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“Coitus Infrequentus” Rating: NC-17…..oo la la!
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Trip stared at her. “Your sister.” He waited, as if for some strange, inexplicable punch line. T’Pol didn’t respond. She had clearly retreated into a distressing world of memory. Anguished brows lowered over suddenly overflowing eyes. She pressed shaking, pondering fingers to her mouth and blinked her burning eyelids rapidly, causing Trip to stare in mystified alarm for full five seconds—before he turned and laid his tiny infant son in the last empty bassinette. He glanced up once desperately for Phlox, but the man was across the room diligently loading his sterilizing unit with the instruments he’d just used, and had not yet noticed T’Pol’s sudden emotional crisis. Trip carefully approached her. T’Pol was still standing where she’d stopped after setting down her youngest daughter. Her hands now tightly clutched her elbows, and she stared, haunted, in the baby’s direction—tears still spilling, unnoticed, down her cheeks. Gently, Trip reached out and put a hand on one of her upper arms. She flinched as he did so, and her eyes flicked to his. Trip was startled to see how miserable they were—already greenish and bloodshot—a patina of welling liquid thickly glassing each one. He noted, however, that the rest of her face was now rapidly becoming as calm as you please. Except for a certain tightness of mouth, a slight pinch to her brow, her features were forced placid…in strange contrast to the steadily coursing, silent tears that were clearly beyond her ability to control. Her gaze went again to the source of her distress: the two-kilogram child, wrapped and warm and utterly innocuous. Trip tried to reach out with his mind, wondering that he couldn’t yet tell what was wrong with her. But she had—consciously or not—erected a smooth, egglike barrier all around her inner self. This was something he had not seen before; but admittedly, he was new to this whole business of telepathy. Clearly there was more to it than simply broadcasting your thoughts all over the place. “T’Pol,” he finally tried aloud. At his voice, and his insistent mind, and his hand gently tightening on her arm, she again tore her eyes from the baby and met his gaze, fuzzily, through the bright fisheye lenses of her clotted eyesight. Trip turned her slightly, so that the baby was out of her view. And taking his own right shirtsleeve in his other hand, he pulled his right hand in a little so that he could dab firmly at her cheeks and eyes with the cuff. Then he looked at her carefully. “Now, who is Gracie? What’s the matter?” His gentle, but quietly no-nonsense actions and tones startled her out of her stupor somewhat, and she worked her mouth momentarily, trying to find human words to describe something she was never, ever supposed to recall. “You said she was your sister,” Trip prompted. He wondered what that could mean? A childhood friend? She didn’t have a sister. And ’Gracie’? That was his mom’s name. Everyone always called her Gracie, even though her name was Elaine. Did T’Pol think the child looked like his mother? But he didn’t think she’d ever even seen a picture of her before. T’Pol finally replied, her voice very low and husky, like someone determined not to cry, no matter how much it makes their throat hurt. “She was.” “But—” Trip started, then stopped, thinking back. Had they ever had that particular conversation? T’Pol, were you always an only child? Hardly. And she certainly had been known to keep one or two things to herself in the past. But still… “How could I not have known about that?” Trip finally asked aloud, his faintly baffled tone making it as if he were speaking almost to himself. They had shared so much. Surely a beloved, deceased sister would have surfaced, especially when he was dealing so heavily with the loss of his own sister. And Gracie? He wasn’t sure if he could have heard correctly. He’d certainly never heard of any Vulcans named Gracie. No, nor Charity, nor Faith, either. T’Pol took a long, steadying breath. She deeply appreciated the fact that Trip was only voicing a tiny percent of the rampant, burning questions that she could feel filling his mind. Now that she wasn’t looking at the haunting little face anymore, now that the brunt of her violent re-education had sledgehammered through her brain and passed away, she could slow her heart-rate slightly and look into Trip’s mystified eyes. She forced herself to lower her instinctive guard. Emotions like these tended to raise such barriers. Not for the protection of the deviant having them, but for the protection of those close to them. Now she dissolved the shell of separation she’d thrown up around her mind, and let Trip see into the newly branded memories, tattooed—bleeding—onto the inside of her skull. She suddenly felt very weary. At length, she spoke. “I was nine,” she said, neutrally. The facts were easy to recite now. Recollection had temporarily razed the forest of her mind, and everything in its smoking expanse was hot and black and brittle. Until she had time to re-sort her thoughts, she was an ashen