The Autobiography of Mr. Spock Read online

  After returning to Starfleet and taking up the post at the academy, I began to correspond regularly with Saavik. She was now entering into her teens and, having considered what path she might follow, was contemplating Starfleet. The changes in her, when we met again face-to-face, were remarkable. Her adopted parents had worked what one might be tempted to call a miracle—but let us call it what it truly is: the result of hard work, patience, kindness, and firmness. If she was angry, or defensive, or aggressive, these emotions did not show—and yet I sensed that they were not simply being repressed, rather they were better controlled. All this while in the throes of adolescence. There was a long road ahead for Saavik, but her dedication to finding a way past the violence and trauma of her early years has always earned nothing but my utmost respect. She was serious-minded, perhaps too much so, and hardworking. She meant to achieve, and she meant to show those of us who had shown complete faith in her that we had not been mistaken. And we were not mistaken. I agreed to mentor her through the process of preparing for entry to the academy, in which she was entirely successful.

  The reasons for my desire to see the reunification of the Romulan and Vulcan people are manifold and complex, but I have no doubt of the part played in this by my friendship with Saavik. As I grew older, I became more easy, more confident, in the simple fact of my dual heritage, and I no longer experienced these parts of me as if they were conflict. Rather, I was coming to see that I was better served when both parts of me were allowed to co-exist, to nourish and succor the other so that the whole of me might flourish. I very much desired Saavik to have a similar peace of mind gained through the same sense of equilibrium. The violence in her past was something that I myself had, thankfully, never had to come to terms with. But the shared heritage of our two peoples provided a further challenge to my thinking, one that was now always at the back of my mind, and which would move ever nearer to the forefront in the years to come. Could two people whose division was forged in such heat and anger, reinforced by many years of suspicion and violence, ever be united? This was no small task for anyone to set themselves. Perhaps, after all, I was vain and proud—but I do not regret the time that I spent working toward this goal. I merely regret my failure.

  * * *

  I was fifty-six when I died, almost a hundred years ago. I surrendered my life completely willingly, believing it well lived, and more or less fearlessly, although with no particular wish to experience excessive pain. I came back to life on a planet that went from birth to death in the time it took that world to circle its sun. I lived a second childhood, in fits and starts, so rapidly and so asynchronously that the memories I have are surreal, like the painting by Dalí where the clock is melting, the emotions that I experienced heightened into blurred intensity. What I remember most, what seems to have been the still point during this most terrifying, most disorienting, most uncharted time in my life, is Saavik, speaking calmly, speaking rationally, guiding me through. Did it ever cross my mind, all those years ago, when I sat by that lost child, hoping that I could coax her into trusting me, that one day the situation would be reversed? That in time she would be the one trying to tell a frightened child with no grip on reality that he had nothing to fear? Sometimes, the stories of our lives repeat themselves in ways we cannot possibly predict.

  The circumstances of my death (and what a curious phrase to have to write about oneself that is) were this. On a mission with cadets (including Saavik) on board the Enterprise, now reassigned as a training vessel, and joined by Jim and my old crew, we were drawn into conflict with an enemy from our past lives, the augment Khan Noonien Singh. He intended to avenge himself on us for the part he believed we had played in the failure of his colony world, and the death of his wife. Part of this revenge involved the seizure of the Genesis Device, an advanced terraforming technology that had been developed by Carol Marcus, Jim’s former lover, and their son, David. When Khan, defeated and near death, activated the device, the Enterprise and her crew were in range, and unable to move away quickly enough as a result of damage to the warp drive. To remedy this, I exposed myself to a fatal dose of radiation. I was able to fix the drive, and I died.

  Only to come back to life, on the world created by the Genesis Device, and discovered by Saavik and David. Jim’s son died protecting me and Saavik from the crew of a Klingon ship that had come to take the secrets of this device. How bitter this is, to think of my friend’s son, lost in this way. He never recovered from this blow; neither did his mother. If I could have swapped my life for his, I would have done so. I had lived one life already—a good life, and a full one—and David deserved the chance to live his. A hundred years, I have gained, thanks to David Marcus. Every single breath taken since then, I owe to him, the son of Jim Kirk and Carol Marcus.

  What does it mean, to come back from death? How does one achieve this? You have written to me about your own near-death experience, Jean-Luc; I hope that is the closest that you come to extinction for a very long time. After my resurrection, and the restoration of my katra to my body, I spent several months on Vulcan, where my mother and Saavik worked alongside me to restore my knowledge to what it had been before my death. Learning all that I had once known was by far the easiest part of this task, as if knowledge once learned was easily acquired again. Every so often, one of them would ask me, “But how do you feel, Spock?” I could never answer that question. I would pass on to the next. It seemed irrelevant, uninteresting, when there was so much else to be recalled. That hard-won knowledge, acquired from V’Ger, was in danger of being completely forgotten. And while I will be the first to admit that a voyage into the past to retrieve representatives from an extinct species is not an option available to all, that is how I was able once again to restore my sense of connection with the webs that connect all living things through space and time. And afterwards? How did I feel? Afterwards, I felt…

  I felt fine.

