Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, November 27, 2024
Genetics are interesting in every way across species. A good question becomes what happens to telepathy when it is blended with human genomes that theoretically don't have the capacity for that. Will there be growth spurts in this area of the mind – and if so, how does a half-or-more-human mind cope with all this?
My name is Dr. Tellur Triefield. My sister, Admiral Vlarian Triefield, is better known in the Alien Art Hive community for her adventures in the M.A. Kirk Universe of stories there, but I came over here because the question of memories not one's own has been a course of study all my life as telepathic races mingle with non-telepathic races, and thus the idea of the privacy of the mind and even memories are breaking down.
I came to this study in a different way than my sister did – she did not tap into what she has as being a quarter-Vulcan consciously until a ravenous being challenged the lives of her fleet and she had to outwit that thing.
Me? I remember a sunrise – shocking in its glory and heat, and yellow in a way Sol, our beloved Sun of Earth, and Spica, the blue star I grew up under, could never be.
"Sol in Angel Style," art by the author, Deeann D. Mathews
Sol is yellow, and Spica is hotter, but there is this thing about where a planet sits in a habitable zone … this sun took over a sixth of the sky, and turned the night sky, full of stars, to red and then gold over a desert world. It is my earliest memory of anything at all – that golden warmth, filling all things after the cold of the night – relative cold, though, because in childhood on Spica 5, cool but not cold really exists. Same in memory – no difference, so I just thought, growing up, that we had lived on a world that was similar in heat before coming to colonize Spica 5.
The smell was different, though. Spica 5 has a lot of underground water because its poles are big and cold and melt runs through its continents very efficiently to its warm oceans, so there's a moisture to its heat in most places on the planet. But this overwhelming sunrise? The smell is just heat – hot glass, hot metal, but in a healthy way – hot sand, hot rock. Probably not enough heat to fry an egg for breakfast, but you know it will be ready by lunchtime. Spica 5 has a few deserts like that, but its sands are white. There is no iron, no redness, reflecting into the sky at sunrise – not red like, say, Mars, but at sunrise, the tint and the smell is obvious. Yellow with a hint of red – not orange, but yellow with the rust red visible when light hits at the right angle even under artificial light.
As a pure Earthling, even if you have never left Earth, you understand light that can be felt, and on Spica 5 it is a blue that can be felt in everything – but this sunrise I remember was above even that. This light had heat, thickness, aroma … and more … I often cried at its beauty, but also with feelings that I could not understand as a child … awe, yes … but there was much, much more. Sometimes the sun throbbed like a heartbeat, in a rhythm that seemed familiar to me, but in childhood, I could not place it.
When I was 15, I asked my human father, Laurence Triefield, where we had lived before coming to Spica 5. He gave me the whole human history of settling Spica 5, in which there was no time in which we had just moved there. He had been born there, and his father and mother also. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, had been in the settler generation.
My mother, Telluria Triefield, walked in on the conversation – being half-Vulcan, she had sensed my growing confusion and distress, and confirmed what my father had said with the addendum of asking me to recall, in detail, what my memory was. I could see – or really, feel, for of course she and I had been telepathically connected fro the womb – her thinking about this for several minutes afterward.
“We must go see my mother, Mama T'lari,” she said, and so off we went to see my full-Vulcan grandmother.
Mama T'lari had not intended to become a Spican settler: a Vulcan exploratory vessel had crashed there, and she was the lone survivor. She had been taken in by the Hogan family among the settlers, and eventually married and had five children with my Hogan grandfather. Eventually, Vulcan had sent out a rescue ship, decades late, and she had gone there but returned to Spica 5, having decided it was now her true home.
Mama T'lari got around, being in her 80s at this time and not slowing down – still young in Vulcan standards, and enjoying life. Stoicism and her did not know each other, although she was and is the most eminently logical and straightforward family matriarch on Spica 5. Everyone in her family and in the local settlement treated her with the utmost respect, and she carried the responsibility well. But she also was warm and loving, so much so that Joe Hogan, my grandfather, left to everyone the idea that “she has the Vulcan sun in her heart for golden warmth.”
That turned out to be the solution to the mystery.
“Tellur, you are strong in telepathy, and very much connected with me,” Mama T'lari said. “Your memory comes from me – when you were born, I remembered the Vulcan sunrise, because your mother is half-human and you are larger and more robust than her human genome expected to cope with. Viewing Vulcan sunrises, for human eyes and skin, is a costly enterprise over time without protective gear – and getting you here was costly to your mother, but you are as beloved and wonderful to me, grandson, as a Vulcan sunrise. You picked up what I was thinking of the first time you smiled.”
Mama T'lari, being a full telepath, had inadvertently imprinted a memory on me, as a quarter-Vulcan infant!
At 15 I was satisfied with this; in maturity I realized the challenge this could be. Not every telepath is Mama T'Lari or Mom Telluria, in their deep, warm love – how many people descending from mixed human-humanoid marriages were gliding through much less safe places because the boundary between mind and mind was non-existent in ways no one had means to understand? And, even before worrying about where things could go wrong: could we begin to develop means to understand?
When I began asking these questions, Mama T'lari took me to Vulcan for an audience with her great-grandmother, Lady T'Pau, who shared with me how this was handled in Vulcan families that of course were all telepaths. We picked up a lot of pointers to use in our family on Spica 5 that were of course perfectly logical, but I have spent much time since with my still-living ancestress matriarch on Vulcan, learning deeply of the best methods used among Vulcans and working from there to determine how families with telepaths can gain understanding and customize mental boundaries just like emotional and physical boundaries are necessary.
On the second day I was on Vulcan, Mama T'Lari woke me up very early.
“Your memory shall now be your own.”
So, finally, the reflection in my memory met the sunrise it had looked upon … with Mama T'Lari remembering and sharing with me, with my permission, the memory of what she saw and how she felt the first time I had smiled, and at last, it all made sense. I work so that other families can have that clarity and relief.
Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, November 27, 2024