creature who could easily chant dull particulars without caring much one way or the other about their import. “She was two.” T’Pol looked thoughtful for a moment, as if searching for the next bit of the story. “The family was outside one morning, and she fell into the fountain—around the corner of the house. I was asleep in the sun. No one detected her disappearance. It was only a minute or two.” Her gaze had drifted to the floor as she said these simple sentences, and now she looked up—up at Trip’s white face, his wide, disturbed eyes. “We called the medics. But she died anyway.” But she died anyway. Trip suddenly realised T’Pol’s speech had for a while been starting to sound more human—as she and he lived one day after another, intimately and permanently linked to one another’s brains. He realised, too, that this phenomenon was working both ways, as he schooled the sick pity sloshing around his stomach—and reflective, unwanted, rearing grief for his own dead sister—into a hard, horrible little ball to be dealt with later. He was becoming much more proficient at this unpleasant knack lately, and he suspected it had to do with his enigmatic bondmate‘s skills. Moreover, he was beginning to appreciate the desperate obligation that meditation might become…in order to avoid peptic ulcers and random fits of rage and whatnot. Trip was still absorbing, still trying to formulate a thought of where to begin asking questions, when T’Pol volunteered more: “I was most…unbalanced…by the loss of my sister.” She paused, lost in recollection. “Nine can be an extremely difficult age for Vulcans,” she said after a quiet moment. “We’re just learning to school our emotions with some skill, and yet, with each passing year, they become stronger—more violent.” She looked up. “It was…not the best time…for me to endure a trauma on that order of magnitude.” She couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten it so cleanly until now. The child she became soon after the tragedy was dark and indrawn and wracked with illogical guilt. Sleeping in the sun. Awakened by the shouts of frighteningly emotional parents trying to revive their baby. Trip could vaguely sense the memories she was referring to. Dark and shady and half-peeled-raw, they flitted around the back of her skull in their new, anxious freedom. They weren’t supposed to have got free. And she hadn’t moved. Had only got to her feet and stood stock-still in the centre of the hot, hot patio as the adults had blasted around and past her, running and shouting, calling for medics, trying to calm themselves, failing. T’Pol hadn’t moved because she was intimately linked with her little sibling most of the time. And that day, she could feel that the baby’s katra had already flitted away up and off into some shockingly bright place that her own yearned desperately to follow—but dared not. “My parents took me to a sanctuary for treatment,” she added after another long moment. “What kind of treatment?” Trip asked. His voice was hushed as this quilt of unexpected and awful tragedy unfolded before his ears and mind. “I participated in the Fulara.” At Trip’s look of confusion, she elaborated. “A rather obsolete ritual in which a memory of an event can be completely repressed, thus obviating any emotions associated with it. It is a mostly symbolic undertaking, merely adding mental strength to the person’s natural suppression abilities. The memory is not destroyed. It is always there, and can surface if one allows it. However, few Vulcan minds would be likely to ever permit such a thing to happen. Thus, it is, in effect, permanent.” As she spoke, Trip slowly and painfully collected T’Pol’s now-vivid memories of her troubled time at the dark, quiet sanctuary. Her adamant refusal to participate in the ritual prescribed. The unVulcanish fits she‘d thrown. The sedation. The relief. Feeling sick, he found his voice again. “They did this to you against your will?” Judging by human standards, he found the idea appalling. T‘Pol stared at him. “It was for my own benefit, Trip. You don’t understand.” She wondered curiously how he could see her memories so well and yet not perceive the Vulcan logic behind their occurrence. She struggled to formulate an original response that he wouldn’t simply see as her species’ dogma. “Unchecked Vulcan emotions can become so strong—so devastating—that the chemicals they engender can fatally damage the brain. It is not a question of ‘nice manners’,” she clarified seriously. “In the same unlikely situation, we would have to do the same for any one of these.” She gestured towards their brood. “Yeah, well you might have a little trouble there,” Trip muttered. At her defensively raised eyebrow, he changed the subject: “Anyhow, let’s not put the cart before the horse.” She nodded in agreement, absorbing the agricultural reference easily, whereas a short time ago, it would have utterly stymied her. And it was illogical to argue over plans for an unlikely and hypothetical future. Trip sighed, thinking of all he‘d just learned, still soaking in more as he stood in the presence of T’Pol’s unfolding subconscious. “And how come all this surfaces just now?” he finally