Universe Around Me
By Aconitum-Napellus.
Permission is given for posting and archiving.
Rating: G
Summary: Independently, Sarek and Spock remember Amanda after her death.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are
the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are
the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright
infringement is intended.
[A.N. inspired by the song Universo ao Meu
Redor]
Sarek
Sarek had not lifted his lyre from its stand for five weeks. When he lifted it
now, his fingers left impressions in dust. Everyone knew that his son was a
virtuoso on the lyre, but few knew that it was from Sarek that he had inherited
his talent, and with Sarek that he had spent long, rigorous hours learning the
precise technicalities of the instrument.
Sarek took a cloth, and very carefully and precisely wiped the dust from the
surfaces, wondering how much of the dust was composed of cells from his wife's
then-living body. Very little, he knew. Dust was made up of particles of sand,
soil, of scattered motes of the house one lived in. But this dust was also, in
the smallest amounts, his biological matter, and Amanda's biological matter,
mingled and scattered evenly over every surface in the house, silent and
resolute in its takeover.
The piano stood in the same room, just as neglected as the lyre except for
the fact that Sarek had never learnt to play that particular instrument, and
now he had no one who could teach him.
Untrue. Illogical, in fact.
Spock had learnt piano at his mother's side just as he had learnt the lyre at
his father's side. Spock had progressed to be almost as proficient at the
instrument of his mother's people as he had at the instrument of his father's.
But, illogical as it may be, Sarek could not reconcile himself to the idea of
learning from his own son something that he had never learnt from his wife in
the decades of opportunity he had been given.
On an impulse unexplained by logic, Sarek took the lyre out into his wife's
rose garden. It was dawn or to be precise, it was the time just before dawn,
when the sky was beginning to tint itself crimson, and low swathes of mist hung
over the desert, imparting vital water to the plants before the blazing sun could
burn all traces of moisture away.
Amanda's rose garden was protected by forcefields,
but here too the plants were favoured with dew. Sarek had programmed the
computers himself, over sixty years ago, and the schedule of dew, rainfall,
filtered light, light breezes and nutritional release in the soil had proven so
perfect that it had never had to be changed. The roses would continue to
thrive, as long as the computer that cared for them continued to thrive. But
there was no one to prune them, Sarek realised with a pang. He had never taken
particular notice of how one pruned roses. There was
no one to gather bouquets and set them in vases about the house. Computers
could keep plants alive, but they could not care for them.
Sarek sat. If he began to ponder on the miracle of a computer keeping a plant
alive, he was would start to analyse why a computer, and the skill of Vulcan's
best doctors, could not keep a single human alive. He had discovered in the
past five weeks that it was best not to think at all.
He inhaled the damp air into his lungs. Dampness was not good for a Vulcan's
lungs especially for a Vulcan of his age but he was giving very little
thought to his own longevity at the moment, other than seeing it as a curse.
The damp would perhaps not be beneficial to the lyre, either. That seemed to
matter more to him than his own health but provided he took care with the
instrument afterwards, a short exposure would not harm it. Inanimate objects
were more resilient than living bodies.
Sarek placed the instrument carefully on his knee, and began to play. As the
strings resonated he caught sight of rounded, shining droplets of dew shivering
together on the rose petals and leaves, coalescing into greater drops that
slipped like tears to the ground. They did not even splash on the damp soil,
but were immediately absorbed as if they had never been. The tune was an
ancient one the lament of a man who had lost his wife. Amanda had always
loved it. Sarek had never imagined that he would play the piece as more than a
simple interpreter of the notes.
Above the shimmering forcefield, a t'h'yla bird began to circle, calling for its mate, using
the thermal updraft from the house to aid its flight. Sarek let his gaze move
upward as he played, until he was transfixed by the silhouette of the bird
gliding in circles against the translucent sky. There was a
redness like flame spreading across the heavens but he could also see
stars glittering far beyond in constellations that had not changed for
millennia. Between the bright arms of A'thlya and the
cradle of Lan'y'ya he knew that a starship moved,
totally invisible to the eye from here, and meaningless in the face of the
universe around it. But not meaningless to Sarek. He
tracked the
Spock
The stars were bright and steady from the thick,
transparent window of the
From here he could see galaxies set in frozen cartwheels in the blackness of
space. He could see dust clouds refracting light from the stars that they
obscured, and pulsars giving out their steady heartbeats to time the universe.
From here he could see both Sol, that shone gently on the
planet of his mother's birth, and Eridani 40 who had blazed over most of
her life. From both of those stars his blood was mingled, and now the one firm
tie he had to Earth was gone, decaying back into nothing but the elements that
had come from that earth. Nothing at all. Humans had
no katra.
He shook his head. Humans perhaps had no everlasting soul that they could pass
on or preserve, but they did linger in memories. There must be thousands of
people with memories of his mother, not least himself although his memories
of her were
odd, at best. He could not call them fragmentary, as such, but all
of his memories from before his time of death and rebirth were faded and
indistinct, and required great concentration if he wished to see them with any
clarity. His mother had helped to bring him back from that time. For the past
eight years she had never ceased to help reconstruct his previous self. He had
spent more time with his parents since his rebirth than he had in all the
intervening time since he had left home at eighteen. But he would have paid a
large amount of money now to be able to see the memories of his previous life
with clarity and certainty. He would have given anything to be able to capture
the memories that his father held.
Sarek.
Sarek who had touched his mother's mind, who had loved her
with a bone deep, soul deep passion despite Vulcan logic and Vulcan control.
Sarek, who had stood by her through all of her human
inconsistencies, and who had been anchored by her. Her mind would linger
in his. It would linger in the books that ranged the walls of the study in
their shared home, and in the burnished walnut piano that sat in the middle of
the room, and in the diaries and letters and scribbled notes that she had left
behind. It would linger in the scent of her in her clothes, in the organisation
of the kitchen cupboards, in the individual impressions of human toes left in
the soles of her shoes. His mother was everywhere, and
yet nowhere, visible only by the cut out shape left by the lack of her
presence.
And now there was only Sarek. Was the loss of his mother an invitation to
become more Vulcan, or to become more human? Again, he shook his head. Illogical to attach motivations to an unavoidable natural
occurrence. It was an invitation to nothing. Now, more than ever, he had
to choose his own path. Now, more than ever, his destiny was his own to steer
as he would. There would be no more gentle guiding hand from behind him, or
soft words of logic cloaked in a mother's emotion.
Spock exhaled, and saw his breath form as vapour on the cold window before him.
The limits of life stopped at that window. Everything before him was
fascination and intrigue and deadly, inhospitable science but the ship at his
back held life, and warmth. It held the friends who had seen him through almost
forty years of his life, and who would continue to support him for as long as
their paths mingled. It held his home and his family. All
except
His eyes drifted back to the blazing pinpoint of Eridani 40 and the invisible
planet that basked in its heat. In his mind he could see Sarek, somewhere in
that empty house, looking older than Spock had ever seen him look. His father
was a Vulcan, but he was also an old man, and he was more utterly alone that he
had been in seventy years. Spock had left him there not long after his mother's
death. He had been duty bound to return to the ship. But soon, he thought. Soon
he would gather together some of his accumulated leave, and he would return to
his home, and he would spend time with his father. He was sure that they would
still feel that cut-out emptiness that his mother had
left behind. They would still imagine her in another room, or just gone out for
a walk but perhaps, slowly, they could begin to fill that void between them
with a relationship of their own.