Work Text:
Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom
to kingdom through the wilderness,
where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices.
(Richard Siken, "Driving, Not Washing")
(2286)
He remembers a door. He remembers walking through it.
Then nothing. Then void.
To study spacetime is to accept that while you might be governed by logic, the unerring pattern of this-therefore-that, the universe—vast, impossible, undeniable, still unsolved—is not necessarily so beholden. Or at least not in ways that you can comprehend.
General relativity suggests that all information is destroyed in a black hole. Quantum mechanics dictates that quantum information cannot be destroyed. Physics has not yet unified these two theories nor disproven either of them. Both, as of yet, are accurate, coherent within their own internal logics. Therefore enigma. Therefore paradox.
Spock does not remember this but relearns it from the computer in the early days after his fal-tor-pan. His father had not wanted him to have a computer, but Spock had insisted. He promised to be discerning. Promised not to overload his newly-reconstructed mind with a tsunami of information, too much too soon.
His father (Sarek, his name is Sarek) had relented at last when Spock’s captain interceded on Spock’s behalf.
“He’ll be careful,” his captain (Jim) said. “Isn’t he always?”
Everyone had seemed to agree on that point. Spock, the subject in question, does not know whether he (or rather the self that had formerly been him and may once again be) was characteristically careful, historically prudent. He is not entirely certain that he will be now. But he accepts the computer with gratitude.
Though his memory is in pieces, he feels no impulse to search the computer about himself. Does not scour it for the abstract data of who he once was from Starfleet and Vulcan government records. Instead he studies fal-tor-pan. When he is not (re)learning astrophysics he allows himself to read the historical records of the ritual, all of which have been made accessible to him. He does so slowly. He can remember nothing of his own fal-tor-pan, the passage from self to nonentity to self again.
He does this research alone, in a small hut on the southern slope of Mt. Seleya. Legend describes a customary period of isolation following the successful completion of fal-tor-pan. The length of time is not prescribed. It apparently varies case by case. So the records say. Days, weeks—even years, depending on the degree of trauma attributed either to the katra’s severing from the body and/or its rejoining to it.
“You’re home now.” His mother said this. Amanda with her arms around him, shortly after fal-tor-pan.
But Spock has not returned home. This world is a place where he has never been.
One night he dreams. In the dream someone stands before him with their hands on his collar. They are adjusting it, making proper the angles. Spock stands still and tall, his hands clasped behind his back. He looks past the person fixing him, over their shoulder, with the intensity of someone trying very hard not to look elsewhere.
McCoy’s fingers brush against Spock’s throat. “You nervous?”
“Of course not.”
McCoy smiles. He finishes with Spock’s collar and lets his hands slide over the top of Spock’s shoulders, down his upper arms. He does not let go. “Silly me, asking.”
Spock turns his gaze to him at last. The corner of his mouth twitches upwards against his better impulse. “Indeed.”
McCoy pulls Spock in close and kisses him. At first Spock, dreaming yet cognizant of the dream, does not recognize what it is, this action, this gesture of affection. Then the word suddenly returns to him, ensnarled in murky connotations that he cannot yet parse. To kiss: that is, to hold close, to possess, to surrender to.
“Good luck today,” McCoy says against the corner of Spock’s mouth. Spock can feel him smiling. “Captain.”
“Thank you,” says Spock. “Though I hardly see how overseeing the training of a cadet crew requires luck.”
“Mm.” McCoy kisses him again, then steps back. “You’ll find out. They’re all going to want to impress you. My God, they’re gonna be desperate for your approval.” He smiles wryly. “Poor things.”
Spock touches their hands together. “I do not want to unduly burden them with my expectations.”
“You won’t." McCoy interlces their fingers. " They’ll love you, that’s what I mean. Try not to hold it against them.”
Something jumps the brief telepathic connection between them. Love, Spock thinks—he’s just said it.
“I shall endeavor to do my best." Spock twists McCoy’s hand in his, enumerating his knuckles with his thumb.
He wakes then, tangled in the thin sheets. He sits up and puts his head in his hands, just for a moment. Not a dream, he thinks. Vulcans do not dream. (Do half-Vulcans? Does he?) A memory. A moment that happened, not the random meanderings of REM subconscious thought.
He dresses and goes out to sit on the mountainside and watch Vulcan’s primary come up over the horizon, thin and distant. Even in the early morning chill the orange sun scorches the earth.
(2271)
Kolinahr is the only argument that neither of them can let go of and that both of them cannot resolve.
“So I’ll never see you again,” McCoy says. Taking it personally, taking it literally, taking it too far. “That’s what you’re saying except you won’t actually say it.” He changes tack abruptly. “Are you telling me Jim was okay with this?”
