Deus Ibi Est (Pavel Chekov)
Part I
Love and Mathematics
According to the calculations of Pavel Andreievich Chekov, in the two months past, if the sum total of the digits in the stardate was divisible by seven there was to be an emotional encounter between crewmembers on the bridge. Therefore, ten emotional encounters had occurred, though if he was being honest Pavel had stretched his definition of an emotional encounter to include the incident in which Spock lifted his left eyebrow for the whole duration of 6.718 seconds.
Pavel was privy to four of the emotional encounters.
In addition to predicting emotional encounters he noted a shipwide phenomena, that the occurrence of positive interactions roughly corresponded to a positive linear equation, but the rate of negative interactions exhibited exponential decay. This led him to conclude that the bad times they would never be rid of, but the good times would go on happening, and soon enough the amount of friendship, or more accurately goodwill towards fellow crew, represented by the area between the positive interactions line and the negative interactions curve, would be so huge that little transgressions would be forgiven and forgotten. Pleased with this epiphany, he said aloud: “And in the end, the good shall outweigh the bad.”
Spock happened to overhear, and was intrigued. Pavel explained his theory that good and bad were not inversely proportional, but discrete events that had their own equations, and Spock thought it logical, but also logically concluded that humans, an entirely illogical species, could not be logically expected to adhere to the predicted trend. Therefore, the equation could not be expected to hold true if circumstances were to change, and circumstances changed all the time. “Yes,” Pavel mused. “So it was illogical to have expended time and effort devising equations to describe human behavior.” And then he grinned at Spock, a wide, radiant grin, as luminous as a dwarf star. And that was when Spock lifted his left eyebrow in what Pavel supposed was restrained amusement.
Still, Pavel thought he possessed a fair degree of prescience, for he had yet to be proved wrong. He had also good reason to believe in his equations, and the all-encompassing goodwill that would ensue, for he had committed a small number of transgressions. He once entered Lieutenant Sulu’s quarters and fell asleep on his bed. He had not the intention to trespass, and it was human error on his part, having had a frantic day getting the ship through a galactic barrier. It was only when he reached out and felt around for Saschka, his shabby teddy bear of eighteen point one two five years did he realize he was not in his room. This was an entirely negligible incident by any standard, but for the fact that, in his hasty exit of Lieutenant Sulu’s quarters, he walked right into a table, sending a small green plastic cuboid with rectangular holes and round black plastic discs attached to the bottom crashing onto the ground. One of the small black plastic discs detached from the cuboid, and whirled around in an almost spiral….
“Uhura to Chekov. I repeat, Uhura to Chekov.”
Pavel was startled out of his thoughts. He began to notice his surroundings. Not much was going on. Not much had gone on, really, in the past two weeks or so. There had been a lull in activity ever since the rescue mission on a mining planet. Presently, the Enterprise was cruising along at a leisurely pace, most of the crew had turned in for the day, and the lights on board the ship were dimmed, as if they were on Earth and it was night.
And Pavel was on the night shift, along with Lieutenant Uhura. Pavel noted that in the time he had been daydreaming Scotty and Sulu had materialized on the bridge. He smiled and greeted them.
“There’s no point manning the beaming station--we’re too far from any planet. So I wandered around the ship, and who should I find, but Sulu playing cards all by himself in the lounge! So I says to him, what kind of lonely bugger plays cards all by himself, and he says he cannae find anyone whosnae sleeping, And I say there’s always someone on the bridge. So here we are. On the bridge. To play bridge.”
The game of bridge degenerated into some heart-to-heart. Scotty confessed to being extremely homesick, and it was utterly depressing that he should receive outdated broadcasts of football matches, exacerbated by the fact that Aberdeen FC had lost out on promotion to the first tier league.
Uhura sympathized, for she was a sporting sort of person too, before she joined the Enterprise, and had even won an Olympic medal for her country. Just like my parents, Pavel interjected. As the conversation drew on there were more confessionals, and Sulu mentioned that his mother once accidentally killed his pet hermit crab, Fibonacci, and bought another one and pretended nothing had happened.
Pavel was at once stricken with terror, for he suddenly recalled the cuboid that called itself a San Francisco Cable Car, which he had yet to repair, for the disc that fell off was a wheel, and Pavel surmised that it was an ancient relic from Sulu’s hometown, back when maglev was costly and Heim's equations were unproven theory.
The third emotional encounter happened with Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy and Spock, but its effects were felt shipwide. The three of them had beamed down on a planet to mediate a ceasefire, and returned bearing all the fractiousness of the inhabitants, catastrophe stayed only by the brittle acknowledgment that work must go on, that professionalism must prevail.
A cloud of uneasy glumness spread over the Enterprise. Pavel panicked, for he thrived in harmonious, collaborative environments. Having no facts on the matter, gossip swept and swirled around the corridors and restrooms in hushed, violent whispers. Some said Captain Kirk had pussyfooted and caused the deaths of ten thousand in northeast sector 2.5. Some said it was McCoy who played a part the carnage when he refused to divert medical supplies from the capital city. Yet others said it was the diversion of medical supplies that led the governing body to quarantine the sector out of selfish anger.
Rumors troubled Pavel, and he steadfastly refused to have any part in this--this brutalization of people's reputations, especially when it was based on unproven and inconclusive statements. He voiced this to Uhura, Scotty and Sulu, with whom he now regularly played card games.
