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He is sinking deeper and deeper into the depths. His mouth is wet with salt water. His eyes, wide open, sting.
He’s sinking still.
Epipelagic zone, mesopelagic zone... The light is dwindling. Bathypelagic, and he will be dead.
He tries to spread out his arms, fingers; to splay his hands to make paddles. His arms won’t respond.
All around him the water is ripples of blue, the light slanting and dancing and distorting in his vision. He can see fish.
He thinks of the keathara which swim in Vulcan’s shallow seas. Four lung-like lobes ranged along the insides of the long rib cage, taking in water, extracting oxygen, atoms of oxygen linking on to cupriglobin and sweeping around the body to feed muscles, and that tiny brain.
He thinks of earth cetaceans; sperm whales, which can hold their breath for ninety minutes as they dive deep into the midnight darkness of the earth’s oceans, seeking squid. He thinks of blue whales, ploughing after krill like great harvesting machines churning through a wheat field, drawing in the seed, spitting out chaff.
He can’t make his arms move. His clothing is heavy on his body. His lungs are reaching their limit.
He’s going down, down, down. He thinks of hydrothermal vents, and a plethora of creatures existing through chemosynthesis, and the bleak ocean floor. The wriggling bodies of worms. The pale sides of fish that have never seen light.
How long can he hold his breath? He hasn’t tested himself. He’s about to find out.
He must halt this descent. There’s no place for him down there. Vulcans come from heat and dryness and bright, bright sunlight. Down here there is only death.
Curious how time slows down under duress. Curious how his entire body can be functioning, but apparently impossible to move.
If pain is a thing of the mind, then so is this paralysis. His arms work. His legs work. Neurons are firing in his brain. Electrical impulses are working. He is alive.
It doesn’t matter if he’s tired. He has energy stored in his body. He simply must force the message to his limbs, to make them move.
He closes his eyes on the swimming depths, and focusses. He must move. There is no choice. He moves, or he dies. A human would have succumbed to the depths by now, but he doesn’t have that much longer for his Vulcan physique.
His ears are starting to sing. He can feel the pressure of the weight of water around him. He needs to move his arms.
At last, they move. At last, they overcome the paralysis, and flail out from his sides. He must make this movement smooth and effective. He needs to swim.
His arms push up above his head. It would be easier without the weight of clothing dragging on him, but he has little choice. He can’t take the time to struggle to nakedness. He pushes his arms up, makes scoops of his hands, pulls at the water like a mole tunnelling through earth. He is digging a tunnel through the water towards light, and air.
He can hardly see. There are shapes cascading before his eyes. He doesn’t need to see. He just needs to be aware of his innate sense of up, and follow it. He pulls, and pulls again. He is tired. His arms ache. His lungs are aching too, burning with the need to breathe in. He pulls, and pulls again.
At last, his legs kick. Like a frog, he kicks. Hands like a mole, legs like a frog. Earth creatures, both. What would his father think? Hands like a kitar, perhaps, that little reptilian creature of the Vulcan desert, with paws like scoops, that buries itself deep, deep in the sand in the heat of day. Legs like – No. He can’t think of a Vulcan creature that kicks like this in water. Vulcan is largely free of amphibians.
When did he take his boots off? He must have taken them off, because his feet are bare. He doesn’t remember that. He just remembers the crashing, and the shock of water, and sinking away.
Through the patterns and blotches before his eyes he becomes aware that it’s growing lighter. The weight of water is less. His lungs are straining. His animal body urges him to suck in breath, but if he sucks in now, he will drown. He disciplines himself. He holds the little remaining air in his lungs.
He turns his face upwards, trying to see through the cascading flashes in his eyes. This is his body’s reaction to running out of air. The body’s reaction is to make explosions of neon in his eyes, to make his ears sing, to make his diaphragm scream to be allowed to flex downwards.
But he can see the light. He blinks, but he can’t blink the neon flashes away. He pulls, and pulls, and –
Air. There’s air around him. His diaphragm jerks like a snapped rubber band.
Then water again, and he’s choking, his mouth full of salt. His lungs are still trying to pull air in, but there’s only water. For a moment he’s wide-eyed and wild, arms thrashing. Then he gains control and pulls again for the air.
Up here the quiet of the depths is all gone. The water whips and slashes at his face. The wind howls. The sky isn’t blue, but a thick, rippling mass of white and grey. Water surges, crests, slams down again in a wave. Drops spatter his face, stinging like gravel. The salt is sharp in his mouth. He spits out water, trying to control the need to cough, trying to gather his breath enough to make the cough count.
He treads water, looks about him, tries to see the rock.
Another wave, and he’s gone again, pressed down under the water, bubbles rippling in swift swarms against his skin. He fights back to the surface again, coughs again, tries again to find the rock.
He had taken care to ditch the failing shuttle close to the rock. It should be here. It should be rising out of the water. He should be able to find it, guided by the breaking waves.
The wind is howling like a sandstorm on Vulcan. Howling like a thousand banshees, his mother would say, and his father would remind her that banshees could not howl, since they do not exist. Only corporeal lungs can fill with air.
He isn’t getting the chance to breathe. Every time he comes up above the surface, the waves pull him down again. He breaks into the air again, gasping, and tries to stay afloat. He can see the rock now, close by, the waves smashing into thousands of shining crystals against its hardness. He fights to use his arms again, to pull himself through the water. His lungs are burning. There are those blotches in his eyes again. He is close to the end.
((O))
The shock is terrible, another wave slapping over him, a great, drenching, freezing wave breaking over a body that’s warm and dry. He is another person.
Oh god, oh god, oh god… I can’t do this. I don’t know what’s happening.
The hot sensation of being about to cry wells up inside him, crashing inside him. He’s adrift. He wants to cry out but he can’t cry out because he’s not breathing, he’s not –
He twists onto his side so quickly that a muscle wrenches. Vomit spews from his mouth, salt water, stomach acid, and half digested food. His chest hurts, lungs burn. He’s lying on something solid, no longer in water. His mouth is bitter with the salt and acid. He wheezes in air, then chokes and coughs out water again.
