THE KEEPER OF THE KATRA

But quite soon, McCoy, Leonard H., son of David, was forced to face the possibility that the katra was keeping him.

His first encounter with a memory that was not his had occurred shortly after the fal-tor-pan ended. Descending the steps of the dais with Sarek, he had been concentrating on the necessity of reassuring Jim that he was still in one piece mentally, even though he was not yet convinced of that himself. He had no talent for being a patient, never had had. He wanted that status cancelled, done, over with. Shaken to the core of his being, still disoriented from the trance T'Lar had induced in him, he had walked toward Jim at Sarek's side and suddenly found himself walking there in a child's shoes. For just an instant, memory was superimposed over the present, and as though viewing a double image, he walked beside the Father down the same steps. They had come there together, and Sarek had told him of the ancient legend of fal-tor-pan as they stood before the healers' altar, gazing up at the Hand of Life and Peace. He was proud to have been there, proud that Sarek had trusted him, half human as he was, to make the distinction between fact and legend. One would not believe such stories, of course. It was not logical.... And then the fugue had ended as suddenly as it began. "I'm all right, Jim," he had said, and believed it. Until the next time.

That had happened while he was checking Spock out after he was in bed on their first night at TOQ. Bone-weary himself, he had gone to Spock's quarters only to find his patient fast asleep and Jim sitting on the foot of the bed in the semi-darkness. "What are you doing?" McCoy had whispered, and Jim had answered in kind, "Would you believe watching him breathe?" McCoy nodded, unable to speak, and after a moment, Jim had looked up and grinned. "Want to tuck him in, Doctor?" And then it happened. He was in bed, pretending to be asleep. Mother came in, leaving the door slightly ajar so that the light from the hall outside made a path across the floor. It was all right, he told himself. No Vulcan would permit this, but as long as she didn't know he was awake.... He could feel the coolness of the clean sheet against his chin, and the light pressure of her lips on his forehead.... "No," he gasped, and the memory flew away as Jim looked up quickly, concerned. "Ah--no, I don't want to tuck him in. Come on, Jim. Let's not disturb him." What bull, he thought. Couldn't have disturbed him with a lightning bolt to the pillow. It was McCoy, Leonard H., who was more disturbed than he wanted to admit.

But he buried it. For two days and a night he slept and worked and nagged the childlike Spock to eat his vegetables, and everybody thought good old Bones was doing just fine. If he snapped at Jim while they were decontaminating the Bounty, that was normal enough, since they were all still recovering from the trauma of Genesis. No more of Spock's memories came to plague him, and he convinced himself that the two he had experienced had been some kind of sequelae, nothing more. Yet when Jim snapped, "All? What problem are you expecting Spock to solve for you?", he had a moment of truth: his Help me to the unconscious Spock aboard the Klingon ship might have been more prophetic than he knew. For he also knew that he could not lie down on that slab again and stay sane. He was just too damn tired.

He slept through the day after the crew's food fight, and woke at sunset calm and rested but sweating profusely. After less than a day, the air conditioning in the bubble had apparently taken ill. Throwing the blanket aside, he lay staring at the ceiling, remembering his own thoughts the evening before. Help me. You stuck this damn thing in my head. But it was over now. He was nobody's patient, least of all Spock's. At the thought, he gave a short, bitter grunt of laughter, then glanced over apologetically to see if he had disturbed his roommate. But Scotty was gone, probably prowling around the goddamn ship when it wasn't even dark outside yet. Sighing, he rose and headed for the shower. Time to go to work. After all, he was a doctor, not a memory bank.

Spock's patient. That would be the day.

Both Kirk and Scotty were interested only in getting to work on the ship, and Spock too showed no inclination to fix the ailing air conditioner. He stood with his hands behind his back, waiting for McCoy to look up from the computer.

"You want your pie?" McCoy asked without looking up. An entire Klingon pharmacopoeia still lurked in the Bounty's memory banks along with the Federation files Starfleet had grudgingly provided, but the FAT cube had been damaged and he was having trouble retrieving the Klingon files. The pie would let him keep at it for a while without stopping to fix himself a meal.

