Chapter Text
By the time evening rolled around, Kanna had convinced herself it was just a blip. She was surprised, that was all, and jealous in that moment when she realised someone she thought was as alien as her had a tether she lacked. She and Christine met Sulu in the gym, and Kanna dared to tease Christine about the whole thing, and when the nurse laughed, she suffused with a warm glow. Maybe this was to key: to unlock their strange interactions, she had to let herself into their strange feelings.
Body aching, Kanna made her way to the reading room, contemplating the ethics of this. What would it mean to peel herself open? She thought of the Vulcans on board, who disdained their emotions not because they contaminated the environment, but because they believe they contaminated themselves and lead to disruptive actions.
Unfortunately, Spock spotted her hands fiddling in her sweater pocket as she thought. No one else seemed to notice, but his eyes always went straight to her hands when he saw her, the one point she couldn’t mask.
“What’s wrong?” He asked, turning back to the machines on his lap. Kanna slid to the floor in front of him and picked one up gingerly. A scull cap of wires set into a PVC frame, all feeding into a transmitter box at the back. She popped it open, staring at copper wrapped electromagnet inside. They had been in each other’s minds countless times, thrown together as Spock tried unsuccessfully to separate telepathy from self, but never, even lying exhausted on the floor in the aftermath, had they given voice to what they had seen: disjointed waves of not belonging, betrayals as they tried to slide themselves into worlds where they did not quite fit – the discomfort of skin and noise.
“Do you ever think,” Kanna said slowly, “that you have to be human to be a person?”
Spock paused his calibrating. Unbidden, a memory rose to the surface of his mind: sitting in class as a child, learning how to use correlative conjunctions. A smug child’s voice rang out: Spock is neither Vulcan nor Human.
But there was nothing malicious in Kanna’s posture. She leaned her shoulder against the couch, legs sprawled around his. If he shifted just slightly, his calf would press against her torso, and the question of what the warmth of her would feel like shocked him.
“Two hundred years of contact cannot undo millennia of speciesism,” he replied swiftly, feeling the need to change the subject. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”
She tilted up her face trustingly and let him settle the portable MRI over her scarf. After several weeks of their meeting, there was no hesitation there. She knew he would secure the strap gently, and if his thumb brushed her cheek…
Brain scans had come a long way since the advent of blue and white magnetic imagery. Now, when Spock synched the machines to their tablets, they were met with shining webs of colour, scalable to the cellular level.
“This is me?” Kanna asked in awe, admiring the lights scattering across her lobes. Spock leaned over her shoulder. Watching their minds meld on the MRI would be useful, but he had to admit he was hoping for this reaction – the tense focus that came over her face as she homed in on something miraculous.
“Instinctual activity happens back here,” he gestured to the brain stem, “and conscious thought up here. The older the function, the deeper in the brain its stored, as a general rule. If you think of something you’re afraid of-”
Kanna obeyed, and the very centre swirled in a kaleidoscope of red.
“-or something that disgusts you.”
A different section sparked green.
He leaned closer to tap the screen, bringing up both their images side by side. Spock froze as his cheek brushed her scarf, but she seemed too entranced to notice, dragging her fingers along their brains, giving him the same orders.
“We are the same here,” she declared, tracing the almond-shaped amygdala, “and here, but this is different.” She pointed to where her brainstem fanned into her temporal lobe.
“Divergent evolution.” She smelled of the simple soap stocked in the bathrooms, accented only with a metallic hint of grease and ozone – none of the synthetic scents that made his headache. “Likely concurrent with the genetic mutation that gave your people telepathic abilities.
“What is this?”
“The medulla oblongata.”
“And this?”
“Corpus callosum.”
The curve, called out in lime green, spanned both hemispheres of her brain scan. She flipped to Spock’s scan and found it, slightly different in shape, but there.
“What does it do?”
“What do you think? The two hemispheres have different functions.”
“It’s a link!” She turned her head with a wide-eyed smile, and before he could pull back, they were nose to nose. A soft oh of surprise escaped her, and then they were both silent, still as prey animals not daring to move lest the grass give them away. Above them, the climate control clicked on.
“Do you think,” she said, her breath warm on his cheek, “that you could play it?”
“Play it?”
“Like the stars. It’s the same as the stars from the observation deck.”
He had forgotten about that moment – how had he been so bold to play for her like that, even buoyed by the realisation that she could hear it too.
“Would you like me to?”
Her nose crinkled, eyes bright. This close, he could see a halo of hazel in her blue iris. “You’re not going to lecture me about how they’re not the same?”