asked, in confusion. “Didn’t you say this Fulara mindwipe thing was supposed to be permanent?” “Yes, it was,” T’Pol confirmed. “And it isn’t a ‘mindwipe’,” she snapped in afterthought, before visibly centering herself and turning slightly to break the physical tension that was continually forming—as she tried to deal with sudden, excess emotion. After a moment, she looked back up honestly at Trip. “It was her face,” she finally whispered. “There really is a striking resemblance. Including the brow ridges. The trait belongs to a recessive allele that happens to exist in both my parents’ lines. This information was also repressed. I haven‘t thought about it in over fifty years.” T’Pol put a faintly wondering hand to her own smooth forehead and spoke, as if to herself. “The sight of them startled me. It is a somewhat unusual feature among my people.” “But what made the…repression fail?” Trip persisted, wondering still how all of this could just gush forth without so much as a prior hint. “It didn’t fail,” T’Pol replied, with faint surprise. “The Fulara is, as I said before, not a ‘mindwipe’. It is merely an…aid. A powerful one. But the memories are always there. To be accessed if and when the individual ever becomes ready.” Her voice took on a wry tone of slight self-reproach: “Or, in my case, if sufficient shock is applied.” Trip could see that she silently referred to her self-inflicted brain damage and subsequently lowered control. However, behind that habitual guilt, was a faintly growing sense of pride…that she had allowed herself to access the decades-old wound—and it had not destroyed her utterly, as all her elders had feared it would. “I’m sort of surprised it didn’t show up during the whole Xindi thing,” Trip said, as he continued to mull the bizarre phenomenon over. “I mean—what with Elizabeth and all,” he clarified. T’Pol blinked, tipping her head, but negated his supposition. “I can see how that would seem logical,” she explained, “but remember, the purpose of the block is to prevent emotional overload. It functions in such a way that the closer one might come to accessing the memory out of sympathetic grief for a loved one, the further it would be repressed. Co-dependent tragedy is best avoided where possible.” A frightening thought suddenly occurred to her, and she voiced it before she could stop herself. “Had I known that I had Fulara klotaya memories, I would have been much less likely to experiment on myself with the trellium-D.” “‘Much less likely’? Jesus, T’Pol!” Trip exclaimed, before he could shut his mouth. Right now was probably not a good time to discuss that particular issue. He wasn’t exactly nicely reconciled to it yet, by any means. For her own part, T’Pol simply looked at him with wise and weary eyes, as if to say, the past is the past; it cannot be changed. Perhaps she did say it. The lines of distinction were becoming fuzzy lately. Trip sighed and looked up at the ceiling, arching his tense shoulders backward and trying to calm his inner thoughts enough to think back to where they’d veered off-track. “Gracie,” T’Pol supplied quietly. Right. Trip’s stomach sank back into its habitual stone. “That’s a horrible story,” he finally said, having nothing else to offer as a response. T’Pol nodded. “Horrible things happen sometimes,” she agreed mildly. A moment passed in mutual silence, and the two of them used it to wander the few metres back to their snuffling, blinking, quietly mouthing children. The three infant minds formed a delicately wondrous web of semi-stunned, comfort-seeking inquisition, and Trip realised that this strange energy had been butting up against his own mind insistently over the last few minutes, like a newly-birthed foal pushing its head around for its dam. He put a hand out onto his youngest daughter’s flannelette cocoon. She felt like a small, dry bundle blankets. How could anyone could be so tiny and yet live? He broke the silence with a final note of bewilderment, as he stared down at the younger girl’s pretty little neonatal face. “The thing that I guess I still don’t understand is how you have a child named Gracie living on Vulcan.” T‘Pol almost smiled with inward recollection. “It’s not ‘Gracie’,” she clarified, using her mind to carefully make the point of spelling as she spoke. “It’s ‘G’Rasi’.” “G’Rasi?” Trip queried, making an apostrophe in mid-air with an index finger. “A nickname,” T’Pol affirmed. “A Vulcan nickname?” Trip repeated disbelievingly. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” “You would find it easier to believe in a kidding Vulcan?” she inquired archly. “Well, I know you,” Trip replied. “You didn’t know my parents,” she countered. “They were somewhat… unconventional.” “Really?” Trip asked, a slight twinkle somewhere in his otherwise very serious manner. “With you as a daughter? Impossible.” “I agree…one wouldn’t think so,” T’Pol stated blandly, without hint of jest. “And yet—” She left the rest of the sentence implied. “So what was G’Rasi’s real name?” Trip asked, still amazed at these revelations coming, fully-fleshed, to T’Pol’s conscious mind—like tea-towels fluttering surprisingly down from the apartment above on a windy day. “T’Rasi. The ‘T’ implies ‘from’, and is a traditionally popular prefix, especially for females. ‘Rasi’ is an archaic term for ‘heavy’ or ‘lead’. Her name means ‘from a steady point; from logic’.” “What does your name mean?” Trip asked, intrigued. “Where are you ‘from’?” “‘T’Pol’ means ‘from the heart’, in the same os-lakh,” she replied. She hadn’t thought about that fact in ages. “Both names come from an ancient poet my parents used to like to read.” She gathered her thoughts for a quiet moment, and when she spoke the archaic words, her voice was low with nostalgia:
“Smo’ni t’hy’la pla-yumaya suk’kunel. The English words resonated in his bones as the Vulcan thoughts poured past Trip’s mind and ears.
I wait for my love to return from the mountains. “It reminds me of Li Po,” Trip replied. “From ancient China.” He thought for a moment, and the translated, asian lines surfaced in his own mind, like sand ridges seen through shallow surf.
I wait. “…They made us learn it in school.” He mused momentarily that his teacher had been correct: he was glad he knew some bits and pieces of Earth poetry. At the time, he thought it a needless waste of effort. Little did his younger self suspect that he would have use for it in communing with and comforting the telepathic mother of his triplets. T’Pol simply nodded at the strikingly similar feel to the humans’ verse. People were strangely the same all over the galaxy. She resumed her thread of explanation. “She had trouble pronouncing the initial ‘T’ sound of ‘T’Rasi’, and so called herself ‘G’Rasi’,” T’Pol finished. A strident, photographic memory sliced past: T’Pol helping her baby sister to put her shoes on. “G’Rasi do!” the girl had cried, trying to wrest the footwear from her ko-kai. Neither spoke for a moment as the memory appeared—gripped—and passed. Trip decided it was like nausea more than anything else: waves of powerful, unpleasant sensation that could only be borne out. He inhaled carefully for a moment, and then sighed deeply and consciously, trying to blow the clinging cobwebs of melancholy from his grief-bruised, worn-out mind. “I suppose your mother and my sister are out there somewhere looking after G’Rasi and Elizabeth,” he finally reflected softly, staring at and through his son, strangely comforted at the notion. “Do you think so?” T’Pol inquired seriously, curiously. She could feel the odd relief that the hopeful thought brought him. “Don’t you?” Trip looked up in some surprise. He’d never actually been positive of his own position on the matter. But some childlike inner part of him just assumed that everything went on and on somehow. Like water. Like life. T’Pol looked inward. “I don’t know,” she said honestly, after a moment. “It seems unlikely that anyone living could know the answer to such things.” Trip waited. He could sense there were more words trying to formulate themselves in her mouth. “And yet,” she tried—thinking, “there have been several occasions…when I have been sure that M’aih was in my room with me.” “Here on Enterprise?” “Illogical, I know,” T’Pol immediately replied, negating her own thread of whimsical supposition. “Not so illogical,” Trip countered, musingly. “The few times you’ve contacted me from a long distance, I could’ve sworn you were right next to me. Until I looked up and realised I was just zoning out. So, maybe some part of you really was there.” Trip tucked the tightly wrapped swaddling down away from his son’s tiny chin and stroked the little cheek, causing the boy to twist his small head on the bassinette pad, instinctively mouthing for his mother’s breast. “And maybe that’s the part of us that lives on.” His suggestion hung in the air for a moment as both parents looked at their babies and thought metaphysical thoughts about life and death and the lost loved ones they would never again see in the flesh. Trip broke the silence: “Did you—um—did you know my mom’s name is Gracie?” T’Pol frowned slightly to herself, as she recalled the things she had learned of Trip’s family over the years. She looked up. “I thought her name was Elaine.” “Elaine Grace Tucker. But everyone calls her Gracie.” T’Pol took the coincidence in silently, and then summarised: “So, your name is Charles, but you are called Trip. Your brother’s name is Albert, but he is called Bert—and your mother’s name is Elaine, yet, she is called Gracie.” She paused and then continued in earnest, quiet bemusement: “Why did you not simply name yourselves Trip, Bert, and Gracie?” Trip laughed. She wasn’t wrong. “Sometimes you can’t name a baby right off the bat and get it right for life,” he tried to explain. “Who knows. Maybe Billy Bob here will want to go by Fang.” “We are not naming that baby Billy Bob,” T’Pol replied reflexively and with some real concern forming behind her exasperated tone. It wasn’t the first time Trip had said it, and she was beginning to suspect he was possibly serious. “All right, all right” Trip allowed equably, as if bestowing a generous favour. “But we do have to start thinking of names. Once you’re breathing on your own, you need a name,” he decreed, creating the rules of the unique situation as he went along. “Agreed.” T’Pol thought