Spock tries not to think about the look on Jim’s face when Spock explained kolinahr and its aftermath. Shock-plus-grief. Spock has grown too competent at identifying emotion these past few years. It makes it harder to turn away. “He understood.” In the end.
“Not fucking likely.” McCoy turns around, like he cannot look at Spock. His shoulders slope downwards. He suddenly laughs and rubs his face with his hands. “Couldn’t you just give me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech instead of whatever the hell this is? Jesus.”
Spock does not understand. Then he does. “I do not mean to say that we must separate.”
“No?” McCoy turns back. “You’re just saying you’re going to Vulcan, taking all your feelings, itemizing them, lining them up, neat little emotions all in a row, and then waving goodbye? Pushing them off the metaphorical logic cliff? Where does that leave”—McCoy gestures at the space between the two of them, fumbling for words, not finding them. He is red-faced, flustered: angry, Spock thinks, maybe furious. “I mean, whatever this is, it sure as hell has a whole lot to do with feelings.” He says the word the way that he has always insisted Vulcans say it: bitingly, with malice, even though Spock has tried and tried to explain that this is not so. Feeling is not reviled in Vulcan culture. It is something to be navigated through, navigated beyond.
Spock chooses his words carefully. “Though I will not be the same, and we shall not again be as we are now in this life, still what we have shared these past few years will not change.”
McCoy stares at him, flabbergasted. Speechless. He does not understand, and Spock does not know how to explain.
“The end of something does not mean that it was meaningless.” Spock tries to say it gently. “Nor that we must grieve its passing.”
He had believed that then. McCoy—and Spock's time on the Enterprise, in Starfleet—has changed Spock in ways that he could not even fully quantify. Too numerous to count and too complicated to understand. It was the rapidity and numerosity of those changes that prompted Spock to consider kolinahr. To attempt it before he is unable to, because he will be unable to, eventually, on the continuation of their current path.
“I don’t get a say in this, do I?” McCoy asks.
Spock figures that it must be said. It appears that McCoy needs to hear it. “No.”
McCoy smiles. It makes Spock blink, McCoy’s deep bitterness that Spock does not realize until much later is turned inwards, not out. “Give your mother my condolences when you tell her about this. You are going to tell her, aren’t you?”
Spock has been determining how best to bring it up with her. He has not figured out how yet. McCoy’s derisive astuteness stings. Spock says nothing. He had expected McCoy to be angry but he had also—foolishly, perhaps—expected him to understand. He sees now that he had simply wanted to believe that, as if believing it would somehow make it true. That is unlike him.
McCoy steps closer. His hand hovers at Spock’s wrist, so close that Spock can feel the warmth of him. Then he pulls away. Lets his hand close at his side. He has to look upwards slightly to meet Spock’s gaze, which he does unreservedly, stormily.
It takes all of Spock’s great strength of will not to bend down towards him. To press his mouth to his temple and feel his pulse there. He manages it. He still has time left, then.
“This is what you want?” McCoy searches Spock’s face. He has become quite adept at discerning intent and thought from Spock’s features these past few years. Another indication of kolinahr's urgency.
“My decision has nothing to do with wanting,” says Spock.
McCoy’s expression slides away. He takes a step back. He is still upset, profoundly so, but you would never be able to tell just from looking at him. It is remarkable. “Do it, then. Don’t let me stop you.” Again, absurdly, he smiles. “Apparently I never could.”
Spock writes a letter before he leaves for Vulcan. A final goodbye, a quasi-apology.
Leonard,
Though you do not (cannot, perhaps) understand, and I cannot (perhaps will not?) explain, let me say this. I did not make this choice to harm you, though I knew that it would and that in many ways this was unavoidable. This shall hardly be a comfort to you. What I intended is scarcely relevant to you, the recipient of my action. Yet I thought it still might bear stating, here in writing where I cannot equivocate and you cannot turn away.
Would it surprise you to learn that I, too, do not understand? I must do this. It is what I am meant to do.
I can imagine your rebuttal, your assertion that Vulcan ritual is hardly logical. Yet is there not a logic to the ritualization of the self, of transforming the figurative into something literal? I should have liked to discuss this more with you. I see now that this was selfish.
Do you not see why I must do this?
In the end I must thank you for all that you have given me of yourself. I can only hope that, in my own way, I have returned you in kind.
He allows himself one sentimentality. He signs the letter, merely:
Yours.
Months pass, then years. As McCoy predicted, and as Spock had not wanted to admit, they do not see each other again.