Something twinged in Spock’s chest, he felt light. He knew he should pull back and remove himself, but instead he lifted his hand. “I don’t believe I’m quite beyond a little suspension of logic,” he said, laying his fingertips on her cheek.
The affect was instantaneous. She drew back, a mask falling over her expression.
Spock dropped his hand. “I apologise. I-” He what? He could hardly name the motivation behind his gesture. It wasn’t sex – there were less complicated way for him to fill that occasional need. But he also didn’t think he had misread her interest, unless Gwydions shared personal space with different motivations. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he finished lamely.
Kanna ducked her face, temples pink. The MRI sat on her head, wires skewed like the tentacles of a ridiculous sea creature. “I was in the medbay,” she bit out, “earlier. When you came in. I was fixing a table.”
“Oh.” There was no way to explain without sounding callous or cruel. I assure you, I only use her affections for sex, wasn’t something he was ready to admit even to himself.
Kanna bit the tip of her tongue and forced her breaths to slow. On the screen, their MRIs still transmitted data, turning their distress and discomfort into a flurry of colours. She forced her thoughts to static, letting white noise fill her from hear to ear until the storm faded. Spock must be doing the same, and only when the activity lessened did she dare to look back up, prepared to go on with their evening.
That’s when pinging started.
Mail day was a quietly anticipated occasion. There was only one known way to send data through warp, and whenever the Enterprise passed one of the message buoys, it slowed to allow terabytes of video messages and letters and new bulletins to upload onto servers and connect, for a moment at least, the crew to the rest of the galaxy. For a day or two, one couldn’t escape a conversation without seeing a photo of a nibling or pet or viral video two months out of date.
It was also a time to get non-urgent messages from the Fleet, and it was one of these that made Kirk lift his eyebrows and gesture to Sulu as he hopped up.
“Helm, half speed again please – I need that buoy in range for at least an hour. Kirk to Spock,” he said into his communicator as the lift doors closed him in.
The pause was longer than usual before the voice came back. “Spock here.” Was it Kirk’s imagination, or did his unflappable second sound tense?
“Have you seen the message from the Federation?”
“Looking at it now.”
“Good. Find Ms Taliesin and meet me in Conference 3, would you?”
“Momentarily captain.”
“Kirk out.” He terminated the message with a sharp jab of his finger. Having Spock sit in on a meeting with his estranged father wasn’t his ideal order, but it would look rude to greet the ambassadorial board without him present, and he trusted that both could put any personal matters aside for the length of a call.
To his surprise, the pair were already in the meeting room when he arrived, carrying with them a distinct air of awkwardness. Kirk bit back a smile. He hadn’t seen much of their stowaway since she came aboard, but the last four months had clearly been good to her. She was still slight, but a layer of muscle and fat filled out her shoulders and hips, and her cheeks no longer had their sunken shadows.
But it was the tableau the two made that made him want to laugh. Clearly they had been together already to reach the room before him, and he knew that Spock wasn’t prone to lingering in common areas so late. Kanna had slung herself cross-legged onto the table, her body oriented towards Spock even as her chin was pointed determinedly away. Spock lingered near by just as uncomfortably. A conference table of ten for them to occupy, yet they chose to ignore each other from an arm’s distance.
Kirk couldn’t claim to be baffled by Spock’s affect on those around him. Hell, even he’d fallen into that trap at points in their friendship, bound by the intense chemistry of repression. But he knew those moments for Spock were few and far between, usually spurred by a wide-eyed admiration of scientific paragons. The poor girl must have expressed a desire and been rebuffed – whether the Vulcan had done so fumblingly or cruelly was yet to be determined.
Kanna spotted him first, sliding off the table into a loose attention. Spock greeted him with the quirk of an eyebrow.
“Ms Taliesen. Has Mr Spock told you why you are here?”
“Someone wants to speak to me.” Her Standard was smoother than the last time he’d heard her speak, but still carried a musical cadence that seemed at odds with her flat mien.
Kirk gestured at Spock, who busied himself at the console patching in the call. “Not just anyone – the Ambassadorial Board. Do you know what that means? They oversee relationships between Federation members. They carry quite a bit of weight within the Federation and the Fleet.”
Kanna hesitated. “You’re worried I’ll embarrass you.”
Kirk smiled gently. “It’s not just me I’m worried about. Ambassadors tend to speak in riddles compared to you and me. I don’t want you to feel intimidated or backed into a corner.”
“Why are they going through this trouble?”
