McCoy had said that my "damned gizmo" was proving problematic for the engineers and scientists, and Elydex's oblique comment appeared to confirm that fact. It didn't surprise me: I could have told them that the cloaking device was highly temperamental, and that our own extensive field-testing had been undertaken in the hope that the thing could be induced to perform more predictably and reliably--and safely, but that was another story. Only extremely bad luck had enabled Scott, who hadn't a clue about cloaking technology, to engage the device so that Kirk could flee from Eidolon. And now Scott and Spock were discovering what I had known all along: the device was perfected in theory, but often fallible in practice. That fallibility suited my purposes, however: the more often the engineers were frustrated in their testing, the more likely it became that my plan would succeed.
I sat at my workstation sipping tea and chewing on sweetmeats called fig-newtons as I composed requests for information from the library computer. I'd covered most of this research during my earlier attempts to devise a strategy with Adiv and Lem, but I wanted to make sure that I was prepared for Ambassador Tilendi's questions.
My requests for access were surely being logged and analyzed somewhere, so I was careful to intersperse questions about innocuous subjects, such as temperature ranges in Earth's northern hemisphere and combat records of all Terran vessels named Enterprise, among my more substantive inquiries. I was itching to see whether I could retrieve some highly specific information about certain types of Starfleet ships and Federation science facilities, but that line of inquiry was too dangerous. I had to be content with reading between the lines of more general material.
It was difficult to think of plausible questions, though; those that were too farfetched would be recognized for the deception that they were. On an impulse, I asked the computer to display a roster of the senior officers of the Federation starship Enterprise, NCC-1701, now on active duty. That information wasn't classified, and the request ought to be catalogued by my watchers as yet another example of idle but not irrational curiosity on the part of a bored prisoner.
The records contained little information other than a statement of the officers' current positions and, in some cases, their previous two or three postings. I scrolled rather perfunctorily through the listings for Montgomery Scott, Hikaru Sulu, Nyota Uhura, Leonard McCoy, and other department heads whose names and faces I didn't recognize. I paused briefly when I came to James T. Kirk. Our Starfleet operative's continuing intelligence reports on the captain's activities were comprehensive and perceptive; once she'd etched a single word into a chip she'd smuggled out of Starfleet headquarters and off the planet, the chip that contained the public and private record of Kirk's honors and reprimands and dizzying promotions: hotshot. The people at Fleet Intelligence had to consult three Standard lexicon programs before they could translate it.
It wasn't really necessary even to glance at the entry for Commander Spock of Vulcan, first officer and science officer of Enterprise. I'd virtually memorized his confidential record and its updates when they were forwarded, along with Kirk's, from High Command. All generals and fleet commanders were on the distribution list, but I doubted whether the rest of them had given the Vulcan's file the same careful attention that I had.
Gazing at the image of Spock's face on the screen, I heard myself in memory speaking calmly, authoritatively: We were not aware of Vulcans aboard the Enterprise. Well, no one had ever said that Romulans were incapable of lying.
The Neutral Zone had remained inviolate for a hundred years until Krinein, under the command of Aeron Siridar, an honorable and courageous officer and a near cousin of my own father, had entered Federation space. In the tragic battle of will and wits that followed, the captain of Enterprise had proved himself--and by extension, the Federation--a potentially serious threat to Romulus. From that time on he and Spock, and a few other officers on a few other ships, had never been free of the Empire's scrutiny.
Of course, I'd had no intention of disclosing to Kirk the extent and accuracy of our intelligence; I'd wanted him to believe that my information was hopelessly out of date, that as far as I was aware Spock had faded into oblivion after Christopher Pike's promotion. But the truth was that I'd known enough about the first officer of the Enterprise to have fallen halfway in love with him long before he ever set foot on my ship.
* * *
In retrospect, I wondered whether the agent who had compiled Spock's record mightn't have been infatuated with him herself. Certainly her reports had emphasized attributes that were much admired by Romulans: his personal bravery, his military honors, and his loyalty to his captain--a man who was, as the Romulan saying had it, enough unlike him to be his brother. She'd described his prowess in Terran and Old Vulcan martial arts and in the Andorian combat rituals; waxed almost poetic over his scientific and scholarly achievements; and, to my mind, allocated far too much time and effort to securing identification holos, though I had to admit that the ones she'd supplied were of very high quality indeed.