(2273)
Hot dust. The smell of ash. Spock kneels and gravel digs through his thick robes into his skin as the minutes pass. His head is bowed. Ready, waiting, the figurative poised to make the conceptual and metaphysical jump to literal: kolinahr, pure logic embodied.
The ritual shatters. Something shouts across the galaxy. Its desperation leaps across lightyears as easily as a starship cuts through warp space, making a fool of that great universal speed limit, lightspeed. Spock does not know what or who it is but he can hear it, cannot avoid hearing it. He cannot resist turning towards this voice defying spacetime to be heard.
WHAT AM I?
Of all the questions to ask, Spock must allow that it is one of the better ones.
He returns to his dwelling and packs his things. He does not have much. Kolinahr demands the surrender of all earthly attachment. Robes, stark and serviceable. A few padds, mostly empty. He cuts his hair. He shaves. He sweeps up these physical remains of his last three years of training and mental discipline and disposes of them. He sits at his desk and composes a message to his mother, just a few short sentences. Before he sends it he pauses, his hands hovering over the keys. Then he goes to the table and opens the small package there which the day before he had labeled with his mother’s name and appended the directive to be returned to.
Inside is a necklace of human design. Delicate links bear a heavy gold pendant shaped into an intricate, broad-branched tree set with glittering emerald and tsavorite leaves. Spock imagines, though he knows and can feel that it is not true, that the metal is warm to his touch.
He takes the necklace, his mother’s long-ago gift to him upon his Starfleet graduation, out of the box and puts it on. The pendant lies heavy against his skin.
He sends the message. He books transport to the capital and arranges for a shuttlecraft to take him out of orbit. Vulcan fade orange and distant in the rear viewscreen behind him. Spock thinks, for the first time in a long time (but not as long as would be right—as would have permitted kolinahr), of void. Of absence.
Whether or not the void should be possible is rendered obsolete by the undeniability of its existence. Like the speculation of the black hole centuries ago, this theoretical possibility (a gravitational singularity where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite) can only be observed through its absence (blackness, a hole in spacetime, which in consuming light- or radiation-emitting matter elsewhere can imply its existence. Which is to say: if the matter the black hole eats is also dark, inert, then there will be no determinable evidence of the consumption at all).
There are some Vulcan astrophysicists, pedantic, ostensibly logic-seeking, who still refuse to say that the black hole is a proven astrophysical phenomenon. Black holes have not been themselves detected: merely their theorized effects. Only their impact on the rest of the universe has been observed. They remain alleged, unseen, still a matter of technical debate.
Spock, who in several decades’ time will fall through such a gravitational singularity (a black hole plus spacetime rupture resulting in a conduit, meaning wormhole, meaning proof, meaning QED) into a universe next to but not his own, is not one of those theorists. It is illogical to state that a thing which by its nature cannot be detected with the equipment and knowledge you currently possess therefore does not exist because you have not detected it yet. It is an act of circular reasoning, a fallacy presuming that all the knowledge needed to perform scientific evaluation is already known. The laws of physics not only allow for the existence of such an impossible celestial object—they demand it.
The void which Spock now contemplates is not a black hole, not an astrophysical inevitability of a universe whose spacetime is curved. It is psychological, interpersonal, emotional. Its absence cannot be seen or heard but it can be felt, which Spock supposes constitutes detection, constitutes proof. When you care for someone (messy, fraught, terrifying, an act which like the universe is not beholden to a rationality that Spock understands), it follows that upon their leaving you will feel their absence. You will yearn towards the mental and emotional space that they once occupied beside you. There is a logic to this. That emptiness pulls at you like the gravity well of a black hole consuming matter, stars, vacuum, only this time Spock can see past the event horizon into the absence itself. Or rather feel into it. It feels like resentment, like irritation, like biting your tongue to keep from saying something that you know you will regret. It feels like the sky on Vulcan after a volcanic event, overcast, heavy, low, smothering. It feels like benediction.
(interlude)
COMPUTER_PERSONAL: Spock, S'chn T'gai
ARCHIVES: >History, >Fal-tor-pan, >show all
KEYWORDS: "Sylat"
//Retrieving....//
Here is the story of Sylat, who lived only two centuries after the coming of Surak when the ritual of fal-tor-pan was still new. She lived in the desert where nothing else lived and devoted herself to Surak’s teachings. Though she studied and meditated and learned and grew she felt that the arc of her development was not as efficient as it could be. She lacked focus. No matter what she tried she could not correct this inefficiency.