The person is sitting just a few feet away, arms curled around their knees, knees pulled up to their chest, bronze hair falling in unbrushed tails around their face. They are sobbing and rocking, and he lies on his side and stares, trying to parse what has happened.
He wasn’t breathing. He knows that. He was not breathing, and now he is. His ribs hurt so much; if he were a human he would cry. He is almost crying, almost crying. His throat aches. His mouth is sour and everything tastes of acid and brine.
His clothes are wet on him, like cold, wet sacking lying heavy over the contours of his body. His entire body feels heavier than he can bear.
He analyses the memories that must be there. Lips on his lips. The pummelling thrust of clenched hands on his chest. Lips on his lips, and a hand spread on his face, fingertips touching those vital points.
The human must have unwittingly put their fingers on the meld points. Desperate as he was, his mind reached out. An uninvited meld is a traumatic thing for a human to process. An uninvited meld from a mind that thinks it’s dying must be a hundred times worse.
The lips had been hot on his lips. His body temperature must be low. He moves a hand and finds he’s shaking. He presses that hand to his chest, feeling over his ribs, remembering the savage pressure of those locked hands. The human had been trying to start his heart, unaware that his heart was in another location, unaware that there had been no heartbeat because he’s not human.
He tries to move himself, presses a hand on a cold floor, trying to get himself into a position where he can sit. The human looks up, their eyes blurred with tears, a hand reaching out.
‘No, no, stay there. God. God. Stay there. You almost drowned.’
The voice is light but low, clear but shaking.
He tries to breathe steadily, and coughs so hard that his lungs and throat burn. His ribs sear. It feels as though the steady, solid floor beneath him were rocking and spinning. The floor can’t be rocking and spinning, so it must be him.
He remembers the waves crashing and crashing, smashing over him every time he managed to get to the surface. He remembers finally seeing the rock. He looks at his hands, curled into loose fists, and sees the bruises and blood where he tried to grasp onto something solid, and was smashed against it by the brutal sea. The blood is green and diluted by salt water, and the grazes sting.
Another wave had come up and crashed, had sucked like a mythical creature, a serpent from the deep. It had sucked him back, dragging his fingers from the rock, and pulled him down again. He doesn’t remember anything after that, until that moment of waking, that moment of being momentarily himself, and another person, a person overwhelmed with the horror of suddenly being someone else.
He lies on the floor, adrenaline gradually fading into a dull cold. The cold is seeping up through the stone or concrete, lying over him in wet folds of clothing. He remembers sinking through the water, the currents like fingers through his clothes, touching his body. The freedom and the imprisonment of the water all around him. He is so cold that it hurts, and he tries to control the hurting, but it’s hard, because all his resources have been sapped away.
((O))
He doesn’t remember sinking away. He must have. Did he fall asleep or lose consciousness? He reaches back into his mind, trying to tell. It’s impossible to know. He knows that he was lying on the cold floor, feeling colder and colder. Now he’s not. Now he is dry, naked, and, if not warm, at least not hypothermic. There’s a cover over him, something soft and moulded to his form. He can hear the wind howling and the waves thundering, and every now and then the building shakes.
He licks his lips, and tastes salt. He’s dry, but still flavoured with the water that was all around him. He blinks and opens his eyes and looks up at a ceiling, at long lines of wooden joists above him, and the underneath of floorboards. He turns his head sideways and sees he’s in a round room, in a narrow bed. The floor is made of dirty trodden boards and covered in the middle by a woven rag rug that is faded and tired.
His lungs burn. He feels so tired. He remembers lying on the cold floor, lips pressing against his, then retching suddenly, twisting a muscle in his side.
He lifts a hand and tastes the fingertips. Salt. His hand is shaking. He tries to clear his throat, and makes a little rasp. Just that little coughing motion makes his ribs spike with pain. He thinks of trying to stand up, but his body tells him to think again. He lies still instead, and tries to remember.
The lighthouse. He had come down near that little island, and the lighthouse. He had seen it on his descent, and known the rocks would kill him, but hitting the water he might survive. So he had steered for the tossing sea just off the shore, and that was where his bird had come to land.
There had been gulls wheeling. Perhaps, as a gull, there was nothing to do in such wind but fly. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to hunker down. The island was a green-slimed rock and the waves lashed right over the top. Better to be in the air than on the land.
He breathes in, and out again. His ribs must be cracked. He remembers that person, their lips pressed against his, hands pummelling on his chest. Strong arms. A strong mind pulling him back to life.
Had his heart stopped? He doesn’t know. The human thought so. His breathing certainly had. He doesn’t know how long he was in that dark, dead place, no breath entering his lungs. He can’t know. He just knows that he was in the water, and then he was not. He wasn’t breathing, and then he was.
He drifts in and out again, overcome by irresistible waves of exhaustion. Curious how exhausting almost dying can be. Then he wakes again and the human is there, sitting by his bed, sitting on a wooden chair and watching him from eyes that are part blue, part green, part sea.
‘I didn’t know if you’d ever wake,’ the human says, and they smile.
It’s a small smile, hesitant. He lies there and regards that expression. Enigmatic. Not open, but friendly. There is a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of the nose. The hair is tawny red-gold and hanging in unbrushed tails about the face. The body is small and spare, long-limbed, lost in simple clothes. A simple cotton shirt, buttoned not quite to the top. He can’t see any lower from where he lies, not without moving his head.
‘I do not understand how you pulled me out,’ he says.
How could such a slim body, such winnowed limbs, lift his wet, unconscious weight from the sea? How could they pull him over the rocks, get him inside, bend over him for all that time breathing air into his lungs, then strip him and get him into bed?
‘It was necessary,’ the human says.
‘Are you – the lighthouse keeper?’ he asks.
