Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [9]
T’Pol had felt oddly troubled since shooting the alien down on the planet’s surface; troubled, indeed, to the point where she had come close to saying something to the captain as they had all been sitting, smeared with gel, in the decontamination chamber. Yet she had not known precisely what she had wanted to say.
She knew only that she should not have shot the alien; her action had been a mistake, one that led to his untimely death. In the context of the planetary catastrophe, that one premature death had very broad and disturbing implications. The mystery of his peers’ deaths might now never be solved.
T’Pol settled back into the prescribed position, let go a deep breath, closed her eyes, and forced all thoughts from her.
For an instant, no more, there was silence, and darkness.
And then the image of the dead alien, lying at her feet, rose unbidden. Why had she not considered the possible consequences of her action before she fired? Admittedly, she had acted not on intelligence but on pure impulse. Had her time among humans begun to affect her so deeply?
She rejected the latter question as soon as it arose. She had already told Hoshi that guilt was illogical; so, too, was blame, and she would not lay the responsibility for her own actions at the humans’ feet.
Once again, T’Pol struggled to quiet her mind.
The image of the dead alien resurfaced once more; she remembered the instruction of her meditation teacher. If an image will not leave you, simply focus on it. See where it leads; in doing so, you will clear the obstruction it represents. Only then will you be able to successfully meditate.
T’Pol let go a deep, closemouthed sigh, drew in a fresh breath, and this time studied the image closely when it presented itself.
And at once, she was no longer a woman sitting on the deck of a starship hurtling at subwarp speed in orbit about an unknown planet, but a girl, kneeling in the hot red sand of a Vulcan garden.
Before her, a desert succulent, a large kal’ta plant, lay uprooted and limp beneath the relentless sun, its deep violet leaves, edged with iridescent blue, partially eaten away. The plant had grown for years in the garden, well before T’Pol’s birth; vast and venerable, it had been her father’s favorite, grown from a cutting handed down in the family for unbroken generations.
Now it lay destroyed; and as young T’Pol studied the damage, aghast (yet even at the age of five years being trained enough to control the outward expression of what she felt), she heard her mother’s calm voice addressing her father just inside the house.
“A ch’kariya, no doubt. I will purchase a trap for it, and contact your father for another cutting from his kal’ta.”
A ch’kariya: a burrowing mammal that relied on the roots of plants for water and nourishment. T’Pol had never seen one, and when she heard her mother’s word, an idea struck the young scientist: she would construct a trap herself, immediately, from materials already in the family home, and capture the creature for observation. This would do two positive things: please her parents, and further her knowledge of Vulcan zoology.
T’Pol immediately constructed a simple trap, no more than a tranparent box with one side that was rigged to slide closed when the animal entered. As bait, she left a small portion of the kal’ta plant with its roots attached.
By sunset, her plan bore fruit: inside the box she found a long, slender quadruped, pale-skinned with sparse hair, so small she could hold it in her hands. Its tiny eyes were squinted shut, blinded even by the waning light of dusk.
She said nothing to her parents, but carried it to her room in secrecy. That night, for many hours,