back to the names she’d idly considered over the years for her future children. There had always been some she’d preferred, both human and Vulcan; but strangely, now that it was time to actually put them into use, she couldn’t recollect a single one of them. She gazed down at her three unprecedented infants, and appreciated the immensity of the task before them. Billions of people would be hearing the news shortly. Whatever they chose would go down in history as the names of the first Vulcan-human hybrids. The first to survive, at any rate, she hoped fervently. The fragility of the babies’ tentative beginnings brought to mind a first suggestion. “Perhaps we should call one…Amanda,” she ventured, wondering what Trip would think of the idea. It startled him. He had actually made the same suggestion somewhat jokingly to Cole herself yesterday in the mess hall. However, she hadn’t been appreciative. “Amanda hates her name,” Trip supplied. “She told me so herself, yesterday morning. She said if we so much as make it into a middle name, she’ll put in a formal complaint to the captain.” “That seems rather excessive,” T’Pol remarked in mild surprise. “I think she was joking,” Trip explained. “You think she would appreciate a namesake?” T’Pol clarified, totally confused now. “No, I think she was serious about not liking her name, but joking about the formal complaint,” Trip spelled out. T’Pol could sense that he, at least, felt sure he knew what he was talking about; though she was nearly positive now that she would never fully grasp the vastly-obscure nuances, complicated innuendos, double-meanings, and flat-out falsehoods that humans termed ‘humour’. “Don’t worry,” Trip assured her. “I won’t,” T’Pol assured him in return. She seldom worried. “What suggestions do you have?” “I’ve tried and tried and I can’t think of any girls’ names yet,” he began. Memories of thinking of names for baby girls were painful, and thus creativity was pre-emptively squashed. “And boys’ names?” T’Pol inquired. She could tell he had one and was reluctant to voice it. “Well…I kind of like ‘Jasper’,” Trip finally said. “It’s what my dad wanted to call me.” T’Pol tasted the name on her mind’s tongue, as she asked, “Why didn’t he?” “Mom liked the idea of ‘the third’,” Trip said, smiling inwardly with memories of family lore. “Apparently, it wasn’t too hard to get Dad and Grandpa on board with the proposal.” “Jasper is acceptable to me,” T’Pol said. “We will need to think of middle names as well.” “Just like that?” Trip asked in surprise. “You don’t want to think about it for a while?” “I have thought about it,” T’Pol replied with a similar sense of surprise. Even joined mentally, there were certain things, certain modes of thinking, that were distinctly alien to one another’s brains. These intermittent spots jangled interestingly amid the rather seamless doublethink that the rest of their psyches had fallen naturally into. After several days bonded, life was easier in some ways, harder in others, and totally sideways in all the rest. Both were in total agreement on this point. “Jasper,” Trip tried aloud somewhat wonderingly, as he stared down at the middle scrap in the scrap-line-up. “I could live with that.” “The important question is, could he?” T’Pol replied in all seriousness. It was a momentous decision to make for a person. She favoured the name (she realised this likely was a partial result of Trip’s own strong preference bleeding through, but she didn‘t mind), but would it simply be turned into another nickname? She approached the other side of the bassinette and, looking down, visualised the child in various possible roles throughout his life. In Vuhlkansu, the name sounded like ‘urn-crystal-actor’. Nonsensical at best, but the child would likely need some of the skills of a thespian to succeed in either universe: human or Vulcan—or a third (unlikely) one: some benevolent mixture of both. “What does the name mean for humans?” she asked. “Is it simply the mineral?” “I don’t know,” Trip replied. He hadn’t thought of what the name meant; he’d just always liked the sound of it. “Computer,” he asked aloud, “what does the name ‘Jasper’ mean?” “’Jasper’:” the machine replied evenly, from the nearest speaker. “An opaque, impure variety of quartz, usually red, yellow, or brown in colour, found on many Minshara-class planets. ‘Jasper’: A human name derived from ‘Casper’, and being one of the three Magi supposed to have visited the manger, following the birth of Jesus Christ. ‘Jasper’: A midsize Terran city located in Alberta, West Cascadia, which exists entirely within the boundaries of the largest national park south of—” “Thank you, Computer,” Trip replied, cutting off its never-endingly helpful stream of data. A tone and then obedient silence followed. Trip made a mental note to go over the response subroutines sometime with T’Pol and Hoshi to see if they couldn’t refine—yet again—the recalcitrant machine’s ability to supply accurate, but succinct answers. He forcibly dragged his mind back to the here-and-now…even as the little engineer who lived in his skull jumped up onto his stool, licked his pencil, and started scheming algorithms for