, by Diane Duane. This is the amazing moment of McCoy’s that I mentioned in another thread, but I think it belongs in this thread. It’s been so many years since I read it that I’ve forgotten most of it. But, basically, the Vulcans get all fed up with the Federation, and humans in particular, and are seriously considering seceding. There’s lots of articles on their internet, papers, etc. Probably the loudest voice for secession is someone named Slev. There's a huge summit being held on Vulcan, where both sides of the issue are being discussed by many speakers. McCoy is one of them. In that other thread, I think I said this seemed a bit out of character for him. But now that I’ve thought about it more, particularly episodes like
A couple of quick basics.
-McCoy can speak fluent Vulcan because of some medical procedure that gives the ability for, iirc, at least a few days.
-Surak, for those who are less familiar with Trek-lore, is the Vulcan who saved them all from self-destruction. Vulcans were originally horribly violent, driven by their strong emotions. Surak was their savior. On a planet where almost everyone was at war, he began preaching about logic being the way to peace. Though it took a while, the result is what we know now. Diane Duane may have gone beyond the continuity that we know, for Surak and Vulcan in general, which may or may not be to the liking of the fans, but it made for an awesome story!
-There are also differences with the continuity of the Trek-verse that have been revealed
came out. Oh well.
“My name is Leonard Edward McCoy,” he said, and the focusing field caught his voice and threw it out to the back of the room, all around: but there was still something about the tenor of the voice itself that hinted that the focusing field might be doing slightly less work than usual. “I hold the rank of Commander in the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets: my position is Chief Medical Officer of the Starship Enterprise. And as regards the question of the secession of Vulcan, my position is, hell no!”
There were chuckles from some of the humans present, a bemused stirring from some of the Vulcans. “I hope you will pardon me the momentary excursion into my mother idiom,” McCoy said: “perhaps I should more correctly say, with Surak, ekhwe’na meh kroykah tevesh.” This time there were murmurs from the Vulcans, and they were of approval. The translator did not render the words – Jim assumed they were in classical or “Old” Vulcan, which the translator was not equipped to handle.
When the crowd settled a bit, McCoy went on in very precise Vulcan, and this caused a minor stir as well, which died down eventually. “I want to keep this on a friendly basis,” he said, “despite the fact that some of you are feeling decidedly unfriendly toward Terrans. Nor am I here to lecture you. Others here have been doing that a lot better than I could.” There was a dry sound to his voice for a moment. “I am here to ask you, as a planet, not to pull out of what has been a very old and successful affiliation for everyone involved.”
He paused for a moment, looking around. “It’s kind of sobering to be looked at by an entire planet,” he said. “You people have hidden the cameras perfectly: I appreciate the effect. Anyway. Some people here have spoken about the mode of their comments – scientific or ethical or whatever. Well, for my own part I’m not sure there’s a difference, or should be. Science is barren without ethics, and ethics has very little to use itself on without science. But I’ll speak of what I know, if I may. The medical mode, I suppose we might as well call it. I understand that Surak valued the healer’s art highly, so I suspect there’s some precedent.”
Bones walked around the stage for a moment, his hands clasped behind him. Jim had to smile: he had seen this particular pacing mannerism many times, while McCoy tried to figure out the best way to deliver some piece of good or bad news. “The first thing I want to say to you,” he said, “is that it is illogical to re-wound what is already healing. Or as my mother used to say, ‘If you don’t stop picking at it, it’ll never get better.’” A soft sound of amusement ran around the hall.
“Most of the agreements going these days between Terrans, or the Federation, and Vulcan, are in the nature of band-aids. One of our species hurt the other, somewhere: the other said, ‘Sorry,’ and put a bandage on it. It’s the usual thing you see when you see two children playing together. At first they hurt one another a lot-”
“Our species is hardly a child compared with yours,” said someone in the audience, a sharp angry voice.
“Well,” McCoy said, turning that way and searching the audience with his eyes, “that depends on how you reckon it. Certainly your species was making bombs and guns and missiles and such while ours was still mostly playing with sharpened sticks and stone knives, or in a few favored areas, bronze. But I’m not sure that any particular virtue accures to that distinction. And even if we have been kicking one another’s shins for less time than you, it’s still true that era for era, Terra’s people have kicked a lot fewer shins per capita than Vulcan has. You have several times almost reduced your population to below the viability level” it took a miracle to save you. We may be a bloody, barbaric lot of savages, but we never went that far. Even when we first came up with atomics.” He chuckled softly at the slight silence that fell. “Yes,” he said, “you saw that article in the data nets last night, too, some of you. Where is Selv?” he said, peering amiably around the audience. “You in here?”