Uhura concurred, and added that she could see Spock was deeply affected, but was not ready to explain the facts and clear the air, and she could only hope that things would not fall apart in the meantime. Scotty said he felt people were beginning to clump together, lines were being drawn and allegiances tweaked. Sulu commented that the four of them were clumping together too, forming their own secret clique--they were no different.
No one knew how to argue against that.
The fourth emotional encounter was also the last of the emotional encounters that fit within the mathematical pattern Pavel found. On hindsight he attributed it to the fact that there were two major emotional encounters on the day, instead of there being just one, which was the likely source of error.
The first occurred on the bridge. Captain Kirk was sitting in his chair, but Pavel could see he was slumped over. The cockiness and self-assurance had left him, and he would put a hand to the forehead, or to his cheek, and hunch over, elbow digging into the flesh on his thighs. It was just Captain Kirk and him, on the night shift, and the sight of a leader so discombobulated and vulnerable frightened Pavel. He thought that Captain Kirk did a good job of masking his insecurities in the day. He wanted to help, if help was of use.
He did not expect the captain to address him. "What do you think of honesty?"
"Honesty?" Pavel drew a blank. "Is the best policy," he said, echoing his preschool teacher and his parents and his babushka.
Kirk smiled wanly. "Just as well," came his cryptic reply. "The best thing we can hope for is that we move on."
Pavel didn't know if he said the right thing. It gnawed away at his mind, he felt like he had more to say but did not know how to express it, and when he finished his shift he was still thinking about the exchange. It alternately gave him heart palpitations, when he feared that the captain would crack, and all hell would break lose, and a nasty sinking feeling, when he worried that the ship might implode from the division of loyalties and the multiplication of doubt.
Pavel was so absorbed in his thoughts that when he exited the turbolift he forgot which door he stepped out of and walked counterclockwise instead of clockwise, counted four doors down, stepped into the room and conked out on the bed.
He was woken up two point four three hours later, by his sixth sense that told him there was someone in the room, standing over his bed. It was Lieutenant Sulu.
"Why are you in my room?" Pavel slurred drowsily.
"Funny, I was going to ask you that."
Ohh, Pavel thought, and didn't know if he said it out loud. He patted his left side for Saschka, who was missing. Reality hit and, alarmed, he jumped out of bed and crashed into that dastardly table again.
"Sorry, wrong room," he mumbled, and tore out of the room in a fluster. The blasted circular layout, he thought. It was supremely disorienting, there was no telling which was north and south and east and west, and there had to be two blasted doors on the turbolift and clockwise and anticlockwise was confounded too and he blearily counted the doors till he reached the one he thought was his, but it was locked and he had miscounted.
When he finally entered his room he heaved a sigh of relief. He noted that Saschka was in his usual place, and was about to undress for bed when he saw the ancient relic of Sulu's hometown.
He decided he should bring the recently-repaired cuboid called the San Francisco Cable Car to Sulu before he forgot about it again.
That was when Pavel noticed that Sulu's room was full of things. "You have a lot of things," Pavel commented excitedly, for he loved things, he found things fascinating. "What is that?" he asked, taking hold of a slim cylindrical container with a vial of liquid suspended within.
"It's a ballpoint pen," Sulu said with a certain measure of pride.
Pavel was amazed. "This thing is more than three hundred years old." Ballpoint pens were a thing of the past, of course. Two hundred and seventy years ago touchpens were invented along with touchpads, and back in those days they were extremely revolutionary, and did a hell lot of good for the warming climate by getting rid of the dependency on unrenewable biopulp paper.
Following that, Pavel Andreievich's emotional encounter predictor failed to work. Over the next few days, he could not discern any recurring trend though he tried as best he could, noting the exact moments and ship location coordinates when he observed something significant. His whole world was in disarray; the Enterprise's five year voyage seemed doomed to a premature conclusion, there was talk of mutiny, talk of betrayal, talk of fear. It seemed that Spock was going out of his way to provoke the captain. Most of the medical department cowered and slinked about meekly, as if they were culpable for the disunity.
And yet, one point five years into their mission, it seemed that Pavel had finally found true friends. They were ordered to report to Starbase Eleven in five days, which allowed them to proceed at a leisurely pace. Sulu had remarked that there was no leisure onboard the way things were, with tension so thick you could slice into chunks, melt it, boil it, but find no way of disposing it. Pavel harbored a secret admiration for Lieutenant Sulu, he had a manner of speech that was succinct yet precise, accompanied by a truncated, intelligent sense of humor that led to a delay of point oh five seconds before Pavel laughed. This was so unlike himself, Pavel thought, for he was verbose and excitable and predisposed to waffling on at length about anything and everything, and he often jumped from one topic to the other because he was in addition easily distracted....
Pavel decided that cliquishness was not a good thing, though he greatly enjoyed the company of Uhura, Scotty and Sulu. Emboldened by the message he wrote on Lieutenant Uhura's wrist whilst playing bridge the night before with the ballpoint pen Sulu allowed him to keep ("Never never never never give up"), he decided to ask Captain Kirk, who seemed really down, to their bridge club meetings.
If there was anything Pavel learned, it was that bridge on the bridge gave way to heart-to-hearts, and heart-to-hearts led to hand on hands, or hand on shoulders, which led to smiles all round, tiny smiles growing to larger smiles, larger smiles reflected in twinkling eyes, twinkling eyes sparkling with the spark that would relight the ship and solve the problem of disunity as Pavel saw it, it was the translation that would inverse the function and get rid of the downward trend.
