Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (27 page)

“I think you’ve drunk too much, Bones,” he said.

“Me?” McCoy said. “I haven’t had
nearly
enough.”

Kirk tried to restrain his anger at McCoy’s juvenile behavior. “Why don’t you get some sleep? You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“I’ll feel awful in the morning, Jim-boy. And the morning after that, and—”

“You’ll feel worse if you have to deal with a hangover
and
the results of a big mouth.”

McCoy frowned at him blearily, obviously not understanding. Kirk felt a twinge of unease. McCoy generally made sense, even when he had had a few too many. In fact, his usual reaction to tipsiness was to become more direct and pithier. Kirk glanced around, seeking Chris Chapel. He hoped that between them they might get McCoy either sobered up or asleep. Chapel was nowhere to be seen. He could hardly blame her for avoiding the wake. He wished he were somewhere else himself. He had come only because McCoy insisted. Jim supposed Chris had decided that the hard time McCoy and Scotty would give her for absenting herself would be less unpleasant than attending. Jim suspected she was right.

“Come on, Bones,” he said. Back in sick bay, the doctor might be persuaded to prescribe himself a hangover remedy and go to bed.

“Not going anywhere,” McCoy said. He shrugged his arm from Kirk’s grasp. “Going over there.” He walked slowly and carefully to an armchair and settled into it as if he planned to remain till dawn. Getting him to his cabin now would create a major scene. On the other hand, McCoy no longer looked in the mood to make proclamations. Jim sighed and left him where he was.

Jim wandered over to Carol. She was alone, surrounded by shadows. They had barely had time to talk since meeting again. Jim was not altogether sure she wanted to talk to him. He did want to talk to her, though, about her life since they last had seen each other, twenty years ago. But mostly he wanted to talk to her about David. Jim was getting used to the idea of having a grown son. He was beginning to like the idea of coming to know the young man.

“Hi, Carol,” he said.

“Jim.”

Her voice was calm and controlled. He remembered that she had always been able to drink everybody under the table and never even show it.

“I was thinking about Spacelab,” she said. “And the people I left behind. Especially—”

“You did fantastic work there, you and David.”

“It wasn’t just us, it was the whole team. I never worked with such an incredible group before. We got intoxicated on each other’s ideas. I could guide it, but Vance was the catalyst. He was extraordinary—”

“Spock spoke highly of them all,” Jim said. It surprised him, to be able to say his friend’s name so easily.

“Vance was the only one who could keep his partner from going off the deep end. He had a sort of inner stillness and calm that—”

“They were the ones who designed computer games on the side? A couple of the cadets were talking about them.”

“…that affected us all.”

“David and our Lieutenant Saavik seem to be hitting it off pretty well,” Jim said. David and Saavik stood together on the other side of the recreation hall, talking quietly.

“I suppose so,” Carol said without expression.

“She has a lot of promise—Spock had great confidence in her.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I had to meet David—and you and I had to meet again—in such unhappy circumstances,” he said

The look in her eyes was cold and bitter and full of pain.

“That’s one way to put it,” she said

“Carol—”

“I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly. She stood up and strode out of the recreation room.

Jim followed her. “I’ll walk you to your cabin,” he said. He took her silence for acquiescence.

With some curiosity, Saavik watched Admiral Kirk and Doctor Marcus leave together. Of course she knew that they had been intimate many years before. She wondered if they intended to resume their relationship. She had observed the customs of younger humans, students, while she was in the Academy, however, and she now noted the absence of any indication of strong attraction between Marcus and Kirk. Perhaps older humans observed different customs, or perhaps these individuals were simply shy. Mister Spock had told her that she must learn to understand human beings. As a project for her continuing education in their comprehension, she resolved to study the admiral and the doctor closely and see what transpired.

After Doctor Marcus and the admiral left the recreation hall, Saavik returned her attention to the gathering as a whole. She wondered if there was something in particular she was supposed to do. Keeping her own customs after the deaths of Mister Spock and Peter Preston, she had watched over their bodies the night before Mister Spock’s funeral. Only yesterday morning she stood with the rest of the ship’s company and sent his coffin accelerating toward the Genesis planet. She wished she could have sent young Peter’s body into space, too. He had loved the stars, and Saavik believed it would have pleased him to become star-stuff. But his body was the responsibility of Chief Engineer Scott, who had decreed he must be taken back to Earth and buried in the family plot.

Everyone assumed Captain Spock’s casket would burn up in the outer atmosphere of the Genesis world. So Admiral Kirk had intended. But Saavik had disobeyed his order. Instead, she programmed a course that intersected the last fading resonance of the Genesis effect. When the coffin encountered the edge of the wave, matter had exploded into energy. Within the wave, the energy that had been Spock’s body coalesced into sub-quarkian particles, thence, in almost immeasurable fractions of a second, to normal atomic matter. He was now a part of that distant world. He was gone. She would never see him again.

She wondered how long she would be affected by the persistent, illogical certainty that he remained nearby.

“David,” she said suddenly, “what is the purpose of this gathering?”

David hesitated, wondering if he understood it well enough to explain it to anyone else. “It’s a tradition,” he said. “It’s like Doctor McCoy said a while ago, it’s to celebrate the lives of people who have died.”

“Would it not make more sense to celebrate while a person is still living?”

“How would you know when to have the celebration?”

“You would have it whenever you liked. Then no death would be necessary. The person being celebrated could attend the party, and no one would have to feel sad.”

