fic: qui ante nos fuerunt
Title: Qui ante nos fuerunt
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Characters: Saavik, Spock Prime
Notes:Written for the Halloween Drabblefest at where_no_woman, prompt 37: "ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt;" revised from that posting.
in ea tempora natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis
(you have been born into those times when it is well to strengthen the mind with models of fortitude)
--Tacitus Annals XVI.35
She is almost too young to remember Vulcan. The buildings of her city are stone, carefully cut in the traditional manner, but bright-edged and unsmoothed by time. When she is taken to the Ritual Place of her adoptive family on ceremonial days, the bells and the fire pits are there, precisely as her imprinted cultural memory tells her they should be. The shapes are correct; the materials are correct; the arrangement is as she knows it has been since the memory of Vulcan can record. Like every Vulcan, she has helped build and reestablish the forms of Vulcan society in this new place -- not as copy, but as a continuation.
But to Saavik, it nevertheless seems as a shadow of what it should be. She knows that she should not feel the absence of foot-worn paths and uncountable breaths taken as keenly as she does. Nostalgia is the emotion, she has been taught, that will most endanger the Vulcans of her generation.
She could always perceive that there were many things her elders did not speak of before her: pain that they should not be suffering after 15 years, illogical longing for something that cannot be returned, anger and frustration at a failure of justice that they should not expect to exist in the entropic universe. Every Vulcan child will bear the memory of The Destruction, but the new generation must grow untainted by the passions that it stirs up. This Saavik knows; it is logical. Insofar as she does bear personal experience, however small and child-like-ignorant, it is her duty to suppress every memory of anguish, every nostalgic stirring. It is her duty to be content in the restored world in which she was bred, according to the Vulcan way.
She is taught by recitation and catechism until she graduates to a learning pit that is younger than she; her studies continue under the auspices of the Academy, where lecture halls have been constructed for the population of several centuries hence, and libraries hold every ancient text of Vulcan -- in copies newly brought from Memory Alpha. If counterfactual optatives were not ungrammatical in her native Post-Reformation Golic dialect, Saavik would long to touch an ancient codex instead of a cool modern PADD, desire to read the classics at the same tables where T'Paras and Stolok and T'Verek wrote them instead of in a study cubicle at which only seven students before her have sat or the desk in her family's house that was built first for her use. She is occasionally struck by the thought that she may be immersing herself in the past in order to find an emotional satisfaction that living after the Destruction denies her. But it would not be logical to abandon the path to which one's talents incline because of an emotion one cannot excise. Therefore, her studies continue in history and historical theory: she decides that it must be her especial struggle not to let longing into her mind even as she devotes herself to the past of a place that no longer exists except in the revivified memories of this new home and the unmindful data-disks of the Academy libraries.
There are new children now, children who never saw Vulcan, but who are better able than she to live in Surak's path. Saavik's cousins and the biological daughter of her adoptive father achieve the age of logic, pass a Kahs-wan in an environment that is sufficiently parallel to Vulcan's Places of Testing, and take up the task of rebuilding their people's society and reclaiming its position in the Federation. They do it without emotion or hindrance, respecting what was lost and the pain their elders suffered, but adopting the traditions and continuing logically. Saavik represses her jealousy and is accepted as an Advanced Fellow at the Academy.
But on the day her cousin is bonded, with the family standing at their Place of Ritual, the absent weight of ages is too much. The words and the bells and the flames are all correct, but they are also all wrong, and Saavik turns and leaves her place in the circle and goes home. In her room, where all is austerely modern and there are no reminders of Vulcan -- except in the shape of the doorway, and the texture of the wall, and the jointure of the furniture and in 536 other codefiable details that mark the architecture and appointments for the culture to which they belong -- she meditates and meditates and cannot eradicate her shame.
Her adoptive father does not ask for an explanation for her inappropriate behavior when he enters in the evening, just before dusk. "Will you show me what disturbs you, Saavikam?" He offers his hand to the meld-points on her face, as if she is a child who needs comforting and cannot rationally express herself in language.
It is worse to hear confirmation of her emotional state from him. "My father, I cannot."
"It is apparent that you are not happy," he says, and sits beside her.
