Chapter Text
He keeps the humans waiting.
What excuses the flight crew of his shuttle make, Soval doesn't know and Soval doesn't care. Someone has invented a new security check, or eight; someone else is inspecting the humans' facilities with a jaundiced eye, finding fault with everything and offering actionable advice on nothing. The humans, for their part, are scurrying, hearts in throats and hopes so high it hurts Soval to even look at them. So Soval blacks his window and doesn't look, twisting his fingers together into a meditative posture as he tries once more to steady himself.
That much hope, on Vulcan, would be an obscenity. Here, it's going to be a constant.
Soval does not know how he is going to adapt to that, but he is saved -- momentarily -- from having to think about it by the buzz of his comm. He drops the meditative hand pose, as futile now as it's been for the past forty minutes, and reaches for the device.
He does not know who he hoped he would be answering (lies, yes he does), but it is not them. It is T'Les, with more unsolicited advice on managing her grandmother's planet for the (un)lucky Third Ambassador Plenipotentiary of T'Khasi to Earth.
Soval almost puts the comm straight back down. But that would involve being alone with his thoughts in this shuttle, a terrible fate only slightly surpassed by the impending terribleness of being surrounded by Humans.
....surrounded by Humans. T'Les's foremother's planet. Perhaps unsolicited advice is not so unwelcome after all. There may indeed be something in T'Mir's experience -- something unwritten and inherited left out of the great surveyor's report, a family secret transmitted in whispers -- that will help him avoid Solkar's disgrace.
Perhaps. It is unlikely. Far more probable is another genteel threat about what will happen to him if he mismanages her daughter's physical safety or her career prospects. As if Soval would ever do that!
But. Well. T'Les has always had different opinions about her daughter's career prospects than the daughter herself. Life in the Ministry of Security is risky, life in the Diplomatic Corps is full of foreign unknowns, and T'Les might be descended from reknowned explorers of prior days but she is no explorer herself. She is an academic, gone up in the world. She is refined and holy, a pure theoretician, safely ensconced on the Mother World with its gardens and fountains and libraries, living a life Soval will never have and T'Pol will never want.
Every part of T'Pol that resembles N'Diran reminds T'Les of how she lost him. Losing N'Diran was Soval's fault. This much cannot be argued with; this much is true.
This much is precisely why he does not sit unattended in shuttles for great lengths of time. Or why he shouldn't.
Soval picks up the comm. If T'Les is going to excoriate him, so be it. It will at least offer new perspectives from excoriating himself.
"You are an imbecile," T'Les says when Soval finally picks up.
"....How gratifying," Soval says, voice prickly with static over the long-distance connection. "Peace and long life to you as well, T'Les."
T'Les switches the comm to hover mode and stalks out into the garden, brandishing the rake for the sand pit with what is, for her, considerable agitation. She switches the handle of the watering can to the crook of one elbow and reaches for a second basket. Within, her pruning shears jostle disorganizedly with a spade. The comm, uncertain of what angle to film from, attempts to focus on the contents of the basket, but T'Les bats it away and stalks out her front door. The comm bobs dutifully behind her.
"Do you have any specific awareness to provide, or are you merely restating opinions on my intellect which you have shared before?"
Soval's voice is not dutiful, or regretful or cowed or surprised in any manner. It is level and patient and snide in a way that makes T'Les want to bite glass, mainly because being unflappable while implying the other person is dumber than the average plomeek is her move, and Soval has no right to take it from her. He hasn't got three doctorates from the Vulcan Science Academy. He hasn't even got one!
But he's flexible -- subtle and tricky in a way that's hard to track and hard to counter. It is a cunning that reminds T'Les too much of her mother, which is admittedly logical, considering the life experiences T'Odunat shared with Soval. They share a low, animal intellect which allowed both personages to pull themselves up from the dust, into positions of beauty and reverence they frankly did not deserve.
Emotional instinct, T'Les fumes, is a form of cheating.
She sets the watering can down on the veranda with a thunk and climbs into the sand pit, tugging her gardening gloves on with more force than necessary. The design in the sand here is smudged; wind has eddied the pattern into illegibility and some of the gravel from the next compartment has fallen over the barrier.
"T'Les," Soval calls from the hovering speaker. "Have you commed me across 16.3 lightyears, merely to insult and ignore me?"
He's laughing at her. She can hear it in his voice, may the Forge that birthed him take him back. T'Les uses the blunt end of the rake to scrub the sand pit smooth, and she does not bother to do so gracefully. She is sorely tempted to take the wayward rock and throw it at him.
"How illogical, T'Les," Soval says, and she doesn't have to look up to know he's covering his mouth to hide the laugh he's biting back. "A woman of your esteemed position should certainly have better control. Is not emotional decision-making exactly that which you reprimanded T'Pol for this past month?"
She does throw the rock. It bounces away harmlessly under the floating comm, but it comes close enough to the camera that it makes him yelp in surprise and then cackle.
There, now we're both illogical. And while we are speaking of things we will both never admit, I must tell you I am worried for you.
"You should not have taken this position," T'Les says, and Soval's laughter dies too fast.