Captain Kirk was not always able to join their bridge club meetings, so Uhura thought that she should try to recruit Spock. The introduction of Spock prejudiced the high score rankings. Spock offered objective insights into their personal problems, and Sulu often asked Spock to troubleshoot his botanical exploits.
On the day before they were due at Starbase 11, Jim T. Kirk dropped by a bridge club session he previously said he was unable to attend. Spock was present at the meeting, which caused some uncomfortable fidgeting. There was silence, for a long while, and Pavel rocked back and forth recounting the digits of pi, something he did in awkward situations of considerable distress where he knew not what to do, hoping Uhura or Scotty or Sulu would cleverly diffuse the tension.
Only, though he did not know it, he was mumbling audibly. A look of concern crossed over the Captain's--Jim, as he had asked Pavel to call him, face.
"You alright?" Jim asked.
"Eight eight four one nine seven--yes I'm alright," Pavel said breathlessly.
"One six nine three nine nine three," Spock added.
"It's...he's reciting the digits of pi," Sulu said. And suddenly, it was some kind of game, some competition they all had to take part in.
"Two zero nine seven four nine!" Uhura exclaimed.
"Four four five nine two!" It was Scotty.
And so it went. At four six two two nine four, Captain Kirk suddenly spoke. "Eight nine five four...nine three zero," he said.
Pavel smiled. He realized now that he was mistaken in thinking that Captain Kirk was unfamiliar with the digits of pi. It was Academy tradition, to streak across the front lawn nude, touching all points in the angular garden path, while reciting the digits of pi till you couldn't remember them, or the groundskeeper swung by to chase you off.
After some while Spock was the only one left reciting. It was a tad unfair, Pavel thought, that Vulcan brains should be able to contain so much more information. Pavel egged Spock on, until it was seven two one one three four and then suddenly everyone jumped up in a fit of agitation to shout nine-nine-nine-nine-nine-nine, except that there were so many of them saying so many nines that the computer marked them as wrong and ceased to judge.
They collapsed into a fit of laughter. Pavel saw the corners of Spock's mouth twitch, and felt so overcome with emotion he wheezed. "What cheer, eh?" Scotty offered, at which point Captain Kirk stopped laughing and his face fell.
"We face court martial tomorrow," Kirk said.
***
The truth was a strange thing. Pavel believed in good because he thought being good was simple, with transparent motives all round. And yet even good intentions can be thwarted by bad timing, as happened on the planet.
The opposing tribe had threatened to launch poisonous spores into the atmosphere, killing all except those vaccinated. McCoy had discovered that the vaccines in the sector he was assigned to were useless, and in fact made the spores more potent due to mutation. Spock was double crossed by the governor general and had to defy the captain's orders to act for the best. Kirk himself was unable to proceed as directed by the Federation, for the inhabitants had threatened to take down the Enterprise. All three were cleared of any charges, for they had acted in good faith for a proper purpose, and at the last minute crucial evidence emerged, a recording that indicated that the planet had formed another treaty with the Klingons just before the Enterprise arrived to mediate, which conclusively put them in the clear.
It further gave them a new mission, for the Enterprise was charged to unearth what the Klingons intended by forming an alliance in the planet. The Federation suspected war with the Klingons was brewing.
Just before they left Starbase 11, the crew gathered at a bar for some drinks. Spock had returned to making bemused semi-philosophical deductions on human behaviour, and Kirk and McCoy were chummy again, talking and laughing and slapping each other's backs. At one point, Pavel got up to help Kirk bring the drinks over, and he commented that he was glad everyone was friends again.
"We were always friends," Jim replied. "But I suppose you are right. We came damn close to not being friends."
When they returned to the table, Sulu had brought out his deck of cards and was dealing for a game of poker. It was a terrible game and everyone made silly mistakes because they were too busy chatting, chatting about life, love, family, friends, the future, everything. McCoy mentioned wistfully that his ex-wife had called to say she was having a child with her new partner. It got them talking about relationships, and the number of serious relationships they'd been in. There was a fair bit of nudge-nudge-wink-winks about Spock and Uhura, who took it in great stride and with dignity. Everyone teased Kirk about the 'seriousness' of his relationships, who diverted the attention to Pavel by teasing him about his inexperience.
"Come on, be honest," Kirk said. "What is it they say in Russia, honesty is the best policy?"
Pavel wanted to cringe, yet he felt a lingering sense of pride that the captain remembered. "Oh, I have had many loves, more than you think," he revealed playfully.
"Yeah," Scotty chirped. "Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, Gabrielle Demora... oh, Demora's second theorem is such a thing of beauty."
"Ah, how about 'Enterprise'?" Pavel remarked. "I have a date with her tomorrow."
"As if she'd want you," Scotty scoffed. "She's mine."
Almost immediately Captain Kirk raised a finger from the beer glass he was drinking from. He looked about to say something, but decided to let it pass.
***
The Enterprise was back in space, everything was fully operational and relations were congenial. Pavel Andreievich wondered if the bridge club meetings would continue, since all the other gossipy cliques had broken up and their 'bridge club', as he thought of it, threw membership wide open at the bar.
Instinctively he knew that things would not go back to where they were before, it wasn't like the state of things before the incident on the planet was x, and the state of things after the incident on the planet x', and the clearing of names at the court martial marked a total return to x.
He understood that the fragmenting of the crew into tiny cliques would happen again if things got bad enough once more, and that everyone was conscious of this. There was a tinge of mistrust that would not leave the ship, that colored how people saw you. The lines of division had been drawn and erased, but a faint trail remained, and people silently noted if you were one of them or if you were with some others, altering their behavior in the subtlest of ways, almost unnoticeable but nevertheless felt.