He wasn’t aware there were such things anymore. He had thought this place must be automated, or long abandoned. There had been hope, when he had come down, but only a little hope. Perhaps he might find shelter. Perhaps he might be able to send a signal of distress. Only hope, not expectation.
For a moment he remembers the gulls wheeling over him, so tight and so close they looked like a whirlwind of wings. For a moment he remembers a shoal of fish. He lies and looks up at the ceiling, and tries to remember. Wings, and seagulls screaming. A shoal of fish.
‘Are you the lighthouse keeper?’ he asks again.
‘I’m the keeper,’ the human replies. It’s not quite an affirmative. Not quite.
He nods minutely.
The human gets to their feet, walks out of the room. Their feet are bare, bony, pale things below legs clad in faded denim. They make him think of the paleness of fish deep underwater. The loose fabric of those jeans flaps as the human walks, trailing on the floor at the back with trodden, dirty, frayed hems. He lies there and watches for a while, until the human comes back carrying a ceramic mug. Whatever is in it is steaming.
‘Here,’ they say, holding out the mug. ‘Can you sit up? It’ll be easier.’
He pushes himself up against the pillow. His ribs ache and sting, and as he sits his blood pressure must dip, because he finds himself dizzy. He closes his eyes and holds himself for a moment, then puts extra effort into just being, into being able to function in a minor way. He sits, pressing his damp-haired head back against the wall, and holds out a hand to take the mug.
It contains neither tea nor coffee, but something that smells of salt and seaweed and – something else. Not fish, he thinks. Perhaps it is something fermented, miso, or a similar concoction. Anyway, he curls his hand around the thick, blond ceramic and feels the heat press through into his fingers, into his bones. He raises the cup to his lips, and sips. It is good. On his raw throat it stings, but it settles in his stomach, and it is good, slowly radiating warmth through into his blood.
‘Who are you?’ he asks.
‘I rescued you,’ the human says. Then they smile. ‘Drink that. Sleep for a while.’
((O))
He does drink, and then he does sleep for a while. He wakes and finds a light burning. It’s a little lamp that sits on a small table near the bed. Maybe it’s an oil lamp. It’s hard to tell. The flame is warm and puts out a golden light.
Every forty-five seconds the room is lit by another light, white as lightning, but slow and languorous as it passes across the room. It’s like the flare of remembered light on the retinas, and then it goes away. He hadn’t noticed the window before, but now he does. A four-paned thing, with glass that is lashed and streaked with salt water. Outside, the wind is screaming. A thousand banshees, he thinks. It’s an unearthly sound.
Whenever the light passes, the streams of water outside glitter and sparkle. Beyond that moving, diamond curtain there is nothing but darkness, blacker still against the closer flashes of light. It seems the darkness has no depth, and has more depth than deep space.
He remembers the craft coming down. He remembers it hitting the water. He remembers waves like mini-mountains, the sides glancing light like glass. Ever changing mountains, a new geography every second.
He managed to wrench open the door. He managed to throw himself from the craft before it was dragged by gravity into the depths. It must be down there now, on the seabed, useless. He can’t fly now. He is a broken bird.
He lies there, watching the sweep of that light. Forty-five seconds, and then it comes round again, regular as clockwork. He can see the sparkle of salt on the window. He sits up and drops his feet over the edge of the bed. He stands, bracing himself with a hand on the wall. He is light-headed. His lungs still burn. He walks like a toddler, naked, across the wooden boards, his bare feet making no sound.
He leans on the windowsill and looks out at the storm. Darkness and more darkness, edged with a little escaping light from the window. Then the beam. It flashes round, and he sees it like a path through the air, making the lines of raindrops into sparks that dance into life and then die. The beam penetrates a long way into the darkness, but there’s nothing for it to light but rain.
Down below the waves foam and hiss and crash. Sometimes it comes up so high it almost touches the glass, and he sees the foam like lace, ephemeral, a brilliant, soft white. In his mind he can hear the fizz of its dispersal, but in reality all there is is the crashing, and the banshee wind.
He is so tired. His legs are like stalks, ready to bend. He’s naked, and the air is not warm. He touches a fingertip to his tongue, and, of course, it still tastes of salt.
He totters back to the bed, and lies down, drawing the covers up to his neck. He breathes in, and the breath rattles a little at the top of his lungs. He is tired, and his eyes feel hot. He’s lost his sense of time.
The door opens and his rescuer looks in.
‘I heard footsteps,’ they say.
‘Yes,’ he says. His voice still sounds rough.
‘You should be resting,’ they say.
They come across the room and sit on the chair by the bed. He lies and regards them. Long, tangled hair. A delicate face. An angled jaw. Fascinating eyes. Those eyes…
He becomes very aware that he’s naked under the covers.
‘I rested for – ’ He tries to think of how long he had been asleep, and finds he can’t tell. ‘ – for long enough,’ he says. ‘Perhaps the light woke me.’
‘I tried curtains but it doesn’t make a difference,’ they say. ‘So I took them down.’
‘Logical,’ he murmurs.
‘After a while you stop noticing,’ they say. ‘It’s just part of life. You sleep right through.’
He wants to prop himself up on an elbow, but he feels too tired.
‘How long is a while?’ he asks. ‘How long has this been your home?’
They smile an enigmatic smile. ‘Oh, it feels like forever,’ they say with a little shrug. ‘Maybe it is forever. Sometimes it feels like the light and me – like we’re one and the same.’
He wants to tell them that the sentiment is illogical, but he thinks he understands.
‘You should sleep,’ the human says.
I’m not tired, he wants to protest, but that wouldn’t be true. Getting out of bed, looking into the darkness, and stumbling back across the room to get back into bed, has left him enormously tired. It seems ridiculous, but there’s no arguing with it. He is exhausted.
‘Sleep,’ the human says again.
He rests his head back onto the pillow and closes his eyes.
((O))
Every breaking wave curls in with a distant sound, like someone stirring gravel in a pot, far away. He lies with his eyes closed and smells the salt in the air, the light scent of fish and seaweed that lingers along coastlines. He can hear the calling of gulls, a mewling sound like cats, muted with distance. The light through the inside of his eyelids is like the light through the pale thinness of a shell.