"You know why it is imperative that I take this position." His voice is solemn now, fervent as the grave.
"Someone must take this position. Even Sasav could have continued in this position. It need not have been you."
"Sasav was removed for gross mismanagement of the Embassy. He did nothing functional to stem the flow of illegal emigration on Terra. His lax enforcement of propriety among Embassy personnel has led to scandal. It's not enough that Sasav managed to hold the position for thirty years without going flat raving insane, or -- or -- running off to join the natives."
The less said of Solkar and Cochrane the better.
"The Humans built an entire warp research facility under his nose, with our technology and probably with our own rogue citizens, and now the Earthlings are likely to break Warp Two within this century."
And yet here he was, speaking of Solkar and Cochrane again. Quickly, Soval changes the subject.
"Are not the Andorians enough barbarians to have rocketing around the quadrant? Literally rocketing around?"
Not quick enough to avoid T'Les' notice, however.
"Sasav's incompetence has been decided by those with more political acumen than me," T'Les says loftily, making political acumen sound like sanitation engineering as only a theoretical physicist can. "But the Andorians are precisely why you should not have been selected to replace him."
"And why is that?" says Soval snippily. "'Those with more political acumen than you' have determined my experience on the Andorian front is precisely why I am the most suitable candidate. Like Andorians, the Humans are emotional, impulsive, and warlike. When they first encounter setbacks in their ambition for the stars, their pretensions to world peace will evaporate. Infighting will resume, the old grudges will reopen like bleeding wounds. Only by then they will be everywhere. The urge for revenge is never far from the surface with these people, and it is never satisfied. It is far better that when they return to their base instincts they are contained within their solar system -- or at least restricted to very slow ships."
T'Les sighs and leans on her rake. Spare me the propaganda V'Las fed you, Soval, I've heard it before. She sighs again, takes her weight off the rake, and turns, pretending to use it, so that the camera cannot see her face.
"That planet will destroy you, Soval. Even if the Humans do not kill you -- which they may well do -- they may do far worse."
They are speaking of Solkar and Cochrane again.
"Things happen to people there. The planet itself -- it has some force upon the mind. Your logic will be degraded, if it is not destroyed. Terra will change you. Terra will dissolve you. You will come apart like a corpse in the sea."
"....What a charmingly evocative metaphor," Soval says, sounding strangled.
"I am in earnest, Soval. Just because logic struggles to explain a phenomenon does not mean the phenomenon does not exist. There is something ill in the air there, in the trees, in the water. More than the radiation poisoning! It works upon the soul."
"I do not know which is more alarming," Soval says at last, measuredly, "your descent into metaphysics or the implication that you know something I do not."
T'Les crouches and begins tugging at a weed that has come up in the sandbed.
"Do you know something I do not?"
T'Les stands, beating sand off the roots and off her apron and trousers.
"T'Les?"
Now he sounds frightened.
"I know nothing actionable, nothing specific," she sighs. "It is only...." How to convey this? How to put into words an implication, formed mostly of shadows and things left unsaid? It could be intergenerational gossip. It could be one more boogeyman invented by a spacefaring mother to scare her daughter into staying planetbound and in school.
It could be T'Les' emotional fixation on the supernatural, on the occult and the uncanny, on acts of psy.
But T'Les doesn't think so. She had not just seen her grandmother -- she had seen her grandmother's colleague, the only one to survive that blighted mission to Earth. He had been scared, too. And he had been hiding something.
"It is only.... what?" Soval prompts. "Your grandmother's survey....?"
"Yes," T'Les says flatly, beginning to carve spirals and waves into the sand with her rake as she stalls for time. "My grandmother's survey."
Soval waits.
T'Les stalls.
Soval waits.
"....I do not think they all died. I believe.... there is a sort of seduction inherent to the place, that strips a Vulcan of logic and duty and all bonds of familial loyalty, and leaves a two-legged animal in its place. What happened to Solkar was not a personal failing -- it is a contamination of illogic that works from the outside in, without regard for emotional control, without regard for moral strength or personal intention. It has happened to others before. It will happen to others again. You think you are prepared because you have survived the Andorians--" (while my N'Diran did not) "--and therefore you know what type of enemy you face. You do not know. You understand nothing. I understand nothing. These people defy understanding, and they will turn you inside out. Let V'Las find another sacrifice -- I do not wish it to happen to you."
The sand pit is complete. T'Les steps back onto the veranda and sets down her rake. She turns to survey her work and sees nothing.
"And I do not wish it to happen to T'Pol."
Silence from the hovering comm unit. Nothing but the gentle static of a bad connection and too much space. T'Les wonders what portion of her rambling, disjointed speech Soval will fix onto first.
"....T'Pol is on the Klingon frontier," he says, at last.
Intriguing. In hindsight, T'Les thought Soval would have lodged an objection to her smear on V'Las' honor first.
"Safe," T'Les says. "Safe on the Klingon frontier. And long may she remain there."
"T'Les, are you well?"
"No," she says, "but I am better than you will be soon."
She cuts the comm.