Pavel wondered if the times he spent with Hikaru Sulu talking about things occurred exclusively in x', or if there was the possibility of the event occurring in this version of post-x' x. They had just finished their first shift, and would be heading for their quarters.
"I know you collect things wherever you go," Pavel began. He pulled out a round, furry object from a compartment in the helm. "Uhura and I got this at Starbase Eleven. It has a soothing effect."
"Object?" Hikaru asked. "It looks...alive."
Pavel looked at the furry thing. It did feel alive. Yet it had no eyes or mouth or any other feature except fur, really. He shrugged, and passed it to Hikaru, who gave it a little shake and sniffed it. They exchanged puzzled looks, and stepped into the turbolift.
"At the starbase you said you had been in two serious relationships," Pavel began.
"And you were involved with Emmy Nother and Gabrielle Demora. Out with the truth," Hikaru said.
"Gabrielle Demora is my idol," Pavel said defensively. "I once thought that I would name my daughter after her, if I ever have a daughter, that is to say. But serious relationships, no. I've dated a few people, but that was mostly for the fun, and because I had to, you know? Everyone was doing it. I proposed to my best friend, Irina, in primary school, does that count?"
"Probably not." Hikaru chuckled.
"So tell me about those two," Pavel said.
Hikaru stopped laughing and smiled wryly. "The first was in high school. It was a guy, Jasper Chang-Martinez." His face scrunched up, then continued, "Oh god how I hate him now. The bastard, the fucking bastard... sorry." He grinned at Pavel. "You have no idea how happy I was when I found out he didn't make it into Starfleet."
"What did he do?"
"It wasn't so much what he did, I am being cruel here. I think I hate him for what he was, and not what he did. He was the popular type, ruled the school, sporty, good looking, you name it. To be honest I think I looked down on him all through our relationship, especially when he became really clingy towards the end--ugh!--and mostly I think I hate myself for being weak enough to believe he would make me popular, that I would be accepted into the same circles as he and my existence would be validated. So of course, you see why it's easier to hate him. I'm pretty rotten, deep down inside."
Pavel laughed, an inappropriate hearty laugh. "Yes you are," he replied.
Hikaru grinned, and juggled the furry ball of a creature from one hand to the other. "The second was Jessica Beasley," he said. "That was in the Academy. Started well, but after two years all I could see was that we had turned into my parents. My mom says that there's a curse on our family, that we're all doomed to distant relationships. She says that the men all run away in the end, tempted, not by the lure of other women, or men, but by the lure of material things, too obsessed with hoarding and accumulating things for themselves. And Jessica was just like my mom, she couldn't stand clutter and had a compulsive need to throw things away, so you can see how it didn't work out."
They stepped out of the turbolift, and walked counterclockwise, as had become habit.
"I don't know if I'll ever be happy in love," Hikaru continued. "I mean, my mom's parents stayed married, but they lived apart, in two different continents. The same story goes for my dad's parents as well--they stayed married, but lived in different states. As for my parents--dad refuses to quit his job on Starbase Seven, and mom's in California. When they call each other they end up arguing. Sometimes I think they'd be better off divorcing, and I tell my mom that, but she just can't bring herself to do it somehow. And I fear I cannot escape from this as well, that all my relationships are doomed from the start, to be full of resentment and bitterness, that maybe, I daresay we've become addicted to." He sighed heavily. "So much melodrama," he commented dryly to himself. "I wish you all the best in love, of course."
Pavel smiled blankly. He wondered if Hikaru was too thick to realise--or was he trying to make a point? "I hope so too, for my own sake," he answered. "My parents are very happy together."
They stepped into Hikaru's room. Pavel was confronted by the familiar messy sight, but where he once thought the clutter fascinating, they now possessed an extra dimension of sadness. Was the clutter emotional baggage, he wondered. But he was a messy person too, and he liked collecting things that reminded him of happy times. He picked up an old school communicator and played with it. Could relationships be fit into equations? Was each person bound to follow in the pattern set by previous generations?
Hikaru answered a missed call from his mother, who sounded unusually chirpy.
"I don't know why I did it, Hikaru," she said. "But I did, I did. I called my lawyer and sent a letter to your dad. We're getting divorced!"
Her tone--Pavel wanted to laugh--her tone sounded exactly like that of young girls who had just been proposed to by their boyfriends in the holovision shows. He caught Hikaru grinning at him, and he grinned back.
"And I am packing up and moving to Honolulu," she said with determination. "I'm not setting up a new life there; I'll be living the retirement I always wanted."
The call went on for a while as Hikaru's mom detailed her retirement plans. Pavel sat down on Hikaru's bed.
"She sounds like she has been set free," he said, when the call was over.
"Set free? No, not really," Hikaru began. "Or maybe yes. It's such an extravagant way of putting it."
Hikaru sat down next to him. Pavel leaned in close, rested his head on his shoulder. Extravagance, he thought, playing with the word. He smiled, inhaled, tilted his head up and kissed Hikaru. For a brief moment their eyes met, just before their eyelids drooped shut. There was fear, there was trepidation, hesitation, joy, hope, lust, tenderness.