“You’re the only link we have to a strategically important planet,” Kirk said, flicking his eyes to the screen. One click, and they’d throw this girl into the lions’ den. “You’re our subject matter expert on Gwydion. Would you like to sit?”
Kanna shook her head, and Kirk directed her to stand at the head of the table. He and Spock sat to the side where the camera could still detect them and entered the meeting.
Kanna held perfectly still as the screen loaded, not even her fingers moving. For a moment, she could see herself reflected back on the video, a small figure stark against the white walls of the meeting room. She stood as if she were talking to superior manager, shoulders down, chin neutral, making sure she revealed nothing through her posture. She did not fully understand why she was being sought out, but she had the uncomfortable sensation that she was bait. Important people did not come at a moment’s notice unless the prey was important.
The screen loaded, three squares with three sets of alien eyes locking into focus as they saw her.
“Ambassadors,” the captain said smoothly. His voice had changed again. “Thank you for joining us at such short notice. I apologise for the delay in getting your message. We have been in deep space for some time. I’m sure you are all very busy – we’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
If Kanna found this an odd thing to say – after all, it was the Enterprise who had been summoned – the ambassadors did not. The blue-skinned Andorian woman twitched her antennae, her gaunt cheeks giving her a severe air. “Thank you for your quick response, Captain. The Federation is eager to get into the details of your report.”
Kirk nodded. “I’m sure you all know Mr Spock, my second in command, and allow me to introduce Ms Kanna Taliesin. Kanna, these are Ambassadors Tanar, Cav, and Sarek.” Kanna used the niceties to take in her audience: Cav was a Tellerite whose prominent tusks gleamed by the light of his lamp, but it was Sarek who caught her attention. It was true that most Vulcans looked the same to her – as did most humans – but there was something familiar in the folds of his eyelid, the way the lines on his face bracketed his mouth. She looked at Spock from the corner of her eye and him sitting uncomfortably straight. She folded her hands behind her back and squeezed her thumb tightly.
“Taliesin,” Sarek said. “An interesting choice. Are you familiar with the poet’s work?”
It was only after Kanna had taken the name that Scotty had told her it was a practically prehistoric bard who talked about mead and men and battle. “I have read some,” she answered honestly, “but I do not understand it.”
Sarek frowned, and Kanna fought to control her breathing – that had been the wrong answer, clearly, sending Spock stiffening in his seat. But when Sarek went to speak again, Cav cut him off. “We’re not here to talk about poetry, Sarek. Let’s get to the point.”
“Indeed. Ms Taliesin, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about your importance to the Federation. We’ve all read the report and the articles but feel there is some more information to gather before making a decision on the place of Gwydion-F in the diplomatic sphere of the Federation.”
Articles? She had known of course there was a report. Just as if there had been an incident on site, the captain would have explained what had gone wrong on the planet, but surely that was the end of it? They were all staring at her expectantly, not used to her long silences as she untangled their words. She felt as isolated as she looked on the screen, cut off from any context being part of a hive would have given her.
“Ambassador, you will forgive me my lack of comprehension,” she hedged, “knowing what you do about my people’s communication customs.”
“It is our job to balance the needs of the Federation against the customs of another planet,” Tanar offered.
That was, as Scotty would say, clear as mud, but the implication made Kanna lift her chin, forgetting about the captain’s imploration. “You still wish to trade with Gwydion for accurentum.”
“With so little information available, we wish to speak with you before making such a decision.”
“What would you like to know, Ambassadors?”
If Tanar felt any discomfort, she did not express it. “Perhaps you could tell us, in your words, about life on the planet as you experienced it. We have read about the caste system, but how did it affect you?”
For a moment, Kanna stood stunned, then bitter rage flooded her mouth. Since she arrived on the Enterprise, the only reaction to her past life had been abhorrence and an adamant expression that such things were absolutely taboo in the Federation. A string of lawyers and social workers had plugged holes in her vocabulary, laying out in asylum applications the horror of it all in black and white; Macy had sat quietly while Kanna screamed herself hoarse coming to terms with it. Most nights she still didn’t sleep, worried she would wake up alone in her small room, rounding with an unwanted child.
An ember she thought she had let die sparked at the back of her tongue, and Kanna tilted her head innocently. “Of course, ambassador. I would be happy to. Please excuse my grasp of Standard, I am still learning. Is apartheid the word I am looking for? It can’t be genocide – I believe the forced breeding contradicts that one. I also fail to understand the difference between corporal and corporeal – they share roots, don’t they? Only one is a type of punishment and one is a rank? Or perhaps those are the same and the other is different, but I can get around that by calling them punitive beatings, can’t I?”