One day a traveler came to Sylat’s house in the desert where nothing else breathed and collapsed on her hearth, sick with heatstroke and thirst and delirium. Sylat nursed the traveler back to health after many long weeks and learned that her name was T’wir. T’wir was searching for something but she would not say what. Sylat learned not to ask. When T’wir regained her health, she asked whether Sylat would have her leave. Sylat, who was lonely, and who furthermore was beginning to learn that knowledge pursued can only sometimes be obtained with the assistance of another knowledge seeker, asked her to stay with her in the desert where nothing else drank.
In time they were bonded. In that small house in the desert where nothing else crept the two of them lived a long time in harmony, studying, meditating, learning. They grew together like vines entangled, each using the other as mutual support to reach ever upwards towards the sun.
One day many decades later a dust storm caught the wandering Sylat by surprise. She was overcome several kilometers from their shared home. When the storm subsided T’wir searched for her companion and found her near death from thirst and exhaustion, just as T’wir had been upon their first meeting. But this time age and other ailments were too great to be combated by water, rest, and tenderness. Sylat died in the night after T'wir found her, out there in the small house in the desert where nothing else thought. But first she transferred her katra to a katric ark entrusted to T’wir’s keeping.
There is no record of how Sylat’s body and katric ark were brought safely to Mt. Seleya. We do not know what trials and challenges T’wir may have faced on such a difficult journey, for she was no longer young and the desert was dangerous. Only one priestess was at the temple when Sylat’s body and ark were found on its doorstep. There was no note, no sign from whoever had brought Sylat there to be rejoined in fal-tor-pan. No one knew anything about a person named T’wir, who had lived in the desert with Sylat where nothing else lived for three score and seven years.
When Sylat awoke she did not know who she was but she asked for T’wir. The priestess could not answer her. Messages were sent out throughout the provinces but no record of a person named T’wir was ever found. Sylat’s desperation turned to confusion then to anguish. Perhaps no one named T’wir had ever existed. It might be an invention of the fal-tor-pan, a glitch in the retransference of soul to body. But then who had brought Sylat to Mt. Seleya?
Sylat did not return to the desert where nothing now lived but went to the mountains where the earth touched the sky and climbed one as high as she could. Her body was weak, her mind forgetful, searching, still trying to remember that which had been lost to her. When she could climb no more, she sat. She watched the raptors in the sky and the wind in the sand. She waited.
This time when Sylat died her katra went with her, past the line dividing the known from the unknown; to the place where perhaps her question could be answered.
The story of Sylat is one of the oldest surviving records of fal-tor-pan. It is a secondary source that dates several dozen years after the events recounted by its scribe.
When Spock has finished reading it he sits back and steeples his hands together. He looks at his hands, at the square of sunlight through the window on the floor. Then he reads the story again, and again. Then he goes out to the front of the small house in which he is spending his solitude after fal-tor-pan, on the slope of Mt. Seleya, and he sits cross-legged on the dirt and looks at the sky.
(2273)
The Enterprise is not as Spock remembers. He had heard of its refitting but not expected to ever be witness to it. It is in essence a new ship. How much can be replaced and changed before something is no longer what it once was?
Her soul is the same. He imagines that he can hear Jim saying it. Might a starship have a soul, an essential katra distinguishable from its physical body? It is not necessarily illogical to think that it might. What does logic have to do with that original question of existence, the inherent puzzle of being? Spock does not know anymore. Not after his failed kolinahr. This line of thought is not against logic but it is in a way outside of logic, circumventing it, an extralogic. He allows himself the indiscretion of it.
He can envision Jim smiling at him. Then he no longer need only envision it.
Jim gives Spock his old quarters, or rather his old quarters made new. Spock examines them, noting the differences and similarities. It does not feel the same but the space of the room holds a feeling of nostalgia nonetheless, of tender memory. He asks the computer a routine question which it answers, its voice unchanged.
The door chimes. Spock answers it.
Standing in the corridor, his face strangely open, strangely vulnerable, strangely not acrimonious at all, is McCoy. He tilts his head at Spock. “Can I come in?”
Spock steps aside to allow him to enter. McCoy glances around. “So your quarters are bigger now, too. Nice of them to do that after we retired.”
“I had thought that was what I heard you did.” Spock sounds stilted and formal even to his own ears. He ignores this. “What brings you to the Enterprise?”
McCoy gives him an amused look. “What do you think?”
“Jim?”
“Jim.” McCoy sits at the table without asking whether he might stay. Spock watches him, trying to catalogue the changes in his appearance that three years have wrought. McCoy’s face is more lined, his crow’s feet deeper. His hair has begun to go silver, and what remains of the deep brown has lightened to bronze. But he looks well. Looks, against Spock’s reluctance to admit it, most beautiful. His eyes are the same, discerning, amused.