Love, and life, and humans, Pavel decided, were just as irrational as pi or root three, and there was no more point defining them with equations and expecting them to conform, than there was writing pi, or root two, or e or root three as a decimal. One point seven three two zero five.
originally posted here
Love and Mathematics
According to the calculations of Pavel Andreievich Chekov, in the two months past, if the sum total of the digits in the stardate was divisible by seven there was to be an emotional encounter between crewmembers on the bridge. Therefore, ten emotional encounters had occurred, though if he was being honest Pavel had stretched his definition of an emotional encounter to include the incident in which Spock lifted his left eyebrow for the whole duration of 6.718 seconds.
Pavel was privy to four of the emotional encounters.
In addition to predicting emotional encounters he noted a shipwide phenomena, that the occurrence of positive interactions roughly corresponded to a positive linear equation, but the rate of negative interactions exhibited exponential decay. This led him to conclude that the bad times they would never be rid of, but the good times would go on happening, and soon enough the amount of friendship, or more accurately goodwill towards fellow crew, represented by the area between the positive interactions line and the negative interactions curve, would be so huge that little transgressions would be forgiven and forgotten. Pleased with this epiphany, he said aloud: “And in the end, the good shall outweigh the bad.”
Spock happened to overhear, and was intrigued. Pavel explained his theory that good and bad were not inversely proportional, but discrete events that had their own equations, and Spock thought it logical, but also logically concluded that humans, an entirely illogical species, could not be logically expected to adhere to the predicted trend. Therefore, the equation could not be expected to hold true if circumstances were to change, and circumstances changed all the time. “Yes,” Pavel mused. “So it was illogical to have expended time and effort devising equations to describe human behavior.” And then he grinned at Spock, a wide, radiant grin, as luminous as a dwarf star. And that was when Spock lifted his left eyebrow in what Pavel supposed was restrained amusement.
Still, Pavel thought he possessed a fair degree of prescience, for he had yet to be proved wrong. He had also good reason to believe in his equations, and the all-encompassing goodwill that would ensue, for he had committed a small number of transgressions. He once entered Lieutenant Sulu’s quarters and fell asleep on his bed. He had not the intention to trespass, and it was human error on his part, having had a frantic day getting the ship through a galactic barrier. It was only when he reached out and felt around for Saschka, his shabby teddy bear of eighteen point one two five years did he realize he was not in his room. This was an entirely negligible incident by any standard, but for the fact that, in his hasty exit of Lieutenant Sulu’s quarters, he walked right into a table, sending a small green plastic cuboid with rectangular holes and round black plastic discs attached to the bottom crashing onto the ground. One of the small black plastic discs detached from the cuboid, and whirled around in an almost spiral….
“Uhura to Chekov. I repeat, Uhura to Chekov.”
Pavel was startled out of his thoughts. He began to notice his surroundings. Not much was going on. Not much had gone on, really, in the past two weeks or so. There had been a lull in activity ever since the rescue mission on a mining planet. Presently, the Enterprise was cruising along at a leisurely pace, most of the crew had turned in for the day, and the lights on board the ship were dimmed, as if they were on Earth and it was night.
And Pavel was on the night shift, along with Lieutenant Uhura. Pavel noted that in the time he had been daydreaming Scotty and Sulu had materialized on the bridge. He smiled and greeted them.
“There’s no point manning the beaming station--we’re too far from any planet. So I wandered around the ship, and who should I find, but Sulu playing cards all by himself in the lounge! So I says to him, what kind of lonely bugger plays cards all by himself, and he says he cannae find anyone whosnae sleeping, And I say there’s always someone on the bridge. So here we are. On the bridge. To play bridge.”
The game of bridge degenerated into some heart-to-heart. Scotty confessed to being extremely homesick, and it was utterly depressing that he should receive outdated broadcasts of football matches, exacerbated by the fact that Aberdeen FC had lost out on promotion to the first tier league.
Uhura sympathized, for she was a sporting sort of person too, before she joined the Enterprise, and had even won an Olympic medal for her country. Just like my parents, Pavel interjected. As the conversation drew on there were more confessionals, and Sulu mentioned that his mother once accidentally killed his pet hermit crab, Fibonacci, and bought another one and pretended nothing had happened.
Pavel was at once stricken with terror, for he suddenly recalled the cuboid that called itself a San Francisco Cable Car, which he had yet to repair, for the disc that fell off was a wheel, and Pavel surmised that it was an ancient relic from Sulu’s hometown, back when maglev was costly and Heim's equations were unproven theory.
The third emotional encounter happened with Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy and Spock, but its effects were felt shipwide. The three of them had beamed down on a planet to mediate a ceasefire, and returned bearing all the fractiousness of the inhabitants, catastrophe stayed only by the brittle acknowledgment that work must go on, that professionalism must prevail.
A cloud of uneasy glumness spread over the Enterprise. Pavel panicked, for he thrived in harmonious, collaborative environments. Having no facts on the matter, gossip swept and swirled around the corridors and restrooms in hushed, violent whispers. Some said Captain Kirk had pussyfooted and caused the deaths of ten thousand in northeast sector 2.5. Some said it was McCoy who played a part the carnage when he refused to divert medical supplies from the capital city. Yet others said it was the diversion of medical supplies that led the governing body to quarantine the sector out of selfish anger.
Rumors troubled Pavel, and he steadfastly refused to have any part in this--this brutalization of people's reputations, especially when it was based on unproven and inconclusive statements. He voiced this to Uhura, Scotty and Sulu, with whom he now regularly played card games.