  I will not forget the presence of Saavik during these difficult months. I know that she was grieving David’s death, that some future had been stolen from her when he died. When I left Vulcan again, with my old crew, it was on board the Klingon ship they had captured over the Genesis planet. Dr. McCoy, in a fit of dark humor and mindful of their current status as outcasts, had renamed the ship Bounty, after the ship seized by a band of Earth mutineers, several hundred years ago. My friends, when they disobeyed orders to come and retrieve me, sacrificed a great deal on my account, Jim Kirk most of all.

  Our uncertain mission took us to the past, to save Earth, but Saavik stayed once again in the care of my mother. When we returned, our mission successful, Starfleet reinstated my friends—but David Marcus was still dead. When I saw Saavik again, she was making her own preparations to return to Starfleet. “I am fine,” she told me, when I asked her. “I feel fine.” Ever courageous; ever resilient. She has always been present for me, when I have needed her. By her very nature, Saavik altered once again my understanding of the nature of the world around me. I was not wrong in what I said to her, all those years ago, that to be Vulcan was to be Romulan; to be Romulan was to be Vulcan. She has given me at least as much as I gave her, and she was to play a pivotal part in my life in the years to come. She continues to play her part now, as I write. Extend your palm to her, Jean-Luc, when I am gone. Greet her warmly, candidly, as a sister. Say to her, your heart open and unafraid: Jolan tru. And tell her, please, that I feel fine.

  PART THREE

  KAU—WISDOM—2293—2387

  Valeris

  THE WORD FOR WISDOM IN KITAU-LAKH—the mode used on Vulcan for literary and philosophical texts, formalized by Surak in his Universal Language as Foundation for a Rational Society—is kau. The meaning overlaps considerably with what you might understand from the word—a quality associated with experience, knowledge, good judgment; the quality of acting well in any given situation. Experience; knowledge; good judgment—from this one might see how a wise decision might differ depending on the situation.

  Yet Surak
, in most of his writings on knowledge and wisdom, tends to emphasize the universal principles that might lie behind the quality of “being wise”. What rules, logical and rational, independent of context, might guide us to make the best decision? A similar distinction—between universal and contextual wisdom—might be found in philosophies from your own world, Jean-Luc. Aristotle, for example, distinguishes between sophia: abstract, intellectual knowledge, which is acquired through learning and finessed to excellence through use of one’s reason; and phronesis, the practical wisdom of how to act in the world, moderated by prudence and acquired through experience. You might conjecture, based on this, I think, that sophia, or our equivalent, has in general been in the ascendant in Vulcan thinking derived from Surak, and you would be correct in that assumption.

  But I believe that both of these ideas are present in the idea of kau, and that our emphasis on the universal aspects of the idea results chiefly from the fact of when Surak died. Surak’s writings on kau appear chiefly toward the end of his life. They are brief, epigrammatic, and unusually opaque for a writer who had previously gone to great lengths to be transparent. When I read these later writings, I am reminded of the work of Simone Weil, or the later Wittgenstein, when philosophy seems to take on the aspect of poetry or revelation. Much ink has been spilled by generations of subsequent scholars on the interpretation of Surak’s The Experience of Wisdom, and, in general, this work—which was incomplete upon his death—is considered minor, an odd and somewhat incomprehensible coda to an otherwise entirely lucid and logical body of work. Some have hinted that perhaps Surak was suffering from Bendii Syndrome, a neurological illness that manifests as reduced emotional control, with which you and I are both very familiar, Jean-Luc. In the absence of any formal diagnosis, I must reject this hypothesis as unsubstantiated and unhelpful.

  But I also reject the notion that Surak’s Wisdom is a coda to his writings. I would argue instead that it suggests that he was moving toward a fundamental development in his thinking. Too often we look at a life’s work and attempt to see a coherent whole, when instead we should remember that time alters us and our thinking, and we might better look instead for the changes in our thought. In his Wisdom, Surak is, at the end of his life, inching toward the conclusion we must all reach in time: that the wisest of us know that we are fools, and that the complex systems of rules that we devise for ourselves will always fail in the end. Surak’s Wisdom shows wisdom as the knowledge of our lack of knowledge: the recognition that our rules will always fail us in practice. This, he begins to suggest, is the world-as-it-is, the “reality-truth” of our being in the universe. We are finite beings in a finite universe. We can strive only to be good enough, given who we are, what we know, and the here-and-now of our present situation.

  It is strange to think that, had Surak lived another decade, and been able to expand upon the glimpses that we see in his Wisdom, Vulcan society might look very different. The Prime Directive, for example, based as it was on Vulcan principles of non-interference, of hayal (which we can translate as “calm” or “letting be”), might look very different. Indeed, I have found over my career—as I know you have, Jean-Luc—that this directive is often better honored in the breach than in the observance. That it provides protection against colonialism and imperialist intervention—yes, this is the Prime Directive at its best. (Although there are many on non-Federated worlds who would speak dryly of “soft power”, of the deleterious cultural effects of proximity to us. In this opinion, for example, many Cardassians and Bajorans are united.) That it can permit a lofty disinterest in the face of great suffering—this, as you and I both have cause to know, is also the truth. What might the Prime Directive have looked at, with more emphasis on context, on the use of practical wisdom to guide our decisions? How might the Federation have been different, had Surak written one more book? These are conundrums that I set myself sometimes, Jean-Luc, in my old age. At this point in my life, and given the current context, I find that I have come firmly down upon the side of intervention. Perhaps, with another ten or twenty years, I might come round again to lofty disinterest, to the receptive rather than the active principle. Most certainly it would involve less effort on the part of an old man.

