SPOCK WAS FREE.
His body did not exist.
Despite the catastrophic circumstances of an instant before, there was a moment when all the turmoil he had left behind was blotted out, when all that mattered to him was this sudden renewal of the freedom he had experienced twice before. There was even time enough for a strangely detached elation to fill his mind. If this is what happens to all who are absorbed by the nexus system, his thoughts told him, perhaps it is for the best. Life-forms, particularly those that call themselves human, are forever being betrayed by their bodies. Here such betrayals would be impossible.
But the elation fled, far more swiftly this time than during his first encounter with the bodiless temptations of limbo. Once again, he realized, though still with a touch of sadness, that he was simply rationalizing. His responsibilities had not vanished with the real world. They still existed, were still as powerful as they had been only moments before, and it would be both dishonorable and illogical to try to ignore them.
And then, as if let loose by a suddenly ruptured dam, the memories of the chaos and destruction that had been left behind in normal space flooded back. The unreal detachment vanished, and a sense of urgency gripped him once again. Starfleet Headquarters had been evacuated, perhaps already swallowed up by the catastrophically failing nexus system. Earth itself, according to Captain Sherbourne, was threatened, if not already absorbed.
And Kremastor, whose ship held the only known solution, was lost.
Or had fled.
By now he could be in any of an unknown number of universes.
Or in the limbo of extradimensional space, where he would be even more inaccessible.
But none of that mattered. He had to be found.
There was, therefore, only one logical course open to Spock: to search for Kremastor. To do otherwise, to not immediately undertake the one course of action that offered even a minuscule chance of success, would be both illogical and irresponsible.
Without hesitation, he reached out, opening his mind as he could never have opened it while burdened with the body that held him captive in normal space.
Though fully aware that the sensation could be mere illusion, Spock felt his mind spread outward like the expanding globe of the ship's sensors.
As he had done during his first experience in extradimensional space, he touched the others—Commander Ansfield, Dr. McCoy, the captain, Uhura, Sulu, Woida, and the hundreds of others who had been on the Enterprise. But this time, instead of attempting any real contact, any communication or comfort, he only allowed their mental patterns to register and then let them slip away as his mind continued to flow outward.
Then another cluster of patterns—Sherbourne and the crew of the Devlin? Was that why the Devlin's signal had vanished? Had they, too, been swallowed up by the chaos of the failing nexus system?
For an instant, Spock paused, knowing they were experiencing this for the first time, but after only the briefest of touches he pulled away and let their patterns fall behind. Even if he could communicate with them, what could he tell them that would help? And whatever time he spent in an attempt to communicate, whether he was successful or not, would only delay his search for Kremastor.
And he could afford no delays.
But would he recognize Kremastor even if he did find him? He had had no mental contact with him, so how could he recognize the pattern?
And what else would he find here? How many others had this limbo swallowed up over the millennia? Through how many millions or billions of mental patterns would he be forced to search?
And what if there were beings native to these dimensions? Could the entities themselves be such natives? Or had they—
Suddenly, without warning, there was contact.
But not with Kremastor.
In an instant, Spock's mind was inundated with blind, unreasoning terror.
In another instant, images from unremembered nightmares swarmed around him, summoned out of the nothingness to provide a reason for the otherwise inexplicable, illogical terror.
It was the entity, of course, perhaps the entire swarm of entities.
Logically, it could be nothing else.
And, knowing the terror's source, Spock also knew that he could control even this unprecedented assault. Particularly here, unburdened by an often treacherous body, he could overcome virtually anything.
Methodically, he began to blank out the hollow, nightmare images, the senseless, illogical images that the human half of his mind had always insisted on manufacturing but which his Vulcan discipline had, until now, been capable of suppressing before they reached his full consciousness.
Meticulously, he began to isolate the terror and lock it away from the logical, reasoning part of his mind, just as he had always isolated and locked his emotions away in a place where they could not affect his actions.
And as he slowly forced the terror to retreat, as he gradually regained full use of his mental capacities, another realization came to him.
He was not alone with the entities.
Another mind was there, another pattern—a pattern that had not been totally left behind with the others of the Enterprise.
Another mind, a human mind, that had almost certainly been savaged by the same irrational terror that had, in those first moments of contact, nearly destroyed even Spock's mind.
A mind that, based on all that he knew of the undisciplined nature of human thought processes, should have been reduced almost instantly to virtual catatonia. Even the captain, who had been able to withstand the lesser assaults when the Enterprise had first come within range of the Sagittarius nexus, could not have withstood this vastly more powerful assault.
But this mind was not paralyzed with fear.
