Star Trek: Child of Sarek

Part I: Michael

Growing up as an adopted member of Sarek’s household had all manner of unique challenges. One was mastering the Vulcan art of restraining emotion, which was difficult not only as a human but for the fact that I had lost both my parents, and that was how I had come to live there. Another was the presence of Spock, Sarek’s child with Amanda Grayson, which had the effect of cancelling out any advantages Amanda’s proximity might have had for me, as Spock always chose a fully Vulcan approach.

The final was the existence of Sybok. Unlike Spock, Sybok was not always present in the house. He traveled frequently with his Vulcan mother, the princess, whose infrequent visits always served to emphasize how poorly even Sarek managed to follow the tenets of Vulcan society, which I grew to understand had nothing at all to do with the teachings of Surak and the purity of logic, and everything to do with snobbish devotion to class distinction. To be Vulcan, according to mainstream Vulcan society, meant you were better than everyone else, even the majority of Vulcan society itself.

This is a fact that is often oblique to outsiders; Vulcans are simply Vulcans, and that’s all you need to know, and all you’re likely to see.

Yet the root of the perceived arrogance of Vulcan society isn’t its devotion to logic and disdain for all those who fall below such lofty standards, but rather the elite of Vulcan society, which needs no greater standard than to believe it is better than everyone else, no particular distinction needed. In fact, if you were to peel away the veil entirely, you would find that at this level, the vaunted emphasis on logic disappears entirely.

That is what a Vulcan princess is like.

Very fortunately, Sarek was never like this at all, despite it being difficult at times to live up to his lofty standards, and it being equally hard to know where you stood with him.

I spent my adolescence trying to figure that out. I often confused this with the parallel inquiry into how he had mated with a Vulcan princess to begin with. I am sorry to say my conclusions were often unkind.

Sybok himself didn’t help matters. He lived his life in complete rejection of Vulcan norms. He grew a beard as soon as he was able, and never shaved it off. Beards are beyond scarce among Vulcans. To see one at all on a Vulcan is most often interpreted as the mark of a troubled mind. Sybok wore his in knowing fashion as a mark of pride. I always knew when he was around since even the usually stoic nature of Spock retreated further inward, and it became impossible to talk to him at all, which was of course the complete opposite of the incessantly garrulous Sybok, who punctuated all of it with laughter, another certain indication of madness in Vulcan society.

To be a child of Sarek, in all this, was a constant challenge. Classmates would look for any deviation in behavior, and in a society of outward conformity was to see opportunity subtly diminished. This is why Starfleet was such an attractive prospect, not merely for the opportunity to escape but because it was the only chance to be Vulcan without complication, even if you were half human. Or fully. When all you wanted to do was fit in, and despite it seeming like the easiest thing in the world, was most impossible.

I love my father, but without meaning to he made my life infinitely difficult, forever forced to prove myself. To him, to everyone else, but mostly to myself.

***

Part II: Spock

In many ways I was an only child. Vulcans live solitary lives, contributing to society, in endless collaboration, but always at the behest of one’s own goals. Ideally there is no contradiction in this.

In many ways, I was never allowed to live this way. As a child of Sarek, I endured his peculiar habits on a constant basis. A Vulcan like any other. A Vulcan unlike any other.

To know my father is to struggle with contradiction. His first mate was a Vulcan princess, an ideal arrangement made, as with all Vulcans, when he was young. When he was older and established in his career as a diplomat, he chose a different mate, a human, and from that union I emerged. Often I had to contend with the legacy of his first mating, my brother Sybok, who was fully Vulcan and indulged in all things, favored by his mother and, at times, favored by my father as well, or so it sometimes appeared to me. Sybok had the advantage of every opportunity. He traveled far and studied widely, always of his own choosing, far from the restraints of standard scholastic pursuit. He was the product of a single culture and yet he embraced all manner of alien ways.

One often struggles with the approval of a parent, and yet with my father it was perhaps more accurate to say he was more interested in Sybok’s wanderings and hardly aware of what occurred in his own household. Vulcan discipline would suggest the problem was Sybok, and yet often I would lie awake at night keenly aware of the absence that occupied a room quite near mine.

When the Vulcan princess made an infrequent appearance, inquiring after news of her own son, I would suffer two emotions: jealousy and resentment, jealousy because no one asked about my pursuits, carried out under their noses and yet unobserved, and resentment because I yearned to be doted on in some minor fashion. All of it connected. All of it torment. All of it visible only to Sybok himself, who never let me forget it.

I would pretend he didn’t exist, not merely later, when I should have moved past such petty notions, but when I was a child as well. 

Under the weight of my father’s gaze, at the dinner table, even when everyone sat gathered on those rare occasions, I chose silence rather than conversation. No doubt there was a range of interpretation. My mother would view me as the perfect Vulcan. She always did, and always I felt a traitor to her. My sister, fully human, closest to me in every way, wondered as always if she should follow my lead, but ever eager for approval, and ever pulled in the direction from which it would be hardest to attain. My brother, calling attention to himself. The Vulcan princess, ever with disapproval, except for her son. My father, ignoring me even when given no reason, and yet always with disappointment in fleeting glances.

Or so it always seemed.

The warmth he shared, on rare occasions, always felt like the most genuine version of my father, the part he worked hardest to suppress, the part that was the most like myself, the part he had fled from the Vulcan princess to preserve.

If only he had trusted himself more, or trusted me. If only I had trusted him.

***

Part III: Sybok

It’s not easy to be an outsider. Often you will encounter unspeakable bigotry, even from those who ought to know you best, who watched you grow, who called you brother, son.

It’s easy to view my life in the most dismissive terms. Out of all the children of Sarek, I was the one who had all the opportunities. I was the only one whose parentage was fully Vulcan. I was the only one, as a result, with the full blessing of Vulcan society itself.

And for all that, I was only ever an outsider.

My mother wanted nothing to do with me. She abandoned me at every opportunity, every excuse. She indulged her standing in society at my expense. She mocked my every ambition. She never respected a single thought I had.

My father wasn’t any better. I was unwelcome in his house. He made that perfectly clear at the earliest opportunity. I was free to visit when I liked, but never to live there. He never had a harsh word to say to me, and yet his embrace was like a dagger, and I was the blade he used against all his children. I loved him completely. I understood his impossible situation better than anyone.

He was everything I could never hope to be. He had grasped the possibility of rebellion against a repressive society better than I ever could, and for that he paid the price, forever trapped, and as a result, insulated from rejection in a way that I would never know.

I could never be a Vulcan other Vulcans would understand. I behaved as I wished, believed what I wished, did as I wished, and thus could never live among my own people. 

I was an outcast. It’s easy to say that I led myself astray, and found it easy to do the same with others, always in search of another mad quest, but that’s revisionism. With my brother, for instance, I was a rock of stability, who understood his pain better than anyone, was his only outlet, his only chance to be seen. It was much the same with my sister, though she saw me only as my brother wanted her to, and so only as the unwelcome visitor, forever linked with my mother, the impossible ideal forever corrupted. Unwanted.

With my father it was different. I always knew where I stood with him, an unspoken respect, mutual, the only way it could have been. 

Naturally we did the best we could to bury this deeply, invisibly, below the surface, and in that manner it poisoned everything, made everything possible, destroying the family, pushing my brother and sister into lives that meant something, far away from Vulcan, full of purpose. To be a child of Sarek was a guarantee of potential. Somehow mine, which looked so promising, or so it was the popular mistake to believe, amounted to the least of it.

But such are the children of Sarek. Unpredictable. Like their father.