Work Text:
What is the universal constant of a photon in regards to quantum mechanics?
Six point six two six times ten to the negative thirty-fourth power joule-seconds.
What speed must a starship exceed to achieve warp drive?
Two hundred ninety-nine million, seven hundred ninety-two thousand, four hundred fifty-eight meters per second.
What is Darwin’s theory of evolution?
Populations evolve over time through natural selection, a process which prioritizes biological traits that maximize species’ rates of survival.
What is color?
The visual perception of light wavelengths when reflected from a surface.
What is beauty?
A combination of properties which pleases the aesthetic sense.
Is color beautiful?
It is dependent upon an individual’s particular tastes.
Is light beautiful?
Clarify.
Clarify.
End program.
The man named Jim has been watching me.
I have not yet determined the best way to ask him why; my knowledge of social conventions is somewhat slower to return to me. Yet he is always there—staring a moment longer when we catch each other in my parents’ residence, always heading in two different directions. He speaks differently to me than he speaks with the others, more disjointed and uncomfortable. As is true of most things, I wish to know why.
I attend my accelerated classes and training for twelve hours per day, with periodic breaks for meals and meditation. I fill my time with little else, particularly in the beginning, when my mind feels more like a blank tablet than a half-finished map of a foreign man. As the ancients once carved their logs into clay, I too split the slurry with mental exercises, rewriting the knowledge that, once reminded, falls into place quite easily. The difficulty lies in knowing which things must be prompted, but the software I have been given is efficient, and knows via algorithm which topics I am lacking in knowledge of as I practice.
The complications are found primarily in the things between knowledge, however, nestled between equations and difficult mathematics and sciences. Perhaps the largest area in which I find myself lost is wherever I find Jim is meant to be, murky beneath the surface of an iced-over pond.
(It is curious that I have the instinct to describe an icy pond at all, considering that any of my homes has never had temperatures low enough to induce surface freezing upon any of their waters’ surfaces. One more curiosity to tuck away in my mind with the other mysteries which Jim might be willing to answer, should I be brave enough inclined to ask.)
I suspect Jim feels uncertain, as all his companions do, when he is forced to interact with me. They each do not know how best to approach me, in the same way I don’t know how best to approach them. For this reason, I spend the vast majority of my first three weeks on Vulcan apart from them.
As I near the end of those three weeks, I have a rather unusual encounter with Jim. I am preparing spice tea before my second meditation session when he appears in the kitchen, claiming to be on the hunt for a “snack.” While the favinit leaves seep in my teacup, Jim takes one of the fruits from the counter, turns to leave, hesitates, and settles on leaning against the counter beside me. He looks at me with a sad fondness that lays bare emotions that I don’t find easy to understand or empathize with.
(I am not sure if this is a deficiency of my missing memories, or a part of me that is true to form. I have begun to suspect, by the way my emotions are tiptoed around by my compatriots, that historically, it is the latter.)
“How are you feeling?” Jim asks, his voice subdued, soft, hushed to an almost whisper, and unfathomably warm. Though it feels a little like being spoken to like a hurt child, I suppose I am in many ways like one now, so I forgive the misstep.
“I am functioning adequately,” I tell him.
He huffs a laugh through his nose—a joke, I realize, though I don’t know the joke despite having told it. My first instinct is to ask for clarification as I do with the learning program when it gives me a question I am uncertain how to answer, but I refrain for the purpose of polite conversation. “Sorry,” he says, smiling warmly down at the ameelah fruit in his hand, “it’s just that—you’ve told me that so many times.” He looks up, and a bit of that sadness dampens his smile. “I’m not sure if you remember that.”
“I do not,” I answer honestly. Jim’s eyes cloud over, the smile becoming more of a grimace as he focuses on eating instead. I watch his fingers as they peel, their slow, methodical tearing and pulling exposing the meat of the fruit. He leaves the peel on the end of the ameelah fruit and brings it to his mouth, eating it half-opened, half-intact. 'What a fascinating way to eat a fruit,’ I think to myself. I have only known the Vulcan way (or at least the way of my family), which is to cut the peel with a sharpened knife and eat with utensils, as its insides are rather mushy. The peel would indeed save the hands from the mess.