“Are you all right?” asks McCoy.
Spock blinks. “I do not know what you mean.”
McCoy’s expression turns affectionately pitying. It perplexes Spock that he can sense no animosity in him, no anger or resentment. Either McCoy has grown adept at concealing his emotions in the past three years (a possibility that Spock finds exceedingly unlikely), or....
“You said kolinahr was what you were meant to do," McCoy says. "Now you’re not doing it. That’s some change.”
“So you did read my letter.” Spock does not mean to say it. He had never been sure, as he had never received a response, whether McCoy ever read his then-final message or if he had simply deleted it unread.
McCoy waves a hand. “Eventually, when I got over myself. You were unreachable by the time I got around to it and could have written you back.” It amazes Spock, even after all this time, the way that McCoy can answer the questions that Spock has not even asked. “Not that I had much to say for myself.” He smiles, wry. “So?”
“So...?”
“How are you?”
Spock’s mind goes blank. “Quite adequate, Doctor.”
McCoy stares at him for a long, silent moment. “So you are,” he says at last. He gets to his feet. “I don’t know whether it will do you any good to hear this, but I’ve been thinking of ways to say it for ages now, so I’m just going to get it over with. There are no hard feelings between us. Not from me, at least. You were right back then—I didn’t understand. I still don’t, but I can accept that now. Just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Spock can only nod. It is as if they are having two different conversations, or rather a single one-sided conversation in which Spock cannot participate. McCoy is conciliatory, remorseful, while Spock is rendered voiceless by his own inflexible shame. He does not know what to say to McCoy, as he had not known what to say to Jim, or Chekov or Chapel or Nyota or Scotty when they had greeted him on the bridge smiling. For three years he turned his back on them and somehow they do not resent him for it. What is there to say?
McCoy clears his throat. “I guess I’ll leave you to it.” His prior bravado seems to have faded away. He hesitates, looking at Spock. Spock pretends not to notice his gaze.
McCoy says, softly, “I....” Then he shakes his head and turns to leave.
Spock lets him go. Don’t, he thinks and does not know why, or at whom. Don’t.
WHAT AM I?
It is a question that Spock is most familiar with asking. He has not found an answer yet.
V’ger splits Spock's consciousness like a laser, unexpected in its single-minded intensity, the relentless drive of its soulless logic. Were he standing Spock would have collapsed. As it is he floats senseless through void, watching stars, watching V’ger, immense and incomprehensible but perfectly ordered. He should be able to understand it but he cannot. He should be able to give it the answer that it needs but he does not know it.
Kolinahr had not been the answer to his questioning. Only now can Spock admit it. Even after the ritual failed he had clung to the idea of it, its offered promise of deliverance. If he could have just tried harder it would have worked. If he had just begun his training sooner he would have managed it. If he had just left his friends, his family behind earlier than he did, he would have all the answers now. So he insisted. So V’ger, unaware of doing so, engrossed in its own existential adolescent angst, instantly disillusions Spock of with a thought. With one brush of mind against mind. Kolinahr is not the answer, and it never was.
Such a realization, so violent and abrupt, should shatter him. So Spock thought. But when he loses consciousness out there in the dark, he is laughing.
Later, much later, he finds McCoy in his quarters. He clings to him.
“Spock—?” says McCoy, startled, suddenly tasked with bearing Spock’s weight. Spock feels his warmth, his pulse, the rough scrape of stubble along his jaw, smells his familiar scent that he has not permitted himself to remember in over three years, but he did not forget it.
“I was wrong,” Spock says. He feels McCoy stiffen against him and stand taller. “I was wrong.”
It takes McCoy a long moment to respond. When he does, he puts his arms around Spock’s shoulders and holds him. Spock closes his eyes. “What’s all this?” McCoy sounds bemused. His hands make circles on Spock’s back, and the touch is so familiar and so welcome that Spock would have wept if he could.
“Forgive me.” Spock can feel McCoy’s trepidation, the frantic running undercurrent of how-the-hell-do-I-respond-to-this beating underneath his pulse.
Yet: “Shh,” is all that McCoy says in the end. “Shh, darlin.”
Spock holds him so tightly that he thinks he will leave bruises and must force himself to stop. McCoy is not pulling away. There is no need to cling to him so. One of them is shaking, but Spock cannot tell who.
McCoy kisses Spock’s forehead, then his eyelids, then his mouth. Only when Spock tastes salt does he realize that he is crying after all.