But the notation that had first caught my attention--and that had caused me to go back and reread his file time and again, out of a relentless and fascinated curiosity--was the biographical summary. I had tried to imagine what kind of man he could be--half Vulcan, half Terran, a hybrid of two species superficially alike yet so fundamentally different from one another that they might almost have come from separate universes. How could a Vulcan have bonded with a Terran? How could a Terran have adapted to life with a Vulcan mate, and on his homeworld at that? Above all, what miracle of luck and science had brought them a son? A son who had been raised as a Vulcan and who at eighteen, still a child by Vulcan standards, had shrugged off the spirit-crushing weight of his aristocratic family's expectations and bolted--there was no other word for it--to Earth, and to Starfleet?
For all their prattling about infinite diversity in infinite combination, for all their sober-minded research into the cultures and customs of other worlds, Vulcans were at heart very close to xenophobic. As any Romulan could attest, they suffered from incurable delusions of moral and intellectual superiority to every other sapient species. I tried to picture Sarek and Amanda setting about the dreary business of conceiving a child in a way never intended by nature. The Vulcan geneticists--as fascinated by the science of reproductive technology as they were conflicted about its results--had probably just closed their eyes and thought of Surak. The first viable Vulcan-Terran hybrid was thus brought into a world that could never wholly accept or appreciate him for the unique being that he was.
Terrans, by contrast, had been happily mating, or attempting to mate, with other hominid races ever since the first Earth-based generation ship had disgorged its contents on the unsuspecting civilizations of Proxima and Alpha Centauri. Starfleet, human-dominated and ready to make use of any keen intelligence no matter the appearance of its outer shell, had taken one look at Spock and decided to keep him.
Perhaps no one but a Romulan could have fully appreciated the delicious irony of a Vulcan boy, "bred to peace," as those self-righteous pacifist prigs were so fond of saying, running away to ally himself with people who, though often giddy and feckless, were at bottom every bit as aggressive and militaristic as Andorians or Klingons--or Romulans. Spock, the first Vulcan in Starfleet, decorated repeatedly for valor in combat: the idea was irresistible, and eventually I concluded that the man was too.
I'd made a point of scanning all subsequent intelligence reports for any mention of his name, and I was rewarded often enough with downloads that aroused my curiosity even further. One dispatch described Spock's first command aboard the shuttlecraft Galileo, and how he had saved his crew from disaster by a dramatic all-or-nothing gamble utterly out of character for a Vulcan. Another alleged that he had communicated with a dying alien through the mind touch, and suggested that his altruism, expressed at a terrible personal cost, had spared an entire race threatened with genocidal extinction by, of all things, a colony of miners. Still another fragmentary report--transmitted from Vulcan by one of the few Romulan operatives still stationed there--told an even more incredible story: Spock's marriage bond had been violently broken when his bondmate invoked the ancient challenge, and he had somehow survived the breaking.
That last dispatch had caused me to catch my breath in involuntary empathy with his pain. An unbonded Vulcan. Could it be possible? Perhaps Spock's human blood hadn't been completely subsumed by the dominant Vulcan genes and conditioning, and his mixed heritage had given him a strength and resiliency that had saved his life.
Over the months, I'd fantasized in precise detail how someone like Spock might be persuaded, by logical reasoning and with the proper incentives, to make a place for himself in the Empire, and what an asset he might be. And if more and more often those fantasies had strayed from the political to the personal ... well, that was understandable. For in addition to the man's other qualities, any one of which would have been enough to pique my interest, he was quite astonishingly good-looking.
* * *
His digitized image glowed on the screen now, like and yet so unlike the living face I'd seen on my bridge-monitor feed as Tal sparred with Kirk. At first, I truly hadn't believed the sensor scans; I'd thought our paths would never cross anywhere except in my imagination. But when Tactical positively identified the Federation starship Enterprise, it seemed that all my dreams were about to become reality. Then, Tal's confirmation:
Who is that beside you?
My first officer, Commander Spock.
A Vulcan ...
