Pathways - Jeri Taylor [222]
Then it was over, and she looked at him with an unusual expression: self-satisfaction? condescension?
“As I thought. You have a fantasy of the desert, a romantic spiritualism which informs you falsely. You possess no realization of the reality of the desert.”
“I fail to understand how I could know something I have yet to experience,” Tuvok replied, “or, in fact, how anyone could.” He put his own dark gaze on M’Fau. “Have you, for instance, crossed the desert?” he asked.
There was a long moment before she answered, and he feared he had crossed a boundary in the boldness of his question. But when she answered, he could detect no coloration in her tone. “No,” she said simply. “And that is because I have a respect for it that you lack. It is not my place to say that my attitude is superior to yours, but Tuvok . . .”
She paused, shimmering eyes fastened on him. “I fear for thee,” she intoned. Then she turned away from him and he understood that the audience was at an end.
And so it was that Tuvok, after a month during which he made such preparations as he thought fit, walked into the great red desert with a pack which included only the ritual artifacts of a spiritual retreat: a knife, a cup, and a holy stone which M’Fau, in a final gesture of acquiescence, had given him.
T’Khut loomed fulsomely over the daytime desert in the first week of his journey. He stared at its swollen immensity, volcanoes sputtering fire and ash as they had for eons, and tried to find there some sign, some manifestation that would make clear to him the reason for his odyssey. For the truth was, for all his need to go into the desert, Tuvok had no idea why he was so compelled, and that enigma disturbed him in a way that few things had. He had become convinced that, once he entered the still purity of the vast expanse, the answer would become clear to him.
But after a week, he was no closer to understanding why he was doing what he was doing than he had been when he started.
He had examined the question from every side, bringing to bear all his formidable powers of logic. There was, for instance, the possibility of genetic predisposition. His ancestors had dwelled in the desert, had worshipped at the feet of Seleya, had endured the harsh rigors of the endless sands and the cruel sun. Encoded in his brain might be the need to experience this primal past.
But if that was so, why was every Vulcan not so inclined? Many wanted to make a spiritual journey to Seleya, but that was easily done through transport and that was the method most people chose. Tuvok hadn’t heard of anyone for many generations past that had walked through the desert to the mountain.
He considered the possibility that his spiritual side, because of his father’s influence, had been enhanced from the time he was a small boy, and had implanted in him this need to experience the desert’s depths.
But he rejected that likelihood quickly; even M’Pau, the most spiritual being he had ever known, had never crossed the desert and, apparently, felt no need to do so.
What then, in Tuvok, compelled him? He stared upward at T’Khut, focusing his mind, turning the logical possibilities over and over, only to reject each and every one.
After a week, he realized he could no longer travel by day; he would not survive the journey. He chastised himself briefly for this most simple error in logistics; even in Starfleet Academy he had learned the wisdom of traversing intemperate landscapes by night. In his eagerness to find answers, he had stepped out boldly but foolishly; now, though he had supersaturated his body with liquids before starting out, he was already beginning to feel the effects of thirst. Had he traveled by night, he might have been able to