Pathways - Jeri Taylor [205]
“Have you ever been on Terra?” his father inquired mildly. “And have you ever met a human?”
Tuvok instantly regretted his rash statements, for they had led him into a corner from which there was no escape. Indeed, he had never visited Terra or met a human. He decided to make one final stabbing effort.
“I have never met an Underlier, either, but everyone knows they dwell beneath the sands of the desert. Would you suggest I deny their existence because I have never encountered one?”
Sunak turned his palms up in a gesture of diffidence. “What one has not experienced, one cannot know. What one accepts on faith is fraught with ambiguity. Once one accepts the ambiguous as truthful, one is doomed to ignorance.”
Tuvok regarded his father with respect. His mother was all flinty strength, and the most powerful presence he had ever encountered; but his father for all his kindheartedness possessed a command of logic that was almost unbearably elegant. Sunak’s mind could seize on a point and turn it and turn it, honing and polishing, then unspool the idea like silver wire into an argument that was tensile, incontrovertible.
Tuvok acquiesced, but allowed himself one last pettiness. “Am I at least able to choose my course of studies? Or has that been chosen for me as well?”
A lightning strike into his mind, instantaneous and searing. “Thee will not speak with such insolence, child. Apologize at once.”
Tuvok suddenly felt like a small child again, remonstrated, powerless. Like a child’s, his mind reached out to his parents’, tentative and hopeful. “I ask your forgiveness,” he offered sincerely. “I ask that you understand how unprepared I was for this decision. I am being unreasonable, which ill befits a person of my age. It will not happen again.”
The briskest nod from his mother, and a sweet, ineffable look from his father, ended the moment of mild rebellion. His mother plucked a crystal bell from the sideboard and rang it, summoning breakfast.
It was the last discussion they would ever have on the subject of his attending Starfleet Academy.
“Go, Tuvok, you pointy-eared wonder, go!” The howl from the sidelines carried easily to Tuvok’s sensitive ears, but he hoped that for others, it would be lost in the tumult of the exuberant crowd that packed the Academy stadium. He didn’t begrudge the enthusiasm of his roommate, Scott Hutchinson, but he did wish that the young man would rein in the excesses of his sobriquets. Pointy-eared wonder, indeed.
Tuvok was running the four-hundred-meter hurdle race in a track-and-field competition against their longtime foe, the University of California at Los Angeles. For generations, the “plucky little Bruins” had dominated collegiate sports in the western part of the country, until the advent of Starfleet Academy, in 2161. Gradually the Academy developed its sports program, highlighted by top-notch Parrises Squares teams, until the school rivaled mighty UCLA and the competition between them became ever more intense.
Vulcans weren’t eligible for many sports because their superior physical strength gave them an unfair advantage over other species. Running, however, was open to them, and in his first year at the Academy, Tuvok had elected as his required sport to run the intermediate hurdles.
The whole emphasis on sports competition was one of the many strange anomalies he discovered when he arrived on Earth—the name by which humans referred to their world—four years ago. He was unable to understand fully the ardor with which humans treated their games. On Vulcan, games had two purposes: the dissipation of excess energy and the quieting of the mind. Neither purpose had anything to do