On the low table in front of him was a keethara,with many of its component blocks laying about nearby. He had begun assembling this particular “structure of harmony” two weeks prior, and had worked on it during each of his daily meditation sessions. Today it still remained unfinished. Each new block he added seemed unharmonious.
The purpose of the blocks was to focus his thoughts and help him to hone his mental control. Instead, they were causing him anxiety and frustration. No. Thekeethara blocks are not the cause of my concern.
His emotions had been building in intensity for some time now. More and more he felt tainted by the emotions of [46] his crewmates. It had always been so, even from his first day at Starfleet Academy. With cold, dispassionate logic, he could fathom the most complex scientific questions; he had excelled in his studies, most especially the tactical sciences. But he could never understand—or perhaps allow himself to comprehend—the emotional attitudes of his teachers and fellow classmates.
Upon graduation, Tuvok had been assigned to the U.S.S. Excelsior,just four years after entering Starfleet Academy. Prior to embarking on this posting, Tuvok had consulted with his most trusted teacher and advisor, a middle-aged Vulcan named Xon. Professor Xon had confided to him that life aboard a starship full of emotional beings could be extremely difficult, especially if one was the only Vulcan among them.
Tuvok had had no problem believing Xon’s words then. After all these years, he was still inclined to agree with them.
Though five years had passed since he had lodged his protest against Captain Sulu’s ill-advised attempt to rescue a pair of colleagues during the Khitomer crisis, Tuvok remained bothered by the capricious emotions that so often seemed to guide the conduct of Excelsior’scaptain and crew. Even with the current mission, Tuvok sensed that both Captain Sulu and Ambassador Burgess were basing their decisions regarding the Tholians mostly on what humans liked to refer to as their “gut instincts.” The dispassionate logic that so often provided the key to survival in a chaotic universe was, as usual, being given short shrift by humans.
Tuvok carefully picked up a keetharablock and held it over a section of the small structure on the table. He knew he could not blame his difficulties with human emotions entirely on his crewmates; it had been a part of him since his earliest days. Though he had been called brilliant as a child, his penchant for constantly questioning his teachers had exceeded the expected norms. More than once, his instructors had tried to impress upon him the importance of [47] occasionally simply accepting their experience, erudition, and authority. Instead, he had responded with volleys of interrogatives that had bordered on insubordinate. And yet, despite his alleged deficiencies in tact, Tuvok had remained convinced that his questioning spirit was logical. How could the teachers have allowed themselves to react so emotionally to it?
Then, at the age of nine, Tuvok first grappled with his own emotional demons. And they had almost destroyed him.
Returning home from the primary seminary, young Tuvok was faced with bad news from his father, Sunak. The family sehlat, Wari, had stumbled into the path of a ground car. “Her injuries were too severe to be repaired,” Sunak had told him in measured tones. “She had to be euthanized.”
Tuvok felt pain stab into him, an agony unlike any he had ever felt before. Wari had been his pet all his life; she was older than he was, and had treated him like one of her own cubs as far back as he could remember. He used to hold onto her fangs and she would shake him gently from side to side. Sometimes, he had slept curled up next to her, warmed on desert winter nights by her thick covering of russet-colored fur.
Now, she was gone. His parents had already made plans to dispose of her body, but he had screamed until they allowed him to see his pet’s corpse. T’Meni, his mother, had stood nearby as Tuvok ruffled Wari’s fur and stroked her ears, unmindful of the verdant blood that matted it in spots.
Tuvok had squatted low, on the same level with Wari’s lifeless head, and pried open her eyelids. The eyes were dark and glassy. “It’s not here,” he said, sobbing.
“What are you looking for?” his mother asked, her voice steady and emotionless.
“Wari’s katra.”
Sunak had come into the yard, and spoke then. “Wari did not have a katra. Animals are without katra.”
[48] Tuvok heard his father’s words as a betrayal. He knew what he felt from Wari. She had loved him without reservation, in a way that he had never felt even from his own parents. She had protected him, played with him, touched him, cared for him.
“If Wari does not have a katra,then neither do either of you!”Tuvok screamed, tears scalding his cheeks. He hugged the sehlat’shead tightly.
T’Meni crouched, lowering one knee to the ground so that she could look Tuvok in the eye. “That isn’t logical, Tuvok.” She folded her arms and looked at him serenely, as if the truth of her statement was obvious.
Irrationally, Tuvok wanted her to hold him, to feel his mother and father embrace him the same way his pet so often had, to protect him and soothe away his pain. But she wouldn’t. That was not the Vulcan way.
His hand clutching a few long hairs from Wari’s coat, Tuvok ran out of the yard, pushing past his father. That night, with Vulcan’s co-orbital world of T’Khut dominating the sky, he stole out of their home with a pack full of provisions and a thin, curved knife. The ritual blade—a
sessilent—was
Tuvok had gone on a ten-day-long Kahswanordeal when he was seven, but as he departed through the ceremonial grounds of ShiKahr and eastward toward the punishing heat of the Plains of Gol, he knew that ten days would not be enough to heal him. Now he was embarking on the ritual of tal’oth,making his way over the desiccated wasteland of Vulcan’s Forge, across the jagged mountains that marked its eastern boundary. And back, if the gods willed it so.
Four months later, Tuvok returned to his home, slightly taller and much thinner than when he had departed. He spoke to no one of his journeys, except to tell his mother that he had learned to grow orchids in the parched desert, where no flowering plant should have been able to thrive.
But during his ordeal, Tuvok had forced himself to purge [49] the emotions he had felt. By ridding his mind of the need for affection, of the pride in his accomplishments, and of the sense of loss that had come with Wari’s passing, Tuvok believed that he had come to feel nothing at all, other than the spiritual exultation of dispassionate, affect-free logic.
Over the following years, his path toward Kolinahrwas interrupted again. At sixteen, he fell in love with a visiting Terellian girl named Jara, and his infatuation had almost consumed him. Another trip across the desert wastes—and months spent under the tutelage of a Vulcan Master—helped Tuvok to extirpate his emotions yet again.
Since that time, as he’d left adolescence and entered adulthood, Tuvok became better able to master and suppress his emotions, to channel his mind’s energies into the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of logic. He had entered Starfleet only at the urging of his parents, and his decision to bow to their will had led him inexorably here, now, to this ship so filled with self-contradictory emotion.
In a few weeks, his original five-year assignment aboard the Excelsiorwould be completed. If not for the persuasion of T’Meni and Sunak, who had believed that exposing their son to non-Vulcan cultures would prove beneficial to him, Tuvok would have resigned his commission and returned to Vulcan immediately after the Praxis-Khitomer affair had concluded. But now that he had fulfilled his promise to his parents to finish out his Excelsiorposting, he saw that things weren’t quite so simple. Now that he was a valued senior officer, loyal to his captain and his shipmates, he truly didn’t know if he wanted to stay aboard the ship, accept another assignment with Starfleet—or perhaps pursue an altogether different path.