From the moment it appeared, it had literally screamed out another, radically different emotion: exultation!
For an instant, the terror surged back into Spock's mind, and he found himself wondering wildly if the exultation he felt soaring about him could be coming not from the human mind he had sensed but from the entity itself. If, somehow, the entity had finally achieved some millennia-delayed objective and now saw its ultimate victory over all life within reach, it could be the source of the exultation.
But the instant passed, and the exultation remained.
Reaching out, he touched it.
And the mind behind it.
It was, he realized with only mild surprise, the mind of Commander Ansfield.
And in that instant of recognition, there was also a blending, sudden and chaotic, Ansfield's mind sweeping effervescently through his, its memories sparkling.
And he saw what had sparked the exultation, saw what had, suddenly and unexpectedly, flashed into her mind only moments before.
He saw the truth that she had discovered about the entity, and for one glittering moment he shared her exultation, shared her memory of that pulse of intuition. And he shared her even more exotic memory of how something in her mind had grasped the emotional energy previously bound up in terror and somehow turned it inside out, into the exultation that now dominated them both.
Only in humans would such an illogical transformation be possible, his Vulcan half thought with a mixture of envy and relief. Only in humans could love be turned to hate, joy to tears, terror to exultation, in an instant.
And only a human, certainly no Vulcan, could have had the flash of insight—inspired, he wondered, by yet another of her "musty volumes"?—that had revealed the truth to her.
A truth that he realized, now that he had shared her triumphant thoughts, was only logical.
And, more importantly, a truth that confirmed his own earlier convictions about the entity's lack of hostile intent.
For it was not malevolence that drove the entity's actions, only a constant, unending terror. For all the millennia it had roamed the nexus system, during all the times it had emerged into the alien universes it stumbled into, it had to have been at least as terrified as any of the life-forms it had encountered.
The entity was, her flash of intuition had told her, from a truly alien universe, a universe where the laws were not merely modified versions of those in a "normal" universe but truly and incomprehensibly different.
And, like all life-forms that cross into other universes, the entity had brought its own universe's natural laws with it. Otherwise, it could not have survived.
And it was the alienness of these physical laws that generated an instinctive terror in whatever life-forms the entity came near. As the alien, eight-legged form of a spider can generate an instinctive fear on a conscious level in humans, the fragments of the alien universe that the entity carried with it generated a much more powerful instinctive fear, a terror that reached into the deepest, most fundamental levels of the mind.
And those terrorized life-forms, unaware of the true source of the terror, reacted by dredging up imagined but familiar sources as rationalizations. Spock himself had reacted precisely that way only moments before he had become aware of Ansfield's presence. Like an imaginative human walking through a graveyard at midnight, he had conjured up a thousand imaginary horrors. To a sourceless fear, he had assigned a source, as had countless others before him.
And in real space, these encounters could only be worse. There the terror could be shunted onto real objects. A fellow crewman could be seen as a scheming enemy. An approaching ship could be seen as a deadly danger. Reflexively, the victims of such terror would strike out violently at whatever their emotion-drenched minds tricked them into believing was the source of that terror.
And the death and destruction would begin. And continue, often long after the entity perished or retreated into the nexus system.
But now, now that the truth was known—
With no reservations remaining, logical or otherwise, Spock threw himself fully into the amalgam that was himself and Ansfield.
Together, then, they reached out for that third, alien mind.
And touched it.
And allowed themselves, literally, to be absorbed, for, as Spock had realized during that brief, earlier contact, absorption by the entity was the only way that any real communication could ever be initiated.
The entity had no name, nor any need for a name. It had never before conceived of the existence of any living thing separate from itself.
But slowly it began to understand, at least as much as such a being ever could understand when confronted with something as utterly alien as the concept of individual, separate beings.
Through the Spock-Ansfield amalgam of minds, it "saw" a universe where matter and energy existed, where intelligence was invariably imprisoned in some form of matter or dependent on some form of physical energy for its very existence.
Through the entity's mind, Spock and Ansfield "saw" a universe where neither matter nor energy existed, a universe where the only thing that existed was pure intelligence, an entire universe that was a form of intelligence.
They saw a gate to that universe ripped open, sucking a fragment of that universe through, into the extradimensional limbo where the nexuses whirled through their violent cycles. They saw the beginnings of its desperate search for its home universe, a search for what was, literally, the rest of itself.
They saw fragments of the entity split off and recombine and split off again as it continued its search. They saw it, after what must have been millennia, learn to maneuver through the twisting energies of the nexus and the limbo surrounding them.
And they saw it emerge, finally, into other universes.