later improvements. “One of the three wise men,” Trip said. “Not bad. And kind of fitting…these three look like miniature geriatric cases.” “They certainly do not!” T’Pol riposted impulsively: some inner maternal instinct deeply and illogically scandalized at the suggestion. “They do too,” Trip insisted gleefully. “Look. Lookit this one.” he pointed to their firstborn and then stroked her fuzzy head with a large engineering-roughened hand. The fontanels pulsated beneath his palm. “If I didn’t have Elizabeth to compare her to, I’d say she looks exactly like my Great-Grampsy Smith!” T’Pol’s eyes went to his face, unsure if he was teasing or not. She also had to make a concerted effort to avoid smiling involuntarily at his sudden rush of suppressed, inward laughter—thus she made some queer faces before finally agreeing, “She does resemble Elizabeth,” more as something to say, than something that needed saying. It was uncanny. “She sure does,” Trip echoed, smiling strangely down at his live, technicolor daughter, who cooed randomly to herself, here: in exactly the same room he’d silently, violently grieved for her older sister. “Do…you want to…name her Elizabeth?” T’Pol asked, carefully and curiously trying to gauge his emotions. Trip was learning how to shield those painful memories, and it was becoming harder for her to simply see into his thoughts regarding them. She wasn’t sure how she would feel if he did want to use the name again. “No,” Trip replied quickly, “it was her name.” “And ‘Elizabeth’ has a sad sound to it now, anyway,” he added, after a moment’s thought. T’Pol nodded in complete agreement. “What about ‘Paige’?” she asked next. “’Paige’?” Trip repeated. He was startled at just how easily startled he still was by this woman, given the fact that they were supposed to be of one mind and all. “It is Ensign Lefler’s first name. I noticed it yesterday when I was preparing her quarterly review. It has a pleasing sound to it.” Trip tipped his head, considering, and then realised what she’d said. “You aren’t supposed to be ‘preparing quarterly reviews’. You’re supposed to be resting.” “It is difficult to ‘rest’ when the door chime rings every seven minutes,” she snapped unexpectedly—her cheeks instantly greened and she took a blinking breath. She found she was becoming much more vocally reactive lately. It was most unsettling. “Why didn’t you just deactivate the chime?” Trip asked, awed at her sudden ability to gripe as well as any human. “Y’know, ‘do not disturb’?” “I did,” she said, a deep, irritable frustration still pulsating through her recollection. “And…?” Trip asked. He couldn’t make sense of her powerful, jangled thoughts; it was impossible to sort memories when she was keyed up like this. “They called through the door.” “What do you mean?” Trip asked, mystified. “Exactly what I said.” Wearily. “They called what through the door, exactly?” Who would bother a newly-delivered mother? Fine. She’d explain. Her voice took on a high silly, human female falsetto. “I know you’re resting…I went in to see them…they’re sooooo cute! I’ll just leave this by the door….” Thoroughly accurate in her mime—as in all things—she clasped her hands and pressed them up to her tipped left cheek to indicate the speaker she portrayed was coy and idiotic. Trip stared, speechless, as a closed-eyed T’Pol did a flawless imitation of Lieutenant Weekes’ annoying, superenthused manner. Unable to fathom what other strange revelations she could possibly have in store for him, he simply asked the next thing that came to mind. “Who else?” Dropping her false identity with supreme dignity—as if she were often up for a spot of impressionistic comedy—she simply ticked off a few more people in business-like fashion. “Chef, Ensigns Ballard, Mayweather, and Yevsky, Lieutenant-Commander Hellen, Crewman Nelson…” she paused, trying to think if there had been more. She’d also had a few non-Vulcanish dreams in which she’d throttled visitors calmly, and quietly, and one by one stacked their inert forms in her shower stall—and this was making it hard to remember which visits had been real and which imagined. “We should make some more time for meditation,” Trip said, trying to hide his own slight nervousness at the vividity of her tranquil, violent dream. “Agreed,” T’Pol replied. They could both use it. “So…Paige,” Trip said, again thinking back to where they’d left off. “Don’t you want any of them to have Vulcan names?” “We both work for Starfleet,” T’Pol reasoned. “And though Terra Prime also called it home, Earth is far more likely to properly accept our…strange little family…than Vulcan would be.” “Don’t be so sure,” Trip warned her glumly. Humans had become pretty good at pretending to be noble over the last fifty years or so, but the 1700 millennia just preceding that showed another, xenophobic side: one that was still smouldering relatively close to the surface. But T’Pol shook her head in quiet disagreement. “For an intellectual race,” she replied, “we Vulcans indulge in an illogical quantity of judgement over other species. It is most unreasonable to randomly hold one species to the moral, legal, or cultural standards of another, and yet