When the Stars Stop Moving

Disclaimer: No filthy lucre changed hands.

Summary: this is part two of my poem “So Very Many Stars” which you can find in the Tris archive .  The first part of this poem was meant to stand alone, but the fate of the young Vulcan male is unknown and a reader was asking be about it.   So the second part of the poem shows that the male often does make it home to continue Vulcan kind.  And this is how it happens . . .

Note: The events of the ritual of a first mating are taken from The Vulcan Language Institute page “Vulcan Rituals and Ceremonies”.   For a private people, very Victorian about sex, I was surprised that the VLI mentioned a ritual witness.

When the Stars Stop Moving

By Linda

The stars have stopped moving,

The planets are growing larger on screen . . .

A face . . . Hers! . . . replaces them

“Sonak, it is I”

Formal dress - he notes she is prepared

Anticipation shivering through him,

He is hot, he shivers, he is ready, he speaks:

“T’Lis, parted from me and never parted”

From a race sparing of words, plain and logical,

She leans almost out from the screen

And as eons of women before her, she gives voice:

“Never and always touching and touched.  I await you.”

She vanishes and two tightly bound worlds jump into view

Like a Vulcan couple, endlessly, inexorably, circling each other, 

Moving out from behind its companion T’Kuht . . . the planet Vulcan!

Gold sparkles, tingling, a brief dissipation,

Reassembled amid stones heavy with age,

He tests the firmness of sand, the taste of the air . . .

Inflating his lungs enables a whisper:

“I have beaten the stars, their distance has not defeated me”

And he strikes the gong in his need

It is answered.

Enter the matriarch, and the gathering of the clan,

An arc of robed figures, curving single file in the shadow of the stones  

“What you are about to see comes down from the time of the beginning”

Time of challenge!               “Kali Farr!”

Silence . . . and he breathes easier

Time of mating!                   “Pon Farr!”

The Plak Tau burns, consumes, he reaches for her roughly and she . . .

Responds in kind

The clan files out - privacy the hallmark of all Vulcan

He takes her right there on the sand

His seed finds the hot trembling passage

While the matriarch alone observes

As is the way at a first consummation,

The couple . . . oblivious to this singular privacy violation

Exhaustion.  They sleep,

Coiled around each other like the planets . . .

There will be a child.