(2286)
Spock sees the figure in the distance a few hours before noon. They make their way up the switchbacking mountain path, their face hidden even from Spock’s sharp eyes by the robes they wear and the hood drawn over their head to protect from the primary’s radiation. They lean on a walking stick that they use to navigate the rocky path and the steeper sections of the climb. They bear a small bag on their back which is either deceptively heavy or they are otherwise encumbered, or tired, because they pause several times during the climb to sit in the shade of a low scrub bush and drink from a canteen. When their journey is almost finished Spock goes into his small house and retrieves a bowl of water, a glass, a washcloth, and handful of sharp bitter fruits whose name he does not yet remember. Then he goes back outside.
The person is sitting in the cool patch of shaded dirt where Spock has been taking his daily meditations. They look out over the vast view from the mountainside. Then they turn their head as Spock approaches and he sees their face for the first time.
“Spock.” McCoy is flushed from exertion and the heat. “Hell of a morning, huh?”
“It is now several minutes past midday.”
“Yeah. Climb took longer than I thought. I was trying to beat the heat.” McCoy sees the tray that Spock is holding. “You read my mind.” His mouth quirks at one corner. “Not literally, I hope.”
Spock sits cross-legged beside him and holds out a glass of water, which McCoy accepts. His hands are shaking slightly, and they appear startlingly spindly, the fragile metacarpals too prominent, the tendons stark white. Spock does not know why he is shocked by this until he realizes that McCoy’s hands are not as he remembers them—that he cannot quite remember how they were but he remembers enough to know that they have changed.
He dips the washcloth into the water bowl and wrings it out. “For your forehead.”
“I’m fine. I just need to rest a moment.” But McCoy takes the washcloth and presses it against his temple and closes his eyes. Water drips down the side of his face, marking a trail over the delicately wrinkled skin around his eyes, at the corner of his mouth. He is scruffy, as if he has not shaved since fal-tor-pan. He hesitates a moment. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Doctor,” says Spock.
They sit in silence. A slight breeze picks up, for which Spock is grateful. Despite his words McCoy is clearly exhausted, and Spock fears heat stroke. McCoy pushes his hood down and takes off a layer of his robes before redipping the washcloth in the water and reapplying it to his face. The loss of the bulky protective outer layer of clothing reveals the thin shape of McCoy’s shoulders, the slenderness of his torso. He has always been a slight man but he looks smaller than he should, his face slightly sunken, whether by dehydration or some recent illness. He looks as if he has not been well for some time.
Finally McCoy puts the washcloth aside. Some of the flush has gone from his face. He picks up one of the fruits with interest. “How do you eat this?”
Spock breaks one in two with his hands, the fruit's hard outer layer brittle enough to split with the right application of force, and shows McCoy how to eat the soft insides, which can be pulled out in sections. McCoy makes a face at the taste.
“Bitter,” he says.
“Yes,” Spock agrees.
They eat in silence for a few more moments. Spock puts the fruit skin on the tray and dips his hands in the water bowl to rinse off the sticky juice. McCoy does the same, then dries his hands on his robes.
“So this is where they’ve got you sequestered. Quite a view at least.” He looks at Spock slantingly. “How’s your head?”
“Ah,” says Spock. “It is....” He trails off.
McCoy makes another smile, just at the edges of his face. “They didn’t want me to come up here, you know—your father, and some of the priests and priestesses. Said you needed to be alone. But Jim managed to convince T’lar. He said we went through it together and maybe we need to go through this together. I don’t know about that. I just felt the impulse to come. Truthfully I think none of them really knew what to do with me, and maybe they were glad to be rid of me. There’s never been a human who carried a katra before. You might have warned me, you know.”
“I am sorry.” Spock only vaguely remembers the meld in which he had transferred his consciousness to McCoy. In retrospect it seems a shockingly rash—shockingly emotional—decision. He had no way of knowing whether it would work, what effect such an experience might have on a non-Vulcan, whether it would even be possible to restore his katra to his irradiated, inanimate body at all. Though of course that last part had turned out to be the least of their worries.
Their worries: McCoy, Jim, Nyota, Chekov, Sulu, Scotty. His friends who had risked everything to restore him. He has avoided thinking about them too much in recent days because the thinking has felt too immense. He does not know where to begin.
McCoy sighs and drinks the rest of his water. “That’s not quite what I meant.” But he does not explain. He looks at the little clay house behind them. The primary has crept higher in the sky, slicing thinner the patch of shade in which they sit. “Can we go inside?”
“Yes. Come with me.” Spock picks up the tray, then suddenly stops. McCoy looks at him.
“Abareth,” Spock says.
“What?”
Spock holds up one of the uneaten fruits. “Their name.”