"No, thank you, Doctor."

"Fine. Thanks." With a small mental sigh, he consciously recognized the fact that Spock was not going to go away unless attended to, and sat back in the chair, arms hanging at his sides. "With apologies to Mark Twain, the worst summer I ever spent was a winter on Vulcan. It is winter, isn't it?"

"Affirmative."

Still slumped, McCoy looked up. "What's going on?"

"I should like to request an overnight pass, Doctor," said Spock in his most Spock-like voice.

McCoy frowned, concerned. It wasn't like Spock to take off when there was work to be done. Then he remembered that Sarah worked days. "All right."

Spock's eyebrows rose to his hairline.

Turning a little in his chair, McCoy leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and pointed at Spock. "See how easy it is?" He felt great, almost high. The nightmare was over. Nothing to worry about. "Now, don't go until the sun gets a little lower, and you don't need to make a marathon out of it."

"Doctor McCoy, I see no reason to overdo this."

"You don't, don't you?" By God, Spock was even starting to sound like himself. Flying high, McCoy flopped back in the chair. "Know what? I don't either." Spock's right eyebrow rose, and his eyes smiled. "Just don't push it. Take it easy and don't try to beat your time up the garden steps. It's too hot--" He felt his throat close and his mouth go dry.

Spock was staring.

He doesn't do that anymore, McCoy thought, feeling dizzy. He only did that when he was a kid.

Spock was staring, staring.

"You told me," McCoy pleaded. "You must have told me." Spock's head moved, side to side. "You never told anybody." Spock was silent. "Oh, dear God," McCoy whispered, and tried to look away.

Moving as though he were trying not to scare somebody (Nobody here but us...), Spock picked up a chair, placed it at the corner of the table, and sat down, his gaze still holding McCoy's. (...chickens.) McCoy saw the hand coming (Chicken!), saw his own hand shoot up and knock Spock's away from the inside. He stopped it in mid-swing, and it remained in the air, shaking against Spock's wrist.

"Sauce for the goose, Leonard," Spock said softly, making no attempt to force McCoy's hand down. "I can help you if you will permit me to take responsibility."

After a long moment, McCoy made himself lower his hand.

He had expected to feel violated, brutalized, gutted, as he had felt that night on the mountain, with the livid lightning flashing and the thunder filling the universe. He felt nothing. When Spock took his hand away, he carried the horror and the anguish within it. And the memory of the little boy, running hell-bent up those steps trying to beat his own time, was no longer his.

"I said it," he whispered. "I remember remembering. But I can't remember it anymore. How'd you do that?"

"Voodoo, Doctor." Spock rose, placed the chair exactly where it had been, and headed for the door.

"Spock--"

Spock turned.

"Thanks," McCoy finished.

"The obligation is mine." The dark eyes were clear, quiet, unwavering. McCoy nodded. "If this should happen again, you must tell me--deign to tell me what you have in mind." One eyebrow quirked.

"You," said McCoy huskily, "have got yourself a deal."

But when Spock was gone, he covered his face with his hands.

"Well, are you satisfied?" In a warm blue darkness lit only by the Vulcan's permatorch and a few intrepid stars, McCoy followed Spock, who was inspecting the Bounty's outer hull as though it were the only object worth looking at on the face of the planet. "Finally got your revenge for all those arguments you lost?" In memory--his own memory, thank God--he saw a blue-shirted Spock prowling the outer hull of the Galileo with a blue-shirted McCoy badgering along behind. Just like the good old days. In a pig's eye. "You've got me chasing you like a kid with a runny nose wanting Mama to wipe it for him. Is revenge sweet, Spock? Dammit, forget the damn ship. I want to talk to you."

"'The damn ship,'" Spock informed him without pausing, "is in need of a thorough inspection, and revenge is not the issue." The tricorder buzzed in his other hand, and he moved on, apparently satisfied with his findings.