Uhura concurred, and added that she could see Spock was deeply affected, but was not ready to explain the facts and clear the air, and she could only hope that things would not fall apart in the meantime. Scotty said he felt people were beginning to clump together, lines were being drawn and allegiances tweaked. Sulu commented that the four of them were clumping together too, forming their own secret clique--they were no different.
No one knew how to argue against that.
The fourth emotional encounter was also the last of the emotional encounters that fit within the mathematical pattern Pavel found. On hindsight he attributed it to the fact that there were two major emotional encounters on the day, instead of there being just one, which was the likely source of error.
The first occurred on the bridge. Captain Kirk was sitting in his chair, but Pavel could see he was slumped over. The cockiness and self-assurance had left him, and he would put a hand to the forehead, or to his cheek, and hunch over, elbow digging into the flesh on his thighs. It was just Captain Kirk and him, on the night shift, and the sight of a leader so discombobulated and vulnerable frightened Pavel. He thought that Captain Kirk did a good job of masking his insecurities in the day. He wanted to help, if help was of use.
He did not expect the captain to address him. "What do you think of honesty?"
"Honesty?" Pavel drew a blank. "Is the best policy," he said, echoing his preschool teacher and his parents and his babushka.
Kirk smiled wanly. "Just as well," came his cryptic reply. "The best thing we can hope for is that we move on."
Pavel didn't know if he said the right thing. It gnawed away at his mind, he felt like he had more to say but did not know how to express it, and when he finished his shift he was still thinking about the exchange. It alternately gave him heart palpitations, when he feared that the captain would crack, and all hell would break lose, and a nasty sinking feeling, when he worried that the ship might implode from the division of loyalties and the multiplication of doubt.
Pavel was so absorbed in his thoughts that when he exited the turbolift he forgot which door he stepped out of and walked counterclockwise instead of clockwise, counted four doors down, stepped into the room and conked out on the bed.
He was woken up two point four three hours later, by his sixth sense that told him there was someone in the room, standing over his bed. It was Lieutenant Sulu.
"Why are you in my room?" Pavel slurred drowsily.
"Funny, I was going to ask you that."
Ohh, Pavel thought, and didn't know if he said it out loud. He patted his left side for Saschka, who was missing. Reality hit and, alarmed, he jumped out of bed and crashed into that dastardly table again.
"Sorry, wrong room," he mumbled, and tore out of the room in a fluster. The blasted circular layout, he thought. It was supremely disorienting, there was no telling which was north and south and east and west, and there had to be two blasted doors on the turbolift and clockwise and anticlockwise was confounded too and he blearily counted the doors till he reached the one he thought was his, but it was locked and he had miscounted.
When he finally entered his room he heaved a sigh of relief. He noted that Saschka was in his usual place, and was about to undress for bed when he saw the ancient relic of Sulu's hometown.
He decided he should bring the recently-repaired cuboid called the San Francisco Cable Car to Sulu before he forgot about it again.
That was when Pavel noticed that Sulu's room was full of things. "You have a lot of things," Pavel commented excitedly, for he loved things, he found things fascinating. "What is that?" he asked, taking hold of a slim cylindrical container with a vial of liquid suspended within.
"It's a ballpoint pen," Sulu said with a certain measure of pride.
Pavel was amazed. "This thing is more than three hundred years old." Ballpoint pens were a thing of the past, of course. Two hundred and seventy years ago touchpens were invented along with touchpads, and back in those days they were extremely revolutionary, and did a hell lot of good for the warming climate by getting rid of the dependency on unrenewable biopulp paper.
Following that, Pavel Andreievich's emotional encounter predictor failed to work. Over the next few days, he could not discern any recurring trend though he tried as best he could, noting the exact moments and ship location coordinates when he observed something significant. His whole world was in disarray; the Enterprise's five year voyage seemed doomed to a premature conclusion, there was talk of mutiny, talk of betrayal, talk of fear. It seemed that Spock was going out of his way to provoke the captain. Most of the medical department cowered and slinked about meekly, as if they were culpable for the disunity.
And yet, one point five years into their mission, it seemed that Pavel had finally found true friends. They were ordered to report to Starbase Eleven in five days, which allowed them to proceed at a leisurely pace. Sulu had remarked that there was no leisure onboard the way things were, with tension so thick you could slice into chunks, melt it, boil it, but find no way of disposing it. Pavel harbored a secret admiration for Lieutenant Sulu, he had a manner of speech that was succinct yet precise, accompanied by a truncated, intelligent sense of humor that led to a delay of point oh five seconds before Pavel laughed. This was so unlike himself, Pavel thought, for he was verbose and excitable and predisposed to waffling on at length about anything and everything, and he often jumped from one topic to the other because he was in addition easily distracted....
Pavel decided that cliquishness was not a good thing, though he greatly enjoyed the company of Uhura, Scotty and Sulu. Emboldened by the message he wrote on Lieutenant Uhura's wrist whilst playing bridge the night before with the ballpoint pen Sulu allowed him to keep ("Never never never never give up"), he decided to ask Captain Kirk, who seemed really down, to their bridge club meetings.
If there was anything Pavel learned, it was that bridge on the bridge gave way to heart-to-hearts, and heart-to-hearts led to hand on hands, or hand on shoulders, which led to smiles all round, tiny smiles growing to larger smiles, larger smiles reflected in twinkling eyes, twinkling eyes sparkling with the spark that would relight the ship and solve the problem of disunity as Pavel saw it, it was the translation that would inverse the function and get rid of the downward trend.