In truth, though, ambition had overridden instinct and experience. I'd been so dazzled by the vision of myself heading home with Enterprise in tow and Spock at my side, to the acclaim of the Senate and the admiration of the multitudes, that I'd ignored the high strangeness of the ship's sudden appearance in Romulan space. What an unbelievable piece of luck, I'd thought, without pausing to wonder why the collocation of "unbelievable" and "luck" wasn't setting off any alarms. Why, this is too good to be true. And of course it was ...
I killed the personnel files and halfheartedly went back to browsing the library. This time I asked for an image of the Federation Council chambers in Ottawa, along with a historical briefing on the Terran province called Canada and comprehensive star charts for the constellations visible from those coordinates to the aided and unaided eye. I might as well pretend that I cared.
* * *
McCoy's unexpected appearance at my door took me away from the computer.
"I've come to give you your tailor-made immunization, Commander," he said, pointing to the airhypo he'd removed from his medikit. "You're the third to last one on my list, and you rate a house call."
"Immunization against what?"
"Any and all airborne, waterborne, food-borne, and critter-borne bugs of the Terran variety. Can't have you coming down with flu right after your bout with chengha. Here, give me your arm."
I complied. "That chengha virus wasn't supposed to get me, Doctor. My ship's physician had already immunized everyone against it. I hope your vaccine is more efficacious than his was."
"Guaranteed. Now, you may feel a little headachy over the next eight hours or so, but that's nothing to worry about. Any symptoms'll be gone before we make starfall."
"From what Elydex said, that shouldn't be long."
"About this time tomorrow. I could find out from Spock exactly, and I do mean exactly, when we'll be there, if you want to know."
"No, that won't be necessary."
"So what are you working on?" he asked, eyeing the monitor curiously.
"Information-gathering. I'm trying to familiarize myself with Terran geography and customs, that sort of thing. The library files are most helpful."
"Good." He folded his arms and stared at the computer. "Sure wish I had access to some Romulan library files."
"And what kind of information would you gather if you did?"
"Well, I don't want to start a fight with you again, but ... M'Benga and I are still plugging away on that paper I told you about." He stopped, as if to see whether I would shout or strike him. When I made no movement, he went on: "And there are some things about vulcanoid--about Romulan physiology that we're really curious about."
"Doctor, I regret very much that I was rude to you when we spoke before. I believe I'm less stressed out, as you put it, than I was then. Ask your questions, and I promise I'll tell you calmly if I don't want to answer them."
"Okay, but first may I have a glass of that water? It's pretty hot in here."
"Of course. Please sit down. I'll get some ice from the dispenser if you like."
"Thanks. I guess your homeworld is as hot as Vulcan, eh?"
"In some places. How much ice do you want?"
"Would you fill the glass, please? I'll pour the water over it. There, that's perfect."
"Now, Doctor. What do you want to know?"
"You remember I said we couldn't find any significant biological differences between Vulcans and Romulans."
"I thought we'd agreed to disagree on that subject." Did he never let up?
"I know we did. It's just that--it's beginning to look like you're very dissimilar in one respect, anyway." He reached for a serviette and wiped his face, which was turning an alarming shade of red.
"Are you all right? I can lower the room temperature if you wish."
"No, no, I'm fine. But I wanted to ask you--I've had my head bitten off before when I tried to pursue this particular question, and I feel kind of awkward about bringing it up with a--with you. But--"
"Go on. I've said I'll let you know if I don't wish to answer."
"Well ... without going into the technical details, it's about the blood chemistries we ran on your two officers. One of them--the older one--"
"Yes? Was he ill? No one told me." Adiv had been his normal robust self when I'd last seen him. What could be wrong?
"His endocrine--some of his hormonal levels weren't normal ... at least, what we think of as normal for a Vulcan. And I'd seen--that is, M'Benga had seen readings like that in some of his Vulcan patients who were, ah, in the early stages--that is, they were experiencing ..." He swallowed. "A serious hormonal imbalance," he finished redundantly. "But your officer seemed to be fine. He didn't show any other, ah, symptoms. And that's really puzzling ..."
I was trying hard to understand him. An endocrine problem? I could only guess at what he meant. "If you're referring to what the Vulcans call the pon farr--"
"Yes." He sounded relieved. "But we don't have to talk about this if it makes you uncomfortable."
"Why should it make me uncomfortable?"
"I know it's a very private matter ..."
