Pathways - Jeri Taylor [207]
What was unmistakably a smile pulled at Sarek’s mouth. “It’s called ‘short-sheeting,’ Cadet,” he said, and his wise eyes twinkled as he said it. “It’s an ancient tradition on Earth and I wouldn’t imagine it’s going to go away any time soon. It’s not meant as disrespect, just as a kind of irreverent fun.”
Tuvok pondered this reply, but found no satisfaction in it. He decided to try another example. “I have found that, at least among the males of this species, there is endless delight taken in stories which involve the functions of the toilet. They will howl with laughter over a description of almost anything that is a bodily function. Does this not strike you as odd?”
The smile on Sarek’s lips was even more pronounced this time—in fact, a gentle laugh was escaping them! Tuvok stared, fascinated. He couldn’t ever remember having seen a Vulcan laugh.
“It seems that at approximately age four, human boys become fascinated with bodily functions and deal with this fascination by making fun of these physiological necessities. It has a term—‘bathroom humor’—and you are correct in your observation that the females seem not to share in it. Unless, of course, the female is like my wife, who is much saltier than most human females. At any rate, men seem not to outgrow this infantile behavior, and continue for most of their lives to find amusement in stories about the bodily functions.”
Tuvok had pondered statements like these for days afterward, hoping there would be contained within them something he could grasp, something that would help him to endure the beings with which he was now surrounded. But it seemed to come down to the fact that Sarek enjoyed humans, while he could summon no such response.
And then there were the women.
They had proven as astonishing as anything Tuvok had encountered on this singular world. He was accustomed on Vulcan to women of uncommon power, but Earth women were extraordinary in their brazenness. Audacious, forward, impertinent, bold—they struck him as not unlike hungry lematyas, the fearsome beasts of Vulcan who often hunted in packs.
It was not unusual for one or more human women to follow him across campus, striking up conversation for no apparent reason, or to sit themselves down with him at dinner and begin asking the most probing of personal questions. On several occasions he had returned to his dormitory to find one of them sitting on the floor outside his room, who would then follow him into his quarters unabashedly, as though this were commonplace and proper.
He had received from them countless invitations to dances, concerts, and lectures—and he had, at times, accepted, depending upon the appeal of the occasion. But he never failed to feel somewhat breathless and disoriented after an encounter with one of these frank and disarming creatures.
One of the most memorable of these adventures involved a young woman, Lily Astolat, whose name Tuvok found unremarkable, ignorant of its origin. She was delicate, with honey-golden curls and pale brown eyes, and skin that was so smooth and flawless it looked as though it had been replicated.
She sat next to him in his calculus class, and seemed to absorb the mysteries of calculus with an effortlessness he found intriguing. She also seemed less bold than some females, and he appreciated that. So it was that, after struggling for several days with a problem in metric differential geometry, he accepted her offer of help.
They met in one of the study rooms of the dormitory and found it, for once, empty. The fact that it was eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, a day and time when there seemed to be many social activities, undoubtedly accounted for the privacy they enjoyed now.
Lily proved an excellent tutor, and sorted through the intricacies of the problem with him. She clarified the rules of tensor-product formation, and once he had grasped those