many Vulcans find it extremely difficult to avoid doing just this.” “Well, I’m glad you think so anyhow,” Trip replied after a moment of surprised silence. After spending his life trying to pin things on Vulcans, it felt most oddly refreshing to hear one honestly criticise her own species—and far from feeling suffused with vehement, self-righteous agreement (as he would have a few years back), he held nothing but vague sympathy for the closedminded of the galaxy. That was all. It was extremely restful. And he abruptly realised that he made his own reality in a way—by choosing which things in life to become incensed over. “So, Vulcan middle names then?” T’Pol nodded, thinking to herself. “What are some of your family names?” Trip asked, trying to see if he could stir them up himself. It was very hard to find particular ‘memories’ amidst the cloudy, secret soup of someone else’s running psyche. “Vulcans don’t traditionally use family names,” T’Pol informed him, whisking shut the mental curtains of her family tree. His prodding psychic fingers were childlike at best—and tickled, in an eerie, greymatter sort of way. “Given the fact that we don’t use surnames as such, repeated naming within a clan quickly becomes confusing.” “So, toss some other ones out there. Some you guys haven‘t used.” At his odd-sounding choice of words, she gave him a look. “Y’know,” he prompted, not put off in the least, “reel some off. A list.” She blinked and thought to herself, allowing all the thousands of Vulcan names she’d ever heard to swirl in her eidetic mind. Randomly, and in no particular order of any preference, she began to recite. “Haadok, Sarpk, S’t’kal, Chu’lak, Asil, T’Penna, Tuvok, Falor—” “Falor?” She stopped. “Yes?” Trip shook his head, surprised at how alien the Vulcan names sounded in a group like that. He realised he knew very few Vulcans by name. “We can’t name any of ‘em Falor,” he said. “In English, it sounds like ‘failer’. The kid would hate it. Trust me.” The last was delivered with cryptically darkened brows. At T’Pol’s quizzical look, he vaguely elaborated: “My name’s pretty easy to rhyme with lots of stuff.” This concern seemed most illogical to T‘Pol. “If we are to judge by that standard, are you not also concerned about what ‘Tucker’ sounds like in Vuhlkansu?” “What?” Trip asked warily. “Well,” T’Pol began reflectively, “the closest-sounding match to my ear would be ‘T’kahr’.” “Meaning…?” “Literally? ‘Ancient’. But with a connotation of a teacher or sensei of sorts.” “’Ancient’?” Trip interjected, “Well, that’s not so bad. And in your case it happens to be true.” He spoke the goading sentence as if he were calmly describing her height or her eyecolour. It was part of an unobtrusive, ongoing revenge for her waiting so long to tell him her age. T’Pol didn’t bat an eyelash, but merely regarded him for approximately two seconds longer than was needed to make him uncomfortable. And when she replied, her low voice was that of one scientifically certain of the last laugh, no matter how black the humour. “Have your fun now, Commander.” She allowed him crystal clear access to a visualisation of their state in, oh say fifty—sixty years. He: pink and wrinkled and perhaps quite, quite bald. Veiny and frail and elderly as all get out. And she: comfortably and delectably middle-aged, likely still trim and fit—a few becoming streaks of grey shining in her glossy hair—and perhaps solicitously pushing his antigrav chair around. Trip rolled his eyes at the ruthless picture she painted, but ceded the point. “You win,” he forfeited gamely, “I’ll probably be a lot more ‘ancient’ than you, before I’m done.” “However,” T’Pol resumed, mollified, “I was more concerned with the other homonym to your surname. ‘Teker’ which means ‘deviation from the norm‘.” Trip stared for a moment, now unable to be sure if she was serious, given her recent behaviour. “Well,” he said after thinking, “at least it’s accurate. Probably even more so than the first one.” There was nothing to be done in any case, but she felt he at least had the right to know. “What was that other one? Before Failer?” Trip asked, doggedly determined to stay optimistic. “’Tuvok’ right?” He tried it on his kid. “Tuvok. Hm. Tuvok. Jasper Tuuuuu-vok. I don’t think so.” He looked up somewhat doubtfully. “Can y’give me some more?” “Lorot, Mestral, Stonn,” T’Pol recited. And becoming irritated at his look of deepening disbelief, she threw a couple of false ones in: “Retron, Zaphod, Bilge, Bunny, Sybok…” Zaphod caught his ear, and when followed by Bilge and Bunny, Trip finally figured she had to be joking. He laughed, marvelling at her ability to keep both a straight mind and face when she wanted to. However, this bit of honest, unconscious praise from her mate went straight to T’Pol’s newly-more-emotional head, and it had the effect of cracking her serious façade into a short, self-deprecating grin. She covered it up quickly enough, and after a moment was again able to look frankly up at Trip and remark solemnly: “Clearly, I am going to have to relearn my manners before I venture back into Vulcan society.” “I dunno…at least your new last name—if you want it, that is—will warn them