I shrugged. "For Vulcans, perhaps. Not for us. It's of little concern to us."
"But your officer--he might die!" McCoy was becoming agitated.
"Truly, Doctor, there's nothing to worry about." Could a physician really be so uninformed about the simplest facts of life? But McCoy, like all Federation healers, probably had to rely on what the Vulcans chose to tell him. "I will give you a short lesson in sociobiology, and you have my permission to take this back to your colleague M'Benga, if it will do any good."
"I'm listening."
"Romulan males, just like Vulcan and Rigelian males, experience a periodic hormonal fluctuation. It's an evolutionary anomaly--an inexplicable remnant of the breeding cycles of our earliest common felinid ancestors."
"I know Rigelians are physiologically similar to Vulcans and Romulans," he said. "You're suggesting that they experience this--this cycle, too? No one's ever reported that, as far as I know. At least not in the major journals."
"Perhaps their doctors don't think it's worth reporting. It's common knowledge that Romulans, like Rigelians, deal with the inconvenience by medication or by taking well-timed holidays with their spouses. But Vulcans, for reasons known only to themselves, have made what they call the Time of Mating--as if there could be no other--into a thing of terror and pain, veiled in shame and secrecy. The psychic conditioning is brutal, and in any other advanced society would be forbidden."
McCoy was staring at me intently. "There's no doubt that the physical pain is real," he said. "I know that for sure."
"You're a healer, so you should also know what the mind is capable of doing to the body. And when the mind is a Vulcan mind ... well, the result is obvious."
"The result, maybe. The reason, no."
"Some scientists think the need for pair-bonding experienced by many telepathic species accounts in part for the Vulcans' rigidity concerning their sexual habits. Others believe that a race so obsessed with the denial of all natural emotion had to find a ritualized way of dealing with the one instinct that couldn't be suppressed forever. There are a number of other theories." I smiled kindly at McCoy. "Of course, the many noted researchers who've written on this topic are Romulan, so you wouldn't have had the benefit of their thinking."
"You mentioned that your people deal with it by medication," he said thoughtfully.
"A very straightforward course of treatment is available at every chemist's shop. If my officer is indeed experiencing this type of hormonal imbalance, it will be remedied quickly and effectively."
"What happens if he's on a mission where no treatment is available?"
"He will simply live through it, as I lived through the chengha virus, with about the same degree of discomfort. It's unpleasant, I grant you that, but it's never fatal."
"But people have died."
"I repeat, the mind often controls the body. If one believes strongly enough that he will die, then he will die."
"It doesn't make any sense--Vulcans are so rational. If the treatment is as effective as you say, then why would they put themselves through such an ordeal when a logical alternative exists?"
"You're asking the wrong person, Doctor. Romulans despise Vulcans for many good reasons, and, I will admit, some bad ones. But the single aspect of Vulcan life that we find most repellent is their turning a simple, non-life-threatening biological phenomenon into a ... a twisted nightmare. As to why they would do such a thing--" I shrugged again.
"Do you think it would be possible--is there some way I could get some clinical literature on the treatment?"
"I don't know. You'd have to have access to Romulan medical databases. It would probably be easier to get information from one of the Rigelian worlds--maybe directly from a physician, if there's nothing in the archived journals. Or there may even be something in the Vulcan literature."
"No, there's sweet f-- I mean, there's nothing there. I've done extensive database searches. They just shut you down. The Vulcan privacy laws--" He shook his head, as if words failed him. "Even when lives are at stake."
"I agree, it's completely irrational. But Vulcans have their own view of reality, and it's unlikely that you or I will influence it."
"Well, you can be damned sure I'm going to try to influence it. Thanks for the information, Commander."
"Good luck in the rest of your research, though I fear that your hypotheses are seriously flawed."
"Thanks." He grinned. "Glad you're not still mad at me."
"'Anger is a waste of energy in virtually every circumstance save battle.' That's a Romulan saying--a cliché, really. And it isn't even true. Losing one's temper in combat is counterproductive in the extreme."
"Except for the battle part, you could be reciting a Vulcan proverb."
"There's no need for you to insult me, Doctor." For some reason, that made him laugh out loud.
© 1996, 1999 Kathleen Dailey. All rights reserved.