“Here,” said the sharp voice.
“Aha,” McCoy said, looking out in that direction and shading his eyes. “Long life and prosperity to you – though I doubt you’ll attract much prosperity with that kind of world-view. Still, maybe wishes count. But it might help if you went to Earth some day and checked out what you talked about so blithely-”
“The data about Earth speaks for itself-” Selv’s thin, angry voice came back.
“No data speaks for itself,” McCoy said, forceful. “Data just lies there. People speak. The idiom ‘speaks for itself’ almost always translates as ‘If I don’t say something about this, no one will notice it.’ Sloppy thinking, Selv! You are dealing with second- and third-hand data. You have never been to Earth, you don’t understand our language – and this is made especially clear by some of the material you claim to be ‘translating’ from Earth publications: an Andorian spirit-dancer with a Ouija board and a Scrabble set could do a better job. Though I must admit I really liked the article on the evolution of the blood sacrifice in Terran culture. That is not what major-league football is for…”
McCoy let the laugh die down, and then said, “Anyway, where was I? Agreements as bandages. Every species in this galaxy that bumps into another one, bruises it a little. Some of them back off in terror and never come out to play again. Some of them run home to their mommies and cry, and never come out again without someone else to protect them. That’s their problem. I for one would like them to come out and play-”
“And be exploited? The Federation’s record of violations of the Prime Directive has been well documented-“
“Selv, I love you. How many violations of the Prime Directive have there been?”
A brief, frantic silence. “Well documented,” McCoy said, good-humored, “but not well enough for you to have seen it. Too busy reading about football? Anyway, don’t bother looking it up,” McCoy said, “I’ll tell you myself. In the last one hundred and eighty years, there have been twenty-nine violations. It sounds like a lot…except when you consider that those took place during the exploration of twenty-three thousand planets by the various branches of Starfleet. And don’t start with me about the Enterprise,” he added, “and her purported record. There have been five violations…out of six hundred thirty-three planets visited and physically surveyed over the last five years.”
“And all those violations have taken place under a Terran’s captaincy-”
“Oh, my,” McCoy said, and it came out almost in a purr, “can it be that Vulcan is leaving the Federation because someone here doesn’t like James T. Kirk? What an amazing idea! Though it would go nicely with some rumors I’ve been hearing.” Bones strolled calmly around the stage for a moment, while Jim and Spock looked at one another, slightly startled. “Well, no matter for that. Still, Selv, your contact with the facts about things seems to be sporadic at best. If I were the people who’ve been reading your material in the nets – and a busy little beaver you’ve been of late – I would start wondering about how much of what I was reading was for real. That is, if I were logical-” McCoy lifted his head to look up over the audience’s heads, and Spock glanced meaningfully at Jim. McCoy knew perfectly well where the cameras were.
“You may say what you like,” Selv said, “but even five violations are too many! And your use of your data is subjective-”
“Of course they’re too many!” McCoy said. “Do you think I would disagree on that? And as for my data, of course it’s subjective! So is yours! We are each of us locked up in our own skull, or maybe skulls, if you’re a Vulcan and lucky enough to be successfully bonded. If you start going on about objective reality, I swear I’ll come down and bite you in the leg!” There was some chuckling at that.
“Though I hope you’ve had your shots,” McCoy added. “If not, I can always give them to you afterward. I’ve become pretty fair at taking care of Vulcans over the past few years. At any rate, I was talking about bandages-”
“The doctor is tenacious,” Spock said softly.
“The doctor is a damn good shrink,” Jim whispered back, “and knows damn well when someone’s trying to give him the runaround.”