"Tell me about it," McCoy snorted. "What is the issue then?" Spock moved on without answering, and McCoy continued his tirade in a somewhat lower tone. No use enlightening the whole crew. But as long as they were all inside.... "I can't get rid of these memories by myself. And I can't go back up there--"

"There is no necessity--"

"Not as long as you're here, right? You'll take the responsibility, right?"

"If you will deign--"

"Go ahead, Spock. Rub it in." McCoy wiped his streaming forehead with the inside of his arm, and then wiped his face. "All right. I've got three more that I haven't told you about."

Spock turned, the bright, colorless torch lighting his face from below, and McCoy studied it for signs of satisfaction. Teddy bears, his very own memory informed him, have six-inch fangs. But he could detect no satisfaction in Spock's expression, what little there was of it. Damn control must be a reflex. Spock was hardly back in school long enough to have aced the whole course already.

"It is not necessary for you to tell me about them. It is necessary only that you tell me that they exist."

"Maybe I want to tell you about them," McCoy persisted, driven. "How about this? Your dad told you the legend of the fal-tor-pan when the two of you were up there in the voodoo chamber, and you thought it was a great story even if it wasn't logical. And your mother used to come and tuck you in at night when she thought you were asleep. And you sneaked in after your grandparents brought your mom some peppermint schnapps and sampled it, Spock. Now, that wasn't a very nice thing for a good little Vulcan boy--"

"You are exhausting yourself," Spock interrupted without raising his voice. "I suggest that you sit down--" He extinguished the torch and sat down himself, cross-legged, the torch and the tricorder in his lap. "And rest," he finished. And waited.

McCoy made two or three aimless, inarticulate gestures and then let his arms fall to his sides. He was getting dizzy again. Resigned for the moment, he approached the ship and collapsed against it, sliding down to a sitting position. "What is the issue, then?" he asked, and closed his eyes, feeling the sweat run down his body like a sticky bath.

"Dependency."

He closed his eyes tighter to keep the tears from joining the sweat. When he could speak again, he whispered, "Blast your Vulcan hide." After a time, he said, "Scotty was right there too, outside the radiation chamber. Why didn't you give it to him?"

"That never occurred to me."

The tears and the dizziness faded as McCoy contemplated the implications of that statement, voiced without expression but somehow not without emotion. If he had been asked to identify the emotion, he would have called it tenderness.

"What was it," Spock asked then, "that triggered the memory of the peppermint schnapps?"

"Chekov got some at Con Tower. They were out of vodka." When Spock declined comment, McCoy rolled his head back and forth against the hull. "I only had one. Getting bombed out of my mind won't help if I'm already out of it."

"You exaggerate."

"Don't I wish."

"Has it occurred to you that none of these memories involves anything that would embarrass either of us?"

McCoy's eyes flew open, and he turned his head against the hull to look at Spock. "Kid's stuff," he murmured. "They're all little boy stuff." Little human boy stuff. Could Spock have wanted--

"They are from far in the past, not held by me at the conscious level. Perhaps...." His voice died away.

McCoy hesitated, torn. A gift from the unconscious? But he wasn't able to accept that gift. And as long as Spock didn't know.... "You mean T'Lar couldn't reach them? Didn't know they were there?"

"Perhaps," said Spock, "she did not wish to know." The right eyebrow elevated fractionally.

"Some surgical technique," McCoy growled. "Come on, Spock. Don't make a production out of it. I'm deigning." Again Spock's hand carried away the memories, and again it was as though their keeper had read them somewhere rather than experienced them himself.

Yet this time a lingering sense of loss remained, reflecting the tone of Spock's voice when he said, That never occurred to me.