He opens his eyes to see. It is dawn. The sunlight is golden and rose in the room. Everything seems to be alive with an extra layer of warmth, a colour that penetrates the surfaces and makes them shimmer. He thinks about the excitement of molecules under heat. He can’t see that, but it’s as if that’s what he’s seeing.
He gets out of bed and walks across the room on his bare feet. His chest aches and his lungs burn, and he still feels tired even after his long sleep. But he can walk. He goes to the window and stands there. The sun is a great molten ball just above the liquid horizon, streaking a pathway of gold across the waves. The storm has subsided but each wave that breaks, breaks into a foaming mass of droplets, each of which sparkle with the sunlight as if infused with gold. He stands naked at the window, watching the surging waves, watching the slow progress of the sun, watching the gulls wheel and swoop and dive.
He turns to look at the chair by the bed, where the human sat last night. There’s no one sitting there, but there are clothes. They must be meant for him. This person is a little smaller than him and can’t have many things exactly his size, but there’s a shirt on the chair, a simple, button-up thing of light cotton. There’s also a kind of sarong wrap. That is all.
He puts on the shirt, and when he looks down to fasten the buttons he sees the wide bruising across his chest. Broken ribs, he reminds himself, maybe from the resuscitation, or maybe from being pummelled against the rocks by waves. There are bruises on his legs, one on his hip, but no blood. The seawater must have washed it away, cleansed the wounds, and left them healing.
He does up enough of the shirt buttons, not all of them. He shakes out the sarong and regards it for a few moments before working out the most logical way of fixing it about his waist. It reaches to halfway down his calves, and knots easily enough above his hips. It feels more precarious than it is. It covers him, anyway.
His room has a wooden door that looks as if it’s been there for a very long time. It hangs on iron hinges of an old-fashioned type, where a ring on the door slips over a peg in the frame. The hinges are rusted but the door doesn’t make a noise as he opens it.
He’s greeted by a staircase right outside the door, a twisting one which goes up above him and down below. He turns his head a little on one side, listening, then decides to go up.
The staircase curves round and around to the right. Every now and then, in the thick wall to his left, there’s a window, rectangular and paned with thick glass. The metal frame of each window has reacted with the salt water, and there are orange rust stains on the peeling paint. Outside there is little to see. Just sea. Just the black rock upon which this lighthouse is built. Just gulls, wheeling in the sky.
Had he expected to see his craft out there, moored to the rock? His craft is long gone.
He continues upwards. Perhaps he should have gone down, but there seems little point, because all he’d find if he went down to the outside door would be slippery rock, and waves. A floor up there is a door, but it’s locked.
He has to stop for a while. He just stands there, catching his breath, which is frustratingly hard to do. He can hear the air wheezing in his lungs. He can feel the burning in his lungs.
He’s determined to explore. There’s another door another floor up, which he opens a crack. He sees the corner of a bed, dressed in covers of greens and blues, the light shafting over the floor and up over the soft bedclothes. He shuts the door quickly without looking further. This isn’t the place for him to intrude.
Another winding storey, and another door, made of rough, old wood like all the others. He’s breathing like an old man, but this is the final door, topping off the staircase. He turns the handle. What is it made of? Not metal. Not plastic. He racks his mind for the word. A short-lived material, he thinks. Telephones were made of it. Bakelite, he recalls. This black stuff, half plastic and half ceramic, is called bakelite. It is smooth and warm under his hand.
Beyond the door is a room flooded with light. The sudden brightness makes him blink. There are windows all the way around the walls, almost no wall at all, as if the top of the lighthouse were held up by nothing more than light and air and metal framework. He enters the room and stands there, breathing the air. There’s a tang of salt. An open window, letting in the sea air. At one side, a metal ladder, which must lead up to the light.
He steps across the room to a bare wood table and touches a finger to the surface. Sun warm. There’s sunlight coming in through all the windows, warming every surface, making a warmth he hasn’t felt since his craft crashed into the sea. He craves that warmth on his aching lungs.
It’s a kitchen of sorts. A living room of sorts. An antiquated cooker against the curving wall, and wooden counter tops built in around it. All the cupboards are floor level, because of the windows above. There are woven rag rugs on the floor. There is a sink with a draining board. On one upright piece of window frame, between two panes, a piece of wood has been fixed, pierced with screw hooks, with a mug hanging on each one.
Homely, he thinks. Timeless. There’s no sense of the current century in this place. No sense of all the incremental advances of technology that would make everything here obsolete. It is as if nothing has changed since – He eyes the surroundings. Since the 1950s, he thinks. He can even smell the gas that must power the stove. This is a time warp, and he is trapped in it.
He goes to close the window. The ocean is out there, spreading in every direction, glinting under the growing light of the sun. There are some white caps, but not many. No land to be seen. He hadn’t expected that. He stands there, the window still open, just watching the creeping sunrise. The light touches rags of clouds in flurries of pink and gold. The long trail spreads over the water, broken into gold-diamond shards. There is molten glare of the sun itself, the heat which presses against his skin. This small world is so large. This small sun is so large.
He closes the window and sits down at the table, on one of the wooden chairs. He lets the growing heat press into his back, into his shoulder blades, his neck. He lets it penetrate to his bones. He is trembling, just a little, from the climb to this room. He is weak. He is in danger of pneumonia. He knows this. His lungs weren’t made for damp air.
He sits there a while, like a cat, seduced into stillness by the warmth. His solitude grows around him, expands like a bubble, hovers in the air. He lowers his head onto his folded arms and lets the heat press him. He lets the heat soothe him. The light is gold through his eyelids.
Then he thinks of his host. Where can they be? He is on a tiny island, a sliver of rock in an endless ocean. Then, where is his host? There is nowhere for them to be.
