Unification - Jeri Taylor [55]
“This is the second time you have accused me of speaking with another man’s voice,” he said carefully, watching for Spock’s reaction. The Vulcan gazed at him without expression, but Picard sensed a mael-strom of feeling behind his eyes. He knew it was time to acknowledge Sarek’s influence. “Yes, he will always be a part of me. His experiences. His spirit. But I speak with my own voice, Spock. Not his.”
There was a long moment. Picard heard the dripping of the moisture on the walls, the rush of distant underground waters. The face of his own father flashed briefly in his mind.
And finally, Spock drew a breath. “Curious,” he said, “that I should hear him so clearly… now that he is dead.”
The Vulcan moved away then, and Picard recognized the movement as an effort to regain emotional control. “It is possible,” he said evenly, “that I have brought my arguments with Sarek to you, Captain. if so, I apologize.”
“Is it so important,” said Picard softly, “for you to win one last argument with him?”
Spock considered the statement as though he were pondering the hypothetical premise of a scientific inquiry. “No,” he said solemnly, “it is not.”
Then he turned, and with a naked honesty that caught Picard like the chill gust of a winter breeze, said, “Although it is true that I will miss the arguments. It was, finally, all that we had.”
With startling clarity, Picard understood. In some unspoken fashion, he had become father to Spockm Spock, almost a century older than he. The mind meld with Sarek had blended them in some indescribable fashion. To what extent he was Sarek, and to what extent Spock simply heard Sarek, he did not know. But he knew that in a strange, unbidden way he had indeed done what Sarek had asked of him; he had come to Romulus and allowed that relationship to play out its final hand.
Perhaps he could effect closure between the father and the son. Perhaps he could grant absolution. Perhaps he could speak the words that Sarek never would.
“Your fight with Sarek is over,” he said with simple sincerity. “And you have none with me.”
Spock turned away, and Picard sensed his Vulcan desire to place this discussion in a rational context. But what he heard was a son struggling to achieve the termination of a protracted and difficult relationship —and not succeeding.
“I always had a different vision from my father’s,” he said. “It was an ability to see beyond pure logic. He considered it weak. But I have discovered it to be a source of extraordinary strength.”
Picard questioned the reasoning of this statement. If anything, Sarek had always been more emotional than Spock. Spock’s decision to follow Vulcan, rather than human, behavior had caused him to eschew emotions and to deify reason. But he realized that what Spock was uttering was not reality, but rather his perception of reality—his feelings. Picard did not comment.
“Sarek would find this mission of reunification a fool’s errand,” Spock continued, turning the conversation back to the case at hand. “But somehow I think it is not. Logic cannot explain why… but I know I must continue to pursue this—”
“Even,” Picard now interjected, “if it leads you into a Romulan trap?” Spock shrugged. “If the Romulans do have an ulterior motive, it would be in the interests of all concerned to determine what it is.” And for that, Picard had no answer.
“So I will play the role they would have me play,” Spock summed up, and Picard could only acknowledge reluctantly the rightness of his instincts.
Chapter Fifteen
CAPTAIN K’VADA had been sure he would not scream when his shoulder was dislocated by the ship’s physician. He had anticipated the pain, explored it in his mind, and prepared his defenses. When K’kam had torn it from its socket the first time, the wound was unexpected, and he felt justified in having uttered a brief howl at the agony of his arm being wrenched from its joint.
He had not lost consciousness. He had not thrown up. He