David wondered if she was pulling his leg. He decided that was an unworthy suspicion. Besides, he could see her point.

“The thing is,” he said, “the funeral yesterday, and the wake today…they aren’t really for the people who died.”

“I do not understand.”

“They’re for the people who are left behind. People—humans, I mean—need to express their feelings. Otherwise we bottle them up inside and they make us sick.”

This sounded like the purest hocus-pocus to Saavik, who had spent half her life learning to control her emotions.

“You mean,” she said, “this procedure is meant to make people feel better?”

“That’s right.”

“Then why does everyone look so unhappy?”

David could not help it. He laughed.

The door to Carol’s cabin sensed her and slid open. She stopped. Jim stopped. Carol said nothing. Jim tried to decide on exactly the right words.

“Carol—”

“Good night Jim.”

“But—”

“Leave me alone!” she said. The evenness of her voice dissolved in anger.

“I thought…”

“What? That you could come along after twenty years and pick up again right where you left off?”

“I was thinking more in terms of ‘we.’ ”

“Oh, that’s cute—there never was any ‘we’!”

“There’s David.”

“Do you think you’re so great in bed that no woman would ever want another man after you? Do you think I’ve spent all these years just waiting for you to come back?”

“No, of course not. But—” He stopped. That she might be involved with someone else simply had not occurred to him, and he was embarrassed to admit it. “Of course I didn’t mean that,” he said. “But we were good together, once, and we’re both alone—”

“Alone!” Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“Carol, I don’t understand.”

“Vance Madison and I were lovers!”

“I didn’t realize,” he said lamely.

“You would have, if you’d listened. I’ve been trying to talk about him. I just wanted to talk about him to somebody. Even to you. I want people to remember what he was like. He deserves to be remembered. I dream about him—I dream about the way he died—”

Jim took a step backward, retreating from the fury and accusation in her voice. His old enemy, Khan Noonien Singh, had murdered all the members of the Genesis team except Carol and David. The people he captured refused to give him the information he demanded, so he killed them. He opened a vein in Madison’s throat and let him slowly bleed to death.

Carol flung herself into her cabin. The door slid shut behind her, cutting Jim Kirk off, all alone, in the passageway outside.

David finally stopped laughing. He wiped his eyes. Saavik hoped he would explain to her what he found so funny.

She watched him intently. He looked up. Their gazes met.

He glanced quickly away, then back again.

David’s eyes were a clear, intense blue.

She reached toward him, realized what she was doing, and froze. David touched her before she could draw away.

“What is it?” he said. He wrapped his fingers around her hand in an easy grip.

He could not hold her hand without her acquiescence, for she could crush his bones with a single clenching of her fist. This she had no intention of doing.

“For many years,” Saavik said, “I have tried to be Vulcan.”

“I know.”

David was one of the few people with whom she had ever discussed her background. Though she had learned to control her strongest emotions most of the time, she never pretended to herself that they were nonexistent.

“But I am not all Vulcan, and I will never be,” she said, “any more than Mister Spock. He said to me…” She paused, uncertain how David would react.

“He said I was unique, and that I must find my own path.”

“Good advice for anybody,” David said.

Saavik drew her hand from David’s grasp and picked up his drink. She barely tasted it. The raw, imaged alcohol slid fiery across her tongue, and the potent fumes seemed to go straight to her brain. She put down the glass. David watched her curiously.

“David,” she said hesitantly, “I am under the impression that you have positive feelings toward me. Is that true?”

“It’s very true,” he said.

“Will you help me find my path?”

“If I can.”

“Will you come to my cabin with me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

“Now?”

In reply, he put his hand in hers again, and they walked together from the recreation hall.

Jim Kirk strode down the corridor, upset, angry, embarrassed.

He nearly ran into his son and Lieutenant Saavik.

“Oh—Hi, kids.” He collected himself quickly. Long years of experience had made him an expert at hiding distress from subordinates.

“Uh…hi,” David said. Saavik said nothing; she simply gazed at him with her cool imperturbability.

“Got to be too much for you in there?” Kirk said, nodding toward the rec hall behind them. “I never should have let McCoy and Scott have their way about it.”

They looked at him without replying. After a long hesitation, Saavik finally spoke.

“Indeed,” she said, “it is not a ceremony Captain Spock would have approved. It is neither logical nor rational.”

Kirk flinched at the echoes of Spock’s voice in Saavik’s words. He had known Spock longer than she had, but she had spent more time working with the Vulcan in the past few years, when Kirk was tied to a desk by an unbreakable chain of paperwork.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “But funerals and wakes aren’t for the person who is dead, they’re for the people left behind.”

“It is interesting,” Saavik said, “that David said precisely the same thing. I fail, however, to grasp this explanation.”

“It isn’t easily explained,” Kirk said. “And I can understand why you wouldn’t think of Spock in relation to a gathering where everybody was doing their best to get drunk. I was going to go to the observation deck, instead. Have either of you been up there? David, surely you haven’t had a chance to see it. Would you like to come along?”

“I am familiar with the observation deck,” Saavik said.

“I’d sure like to see it,” David said, “any other time. But Lieutenant Saavik wanted to check some readings on the bridge.”

Kirk glanced from David, to Saavik, and back. Saavik started to say something, but stopped. A blush colored David’s transparently fair complexion. Kirk realized that he had put his foot in his mouth for the second time in ten minutes. He, too, began to blush.