I recall that this behavior has been largely inherited from primates on Earth. The learning program had reminded me of evolution not long before this conversation. I am taken back to its particularly unusual line of questioning, where it seemed to devolve into more and more subjective questions. I was puzzled at the time, but Jim smiles at me while he chews on the ameelah fruit and rambles about what he and his crew have been up to lately, and his eyes are a brilliantly unusual hazel color, and I consider if color is indeed capable of being inherently beautiful.
His colors, at the very least, are beautiful. He glows in the overhead sunlight during the day and the candles at night. His eyes are distinct, dewy and begging me to remember him. And I find I am often profoundly sorry, as my memories of him have taken the longest to return. They still hide, but I find the longer that I stare into his peculiar eyes, the closer they come to the surface of the icy pond.
I am not sure when I will break through the ice, but the thought of waiting any longer has me determined to try by any means to return to him, as he knew me before. He excuses himself from the kitchen, and I take a sip of my tea. It’s gone a bit cold.
Ever since the Fal-tor-pan reunited my katra with my body, I have experienced a recurring dream. In it, darkness encroaches on me from all directions, but in the distance, there is a warm light like the illuminated mouth of a cave in a mountainside. There is a holiness to the dream that I naturally attribute to Mount Seleya, which aligns with the dreams having started just as I recovered that first night after my body and mind were joined. The humming of my spiritual connection to Vulcan’s ancient gods, vibrations of love and hushed whispers, pulses in my side with my heartbeat with every footstep toward the light.
Though I feel the warmth of the oncoming sun and the sounds intensify, I never reach the exit of the cave by the end of the dream. When I wake, it is to sunlit silence in my bedroom, the darkness having left me entirely, as has a certain familiarity I don’t yet understand.
I know enough about my personal relationships to know better than to ask my father for his impression of these dreams, and there are few others I would feel comfortable asking; nonetheless, my often unquenchable thirst for knowledge leads me to analyze this dream most days while I meditate between classes. In moments where I am alone, I long to recede into that warm place, the humming sound of my katra’s connection to its ancestors a welcome change from the silence outside of it. What does it reach for that wakefulness cannot find?
Though I study it extensively, a month passes before I am any closer to understanding it.
I have begun to study Terran literature with Jim.
It is a less efficient form of education than the learning programs, but even I can tell that there are large thoughts in Jim’s mind that are racing to burst out of him at almost all times, and literature is one topic which he is always willing to discuss. The learning program is also attuned more closely to the Vulcan knowledge banks, and if I am to return to a crew that is majority Human, I find it important to immerse myself in their own rich cultures. I have thus learned much from my mother as well, who has also offered to teach me the values and customs of the Human part of my ancestry separately from the computers.
One quiet evening after my studies with the learning program concluded, my mother had swept into the drawing room in her gauze robes and handed me a large, weathered book. She informed me that it was a ‘humash,’ a bound version of the primary religious text that her family adhered to in her youth. She explained that soon, it would be time for Hanukkah, a lasting Jewish tradition and holy period. Much like the other languages that I am knowingly literate in, the ability to read the text came naturally to me, but the details required separate stimulation to remember.
She was methodical in her teachings, taking care to explain the meaning of each aspect of her religious observations. Of everything that she taught me, however, the most fascinating thing was when she turned to me halfway through explaining the candles on the menorah before lighting it, and said, “But of course, you needn’t practice if you so choose.”
I was puzzled by this. Why take the time to teach if the practice is not intended to be later replicated by the student? To which she smiled and said, “You are my son, but you are also a new man. Your choice remains your own. As in all things a parent teaches their child, what you choose to do with that knowledge is up to you.”
Jim was invited to the lighting. I realized very quickly that he is familiar with the religion. I observed silently as he and my mother completed their rituals, content to spectate rather than participate. I have decided that I will consider my options when the time comes for the next Hanukkah, and Jim will assist should I choose to accept it.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Jim said, his eyes crinkling partly shut with the force of his grin. “Thank you, Spock.”