As McCoy had anticipated, the captain of the Bounty was his first heat-exhaustion patient. The only unanticipated aspect of it was that it took Jim two and a half months to overstep. Maybe it happened because he was feeling better, McCoy reflected as he checked out Kirk, who, at mid-shift, was sleeping like a baby in his own room in the bubble. It was obvious that Jim had missed Spock on the shakedown cruise, but he had lost his iron-grip demeanor before lift-off, and space was space. When Sulu returned from a post-shakedown shopping spree with two foils and two masks, the admiral had insisted on a match at sunset, and had been giving Sulu more than he bargained for until Jim suddenly stopped sweating. Even he knew what that meant, and McCoy had had little difficulty in persuading him to strip to his briefs and lie down. Now, an hour and a half later, the admiral was sweating profusely but showed no sign of awakening.

McCoy had waved out the light and was about to leave the room when a tap on the door frame made him turn. Sulu, cool and slicked down in a clean work tunic, was looking across the room at the admiral.

"How is he?" Sulu whispered over the large plant in his arms, and McCoy thought he heard a small voice echo, "Is he?"

"He's fi-- what the hell?" Whispering too, McCoy frowned at the plant, which had two clawed appendages sticking up from its trunk. "Hell?" whispered the plant, and Sulu grinned.

"I brought him a present," he said, and winked. He tiptoed across the floor and set the plant on the bedside table. "Pavel says her name is Catherine the Great."

"Great," murmured Catherine, flexing her claws. But McCoy's grin froze. In an instant, he was years away in time but only three kilometers in distance....

T'Sal looked like a cactus--monolithic, gray-green entity with a spiked, domed head, nodding beside the garden steps as she sang to the heartsick little boy who had just lost his sehlat to a Le-matya's poison. Her voice was the voice of a wind-chime in a gentle breeze; there were no words to her song, but she needed none. Soothed and comforted, the little boy sat beside her in the first light of morning, still in his sleeping robe--alone, but for the moment no longer lonely....

"Dr. McCoy?" Sulu was looking at him hard as he moved back toward the doorway.

"She's...great," McCoy managed, and reinstated his grin when Catherine echoed "She's great" from the bedside table. Then he realized belatedly that he and Sulu had not been whispering during their last exchange, for Catherine was no longer whispering either.

The admiral's eyes opened and immediately focused on McCoy. "What time is it?" he demanded, and McCoy wondered if the man ever woke up groggy like the rest of the human race.

"It's a little after 2100. Now, Jim--"

"Why the hell didn't you wake me up?" Jim threw back the sheet and was in the act of swinging his legs over the edge of the bed when Catherine barked, "Wake me up?" from the bedside table.

Jim turned slowly to look at her, said "Jesus" very much under his breath, turned his unfolding grin on Sulu and mouthed silently, "On report, mister."

"Don't you like her, Admiral?" Sulu inquired innocently.

"Love 'er," sighed the admiral, rolling his eyes, reaching for his pants, and realizing too late what he had done.

"Lover," murmured Catherine.

Forgetting his pants, the still grinning but slightly red-faced admiral picked up Catherine rather gingerly and deposited her, claws waving, in the arms of the now inarticulate Sulu. "Shuddup," he mouthed at McCoy, who was similarly speechless with laughter. "Brig," he mouthed at Sulu. "Kitchen table." Sulu nodded and departed, and Kirk turned again to McCoy. "Was this your brilliant idea?" But he was still grinning.

"No, sir," said the doctor. "But Admiral, sir, I'd give a lot if it had been, sir."

At breakfast, there was a long, good-natured argument about whether what they were eating was breakfast or supper. McCoy listened with half an ear, his gaze continually returning to Catherine, who had folded her appendages and apparently gone to sleep, plant-fashion, after consuming a variety of Vulcan insect life. She had triggered the first of Spock's memories to come to him since the evening beside the Bounty, and that had been well over a month ago. But this one was different--not a human child's memory, but a Vulcan child's. And yet there was something touchingly human about the little boy being sung to by his only friend. Musing, he realized that Spock was watching him.

Meeting Spock's gaze, he shrugged and looked away. Yet he felt Spock's eyes on him intermittently throughout the rest of the meal, and when they had finished, Spock remained seated, elbow on the table, hand curled loosely against his mouth. Whenever McCoy looked at him he was looking back, engendering in McCoy a mixture of gratitude and resentment. How did he know so damn much about everybody? But it wasn't everybody Spock was watching. It was McCoy, Leonard H., son of David.