Captain Kirk was not always able to join their bridge club meetings, so Uhura thought that she should try to recruit Spock. The introduction of Spock prejudiced the high score rankings. Spock offered objective insights into their personal problems, and Sulu often asked Spock to troubleshoot his botanical exploits.
On the day before they were due at Starbase 11, Jim T. Kirk dropped by a bridge club session he previously said he was unable to attend. Spock was present at the meeting, which caused some uncomfortable fidgeting. There was silence, for a long while, and Pavel rocked back and forth recounting the digits of pi, something he did in awkward situations of considerable distress where he knew not what to do, hoping Uhura or Scotty or Sulu would cleverly diffuse the tension.
Only, though he did not know it, he was mumbling audibly. A look of concern crossed over the Captain's--Jim, as he had asked Pavel to call him, face.
"You alright?" Jim asked.
"Eight eight four one nine seven--yes I'm alright," Pavel said breathlessly.
"One six nine three nine nine three," Spock added.
"It's...he's reciting the digits of pi," Sulu said. And suddenly, it was some kind of game, some competition they all had to take part in.
"Two zero nine seven four nine!" Uhura exclaimed.
"Four four five nine two!" It was Scotty.
And so it went. At four six two two nine four, Captain Kirk suddenly spoke. "Eight nine five four...nine three zero," he said.
Pavel smiled. He realized now that he was mistaken in thinking that Captain Kirk was unfamiliar with the digits of pi. It was Academy tradition, to streak across the front lawn nude, touching all points in the angular garden path, while reciting the digits of pi till you couldn't remember them, or the groundskeeper swung by to chase you off.
After some while Spock was the only one left reciting. It was a tad unfair, Pavel thought, that Vulcan brains should be able to contain so much more information. Pavel egged Spock on, until it was seven two one one three four and then suddenly everyone jumped up in a fit of agitation to shout nine-nine-nine-nine-nine-nine, except that there were so many of them saying so many nines that the computer marked them as wrong and ceased to judge.
They collapsed into a fit of laughter. Pavel saw the corners of Spock's mouth twitch, and felt so overcome with emotion he wheezed. "What cheer, eh?" Scotty offered, at which point Captain Kirk stopped laughing and his face fell.
"We face court martial tomorrow," Kirk said.
***
The truth was a strange thing. Pavel believed in good because he thought being good was simple, with transparent motives all round. And yet even good intentions can be thwarted by bad timing, as happened on the planet.
The opposing tribe had threatened to launch poisonous spores into the atmosphere, killing all except those vaccinated. McCoy had discovered that the vaccines in the sector he was assigned to were useless, and in fact made the spores more potent due to mutation. Spock was double crossed by the governor general and had to defy the captain's orders to act for the best. Kirk himself was unable to proceed as directed by the Federation, for the inhabitants had threatened to take down the Enterprise. All three were cleared of any charges, for they had acted in good faith for a proper purpose, and at the last minute crucial evidence emerged, a recording that indicated that the planet had formed another treaty with the Klingons just before the Enterprise arrived to mediate, which conclusively put them in the clear.
It further gave them a new mission, for the Enterprise was charged to unearth what the Klingons intended by forming an alliance in the planet. The Federation suspected war with the Klingons was brewing.
Just before they left Starbase 11, the crew gathered at a bar for some drinks. Spock had returned to making bemused semi-philosophical deductions on human behaviour, and Kirk and McCoy were chummy again, talking and laughing and slapping each other's backs. At one point, Pavel got up to help Kirk bring the drinks over, and he commented that he was glad everyone was friends again.
"We were always friends," Jim replied. "But I suppose you are right. We came damn close to not being friends."
When they returned to the table, Sulu had brought out his deck of cards and was dealing for a game of poker. It was a terrible game and everyone made silly mistakes because they were too busy chatting, chatting about life, love, family, friends, the future, everything. McCoy mentioned wistfully that his ex-wife had called to say she was having a child with her new partner. It got them talking about relationships, and the number of serious relationships they'd been in. There was a fair bit of nudge-nudge-wink-winks about Spock and Uhura, who took it in great stride and with dignity. Everyone teased Kirk about the 'seriousness' of his relationships, who diverted the attention to Pavel by teasing him about his inexperience.
"Come on, be honest," Kirk said. "What is it they say in Russia, honesty is the best policy?"
Pavel wanted to cringe, yet he felt a lingering sense of pride that the captain remembered. "Oh, I have had many loves, more than you think," he revealed playfully.
"Yeah," Scotty chirped. "Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, Gabrielle Demora... oh, Demora's second theorem is such a thing of beauty."
"Ah, how about 'Enterprise'?" Pavel remarked. "I have a date with her tomorrow."
"As if she'd want you," Scotty scoffed. "She's mine."
Almost immediately Captain Kirk raised a finger from the beer glass he was drinking from. He looked about to say something, but decided to let it pass.
***
The Enterprise was back in space, everything was fully operational and relations were congenial. Pavel Andreievich wondered if the bridge club meetings would continue, since all the other gossipy cliques had broken up and their 'bridge club', as he thought of it, threw membership wide open at the bar.
Instinctively he knew that things would not go back to where they were before, it wasn't like the state of things before the incident on the planet was x, and the state of things after the incident on the planet x', and the clearing of names at the court martial marked a total return to x.
He understood that the fragmenting of the crew into tiny cliques would happen again if things got bad enough once more, and that everyone was conscious of this. There was a tinge of mistrust that would not leave the ship, that colored how people saw you. The lines of division had been drawn and erased, but a faint trail remained, and people silently noted if you were one of them or if you were with some others, altering their behavior in the subtlest of ways, almost unnoticeable but nevertheless felt.