He opens his eyes, lifts his head. The door to the room is opening, and he blinks, confused. Had he fallen asleep? He hadn’t heard anyone ascending the stairs, but the door is opening, and his host comes in. They are wet, their clothes wet in patches, sticking to their skin. Their hair is wet and dripping. They are carrying a net, some kind of net bunched into a bag, and in it writhe the silver-flashing bodies of suffocating fish.
He feels a flicker, quick as the silver glint on fish scales. The agony of the fish, drowning in thin air. Their eyes are saucers through the mesh of the net.
‘You won’t eat them,’ his host says, their tone matter of fact, following his gaze.
‘No,’ he says, although he knows this is a difficult choice out here, where there must be so little to subsist on beyond fish.
His host lets the net swing in their hand, and he sees not all the contents is fish.
‘A lot of seaweed,’ they say. ‘Once you know what’s down there, there’s almost as much variety as a vegetable garden.’ They smile, a small, endearing smile. ‘You won’t starve.’
‘What is your name?’ he asks.
‘What is yours?’
‘I am Spock,’ he says openly. He has no reason for concealment.
‘Eirian,’ they say. ‘Yes. That’s my name.’ They smile, an almost apologetic look this time. ‘I don’t use it very often. I don’t really think of it. Are you hungry?’ they ask, and he nods.
He is hungry. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of such things. He had been concentrating on drowning, recovering, exploring his surroundings. But the next thing, he thinks, should be food. He tries to remember when he last ate. Something before he boarded the shuttle, he thinks. Since then, only liquids. He casts his mind back, tries to think of where he was, what he ate. In the mess hall, he supposes. A standard replicator meal. But he can’t remember clearly. It feels like trying to remember a dream.
‘Where am I?’ he asks.
His host smiles. Eirian smiles.
‘Here,’ they say.
‘A philosophical answer to a concrete question. I know I am here. I wish to know what this place is. Its position on the map. The name of this lighthouse.’
‘I suppose it had a name,’ Eirian says. ‘Like I do. But it’s not like I use it. I don’t need to.’
They look around, as if looking for the name in the tired paint on the walls, or in the glass of the windows.
‘The Beacon,’ they say eventually. ‘Call it the Beacon.’
That doesn’t help him at all, because the name is generic. There’s nothing to pinpoint it to a location, a culture, a people. This whole place feels like something of a dream.
Eirian moves around the kitchen, working with the fish and greens they brought back from the sea. They slip a knife up the bellies of fish, pulling out the guts, scraping away the scales, cutting off the head and tail and fins. They throw the offal out into the salt air, and gulls scream and wheel, coming in to snatch pieces as they fall. It is efficient. Nothing, in the end, is wasted.
The air grows fragrant with the scents of the fish and the cooking seaweed. Most of the fish are placed into the aged refrigerator, but one stays lying on the cutting block, glistening and fresh. After a time his host brings platters to the table. A soup thick with seaweed pieces. A board of cut brown bread. A plate with thin, raw slices of fish. These Eirian eats, with a portion of the soup, and bread. Spock sits dipping the nutty brown slices into the liquor, alternating bites of bread and spoonfuls of soup. It is good, and it fills a hole inside him that he had only just become aware of.
‘What do you do here?’ Spock asks eventually.
They look at him, nonplussed.
‘Why are you here?’ he tries to clarify. ‘What is your job? Why is this your home?’
‘I’m the keeper,’ Eirian shrugs.
‘Then – how long have you been here?’ he asks, trying a different tack.
‘Oh, just about since this place was built.’
He looks about, at the style of the building, the window frames, the decor, the light above.
‘This building shows clear signs of having been built in the mid nineteenth century,’ he says, ‘with modifications perhaps through to the nineteen fifties?’
‘Yes,’ they say. ‘Yes, that’s about right. That’s when they lost interest in warning ships of rocks.’
He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to parse the meaning of this. For a moment he sees himself sinking down through the heavy, merciless depths of the sea. For a moment he feels as though, if he attempted to breathe in, he would inhale salt water.
He is lost in a dream. An illogical thought. But maybe he is lost in a dream. He had been underwater for a long time. His breathing had stopped. Perhaps this is all something in his mind.
He puts aside his confused thoughts for a little time, and just eats.
((O))
He spends some time down in the bedroom, in his room as he has come to think of it, resting after eating, attempting to meditate, attempting to parse his experience in this place. Then he walks back up the curving stairs, feeling the ache in his thighs, feeling the throb in his hands when he touches the wall to steady himself. He must have bruised his hands quite badly, in trying to hold onto the rocks against the force of the waves.
Eirian is standing there at the window, looking out over the sea. It must be a view seen often, a view that is always the same, a view that is ever changing. The sea is always the sea, but the sea is a capricious substance. It strikes him that the tangled waves of Eirian’s hair are something like the sea, like the waves of the sea, cast in a sunset gold.
He stands there, a little behind his host, just watching. At sunset the world becomes beautiful. The height of this living, kitchen room above the sea becomes emphasised by the slant of the light on the water. The sun has started to sink into the sea, a ball of liquid fire, sending ripples of pink and orange and gold over water which spreads three hundred and sixty degrees in blacks and blues, browns and greens, with white flashes wherever a wave breaks. For a little time there’s just the sinking sun, and the light on the waves. Then the light above comes on, and flashes its brilliance out over the sea. He can’t see that the light is needed any more, with modern navigation equipment, but he’s learning not to question this place. It is a lighthouse, and at sunset the light turns on. It could not be any other way.
After a while, practicality wins out over wonder.
‘Do you have any means of communication here?’ he asks.
Eirian jumps, and he realises that they had no idea he was there. A Vulcan would have been aware of his approach. If they had not heard his footsteps, they would have been aware of the presence of his mind. But Eirian is a human. At least, he thinks that Eirian is a human. Human minds are dull in comparison to Vulcan minds. Their senses are dull. They are just sharp enough for the world they live in, and no more.
‘I hadn’t realised – ’ they say, a flush on their cheeks.
