Fur and Fathers

Chapter Fourteen

“You mean… this thing works?  Every time?”

Trip stopped and stared at her.  Shiránnor halted too.  Her face was serene, compassionate.

“Yes.  Every time.”

He was, first and foremost, a man who dealt with realities.  Engineering schematics did not have any tolerance whatsoever for things that ‘happened for no reason.’  If he could find an explanation, he could deal with it.  That was the way his mind worked, that was the way he’d been trained to think.  In his own way and in his own field, he could almost out-logic his wife.  Things didn’t just happen.  Everything he’d ever encountered had ‘cause and effect.’  It was just that sometimes ‘cause’ took a bit of finding, even if ‘effect’ smacked you upside the jaw.

He had to admit, though, that something had happened on their last visit here that still defied his attempts to track down any cause.  T'Pol had come here a very sick woman – a dying woman, as fiercely as he’d tried to deny that fact to himself at the time.  A conventional cure (conventional by this world’s strange standards, at least, and presumably one with some basis in science if anyone had cared to look closely enough) had existed, and they’d been in a desperate search for it when Something Else had intervened.  Intervened in the very nick of time, and not a day had passed since that he hadn’t given thanks for it.  But to whom he gave thanks, he couldn’t possibly have said.  And how it had happened, and why, he had even less idea.

Shiránnor dealt on a daily basis with a world in which things like this were, if not the norm, at least a possibility.  To the best of his knowledge, she hadn’t had a thing to do with those events, though she’d certainly been in the vicinity and she was the sort of person whom one could never quite dissociate from amazing acts of kindness.  Right at their first encounter she’d pushed him and T'Pol together, understanding before they did themselves that they were meant for each other.  Now she’d taken him aside while his wife was taken up with her daily meditation, and proposed something that was utterly and totally outside his universe.  It was some kind of ceremony, one they performed every year on this world, during the course of which, couples who’d had problems with infertility supposedly got the problem solved ‘by the gift of the Goddess’ – or by magic, in other words.  And Shiránnor was suggesting – quite seriously – that he and T'Pol might want to take part.  His first, instinctive, almost overwhelming reaction was to laugh.  The second was to run.

A part of his mind registered surprise that T'Pol hadn’t picked up immediately on his mental turmoil.  Normally in situations like this she’d have come out of her white space at once and charged to his side, ready in his defense just as he would have been in hers.  He still suspected that in her Vulcan way she didn’t really approve of Shiránnor – the Skair’s effervescent and unpredictable enjoyment of life was perilously illogical.  If the First Priestess realized this, it certainly didn’t trouble her; he didn’t think he’d ever met anyone so free from self-doubt, but her boundless confidence was simply another part of her charm.  Nor did it abate in the least her evident wish to promote their wedded bliss – as evidenced by this latest astonishing offer.

“I wished to speak of this to you first,” Shiránnor said tranquilly, resuming her slow pacing around the border of the pond.  T'Pol was back in the infirmary; Shran was in the shuttle, tinkering, apparently unaware that he had an audience of fascinated cubs of various ages peering through the door at him, as well as several adults who were sedulously pretending they were only there to keep the youngsters in line.  “It was not for any wish of secrecy; all that I have said to you alone I will say again to both of you.  Your wife does not wholly trust me, and she has reasons that seem to her good and sufficient.  Moreover, she carries even more wounds than you do – from the loss of her people as well as the loss of her cub.”

Elizabeth.  His eyes pricked at the memory even now.  A clawed hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder, and he nodded, for the moment not trusting himself to speak.

“My aim was not – as she would reasonably suspect – to recruit you to my schemes.  I have placed the situation before you and will do no more.  My care is that you should be in the best position to support her when I speak to you both openly.  She is one of the strongest people I have ever known, but she needs you very greatly.  Therefore, and for that reason only, I have spoken to you in secrecy.  So that you can be free to concentrate on how this will affect her.”

“She’s not gonna like it.”  He found his voice.  It was creditably steady.

“No.”  Her gaze was bleak.  “It will run counter to everything in which she has ever believed.”

“It doesn’t exactly fit into my world view either.”

“No.  But I think there remains in your people a facility to step beyond facts that hers rejected long ago.  You do not scorn dreams of the impossible.  You tell stories, you play, you take risks. When the need is there, you defy even logic itself.  Reason is not the be-all and end-all of your thought.  Into that enchanted space – the place of your dream – the impossible may step.”

The place of your dream.  The place where little Elizabeth hadn’t had to die; where she lived and thrived, and learned to call him ‘Daddy’.  Where he carried her piggy-back and taught her how to fish, where her laughter was the sound that he heard sometimes in the moments between waking and sleeping.  Where she had him wrapped around her little finger and T'Pol was the one who had to keep the balance, because there was no way in hell he’d ever have been able to do anything but spoil his little girl rotten.

“I guess that’s true.”  He spoke around the lump in his throat.  “So you want me to persuade her?”

“No.  Not in any way.  I am asking you to support her while she comes to her own decision.  The facts are there.  The offer is there.  It seems to me that you have nothing to lose by accepting, but if your world and mine are far apart, hers and mine are infinitely further.  What she might perceive as losing would be the integrity of her thought – and that, to one of her people, would be a heavy loss indeed.”

“And your people wouldn’t mind?”

A rather wry smile touched her mouth.  “I will not say they like it.  But they will accept it.  They too have been confronted by the obvious.”  The blindingly obvious, she could have said.  “I will leave you now.  I have duties to attend to, and the Healers wish to speak with me regarding your captain.”

“How is he?”  The concern for Jon had, of course, been weighing on his mind and he felt slightly guilty for not asking before, but what with one thing and another he’d been a bit preoccupied.

“Still suffering.  I am not afraid for him physically, as I am for Hoshi.  Grenyal and the others can take care of that.  But he is terribly wounded at his heart, and it will take time to restore him; it is fortunate indeed that I touched minds with him as I did, so that I can understand where the damage was done.  I told you that his cure will not be easy.  But he is a strong man and a brave one, and we have begun the rebuilding.”

“Please.  Tell ‘em – tell anyone who’s workin’ with ya – tell ‘em how grateful I am.”

“They do not do it to earn your gratitude,” she said gently.  “They do it because they are Healers, in the same way that I govern Skairesse because it is my duty and my joy to do so – and heal the broken, too, where that is possible.  But I will certainly tell them of your thanks.”

She left him then, padding away with that loose, easy grace and disappearing among the buildings.  He sat on beside the pond, staring at nothing, while the evening breeze stirred the weeping branches of the tree beside him and the stars began pricking out in their thousands in the darkening sky.