I don’t yet understand why he thanked me, but I nodded in acceptance nonetheless. This seemed to please him. The night was quiet, and kind.
Today,
my training software taught me,
“What is the grass?”
A recurring motif;
the significance
of repetition
as it pertains to literature.
Walt Whitman spent much time
deliberating over this question—
the grass:
the ‘hair of graves,’
the ‘journeywork of the stars,’
a man who lived before human boots
touched Earth’s moon,
who believed that the grass
was the beginning and end of life;
a return to the dirt in death;
a growth cycle which repeats indefinitely.
I can find this idea
fascinating
and dreadful,
as a being who has known both death and life;
as myself who must reckon with
his place in the dirt and the stars;
a man who was reborn in a casket;
an extant candleflame; a light.
In a departure from what has become typical, five weeks after beginning my training, I wake not to sunlight streaming into my bedroom, but to total darkness. I blink to acclimate to my surroundings, and though I’ve only slept three point seven hours, I am decisively awake. I sit up in bed, swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress to press to the floor. There is no moon on Vulcan, so I am puzzled by the faint powder blue light that appears to be streaming into my bedroom. It spills over my feet, casting long marine shadows into the floorboards. I stand to investigate and pull my robe over my shoulders to keep out the chill.
The memories of this home have largely returned to me, and so I am familiar with what parts of the floor I must avoid in order to prevent errant sounds from echoing through the sleeping house. I pad gently through the hall toward the back gardens, which is where the light seems to come from.
I find the culprit before he notices me; Jim is seated atop the thick stone fence, looking pensively up at the brilliant sky. The light outside of the house is lit halfway, just enough to illuminate the grounds for safe passage. He sits in total silence and solitude, fiddling with something in his hands. A tugging sensation pulls at my side, as though a rope has constricted my heart and tried to lasso it forward. I heed my body’s strange request and enter.
Jim startles when the glass patio door slides open, but he smiles when he notices me. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asks. “Me neither.” There are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that make the liquid gold of his irises sweeter. This thought startles me, too, but I don’t acknowledge it.
Jim sighs. “Come here, Spock,” he says, a little defeated. When I hesitate, a firmness enters his expression that was not there before, which it seems my body is helpless to reject. I sweep around to the other side of the fence and sit beside him. I naturally come very close to touching his thigh when I do so—sitting much closer than I would to any other colleague. Curious.
I pull my robe tighter around my body and stare up into the same starfield above. I wait for him to speak, because I can tell that as usual, he has much to say to me. “I’ve traveled up there so much over the years,” Jim says quietly, “and I loved it. Still love it. I hate to feel the damned Earth beneath my feet at the end of my work day.”
Jim’s eyes finally tear away from the sky, and he looks intently at me, instead. “Something tells me, when this is all said and done, when you’re better and we’ve returned to Starfleet, I’ll never set foot in the stars again.”
A distance forms between us, far greater than the physical distance between us now. I understand what he is trying to tell me, but for some reason, I want to hear him say it anyway. The enormity of the questions that have hung over my head finally escapes the tip of my tongue. “And yet you took this risk, knowing that you may never leave that Earth again,” I tell him. I turn to fully face him and my heart lurches again, lunging for him as I twist my torso in his direction. “You believed the risk was worth the reward.”
“I did,” Jim says. Somehow, admitting this means that he can no longer look me in the eye. His gaze drops down to the flower that he is absently stroking in his hands, his fingertips smoothing down its delicate purple petals. He pauses in those ministrations when he realizes I am watching, and then he extends the flower to me. “But that isn’t all of it,” he says.
“I don’t understand,” I admit, though I take the flower from his hands. I touch the same petals his fingers have touched, admiring their softness and soaking the warmth of his skin from them. “I have never known you to love any one thing more than you loved your work on the Enterprise.” Though my memories of Jim have struggled to surface, I know this one thing very clearly.