‘I apologise. I should have spoken. The sunset – ’
He feels as awkward as they look. Why does he feel this way? He feels as though he has walked into a room and found someone undressed and vulnerable.
‘You must have been alone for a long time,’ he says gently.
He has no real evidence for this supposition. Perhaps Eirian has visitors every other week. But he gets the feeling that they have been alone for a long time.
Eirian shrugs.
‘I have the birds, the fish. Sometimes there are whales, and seals come up to lie on the rocks.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Not alone, then.’
Most humans, he realises, would still call that alone. Most humans have no more connection with animals than the visual and the emotional. They’re not aware of the subtle undercurrent of their ever-moving minds. Not aware of the amorphous impulses and desires that flit in those creatures’ thoughts.
The smile on Eirian’s face touches him. It’s like a little piercing inside his chest, somewhere near his heart.
‘Do you have any means of communication here?’ he asks, apologetic for bringing the subject back to practicalities. He has to bring it back to practicalities.
‘I don’t need any,’ they say.
‘Do you have any means of transport? A boat?’
He hasn’t seen a boat, but then this rocky little island is convoluted, and he hasn’t seen much at all from the windows. Not much but sea and sky.
‘No, no boat. No means of transport. I don’t – ’
‘Need any,’ he finishes, nodding. ‘Of course.’
He is silent for a moment, then says, almost to himself, ‘Am I expected to live here, now?’
His voice is free of emotion, as is his mind. He wouldn’t choose this place to live, but he can’t swim away from here. He can’t shout louder than the waves, shout across kilometres of ocean to the nearest civilisation, wherever that may be. All he can do is stay here, and wait to be found.
‘How do you occupy yourself?’ he asks. ‘When you are not engaged in the tasks of living?’
Eirian looks around the little room. The place is reasonably clean, but not obsessively so. It is reasonably well maintained. The food is good, but not in abundance. There are no signs that Eirian has to work excessively to maintain a standard of living, nor that they are slipping behind in their attempts to live.
‘Would you like to see my bedroom?’ they ask.
Spock raises an eyebrow a little. Invitations of that sort from humans can have multiple meanings, but he suspects, with Eirian, that this invitation is exactly the sum of the words, no more, no less.
He inclines his head, and they start to descend the stairs. He doesn’t mention that he saw a glimpse of that room before. He saw nothing more than the corner of a bed.
Eirian opens the door in front of him, and steps inside. The room is filled with the rich gold light of the setting sun, all running in through a window just like the one in his room further below. The bed is there, wide and dishevelled, with its covers of sea-green and blue. But it is the walls that catch his attention. At least, what is on the walls captures him. He can’t see the walls at all, because they are covered with bookcases, and the bookcases are filled to capacity with all manner of books.
‘You read,’ he says, rather unnecessarily.
‘It’s an entire world,’ Eirian tells him. ‘A million worlds. Why would I need to go anywhere else when I have so much here? I think there are more books in existence than I have life to live.’
He hasn’t heard his host like this before; so impassioned, words running away with one another. In every other interaction they have seemed curiously detached, as if after years of solitude the habit of connection were a hard one to take up again. But now he hears the connection, the passion. He feels it in his mind, a sharp upsurge in emotion that makes him pause in his breathing. In that single deep link when he had stopped breathing and Eirian was pushing oxygen back into his lungs with their own mouth, they had formed a connection that won’t easily be broken.
He casts his eyes over the spines of the books. They must represent hundreds of years of human history. Dickens, Hardy, and Flaubert are pushed up alongside one another. Mantel and Rushdie. Woolf. Roy and Walker and Angelou. Garcia Marquez. Camut and Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky. Ellison and Azimov. There are many spines he cannot make out the words on, many names he doesn’t recognise. He had thought himself well read. He thinks, perhaps, he could survive a few hundred years here with this much reading material.
‘If you want to borrow anything – ’ Eirian begins, almost shyly.
‘I shall indeed do that,’ he says.
((O))
They have settled into a comfortable domesticity. Eirian goes out to gather food and comes back with silver-scaled fish and shellfish squirming in their shells, and ribbons of seaweed. Spock comes too, and although he cannot bring himself to capture the fish, he does gather those ones in shells, and of course he retrieves the seaweed because it is one of the few things he can eat. In time he might have to bring himself to eat some of this flesh, but for now he will stick with the seaweed and whatever else Eirian may have that doesn’t come from the bodies of living things. He will eat an egg, on occasion, if it is clear he is not endangering the prospects of the birds that laid it.
They watch the sunset in the evening and the sunrise in the morning. The sunrise he sees more often from the window in his room. The sunset they almost always share.
It is on the tenth day that they first kiss. It was not quite expected, but a writer of romance novels would have it in no other way, because this happens at sunset, as they stand outside the foot of the Beacon, their bare feet on rocks made treacherous with water and slime. Spock slips a little as he readjusts his footing, and Eirian catches hold of him, and they swing around to face one another, and their faces are very close. Then he is kissing Eirian or Eirian is kissing him, and for a moment the sound of the waves fades away and the gulls are silent and the golden sunset is gone. Then it is all back again, and he is desperately present in the moment. There is the taste of salt on his lips and the crash of the waves is like the heartbeat in a womb, and the heat of the sun is penetrating every part of his skin, and he is aware, acutely, of every freckle on Eirian’s face.
‘I – am sorry,’ he says, when he can.
‘Why are you sorry?’ Eirian asks. ‘Didn’t we make a mutual choice?’
He can’t deny that. He can’t deny that Eirian does not look sorry, and he’s not sorry in his own heart. He said the words only by rote, because he has been taught, all his life, that spontaneity is a fault to be corrected, not an opportunity to be grasped with both hands.
‘I’m not used to – feeling like this,’ he says awkwardly.
He’s not. Anywhere else, it would be easy to subdue this feeling with a host of ingrained mental disciplines. Here, though – He is out of time, out of place. Here none of the rules apply.