“-There’s no arguing the fact that Vulcans and Terrans, or the Terran-influenced functions of the Federation, have had a lot of bumps into one another over the course of time,” McCoy said. “There have been arguments about trade, and weapons policy, and exploration, and exploitation of natural resources, and the protocol of running a Vulcan space service, and everything else you can think of. And every one of those arguments is a bandage over one of the other species’ hurts. Now,” he said, “you would destroy all that hard-built cooperation at one blow: rip off all the bandages at once, yours and ours together-”
“We can bind up our own wounds,” Selv said angrily. “And when two species are no longer going to be cooperating, what does it really matter about the other’s?”
McCoy gazed up at him. “ ‘The spear in the other’s heart is the spear in your own,’ ” he said: “ ‘you are he.’ ”
A great silence fell.
“So much for the man who claims, in the net media, to speak for a majority of all right-thinking Vulcans,” McCoy said, glancing up over the audience’s heads again. “You see that there is at least one Vulcan he does not speak for. Surak.”
Jim and Spock looked each other in utter satisfaction.
McCoy strolled about calmly on the stage for a moment, as if waiting to see whether Selv would come up with anything further. “Can’t have Vulcan without Surak,” he said: “most irregular. At least, that seems to be most people’s attitude here. But a few of you seem quite ready to throw him out along with us.” He kept strolling, his hands clasped behind him again, and he gazed absently at the floor as he walked. Then suddenly he looked up.
“We are what he was preparing you for,” McCoy said. “Don’t you see that? Along with everything else in the universe, of course. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations! That means people who breathe methane, and people who hang upside down from the ceiling, and people who look like pan pizzas, and people who speak no language we will ever understand and want only to be left alone. And it means us! A particularly hard case. An aggressive, nasty, brutish little species…one that nonetheless managed to get out into space and begin its first couple of friendships with other species without consulting you first for advice. A species that maybe reminds you a little too much of yourselves, a while ago – confused and angry and afraid. A hard case. Probably the hardest case!...the challenge that you have been practicing on with other species for a while now! And you met us, and welcomed us, though you had understandable reservation. And since then there have been arguments, but generally things have been working out all right. We are proud to be in partnership with you.
“But now…now comes the inevitable reaction. There’s always a reaction to daring to do the difficult thing, day after day. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: this is the reaction. The temptation is arising to chicken out. It would be easier, some people are saying. Cleaner, nicer, tidier, without the messy Federation and the problems it raises just by being there. And you are backing off, you are panicking, you are saying, No, we can’t cope, Surak can’t have meant everything when he taught the philosophy of IDIC: he actually meant everything but the third planet out from Sol.
“COWARDS!!”
McCoy paced. The Hall of the Voice was utterly still.
“Pride,” he said finally, more quietly. “I keep hearing about Vulcan pride. An emotion, of course. One you were supposed to have mastered, those of you who practice cthia: or something you were supposed to have gotten rid of, those of you who went in for Kolinahr. Well, I have news for you. The stuff I’ve been seeing in the nets lately, that is pride. Not to be confused with admiration, which is something else, or pleasure in integrity, which is something else entirely. This is good old-fashioned pride, and it goes with fear, fear of the Other: and pride and fear together have gone with all your falls before, and the one you’re about to take now, if you’re not very careful.” McCoy’s voice softened. “I would very much like to see you not take it. I am rather fond of you people. You scare the hell out of me sometimes, but it would be a poor universe without you. But unless you move through your fear, which is the emotion Surak was the most concerned about – and rightly – and come out the other side, the fall is waiting for you: and you will bring it about yourselves, without any help from our species or any other. This,” he gestured around him, “all this concern about humans, and indirectly about the Federation – this is a symptom of something else, something deeper. Trust me. I’m good with symptoms.”
He took one more silent turn around the stage. “If you throw us out – for what you’re really doing here is throwing the Federation out of Vulcan, not the other way around – beware that you don’t thereby take the first step in throwing out Surak as well. We are, after all, just a different kind of alien from the sort you are from one another: the first fear he taught you to move through was the fear of one another. Unlearn that lesson, and, well, the result is predictable. Ignore the past, and repeat your old mistakes in the future.”
McCoy gazed up over the audience’s heads one last time. “Surak would be very disappointed in you if you blew up the planet,” he said. He bowed his head, then, regretfully.
“And so would we.”
McCoy straightened after a moment and lifted the parted hand. ”Mene sakkhet ur-seveh,” he said, and walked off the stage. There was a long pause, and than applause. It was thunderous.