Then Jim smiles at me. He tilts his head, and the blue lights from the side of the house cut crescents into the curls of his hair, moons for the moonless planet—light under cover. “You’re almost there,” he says warmly, inviting me to think.
At first, I am frustrated that he won’t simply tell me the truth—but I understand why he allows me to put together the pieces of this reality myself as soon as they click into place.
“You loved me,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he whispers back.“Yes, Spock.”
Slack-jawed, I look up from the flower in my hands and find the warm honey he drizzles in his tea in his eyes. I know that he puts the honey in his tea because I have prepared it for him more times than I can count, in the slow mornings that came after we confessed our love for each other.
The icy pond does not crack—it fractures, collapsing in a spiderweb of fissures that evaporate in the face of the blinding, white hot adoration that floods out from behind it. I gasp, dropping the flower and instinctively gripping my side as a golden fountain bursts from my heart, streaming into the cave mouth that represents—
“T’hy’la—Jim—”
I shudder through a sob as Jim takes my face and settles it into the crook of his neck. I grip his shirt with both fists on either side of his waist as a love unlike anything I’ve ever known overflows between our souls, our marriage bond roaring back to life like a raging waterfall. Jim comforts me through the breakdown of my unexpected emotional breakthrough.
“You have waited so long,” I say, attempting not to gasp between words with the heaving of my labored breaths. I pull away from Jim’s comforting hold, begging for truth in his face. “Why, t’hy’la? Why have you not told me sooner?”
“I wasn’t sure if it needed to come to you naturally,” he says, and I don’t accept this answer at all, but for the moment, I do not object. He shrugs, feigning indifference, but I know the truth and I know his heart, and I can feel his pain in my side as though it was my own. “I knew you would come back to me.”
“And if it took years? Jim, years,” I say, moaning though I wish to wail at the thought. “You surely would not have waited so long.”
“I would have waited as long as it took,” he says softly.
“It took far too long the first time,” I say bitterly into his collar.
He laughs. “You might be right about that.”
We stay awake until the sun begins to rise. Much like the knowledge banks that I practice with, reminders of our past bring my memories of him closer the more we speak of them. We discuss our morning routines, the highs and lows of our relationship over the years, and our many wants and regrets. We’re giddy with the promise of new life.
My mother correctly guesses that I have remembered our relationship the moment she lays eyes on us at breakfast. “Mother’s intuition,” she explains when questioned, as though this qualifies her to know anything and everything to do with her sons.
(“She’s right, you know,” Jim says when I question it.)
Sarek addresses it once. Not long before it’s time for us to return to Earth to face the repercussions of our actions, he asks me if there are any pressing things that I wish to know.
I reflect on this question for a moment, considering what things I have not yet acknowledged but that feel empty in my mind. Nearly all of my pre-existing scholarly knowledge has returned to me, but the more emotional facets of my mind have still taken their time to develop. I finally ask him, “When you arrived on the Enterprise for the Babel conference and you were introduced to Jim, did you understand him to be who he is to me now?”
Sarek lifts his chin, assessing the question seriously. “I understood that what you would come to be was imminent,” he says carefully. “Captain Kirk would sacrifice everything to return you to this universe, as he has so demonstrated. It demands the respect of any father to accept this resolve in his son’s mate.”
I accept this answer with a nod, and we do not speak of it again.
I feel the icy pond—
a call to my heart.
The caress of our bond
steeps there;
the sweet tea of your youth—the spiced tea of mine—
a warmth in chest and abdomen.
The training program
prepared me for the moment our ship
left Vulcan, a homecoming and farewell;
It taught me facts,
but it did not teach me:
the softness of your shoulder in the morning
the color of your iris like the swaying cattails
that dotted the lake behind your childhood home;
the waves of your affection over breakfast
the salve of your katra with mine—entangled—
intertwined.
As I should have perhaps anticipated, our homecoming is not an easy one; however, only a small number of events are concretely embedded in my memories.
I speak and swim with whales; then, with Jim—and I am whole; I am finally one.