ahead of time of your deviant, cheerful ways.” “My ‘deviant ways’ are frequently not cheerful,” T’Pol observed somewhat dourly. Whatever else she was, she was mercurial. She looked at each of her babies as she said these words, wondering to herself what their emotional physiology would be. How much Vulcan and how much human? “No one’s cheerful all the time,” Trip replied, refusing to allow her to succumb to illogical worry. “Except Lieutenant Weekes. And, actually, if you go by the numbers, there are really very few species out there who suppress all their emotions. So, technically, the Vulcans are the ‘deviants from the norm’.” T’Pol considered this small piece of infallible logic, and felt a good deal better over it. “So the last ones were all fakes?” Trip reaffirmed smiling, as he steered them back to the intriguing task of creating several lifelong and infamous identities. “Hardly.” T’Pol arched a slim eyebrow in mild surprise. “Sybok was the name of the Vulcan president before V’Las. Do you never look at the news?” This last in a tone of delicate curiosity. “Well, yeah, but I get the tech feeds,” Trip defended. He realised he often found himself with no idea of current events, and shook his head at her inner judgement of him as a thoroughly absentminded, insular engineer. “Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, “I guess I’ll add interplanetary. It’s just that all those news feeds, they clog up your inbox.” “Not if you check it,” explained T’Pol patiently. Trip rolled his eyes and rubbed his face. He‘d been down this path with many a crewmember, all the way from Ensign Mayweather to one extremely memorable exchange with Admiral Forrest. He was an intransigent case; hopeless. He changed the subject. “So, Sybok? Really?” “No. I hate that name,” T’Pol replied evenly. “How about Kov?” “Kov. I like that.” Trip hesitated for a moment, and then confessed. “Y’know, Kov…was the one who…explained about the whole ‘seven years’ thing.” T’Pol thought about this amazing piece of news. The Vulcans of Kov’s ship were certainly different from those of her homeworld. It was no surprise they had struck out on their own into the loneliness of space. As she had. “I did wonder how you comprehended my request so rapidly,” she replied frankly, as she turned and cautiously and awkwardly lifted her youngest daughter back up into her arms. “You seemed as if you had simply been waiting for me to bring the topic up.” She looked down at the baby girl’s small face again, touching her plump cheek, her strange, barely-there cranial ridges, relieved that the wretched feeling had mostly flown—now that the blister of repressed memories had welled, flooded, and gone past. “Maybe I kind of was,” Trip replied. “Subconsciously,” he added quickly at the querulous face she quirked at him. She actually tsked in scorn, and when she spoke, she addressed their daughter, and in the slightly-higher-than-normal, universal baby-voice. “You humans blame everything on your subconscious.” “It’s to blame for a lot of stuff!” Trip protested roundly. He watched T’Pol watching the face of her baby sister’s doppelganger. “Let’s name her Gracie,” he suddenly suggested. He didn’t mean to, but the thought voiced itself before he could swallow it back. T’Pol looked up, a thread of uncertain fear creeping quickly back into her face. Her thoughts went automatically to the doomed baby Elizabeth, so speedily following her namesake aunt to the world of Giidas—or to oblivion. “You’re not superstitious,” Trip said quietly, as if to remind her. “No. But what if—” she was unable to finish the sentence, as she wasn’t sure exactly what she was afraid of. Some formless, nameless Something Terrible that might happen if she too-closely aligned this child with her unlucky, infant aunt. Aunts again. No. “T’Pol, Elizabeth was ruined from the start.” Trip’s voice broke unexpectedly at his own strong choice of words and he swallowed, before continuing more steadily. “They messed up. Her name had nothing to do with it. We could have called her anything. It wouldn‘t have made any difference.” He looked at the little girl T’Pol held tightly now, as if to make up for having been so affronted by her before. “We certainly don’t have to name her anything you don’t want to. But—I think it’s a great name.” T’Pol looked back down at her daughter. The baby was exhausted from all the sights and sounds of the last hour. Her eyes blinked slowly, barely opening themselves in-between. She finally slipped into sleep, taking temporary refuge from the overwhelming new space she found herself in. “Gracie,” T’Pol said, looking at the girl and trying the name on. The baby opened one bleary eye, fixed her parents with a piercing cyclops glare, opened her infinitesimal pink mouth for a prodigiously petite yawn and then fully and deeply passed out. They could feel her mind slowly tick over into the self-revolving repair of sleep. T’Pol shivered and looked up at Trip, tightening her hold on the swaddled baby. “Gracie Phlox Tucker?” “Perfect.” They smiled at one another and T’Pol looked back down in amazement at her daughter. Gracie.
TBC |
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