‘How long have you been alone?’ he asks.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Eirian says. ‘We can only live in one moment. Everything else is just the past, and the future, and it’s impossible to touch.’
Perhaps this is true, but the past does matter to him. The future does matter. The past is where his life and his friends are. The future is where he hopes to find those things again.
There is sadness somewhere. It is in him, or in Eirian? He thinks it’s in himself, but Eirian catches it, and their eyes connect with his, and he feels as though he were drowning in the sea again.
‘They’ll come for you,’ they say. ‘I know they will.’
He touches Eirian’s cheek with his thumb.
‘And then you will be alone again.’
‘Paths intertwine, and they move away again,’ Eirian says. ‘This is the way of life.’
((O))
Paths intertwine, and they move away again. There is a great and obvious truth to that statement. At the moment, though, it feels to Spock as though he weren’t on a path at all. It feels as though he has stepped off the highway and is lingering in a strange and magical place.
He finds a book of photographs, an album, he thinks it is called, pushed between the books in Eirian’s room. He has been given permission to browse the books, but he isn’t sure entirely about permission to look at this. Still, he draws it out from the shelf and sits down on the soft bed, and opens the stiff-paged book on his knees. The earliest pictures in there are foxed and soft-shaded in sepia tones. There is a man in an antiquated suit, some kind of sash across his chest, a staff held in his hand. This is some kind of uniform, he thinks, although he doesn’t recognise the design. Earth has had so many uniforms in its bloody, troubled history. The hair is longer than current fashions dictate, and a little billowing around the face. The face is Eirian’s.
There are other photographs. A woman sitting on a lawn, people around her who are perhaps siblings, perhaps friends. A picnic is going on. An Irish wolfhound lies at her feet. He would date the picture to the 1910s. The United Kingdom, he thinks. The face is Eirian’s.
He studies each picture intently. It is more than a family resemblance. The face is Eirian’s. The gender, the social strata, the circumstances, change each time, but the face is Eirian’s.
He remembers Flint, who had been Da Vinci, Brahms, Gutenberg, and so many more. This is not unprecedented in the universe he knows, but it is very rare.
He thinks, then of Woolf’s Orlando, who continued on through time and gender, from age to age. That, of course, is fiction. Still, the image resonates.
Humans are not shapeshifters, but they do have a metamorphic ability. Their capacity to reinvent is sometimes endless.
There is a tread in the doorway, and he looks up. Eirian is there, watching him. He closes the album and returns it to its shelf. He doesn’t get the sense that he’s discovered a terrible secret. There’s no feeling of betrayal or shock. This was never hidden knowledge.
‘You must have seen so many changes,’ he mentions.
Eirian smiles. ‘Yes,’ they say. ‘Sometimes it’s good to be somewhere far away from those things.’
It must be exhausting, he realises, to outlive one’s friends and lovers, to never age, to be pummelled mercilessly by the ever-changing flow of fashion and invention.
‘That’s why you came here?’ he asks.
Eirian nods, a very small movement, a slight incline of the neck and a small quirk of the corner of the mouth.
‘The relentlessness of time makes an ache, after a while,’ they say. ‘I’ll go back, I’m sure, for a while, but this place is always a retreat for me, ever since I placed the first stone.’
‘Then how long have you been here?’ he asks, but he doesn’t expect an answer.
Eirian sits on the bed next to him, raises their hand, and Spock raises his own to match. Their fingers touch, pad to pad, thumb on thumb, each fingertip alive with a kind of electricity.
‘It’s never felt like this,’ Eirian says in wonder, looking at their hands as if expecting to see sparks. ‘This is – an alien thing.’
‘Yes,’ Spock says simply.
It is an alien thing, of course, here on earth, but to him it’s simply natural. It is what happens when fingers touch. It’s why his people so carefully avoid touching another’s hands, unless they wish for this electric connection to occur. The connection is like kissing. It is like sex.
He closes his eyes and lets the connection deepen. A sharing starts to occur. He can see, feel, taste fragments of experience, like sinking into an immersive scrapbook, a three dimensional hologrammatic flicker show of a life. Except, of course, it’s more than hologrammatic, because he’s there. He can taste, he can smell, he can feel the reality of these moments. Sipping tea on an Irish lawn. Riding with the warm life of a chestnut horse between his thighs, and the scent of it rising up around him. Standing knee deep in snow on a mountain top.
He knows that Eirian is experiencing the same thing. The dry air of the desert at noon, the sun an orange eye above them. The moment on the Enterprise viewscreen when the stars shimmer, and turn to tracing lines that whip past, and away. The sudden, suppressed fear of a creature coming upon them from behind, and adrenaline surging to allow them to fight for life.
Their fingers feel fused together, and he lifts his other hand, needing more of this feeling in the same way that a human would crave sex. It is enveloping, twisting around him, hugging him. It sends his heart racing, and he can feel the ache in his healing ribs. His eyes open, and he can see Eirian’s eyes, very close, like pools of seawater of infinite depth. When their lips touch he can taste salt, and he suddenly feels that very human craving, the electricity no longer in his fingertips and forearms, but deep in his abdomen, urging him to shed all veneer of civilisation, and become an animal for a while.
((O))
They lie together on the bed, looking up at the imperfect ceiling, the twisted flex of the light, the curves of the low energy light bulb hanging like a berry under a tarnished shade. The light is slanting in through the window in an evening way. His own window faces the dawn, but Eirian’s faces the sunset. No sunset is the same. The sea is always different. The clouds are always different. He feels as though he could never get tired of watching each sunset as it comes.
There’s a scent of sex in the air. He’s never asked Eirian how they wash their linen, but he supposes these things will need to be washed. They must manage it somehow, but there’s a limited amount of freshwater that’s gathered in tanks from the rain. The first wash can be in salt water, he supposes, and only the final rinse needs to be fresh.
‘You think of practicalities too much,’ Eirian says.
