and alive.

‘No,’ he said, shaking that memory away. ‘It was the captain who destroyed the Enterprise, later, when we came back for you. It was the only choice he had. We may have escaped in a Klingon rust bucket, but we escaped, and my poor wee lass...’

Spock looked at him, confusion clear on his face.

‘The ship, Mr Spock,’ Scotty explained tiredly. ‘My poor wee lass, the Enterprise. I know, she wasnae wee, she wasnae even a lass. I’m just a sentimental old Scotsman.’

‘Yes, Mr Scott,’ Spock said after a moment of reflective silence. ‘I believe that you are.’

He went back to the padd and picked it up, zooming out of the graphic again until he could see the Enterprise as a whole, gleaming white against the backdrop of space.

‘This was my home,’ he said. ‘It contained almost everything that I possessed.’

Scott felt his heart swell with grief. He came to stand behind the Vulcan, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

‘Aye, she was a home for all of us,’ he said. ‘Gypsies, we were. Never right unless we were moving. But maybe we’ll get her back. I hear they’re working on rebuilding. We’ll get you back, and then we’ll get her back.’

Spock nodded, still looking at the picture, and Scott was not entirely sure that he had listened to his words. It was all a half-truth anyway. They were rebuilding the Enterprise and Spock was on his way to returning to the man they had known, but it was likely that none of that core of crew would be on the ship when she was complete. Perhaps they would all be in a prison facility, and Spock would still be here, searching for the memories that made a man himself. Perhaps someone else would be seated in that captain’s chair, someone else bending over the library computer, someone else down in the engine room cajoling those wee bairns to keep on purring.

‘I should go, Mr Spock,’ he said abruptly. ‘They told me not to spend too long.’

Spock looked up very briefly, but he returned his attention to the picture of the Enterprise, his forehead slightly furrowed and his eyes intense. When Scott walked out of the room he was still standing there, looking at the image as if looking at it could bring it to life, and make every fragile memory come home.

Sulu

The air up here was so thin that it left him gasping. Sulu had done his share of high-altitude hiking on Earth, but Earth had nothing on this. At base camp on Everest the air was raw and sparse, but it was also chilly. Here the temperature was already pushing towards forty degrees Celsius, and the sun was barely over the horizon. The tri-ox in his bloodstream made the most of every atom of oxygen in the air, but still he felt as if he were suffocating in a dry heat sauna.

He paused with his hands on his hips, pulling in air. He had declined to take the shuttle ride up to the top, thinking it would be fun to try the climb in the cool of dawn. Fun was an exaggeration, but he had made it to the plateau where Gol was situated, and there was a sense of achievement in that.

He looked about, wondering where he would go to find Spock. There were no helpful signs pointing him to reception. There were just winding stone paths and occasional steps carved into the rock, and what looked like far off entrances into the side of the mountain itself. The chambers of Gol, he knew, were largely excavated from the hillside rather than built outside in the hot air.

But then he saw a figure on the edge of the plateau, hooded and robed and standing against the light of the rising sun. It could be any number of Vulcans, but he had seen that frame and that stance so many times over the years, standing on the upper level of the bridge speaking to the captain or taking stock of the surroundings on a landing party or preparing to tell a subordinate officer exactly why their work was not up to standard. That was Spock. He knew it was Spock.

He lengthened his stride to cover the ground more quickly. Somehow he did not feel able to call out his name. It was so quiet here that to shout across that distance would be sacrilegious. The only sounds were wind scudding sand on stone, the occasional call of a creature that Sulu had no name for, and the sudden sharp crack as rocks heated up another degree after the relative chill of night.

‘Mr Spock,’ he said as he got closer to the white-robed figure.

Spock was standing so close to the edge of the plateau that he could have been preparing to make a base jump, although that exhilarating sport would be very unwise on a planet with as thin an atmosphere as Vulcan. The land dropped away just four feet in front of him in an almost sheer cliff to the flat plain below. On the other side of the vast gap mountains rose again, the sun making them burn like ragged sheets of copper against the horizon.

At Sulu’s voice the Vulcan turned. He stared at the human for a moment with a slight puzzlement in his eyes, as if he were looking back into banks of memory and fitting the face to a name. Then he said with a hint of query in his voice, ‘Commander Sulu.’