" 'Happiness is the absence of perturbation from the mind. You will achieve it only through the mastery of emotion.' " She has read the dialogue over and over, trying to suppress the sense that the words on the screen are only words and have been forever unlinked from the generations of readers who made them true.
"Then tell me, Saavikam, what emotion you have not mastered."
She turns her face away from him, uncertain whether it is that he cannot know, or that she cannot bear to speak of it at all.
"You quote Surak. He did not say that we would be able to master our emotion easily." He pauses. "I have spent my entire life in such a struggle, Saavik, and for our people there is now a cause to find it difficult that Surak did not envision for us. You must not be ashamed."
She shakes her head. "There is no remedy." No remedy but her own mastery. We have named fear an evil emotion, but we have named shame a virtue. Therefore you must release both. If one fails to follow Surak's way, then the things that in actuality define Vulcan are destroyed.
Her father bows his own head, examining his clasped hands. "Saavik. I do not speak from any dissatisfaction with your pursuits. But perhaps it will aid you to know that your counterpart in my timeline did not always live... among our people. You -- she -- became a respected officer in Star Fleet. And I, and my counterpart here, found it easier to achieve contentment among non-Vulcans. What I endeavor to express," he says, as she still does not respond, "is that I wish for you to be happy -- whether the word is taken in its ancient or its modern usage -- and that it is not defeat to look for a state of calm elsewhere when you have not found it here."
"I will consider your advice, my father," she says formally, and she allows the brush of fingertips to forehead as he rises. Ambassador Spock is perceptive, and knows when it is better to leave.
But Saavik turns back to her PADD. There is no question of obeying her father's suggestion. She cannot leave: if this colony and all the learning of Vulcan lack the presence of peopled history that her mind seeks, the whole galaxy will not supply it. She closes down the economic treatises she had been comparing and brings up Surak's fourth dialogue, although she hardly requires a text before her after so many readings. It is not logical to repeat an action that has not produced an acceptable result, but it is also illogical that the lemmas of Surak not teach her how to master the pain in her thoughts. She can only conclude that the error is in her understanding of the text, in the sincerity of her comprehension, and that she can correct it by a closer reading. This is the center of her culture: in these words, even as nothing but symbols on her screen, there must be the Enlightening that saved Vulcan once and that can bring her peace.
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Characters: Saavik, Spock Prime
Notes:Written for the Halloween Drabblefest at where_no_woman, prompt 37: "ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt;" revised from that posting.
in ea tempora natus es quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis
(you have been born into those times when it is well to strengthen the mind with models of fortitude)
--Tacitus Annals XVI.35
She is almost too young to remember Vulcan. The buildings of her city are stone, carefully cut in the traditional manner, but bright-edged and unsmoothed by time. When she is taken to the Ritual Place of her adoptive family on ceremonial days, the bells and the fire pits are there, precisely as her imprinted cultural memory tells her they should be. The shapes are correct; the materials are correct; the arrangement is as she knows it has been since the memory of Vulcan can record. Like every Vulcan, she has helped build and reestablish the forms of Vulcan society in this new place -- not as copy, but as a continuation.
But to Saavik, it nevertheless seems as a shadow of what it should be. She knows that she should not feel the absence of foot-worn paths and uncountable breaths taken as keenly as she does. Nostalgia is the emotion, she has been taught, that will most endanger the Vulcans of her generation.
She could always perceive that there were many things her elders did not speak of before her: pain that they should not be suffering after 15 years, illogical longing for something that cannot be returned, anger and frustration at a failure of justice that they should not expect to exist in the entropic universe. Every Vulcan child will bear the memory of The Destruction, but the new generation must grow untainted by the passions that it stirs up. This Saavik knows; it is logical. Insofar as she does bear personal experience, however small and child-like-ignorant, it is her duty to suppress every memory of anguish, every nostalgic stirring. It is her duty to be content in the restored world in which she was bred, according to the Vulcan way.
