moby dickgirlMcCoy put down his fork on his empty plate. “Permission to leave the table, commander?”
“Granted,” Spock said, from above her salad. She appeared to have captured a cherry tomato with her chopsticks and was examining it with a critical eye.
“It’s not going to eat you,” McCoy said, amused.
“Most probably not,” Spock replied absently, “but it would be intriguing if it did.” She popped it into her mouth.
McCoy grinned. “That sounded suspiciously like whimsy.”
“You will have to forgive me, doctor,” Spock said, “a momentary lapse of reason.” But her tone was light.
Crossing to the window, McCoy looked out over the Maiwar. Night had fallen, a remarkably clear one, and the city core was rising to meet it. The incoming nightlife, clubgoers and restaurant patrons and leisure seekers of all sorts, were mingling with the outward traffic of government workers, researchers, and the more sedate of Meanjin’s students and cadets. Transit lights, of all hues but mostly white and gold, swirled and eddied around the glass and steel towers, giving the impression that Meanjin was suffused with a mist of Silmarils, or inside a high-speed camera view of a firework. Their reflection in the dark, tranquil surface of the Maiwar gave the water a dizzying illusion of depth, as if the fire was captured in the river itself.
There was still a question hanging on McCoy’s lips, but he had chosen not to ask. Having seen how Spock’s face had frozen for just a moment when he had come near it, he’d thought it best to tactfully delay it until a more convenient hour.
She beat him to it. “You made an observation earlier,” her voice came. “’It isn’t Vulcan’.”
In the reflection in the window, McCoy could see Spock had finished at the table and was perched on the armchair that faced the window – “perched on” because it was a particularly plush and shapeless number and she was sitting on it with legs crossed, arms placed in the exact centre of the armrests, refusing to lean against the backrest. It was a posture for a command chair, paired with a ludicrously unfitting piece of furniture.
As one commanded, he turned, leaning against the edge of the window frame in a posture of (very) assumed relaxation. “Well,” he said evasively. “It isn’t.”
“Trivially true,” Spock agreed amiably. “But because it is trivial, I will take the liberty of inferring that its being true is not why you said it.”
McCoy made an ambiguous noise.
“I think,” Spock continued, “that you intended to ask why I did not go to Vulcan.”
“I had wondered,” McCoy admitted. “More advanced, surely …”
“In some respects, more technologically advanced, certainly,” Spock said. “But technological advancement is not the only kind. I will answer your implied question with an explicit one, doctor. What do you think my reasons were?”
Pinned, McCoy hesitated. “Ah …” A simple answer had come to mind – in fact, immediately – but it seemed as if it must, surely, be crossing a line. Finally, he said with great awkwardness, “Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted,” Spock said.
Stiffly, McCoy said, “Sarek.”
“Indeed?” Spock said. She did not seem offended, but one of her eyebrows inched upward fractionally, and McCoy, acutely unwilling to commit to this particular potential faux pas, retreated before it.
“Well,” he hedged, “it’s been known. It often went that way, I understand. Still does, in some places. And I know things between you are …”
He stopped as Spock held up a hand. “You need not fear, doctor. It is a logical hypothesis.”