When only Jim remained at the table with them, Kirk looked at Spock, smiled a little and raised his eyebrows; Spock often stayed for breakfast, but it was not his custom to linger at the table before going home. Spock simply looked back at his captain, and after a moment Jim rose and stretched, nodding toward Catherine. "She stays here, Doctor, or your ass is grass. Pass it on." When McCoy nodded, grinning reminiscently, Kirk took his leave.

"Coffee?" McCoy asked to fill the silence, never expecting Spock to agree.

"If you wish."

Startled, McCoy asked, "Black?"

"Weak."

"Outside?"

Spock nodded. Accommodating bastard. McCoy ordered two coffees, one black, one weak, from the dispenser, and they went out to sit on the door sill. It was the end of winter, and the ground on which Spock had lain that first evening was dusted with green, enriched by seasonal rains. In another month, McCoy supposed, it would be baked rock again. Some spring. Whole world was upside down and ass-backwards. Plants talking and singing.... "It's T'Sal," he said. "When she sang to you after I-Chaya died."

"I surmised as much."

"Goddammit, Spock! What kind of a mind-reader--"

"The parrot plant, Doctor. It amuses the others, but it disturbs you. In your present situation, the connection was not difficult to come by."

"All right." They were silent, looking up the steps of Mount Seleya toward the temple, now invisible around a turn of old-wood rock. This morning the sky was peach-colored as it had been that first morning, but the misty, undefined edges of things were clear and sharp, and McCoy imagined that there was a faint scent of spring in the air. "Do you remember when we carried you off the ship that night?"

"No."

McCoy licked his lips. "Do you remember anything that happened on the ship after you and Jim beamed up?"

"No."

McCoy suppressed a sigh of relief. I'm gonna tell you something I never thought I'd hear myself say. I've missed you. I don't know if I could stand to lose you again. Hell of a thing to have to live down, that. And yet....

"I want to keep it," he said. Spock turned to look at him, but McCoy kept his eyes on his coffee. "T'Sal. Your memory. I want to keep it. Is that--um--allowed?"

"There is no precedent," Spock said softly. "Why do you wish to keep this memory?"

McCoy looked up then, and realizing that Spock expected some sort of elaborate justification, smiled at the thought that he was not going to get it.

"I like it," he said.

Spock studied him for a long moment. Then: "Very well."

"Just like that?"

"It is mine to give."

After a moment, McCoy felt compelled to look away from that dark, intent gaze. They were silent for a time, and then McCoy said, "I have to ask you something. You got anything o' mine between those pointed ears of yours?"

"'I remember remembering,'" Spock quoted him back at himself. "'But I can't remember it anymore.'"

"Figures. What was it?"

"You were at summer camp." Western Wisconsin. Ol' Miss, rolling brown and familiar at the foot of the bluffs, but with the smell of evergreens in the air and the dry needles like a prickly carpet under bare feet. "There were offworld children there, a Tellarite among them. The majority were human children like yourself. The other children feared the Tellarite, and their fear took the form of baiting in which you refused to participate. You were ostracized because of this, and became the Tellarite's friend. Eventually he attacked three human boys who were baiting him as though he were an animal at bay, and you fought at his side. No one ever baited him again."

"We beat the shit out of 'em," said McCoy dreamily. So that was my gift. Use it in good health, Spock. "Isn't it about time you were getting home?" he asked, and took Spock's half empty cup.

"Perhaps." They rose, but Spock hesitated, frowning. Somebody's privacy at stake, no doubt. "Doctor, would it be appropriate for you to repeat last evening's conversation involving yourself, Mr. Sulu, the captain, and the parrot plant? The fragments I gleaned at breakfast were...most intriguing."

"Mr. Spock--" Grinning in anticipation, the keeper of the katra returned the coffee cup to its owner and made a sweeping gesture toward the vacated door sill. "Be my guest."