Beneath the table where the camera didn’t reach, the captain was jiggling his leg, and Spock’s eyebrows were practically in his hair. Kanna delivered the whole speech with such a lack of emotion or spite that it would have been impossible to catch her on any insubordination.
“I can show you my scars if you like,” Kanna continued, “but they’re not very impressive. I’m still young – the true disfiguration is normally saved for those who are less desirable. Of course, I suppose it’s not all bad. Fifteen hundred kilocalories a day under physical conditions, and I was only traded a handful of times. Not like some, passed year to year.”
A deep blue blush crept into Tanar’s cheeks. “The accurentum is an essential resource for continued prosperity of the Federation.”
“So trade for it if you like,” Kanna said. Her thumbnails pressed hard into her index finger to prevent her voice shaking. “Such eminences as yourselves do not need my permission.” She fixed the camera with a blank, burning gaze. “Unless of course, its absolution you are looking for.”
A hush fell over the room. On screen, Tanar clamped her mouth shut, her smooth expression disrupted by a twitching frown. After a moment, Cav burst into a booming laugh that made Kanna flinch backwards.
“A fine argument, I think! You’d be welcome on the arenas of Tellar Prime!”
Kanna kept quiet, not trusting herself to speak without being sick. Her body was swirling with a painful mix of anger and confusion that made the room seem to spin around her. It was all she could do to hold herself still and blank as Taran and Cav made their farewells and logged off, leaving only Sarek staring thoughtfully down at her, his face taking up the whole of the four-foot screen.
“Please forgive my fellow council members for their seemingly callousness,” he said finally. “I can only offer my assurances that most of us believe ethical prosperity is the only worthwhile path.” He continued when Kanna didn’t respond. “I found the reports in Evolution very illuminating. I’m sure they will contribute significantly to our understanding of seeding.”
Air was going into her lungs. She could feel it, oxygen feeding her leg muscles even as they trembled. Sarek finally flicked his gaze away, and she had a feeling he was looking elsewhere on his screen. “Your mother sends her greetings,” he said simply, and then he too was gone.
Kanna sank to the floor, fist stuffed into her mouth. The sound that came out of her was neither wail nor scream of frustration, but she gave it once, twice, until the pressure on her ribs had lifted and she was sure she wasn’t going to cry. The world had broken. She was naïve to think this microcosm was all that awaited her. There was no where in the universe where differences existed without conflict, where the machinations of the powerful did not roll over individuals for the greater good. When she stood, she felt like she had aged a century, shrunk down to bones and skin in a harsh wind.
“I apologise, Captain, if I shamed you.”
Kirk shook his head. “Quite the opposite – for someone I’ve been told lacks an understanding of nuance, I think you did us proud.”
There was something else that was bothering her. “What article was the ambassador talking about?” She had a vague idea of what an article was – something that delivered news, or that displayed new discoveries, but that didn’t have anything to do with her.
Spock cleared his throat. “In Evolution. A scientific journal.”
“About me?” Spock nodded slowly. Her voice flattened. She could not keep her emotions held at bay any longer. “Show me.”
“You did consent.”
“Show me.”
The next moments Kanna felt herself rising from her body. Her hand moved to take the proffered tablet, her eyes scanned the paper, but she was not there. She was not seeing her anatomy splayed out in stark diagrams: There were her puzzle-piece ribs, her toes (length noted on a table of averages of known species). A cross section of her dual larynx stared obscenely up at her. On and on she scrolled, through headings like Cranial Structure and Vestigial organs. Pages and pages of words, meaningless in their complexity, describing every piece of her. And then she reached:
Reproductive system
Due to trauma, an examination of the subject’s internal reproductive organs was not sufficient to draw conclusions.
Her breath caught knife-like in her throat. That was it. There she was, ever piece of her for the galaxy to see, to be downloaded and passed from hand to hand, looked over and turned around and taken for spare parts. She was illuminating. She was fascinating. She had interesting implications.
At least it did not mention her foolishness. This had been a ploy from the beginning- from the moment he spread nanogel on her cheeks, she had seen Spock’s eyes on her, watching, dissecting her until he had enough evidence to put his name on. The way he had watched her while they played chess, fiddling with the nuts and bolts of her mind. Even her telepathy – she new better than to think anyone wanted to learn things for the delight of them. To sate what she thought was a kindred curiosity, she had spread herself bare, and now the horrible truth of it all stared up at her.
The last sound she heard was the shattering of the tablet screen as it hit the wall where Spock’s head had been moments before.