Spock lets a hint of a smile touch his lips. They’re still sharing, even now, after the lovemaking. Their minds touched in an incandescent peak, and he supposes they’ll continue to share, whether or not their hands are touching. He turns his wrist, and Eirian’s fingers slip into his, lazy and soft and warm. It’s not often that humans feel warm to him, but it seems to happen, after lovemaking, that their temperatures more evenly match.
‘I must think of practicalities,’ he says.
It’s like something cold growing in him, something that pushes away the loose emotions of such closeness and recloaks him in logic. Before his control returns in full, that feeling is always immensely sad. He closes his eyes, and the soft gold of the sunset disappears. Then he opens them again and sees Eirian’s face, gilded by the light, each freckle alive with the light.
‘Somehow I need to get home,’ he says. ‘It – won’t go well for you if I’m trapped here for – for too many years.’
Eirian turns their face again, a crease between their eyebrows.
‘I don’t know what you mean. What is it? Do you turn into a monster every seven years? Are you more mythical than I am?’
There’s the urge to laugh. How have they pinned down that seven year interval so perfectly? Is it the mental connection, or is it just that seven is a magical number for humans?
‘You are more correct than you know,’ he says gently. He sighs. ‘It’s – hard to speak of.’
He lets their fingers touch more firmly, just enough so that the electrical sparks build into something more firm. Pon farr is such a hard phrase to utter.
‘Oh,’ Eirian says after a moment. ‘Oh…’
There’s a long silence. He can feel the firmness of the bed under him. The room feels very crowded with all those spines of books in the shelves all about the walls. It’s like being watched by a thousand eyes, all judging him.
‘Don’t worry that I’m as fragile as all that,’ Eirian tells him. ‘I would be all right.’
‘I don’t know how well humans – ’
But he breaks off. After all, isn’t his mother human? Hasn’t she survived for all these years?
That isn’t something that he wants to consider. Most of all, he does not want to imagine his father in the depths of pon farr.
Perhaps it’s something else that troubles him. He knows a human would survive pon farr. He doesn’t think he would be so violent as to do irreparable harm. Perhaps it’s a maelstrom of other what ifs. What of the disgust when this ethereal being sees him as a ravening creature? What of the shame when he loses all logic and all self control? What of the pain he might cause them? What if, afterwards, they are trapped together here, they beauty and he the beast, in a simmering hatred because of what he has done?
It’s not just that, of course. Can he really stay here for the rest of his life? If he’s forced into an unbreakable bond, and then finds rescue, could Eirian be persuaded to leave? He doesn’t know. There are so many what ifs.
‘Life is a what if,’ Eirian tells him. ‘Every moment could splinter into a million moments. Every breath is a what if.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Every breath is a what if.’
((O))
They’re out on the rocks when it takes him. They’ve been in the shallow rock pools, pulling up handfuls of seaweed, prising molluscs from the rocks. This is an almost daily task, but it doesn’t grow boring. Only when the weather is too extreme do they have to keep the bottom door of the lighthouse bolted closed, and they eat dried seaweed, dried fish, or leftovers from the last good day of foraging.
He slips his hand into a pool after a thick, translucent ribbon of weed, and Eirian’s hand goes after the same strand. Their fingers touch under the cold water. His touch feels numb after a while of this dipping into pool after pool. He doesn’t stand up to the temperature so well. He thinks autumn may be drawing in, because the days are growing shorter, the weather more temperamental, and the water cooler.
Eirian laughs, and their fingers tangle, and then he pulls out the strand while Eirian cuts it at the thick, anchored root. The scent of the seaweed is fresh and appetising. He’s anticipating dinner tonight, with some of this made into a fragrant soup, with the thick, brown bread at the side of the bowl. He hasn’t asked Eirian where they get their flour. He has learnt to just accept that these things happen, just as Eirian was once a cavalry officer, once a Victorian in a corset and billowing skirt, once a farm labourer walking behind the oxen forcing the plough to cut a furrow in rich earth.
He is looking towards Eirian, moving his lips towards theirs, when the feeling radiates through him. A lightness. A tingling. A feeling of dissubstantiation. The pain is like something breaking inside him, and then he is whole again, standing in a warm, dry room, seeing the faces of humans looking back at him in some kind of naval uniform.
He wants to cry out No! but he manages to control. He touches his hands to the worn shirt he has become accustomed to wearing, and glances down at his black uniform trousers that recently he has been using again, as the temperatures dropped. He must look ragged and lost, with his uncut hair and unshaved face, but he can at least behave like a civilised being.
‘Welcome to the Siren,’ a woman says, the person in the room who seems to have the highest rank. ‘I’m Captain Olowe.’
‘I thank you for the rescue,’ he says. ‘Though I would appreciate the chance to say goodbye to my host.’
The woman blinks. ‘Your – host, Commander Spock? I don’t understand.’
Spock glances back at the small transporter pad, as if that would show him the place from where he was plucked.
‘In the lighthouse,’ he says carefully. ‘I would appreciate – ’
‘Evans, can you turn on the screen and show us the island?’ the woman asks, nodding to a viewscreen to the side of the room.
Evans nods smartly, and flicks on the screen, which shows nothing but sky. She touches buttons, and the view changes to an angled down shot of the island, the black, slippery rocks, the wheeling gulls. There is the lighthouse, but it is grey and tattered. The great circle of windows at the crown are completely gone. The door at the foot of the tower has been ripped from its hinges, and the doorway is a gaping hole.
Spock stands there, regarding it for a long moment. Then he nods.
‘Of course,’ he says. He takes a moment to steady himself. ‘Yes. The lighthouse is ruined, but it gave me shelter. You will appreciate that I’d like to have the exact coordinates of the island. I wasn’t entirely sure of my position when I crashed. I’d be interested in learning more of the history.’
‘Yes, of course,’ the captain smiles. ‘All of that will be contained in the report. We’ll repatriate you to Starfleet as soon as possible, and the report will go along with you.’
He nods briefly. No one in the room would be able to tell that there is a wrenching wound inside him. Eirian, he thinks, and the word feels like a song.