It is cooler inside but not by much. Spock brings the tray into the small kitchen and rinses and refills the bowl and glasses. When he returns to the main room he finds McCoy asleep on the low bench by the door where he had sat to take off his shoes.
Spock puts out a hand to wake him but does not touch him. Something stops him first.
“I’m not asleep,” McCoy mutters. He is unconvincing.
“That is good,” says Spock, “because if you sleep here you will have a sore back when you wake.”
“I’m already sore.”
Spock pauses a moment. “You realize there is a bed, Doctor.”
McCoy opens one eye. Spock waits. “All right,” McCoy says at last. “Just for a little while. Half an hour.”
He does not wake until early evening. Spock is outside at the well behind the house, pumping water from deep in the earth, when he hears McCoy shuffling around behind him.
“Half an hour, I said.”
Spock finishes pulling up the bucket and empties it in the basin at his feet. “You seemed to require longer.”
McCoy watches Spock lift the full basin into his arms. He looks better for having slept, but not as much as Spock had hoped. “Is this what you’ve been doing out here all alone?”
“So far,” Spock says. When he reenters the house, McCoy follows him.
They have the evening meal, simple fare, bread that Spock made the day before (with a recipe from the computer and absolutely no muscle memory) with some more abareth and a few starchy tubers which Spock has not yet recalled the name of and which McCoy does not ask about. They do not talk very much. Spock finds that this is a great relief. He had been afraid when he saw McCoy climbing the mountain that it would be someone who would want answers from him, or who would demand to interrogate his progress.
He does not think he has made much progress yet. (But how can he be sure, when he does not even know how much there is that he does not remember?) He is not concerned by this. The doctor’s current calm acceptance Spock might have expected from Jim (it surprises him to know that as he thinks it), but not from McCoy.
They sit outside again after eating. The temperature drops quickly at night on Vulcan. Spock, who is used to it and looking forward to the cool (at least until midnight, when the chill starts to become bitter), brings several more blankets than he guesses they will need. He hands most of them to McCoy, who rolls his eyes but says nothing.
“There is....” Spock hesitates. “It is not an observatory but I use it as one, less than a kilometer farther up the mountain.”
McCoy frowns. “Like an overlook?”
“Perhaps.” Spock is not sure. “Would you like to come with me?”
McCoy searches Spock’s face. Spock thinks that maybe there are things that McCoy wants to ask right now that he is intentionally not saying. Spock is grateful.
“All right,” McCoy says finally.
“Will you need your walking stick?”
McCoy looks irritated for the first time all day. “No.” He sounds reluctant as he says it, though, like maybe the doctoring part of him disapproves.
Some sort of emotion rises in Spock’s chest, gentle and unobtrusive, which he does not know the name for. He thinks that maybe he had not even known before fal-tor-pan. There is not a name for every feeling, after all. Not everything has been so codified, neatly parceled out and demystified. Some things are still nameless.
“You may lean on me, if you wish,” Spock says.
“Good lord,” says McCoy. “You’d think I was the one who died.” But he takes Spock by the arm.
Death is its own event horizon. That which crosses it cannot come back. So conventional logic goes. Information cannot be retrieved from a black hole—unless it can. The dead cannot come back to life—unless they can.
Can they?
Spock does not know. He does not know whether he died, as all things must die, even the universe, or if the transference and reinstatement of one’s katra might be called something else, referred to colloquially as death but in truth another matter entirely. If that is so then there is no paradox, and Spock is not in contradiction with conventional logic. If that is so then the universe’s information encoded in the animate, organic being known as Spock was not destroyed and then recreated but rather exchanged, maybe. Like matter turning to energy and back to matter. In such a process matter/energy is not created or destroyed. It is changed. So the computer tells him. So Spock thinks that he may remember once knowing.
Yet what is such a change to the person (or universe) observing it? Something so fundamentally transformed from its prior phase might be unrecognizable to all that once knew it intimately. Information might not be destroyed in a black hole’s heart, but if it is altered beyond recognition to the known universe, the only universe in which a person can operate, can think, then might it not be said that this is a sort of death?
Death renders the familiar incomprehensible. The subject who has died becomes unreachable to those who loved them, just as quantum information in a black hole should become irretrievable to the universe outside the event horizon. Becomes lost. But lost might not mean destroyed. It might not mean preserved, either. It might mean changed. It might mean forever out of reach. It might mean that the paradox is not a paradox after all.
Spock does not know. He does not expect to ever know the answer. As someone who has been changed, who has gone beyond the event horizon and then come back from it, what he does know is that sometimes knowledge is unspeakable: sometimes it cannot even be thought.