Pavel wondered if the times he spent with Hikaru Sulu talking about things occurred exclusively in x', or if there was the possibility of the event occurring in this version of post-x' x. They had just finished their first shift, and would be heading for their quarters.
"I know you collect things wherever you go," Pavel began. He pulled out a round, furry object from a compartment in the helm. "Uhura and I got this at Starbase Eleven. It has a soothing effect."
"Object?" Hikaru asked. "It looks...alive."
Pavel looked at the furry thing. It did feel alive. Yet it had no eyes or mouth or any other feature except fur, really. He shrugged, and passed it to Hikaru, who gave it a little shake and sniffed it. They exchanged puzzled looks, and stepped into the turbolift.
"At the starbase you said you had been in two serious relationships," Pavel began.
"And you were involved with Emmy Nother and Gabrielle Demora. Out with the truth," Hikaru said.
"Gabrielle Demora is my idol," Pavel said defensively. "I once thought that I would name my daughter after her, if I ever have a daughter, that is to say. But serious relationships, no. I've dated a few people, but that was mostly for the fun, and because I had to, you know? Everyone was doing it. I proposed to my best friend, Irina, in primary school, does that count?"
"Probably not." Hikaru chuckled.
"So tell me about those two," Pavel said.
Hikaru stopped laughing and smiled wryly. "The first was in high school. It was a guy, Jasper Chang-Martinez." His face scrunched up, then continued, "Oh god how I hate him now. The bastard, the fucking bastard... sorry." He grinned at Pavel. "You have no idea how happy I was when I found out he didn't make it into Starfleet."
"What did he do?"
"It wasn't so much what he did, I am being cruel here. I think I hate him for what he was, and not what he did. He was the popular type, ruled the school, sporty, good looking, you name it. To be honest I think I looked down on him all through our relationship, especially when he became really clingy towards the end--ugh!--and mostly I think I hate myself for being weak enough to believe he would make me popular, that I would be accepted into the same circles as he and my existence would be validated. So of course, you see why it's easier to hate him. I'm pretty rotten, deep down inside."
Pavel laughed, an inappropriate hearty laugh. "Yes you are," he replied.
Hikaru grinned, and juggled the furry ball of a creature from one hand to the other. "The second was Jessica Beasley," he said. "That was in the Academy. Started well, but after two years all I could see was that we had turned into my parents. My mom says that there's a curse on our family, that we're all doomed to distant relationships. She says that the men all run away in the end, tempted, not by the lure of other women, or men, but by the lure of material things, too obsessed with hoarding and accumulating things for themselves. And Jessica was just like my mom, she couldn't stand clutter and had a compulsive need to throw things away, so you can see how it didn't work out."
They stepped out of the turbolift, and walked counterclockwise, as had become habit.
"I don't know if I'll ever be happy in love," Hikaru continued. "I mean, my mom's parents stayed married, but they lived apart, in two different continents. The same story goes for my dad's parents as well--they stayed married, but lived in different states. As for my parents--dad refuses to quit his job on Starbase Seven, and mom's in California. When they call each other they end up arguing. Sometimes I think they'd be better off divorcing, and I tell my mom that, but she just can't bring herself to do it somehow. And I fear I cannot escape from this as well, that all my relationships are doomed from the start, to be full of resentment and bitterness, that maybe, I daresay we've become addicted to." He sighed heavily. "So much melodrama," he commented dryly to himself. "I wish you all the best in love, of course."
Pavel smiled blankly. He wondered if Hikaru was too thick to realise--or was he trying to make a point? "I hope so too, for my own sake," he answered. "My parents are very happy together."
They stepped into Hikaru's room. Pavel was confronted by the familiar messy sight, but where he once thought the clutter fascinating, they now possessed an extra dimension of sadness. Was the clutter emotional baggage, he wondered. But he was a messy person too, and he liked collecting things that reminded him of happy times. He picked up an old school communicator and played with it. Could relationships be fit into equations? Was each person bound to follow in the pattern set by previous generations?
Hikaru answered a missed call from his mother, who sounded unusually chirpy.
"I don't know why I did it, Hikaru," she said. "But I did, I did. I called my lawyer and sent a letter to your dad. We're getting divorced!"
Her tone--Pavel wanted to laugh--her tone sounded exactly like that of young girls who had just been proposed to by their boyfriends in the holovision shows. He caught Hikaru grinning at him, and he grinned back.
"And I am packing up and moving to Honolulu," she said with determination. "I'm not setting up a new life there; I'll be living the retirement I always wanted."
The call went on for a while as Hikaru's mom detailed her retirement plans. Pavel sat down on Hikaru's bed.
"She sounds like she has been set free," he said, when the call was over.
"Set free? No, not really," Hikaru began. "Or maybe yes. It's such an extravagant way of putting it."
Hikaru sat down next to him. Pavel leaned in close, rested his head on his shoulder. Extravagance, he thought, playing with the word. He smiled, inhaled, tilted his head up and kissed Hikaru. For a brief moment their eyes met, just before their eyelids drooped shut. There was fear, there was trepidation, hesitation, joy, hope, lust, tenderness.
Love, and life, and humans, Pavel decided, were just as irrational as pi or root three, and there was no more point defining them with equations and expecting them to conform, than there was writing pi, or root two, or e or root three as a decimal. One point seven three two zero five.
originally posted here