  Wisdom, then, however we might define it, tends in both human and Vulcan philosophies to be associated with old age—with the excellence achieved through many years of learning and scholarship, or the hard-won experience of daily life. But there is a risk to this, for people such as you and me, I think. That when we see the past repeat itself yet again, we begin to confuse our weariness at such repetitions, and at the folly of youth, with wisdom. In the minds of some, cynicism—that rather studied disillusionment with the world which many take on in their later years—masquerades as wisdom. One can see the appeal of such a position. It is frequently borne out by events (although, to my mind, is at least as often contributory); it has the patina of sophistication; and it confers upon the cynic an air of sophistication, of deeper understanding of the “reality-truth” of the world. For all my mistakes, I have not fallen, yet, into the mire of cynicism, and although at times my pragmatism has outweighed my idealism, I believe that the latter has in general been core to my perception of the world, guiding my actions to the extent that I have sometimes failed to see the weariness in others. This has been a blind spot, and, during the events surrounding the Gorkon Initiative, proved nearly fatal. I did not see the jaded weariness in others; I did not see the cynicism of other actors, both young and old; nor did I see how grief might have turned the youthful optimism of one who was very close to me into ferocious, blinkered anger. I speak, of course, of the grief of my friend Jim at the death of his son. I am grateful, at least, that Jim and I had the chance to make amends before he in turn died.

  Jim and I both knew that our active careers were drawing to a close, and that we had perhaps already extended them beyond what was reasonable. I, like my friend, had no real desire for an admiralship, neither the badges nor the duties. When, therefore, my father approached me privately to inform me of the disaster which had befallen the Klingon Empire, and the approaches made to his office by Chancellor Gorkon, and to ask for my assistance in these meetings, I did not think twice before accepting. You will recall that the Klingon moon, Praxis, had exploded, causing dire climatic effects on their homeworld. Gorkon had approached the Federation to explore the possibility of a peace treaty, and this was the mission with which my father wanted my aid. That this move was toward the diplomatic and ambassadorial role that my father had so long wanted for me did not particularly affect my decision: logic suggested that, given my experience and the imminent end of my Starfleet career, this was a natural course. Leaving aside the natural desire to help the Klingon Empire in any way to alleviate the suffering arising from the destruction of their home planet’s moon, I was… fascinated, shall we say, to see how my father and I might work side by side.

  The answer turned out to be extremely well. It is very easy, given the many rifts that lay between me and my father, and the fact that we were estranged at the time of his death, to forget that in fact we were very similar in temperament, worldview, and upbringing. We had a great deal in common and, when our goals and vision were in alignment, it made perfect sense that we should work together both amicably and successfully. My father and I traveled together to the border, to rendezvous with the Chancellor and his entourage. We took the chance, and boarded his ship, heard him express his desire for a lasting peace between our two civilizations, and listened to the practical program of demilitarization by which he proposed to achieve this. I recall after that initial meeting, my father and I, having returned to our own ship, retired to his rooms. We opened the kal-toh board and, eschewing any competitive form of the game, worked in silence together to create a whole. This is an excellent practice, when one has been away from a colleague or comrade for some time, to remind each other of one’s patterns of thinking, one’s strengths and one’s weaknesses, and to find a mode of working to
gether that will serve across the coming days and weeks. This was what my father and I were doing now. Reminding each other of the people that we were and synchronizing ourselves with each other.

  “He would not have made this offer,” said my father, after half an hour of silent configuration of the board, “if his world was not on its knees.”

  “I believe not,” I replied, “but I still do not doubt his sincerity. Whether or not he has been moved by the realities of the situation, his desire for peace is honest. I believe we can build something upon that.”

  “As do I,” said my father, slotting the last piece into place. We both contemplated the regularity and beauty of the edifice we had constructed. The question now, of course, was how to persuade others of this self-evident truth. That we might meet resistance from the admirals I did not doubt; that we might persuade our President that one way for history to remember him would be as the man who made peace with the Klingons was, to my mind, certain. These were predictable responses. What I failed to predict was the ferocity of Jim’s opposition, and the actions of my protégé, Valeris. These were grievous misjudgments that nearly ended our mission at the outset, and while the first breach was repaired, just in time, the second, to this day, is still not mended.

  * * *

  A few years prior to this, while I was back teaching at the academy, I received a message from Saavik, at this point a lieutenant commander on a vessel patrolling the edge of the Neutral Zone. She knew it was a few weeks before the new batch of recruits was due to come to the academy, and she wished to draw my attention to the daughter of friends who was about to arrive. She suggested that I look out for her, and that I might find her of particular interest.