The path to the overlook (promontory?) is not steep but it is rocky. Spock had forgotten to accommodate for McCoy’s less sensitive night vision. He keeps a steady hand on McCoy, who has looped his arm around Spock’s left elbow, and makes sure to carefully pick out their path. If McCoy notices Spock’s particularity, he says nothing. He travels better in the cool nighttime than he had during the day, but something about his posture and pace still twinges at Spock’s thoughts, makes him fumble for memories that he does not yet have.
They reach the place, a small isolated spot off of the main path, shielded by low brush. Spock holds some of the branches back so McCoy can creep through. He gets his robes stuck on the branches and swears quietly.
Hidden on the other side is a flat rock that juts out over the slope of the mountain. It is not large but roomy enough to seat two or three people. McCoy sits with a sigh and pulls some of the blankets around himself. Spock sits next to him, then rearranges the two of them so they can sit more comfortably with their backs to the rocks that Spock had stacked there several days ago for this purpose. McCoy looks at him, his expression amused and something else, something softer. Spock looks away.
Above them, the stars sprawl out in all their resplendent brilliance. They are sharp and exceedingly visible in the thin Vulcan atmosphere, not marred at all by light pollution this far away from the main city. The spiral, purple swath of the galaxy stretches from one horizon to the next.
“Come here often?” McCoy asks.
“Yes,” says Spock.
“Strange place, your planet.” McCoy yawns. “Got its charms, though.”
“Are you tired?”
“No,” McCoy says. Still stubborn. “Are you?”
“You yawned.”
“I’ve been living for two. I think I’m allowed a little leeway, here.” There is no venom in McCoy’s voice. He sounds, if anything, amused. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Spock thinks about it. “I do not think that I am.”
“’Course not.” McCoy settles back against the rocks and tilts his head up to look at the sky. “I should be so lucky.”
Spock looks at him, wondering what to ask, whether he should ask anything. There was a word in the computer archives from an ancient Vulcan dialect that could be translated several ways. Spock saw it a handful of times in his review of the fal-tor-pan records. Very rarely has any living being ever carried the soul of another, even on Vulcan. Sometimes the person who carried the katra is changed afterwards. Sometimes temporarily; sometimes permanently. The word is katren, and it means soul-heavy. Soul-sick.
Might the transference of one’s katra be akin to quantum entanglement? Only instead of two particles inherently correlated by some unknown mechanic regardless of distance, their souls are correlated, now. Katrically entangled. We went through it together and maybe we need to go through this together. It may very well be true. Spock thinks of Sylat and T’wir, who had not been given the same chance.
Extraordinary, to be so lucky.
The realization comes to Spock all at once. There is no state of being further from kolinahr than this mutual entanglement. This interpersonal correlation. This feeling, this emotion with no name, that encompasses love but even more than that, which Spock never forgot.
“What was it like?” Spock asks. He does not specify what, but he does not think that he needs to.
McCoy says nothing for a long moment. “Lonely,” he says at last. He looks at Spock. “What do you remember?”
“Little. Nothing of the ritual at all, or much before it.”
“Really?” McCoy looks like he wants to say something else but stops himself again, like he is scared to. He looks cold, too. Spock puts another blanket around his shoulders.
“I remember the outlines,” Spock says. “The topography of my life. The specifics are coming back more slowly. I remember—” He pauses. “Things I felt.”
Beneath the blankets, McCoy has inched his hand towards Spock. Their fingertips touch briefly. Then Spock covers McCoy’s hand with his own.
“I am sorry for not warning you,” Spock says. “I did not know.... There was no time.”
“I didn’t mean that, earlier,” McCoy says. Then he adds, more quietly, “Don’t apologize for still being here in front of me.”
Spock does not know what to say. His thumb moves over the top of McCoy’s hand—counting, Spock realizes, the knuckles there. The slender metacarpals.
“Do you...?” McCoy trails off. He clears his throat. “Do you feel like yourself?”
Spock reflects. What does it mean to feel like himself? To be Spock? It is a question for which he suspects that he has never truly had an answer. Something tells him this. A thought, a half-remembered engram. He thinks that, maybe, he has been approaching the question wrong all this time.
He feels how he feels. And he is who he is. This has always been true; and as an answer, it is enough.
There are things that cannot be named.
“I do,” Spock says.
McCoy has gone tense. Spock can feel it from the way they are sitting together. He blinks a few times and Spock sees that his eyes are shining, and he is holding back tears.
“Leonard,” Spock says, very gently. “I would like to kiss you now.”
McCoy swallows. He nods.
Spock kisses him. He thinks: this is an answer. He thinks that it is one of many.