Sulu allowed a grin to spread over his face. Chekov had told him that Spock had repeatedly referred to him as Ensign, but he had apparently remembered Sulu’s rank flawlessly.

‘Yes, Mr Spock,’ he said.

He had dithered for too long about visiting the Vulcan. He remembered going to bust McCoy out of that mental hospital he had been incarcerated in when he had Spock’s Katra jostling inside his head. He had hated the place. He had been expecting something of the same here; but it was not the same. It was just Spock and him, and the heat and the rocks around them. Spock was not mad. He was just – lost.

‘Commander, I hope you have familiarised yourself fully with the schematics of the Klingon ship prior to our return to Earth,’ Spock said, surprising Sulu with his directness.

‘Er – yes, sir, I have,’ he said. He had not realised that Spock had even known about their intentions to take the bird of prey to Earth.

‘That is good,’ Spock said.

‘Our return?’ Sulu asked tentatively.

Spock did not reply. Instead he turned to look back at the sun, which had gathered itself up and was spreading its force along the edge of the mountains in a shimmering, molten ball. Spock could gaze straight at that brightness without flinching. It was less vibrant than Sol, but still Sulu could not look at it without squinting his eyes into narrow lines.

A frown furrowed the Vulcan’s forehead as he said, ‘I am told that a great many of my – friends – were instrumental in recovering my body from the Genesis planet,’ he said. ‘Yourself, Mr Chekov, Ms Uhura, Jim, of course, and Dr McCoy – have all risked your future freedom in order to bring my corpse back to Vulcan. You had no hope of finding my body alive.’

‘Er – well, that’s true, sir,’ Sulu said rather awkwardly.

‘Why would you do this?’ Spock asked, his forehead still creased with confusion.

‘Because – ’ Sulu drew in another breath of thin air, feeling that it was important to choose his words very carefully. ‘Because as a colleague – as a friend – you inspired such respect and loyalty that it was important to be sure that we did what was right for your family. We thought that burial in space was sufficient, but it was – very important to your parents that you were brought home.’

‘You did this for my father?’ Spock asked, an eyebrow rising above a questioning gaze.

‘We did this for everyone who cared,’ Sulu said.

‘Admiral Kirk lost his son,’ Spock said.

He returned his eyes to the sun, which had separated from the horizon and was hovering as a pure disc of light, barely shimmering now in the thin, dry air. The stars that had just been making themselves visible at the upper limits of the sky were starting to vanish behind the red of the atmosphere. The colour reminded Sulu of human blood.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sulu said soberly. ‘He – didn’t expect to lose his son.’

‘But he has said to me that he regained a brother.’

‘Yes,’ Sulu said.

He had seen the piercing pain that had made the admiral look a little older, a little more hollow inside, but the joy at the return of Spock had brought him back to life. If they had returned only with Spock’s dead body, and David’s alongside it, he was not sure what the admiral would have done. Perhaps he would even have left the ’fleet. Kirk’s future in Starfleet was still not assured, of course, but if he was forced out it would not be the Admiral’s choice.

Being forced out would not be Sulu’s choice either. He had gone for Spock’s body knowing full well that this might be the end of his career, that he might be spending a considerable amount of time being ‘rehabilitated’ in a Federation jail. They had all known that, but as he had said to Spock, it had been so important to honour their friend as he should be that they had risked everything to get him back.

A great feeling of emotion welled up in his chest, and he swallowed hard. Spock looked at him sharply, as if he had sensed the suddenly eruption of feeling in the man beside him. Sulu stared at the sun and hoped that its brightness would excuse any moisture in his eyes.

‘I think – that we have come to the end of this particular journey,’ Spock said. ‘It is time for another.’

Sulu stared at the Vulcan, but he did not explain his words. He merely folded his hands into the sleeves of his robe and turned and moved away down the sun-lit path, golden light edging his raised hood and the set of his shoulders and the backs of his heels as he walked. On the plain far below Sulu could see the dark shape of the Klingon bird of prey, waiting to make its next flight.

Star Trek Rambling

Sunday, 28 September 2014

Fan Fiction: Moments At Gol