She is taught by recitation and catechism until she graduates to a learning pit that is younger than she; her studies continue under the auspices of the Academy, where lecture halls have been constructed for the population of several centuries hence, and libraries hold every ancient text of Vulcan -- in copies newly brought from Memory Alpha. If counterfactual optatives were not ungrammatical in her native Post-Reformation Golic dialect, Saavik would long to touch an ancient codex instead of a cool modern PADD, desire to read the classics at the same tables where T'Paras and Stolok and T'Verek wrote them instead of in a study cubicle at which only seven students before her have sat or the desk in her family's house that was built first for her use. She is occasionally struck by the thought that she may be immersing herself in the past in order to find an emotional satisfaction that living after the Destruction denies her. But it would not be logical to abandon the path to which one's talents incline because of an emotion one cannot excise. Therefore, her studies continue in history and historical theory: she decides that it must be her especial struggle not to let longing into her mind even as she devotes herself to the past of a place that no longer exists except in the revivified memories of this new home and the unmindful data-disks of the Academy libraries.
There are new children now, children who never saw Vulcan, but who are better able than she to live in Surak's path. Saavik's cousins and the biological daughter of her adoptive father achieve the age of logic, pass a Kahs-wan in an environment that is sufficiently parallel to Vulcan's Places of Testing, and take up the task of rebuilding their people's society and reclaiming its position in the Federation. They do it without emotion or hindrance, respecting what was lost and the pain their elders suffered, but adopting the traditions and continuing logically. Saavik represses her jealousy and is accepted as an Advanced Fellow at the Academy.
But on the day her cousin is bonded, with the family standing at their Place of Ritual, the absent weight of ages is too much. The words and the bells and the flames are all correct, but they are also all wrong, and Saavik turns and leaves her place in the circle and goes home. In her room, where all is austerely modern and there are no reminders of Vulcan -- except in the shape of the doorway, and the texture of the wall, and the jointure of the furniture and in 536 other codefiable details that mark the architecture and appointments for the culture to which they belong -- she meditates and meditates and cannot eradicate her shame.
Her adoptive father does not ask for an explanation for her inappropriate behavior when he enters in the evening, just before dusk. "Will you show me what disturbs you, Saavikam?" He offers his hand to the meld-points on her face, as if she is a child who needs comforting and cannot rationally express herself in language.
It is worse to hear confirmation of her emotional state from him. "My father, I cannot."
"It is apparent that you are not happy," he says, and sits beside her.
" 'Happiness is the absence of perturbation from the mind. You will achieve it only through the mastery of emotion.' " She has read the dialogue over and over, trying to suppress the sense that the words on the screen are only words and have been forever unlinked from the generations of readers who made them true.
"Then tell me, Saavikam, what emotion you have not mastered."
She turns her face away from him, uncertain whether it is that he cannot know, or that she cannot bear to speak of it at all.
"You quote Surak. He did not say that we would be able to master our emotion easily." He pauses. "I have spent my entire life in such a struggle, Saavik, and for our people there is now a cause to find it difficult that Surak did not envision for us. You must not be ashamed."
She shakes her head. "There is no remedy." No remedy but her own mastery. We have named fear an evil emotion, but we have named shame a virtue. Therefore you must release both. If one fails to follow Surak's way, then the things that in actuality define Vulcan are destroyed.
Her father bows his own head, examining his clasped hands. "Saavik. I do not speak from any dissatisfaction with your pursuits. But perhaps it will aid you to know that your counterpart in my timeline did not always live... among our people. You -- she -- became a respected officer in Star Fleet. And I, and my counterpart here, found it easier to achieve contentment among non-Vulcans. What I endeavor to express," he says, as she still does not respond, "is that I wish for you to be happy -- whether the word is taken in its ancient or its modern usage -- and that it is not defeat to look for a state of calm elsewhere when you have not found it here."
"I will consider your advice, my father," she says formally, and she allows the brush of fingertips to forehead as he rises. Ambassador Spock is perceptive, and knows when it is better to leave.
But Saavik turns back to her PADD. There is no question of obeying her father's suggestion. She cannot leave: if this colony and all the learning of Vulcan lack the presence of peopled history that her mind seeks, the whole galaxy will not supply it. She closes down the economic treatises she had been comparing and brings up Surak's fourth dialogue, although she hardly requires a text before her after so many readings. It is not logical to repeat an action that has not produced an acceptable result, but it is also illogical that the lemmas of Surak not teach her how to master the pain in her thoughts. She can only conclude that the error is in her understanding of the text, in the sincerity of her comprehension, and that she can correct it by a closer reading. This is the center of her culture: in these words, even as nothing but symbols on her screen, there must be the Enlightening that saved Vulcan once and that can bring her peace.