Small Talk

By

Pat Foley

Chapter 2

I let Spock know about my trip at breakfast the next morning. If Sarek’s control muted his reactions to merely hinting unease about my prospective absence, Spock’s lesser control displayed flat out horror.

He dropped his spoon from where he’d been plowing through a bowl of fruit and cereal and stared at me, aghast.

“You’re going away and leaving us?”

“I’m not leaving you,” I explained, with perhaps faulty human logic. “I’m coming back.”

“The necessity of coming back perhaps indicates that one is leaving,” Sarek pointed out from his end of the table.

“Thanks. I didn’t know that,” I said somewhat snarkily. That sort of Vulcan precision regarding language gets very old, very fast. “You knew what I meant.”

He tilted his head in a Vulcan shrug.

“You’re going away and leaving us?” Spock said again, returning to the prevailing question.

“Just for a conference. For a few days. Then I’ll be right back.”

Spock looked from me to Sarek, with a totally appalled, ‘What kind of a Vulcan clan leader allows this’ sort of look on his face. Far from staring him down, Sarek met his eyes in a wordless exchange between them that I knew meant, “Yes, she’s impossible, but she’s human. What can even I do with material like this?”

Spock was unappeased at this abdication from Vulcan standards. “You can’t go,” he proclaimed to me.

“Oh, I can’t, can I?” I returned, half amused.

“You’ll never find your way home. You’ll get lost.”

“I won’t get lost,” I said. “And I have a return Starship ticket.”

“You get lost even in the Fortress,” my traitorous son pointed out, exasperated at my denseness.

That was, unfortunately, an indisputable and uncomfortable fact. In my defense, the place was ancient, meant to house an army. It had been built to protect the city of ShiKahr and the underground springs that led from the mountains the Fortress was built against to the oasis under ShiKahr. It was more historical monument than home now, and only tradition kept us resident. In my justification, we only lived in a certain wing, and I never got lost there. Well, hardly ever. Stone corridors can look a lot alike. But it hadn’t helped that my over-candid son had been born with his father’s unerring directional sense, and a passionate curiosity to explore.

When he was a toddler, he was forever disappearing into the bowels of the ancient edifice if I turned my back on him for even so much as a moment. But the worst of it was that though I could find him – that parental bond worked even for me, human that I was -- I couldn’t find our way out. He could, but he would mischievously take advantage of my failing and take us on long meandering detours, determined to satisfy his curiosity, particularly when it was nap or bath time and only leading us out when hunger drove him to seek a meal. He hadn’t forgotten that, of course. I hadn’t forgotten that. I stared him down, my eyes narrowed at the memory. Spock looked away, well aware of his guilt in that regard.

“She’ll get lost.” Spock pronounced to his father, the court of highest appeal. “She always gets lost. She’ll never find her way home.”

This so clearly mirrored his father’s unspoken fears that Sarek shifted uneasily. It was plainly obvious to both Vulcans that a human who couldn’t find her way from one archaic stone corridor to another had no business traipsing around the galaxy on her own.

“I will so find my way, both there and back,” I said crossly. “And I am going.”

“But--” Spock protested.

“That’s enough of that,” I said.

Spock looked to Sarek and got the minute twitch head twitch to the left that was a Vulcan negative. Spock slumped into defeat and his appetite apparently gone, poked at his cereal. And then he straightened, finding a new area of outrage. “What am I going to eat?” he asked.

That was a material point. Sarek was excellent in planning the minute details of his son’s education, from astrophysics to zoology, from telepathy to emotional control, from desert survival to Surak’s philosophies. But he abdicated almost entirely from the lesser considerations of raising children. In fact, from most practical household details. Having always lived in a household of clan retainers, aides and servants before I booted most of them out to have as much of a normal family life as I could get on Vulcan, he did not cook, clean, or involve himself in the more prosaic chores of everyday life and child care. He knew perfectly well, for example, how to open a stasis unit, dial a cup of tea, or even use the food processors to procure a meal. At least, I believed that someone with all his intelligence and computer experience ought to be able to figure that out. Eventually. Not that he had shown much aptitude so far.

“I’ll leave your father instructions.” I said shortly.

This time Spock’s look of incredulity was reserved for me. He gave his father a narrow evaluating look that clearly gave his view that if his meals depended on Sarek dishing up dinner, he’d have a better chance of survival out on the Forge.

“Maybe I should go away to school.”

“For five days?”

“This is totally illogical,” Spock muttered darkly into his cereal, clearly of the opinion that with his parents so mismanaging their affairs, it was a miracle he had survived till seven. Then he straightened and gave his father a speculative look. One I knew too well.

“If you’re done with your breakfast, you can go to school,” I said, hoping to nip such thoughts in the bud.

He looked at me, the corners of his mouth pulled in just a fraction, to prevent a betraying emotion from being revealed, but enough for me to be darkly suspicious of the secret delight it might be concealing.

“Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.” I warned him.

Sarek looked from one of us to the other, blissfully clueless. He would be. Spock rarely played up with Sarek, both because he’d worshiped his father during the worst of that phase, but also because he just wasn’t with him as much. But Spock had inherited a mischievous temperament from both sides of his heritage, and Vulcan disciplines aside, was sometimes tempted to indulge in it, given the right circumstances.

Spock had gotten control of his expression and now looked as innocent as an angel. One with the pointed ears of the devil that was equally part of his nature.

“You’re playing with fire,” I warned.

He flicked a brow, indicating that he was well aware of that, but what was a poor, potentially motherless child to do but struggle along as best he could, when placed in such a situation?

“Go to school,” I said, hoping to head off that thought right now.

“Yes, Mother,” he said. “Good Day, Father,” he said as he passed him. Butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.

“That boy is dangerous,” I said to his father. “Someday he’s either going to be President of the Federation or locked up in jail. Or both.”

Sarek wasn’t interested in Spock, whose life path, as far as he was concerned, was already set in stone, beyond discussion. “Amanda, regarding this trip--”

“Don’t you start.”

“Perhaps it might be best--”

“I am going,” I said. “And I am more than a little tired of this attitude of Vulcan superiority, particularly when you countenance it in our son, against me. I managed my life perfectly well before I met you, and I’d manage it perfectly well without you!”

He drew back and stared at me.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” I said crossly.

“Do I?” he asked, with an enigmatic air that in a Vulcan meant he had reserved judgment.

I lost patience, and gathered up my briefcase. “Look, I’ve got to run if I’m not going to be late for class. You’d just better think of ways to deal with Spock. I know only too well that angelic innocence portends the exact opposite in a Vulcan, whether son or husband. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Don’t I?” he said, looking after me, a line between his brows. But I was too exasperated to take it any further.

To be continued…