And they felt the sudden terror caused by the alien laws of those universes, a terror that smothered it every single moment.
And they saw, filtered through their own distorting mental lenses, how those other universes had appeared to the entity: boundless wastelands, virtually empty of intelligence except for occasional, flickering firefly glows that either fled or were extinguished whenever it approached. Tiny, transient glows which the entity had never until now realized were anything other than detached fragments of itself. For, until now, in this amalgam with Spock and Ansfield, it had simply had no concept of individual, separate intelligences, just as it had had no concept of matter or energy.
Over the millennia, fragment after fragment had approached ship after ship, world after world, never able to make contact except for deluges of terror and utterly incomprehensible images and desires, but still it had not realized the truth. These things it encountered were simply fragments of itself, it thought, fragments that had lost the ability or the desire to recombine. Fragments that had, in effect, been driven insane by millennia of constant terror.
But then it became aware that certain of these aberrant fragments possessed a knowledge that allowed them not only to maneuver through the energies of the nexus system but to find specific universes, possibly even to find its own home universe. But it could not communicate with these fragments any more than it could with the others. It could only attach other, still-sane fragments of itself to any that might possess this knowledge and continue to try to communicate, to try to influence them to return to within the nexus system, where the terror was less, where the possibility of communication might be greater.
And then one of the fragments had encountered the fragments that were the crew of the Enterprise.
For the first time in millennia, it was able to establish at least the beginnings of contact with one of the aberrant fragments.
And it had done everything it could to draw those fragments into the nexus system and reestablish that contact without driving them away or extinguishing them, as it had done with so many before.
But then it had become aware that one of the other fragments—one with which it had coexisted for millennia but with which it had until that moment never been able to establish even the slightest contact—was about to destroy the nexus system. And it had gathered itself together and pursued that fragment into the nexus system, where it still remained, not extinguished but unable to function, unable to carry out its mission of destruction.
And it had returned to the fragments that were the Enterprise.
And, at last, there was communication.
But now, as virtually all the fragments were gathered together and recombined, as the entity's growing mind merged ever more completely with that of Spock and Ansfield, the entity finally realized that these countless glows were not simply aberrant fragments of itself, traumatized by prolonged exposure to the terrors of one alien universe after another.
Each one was a complete being like itself, but somehow indivisible and incredibly fragile!
They were beings that, it realized with horror, it had destroyed—by the billions!
And as the realization of the immensity of what it had done flooded the entity's mind, it drew back from the merging, not in terror but in overwhelming remorse and sadness.
And then it began to fade.
Like a human who is unable to face an intolerable burden of guilt will allow himself to die, the entity simply allowed its life force to drain away.
But the Spock-Ansfield amalgam would not let it go, for by then they had realized that this entity was their only hope for saving themselves and the Enterprise—even the Federation.
For what seemed like forever, somehow controlling their reaction to its alienness, they refused to release it, kept its life force from fading completely while they merged with it ever more completely.
Until, at last, it comprehended what they wanted, what they needed.
And it began to grow stronger. And sadly eager. It saw that, in what would undoubtedly be the last act of its existence, it had some small chance to make up for the millennia of death and destruction for which, all unknowing, it had been responsible.
It drew back from its own extinction.
Controlling its ever-present terror with a new, unbreakable determination, it detached fragments of itself to join these strange, delicate creatures and to guide them to their destinations. At the same time, other fragments returned to the paralyzed shell of that other creature, where, slowly and deliberately, they took control.
In an instant, Kremastor's world had turned inside out.
His hopes of finally completing his mission, so high one moment, had been totally crushed the next.
One second, he had been driving toward the gate, determined that the moment he emerged from the central nexus, he would initiate the destruction of the entire nexus system.
The next second, even as the ghostly energies of the gate enveloped him, the creature had struck.
And this time he had no chance to resist. The attack he had fended off only seconds before was feeble by comparison. This time, the moment the creature struck, Kremastor was lost, control of his ship gone.
And he was trapped.
In limbo.
With the creature.
It swarmed about him, violating his mind, driving him farther and farther toward the insanity that, he now feared, would provide his only relief.
Mentally, as long as he was able, he screamed for release, but it was as if the creature didn't hear.
Or simply enjoyed Kremastor's raging terror.
There was no response of any kind, only the continued, smothering presence.
But then, as abruptly as it had come, the creature was gone.
Once again, Kremastor was alone.
But even then, he could not act. He could only cringe in the nothingness, terrified that if he attempted the slightest action, the creature would return.
Forgotten was his mission.
Forgotten were the millennia he had waited.
Forgotten were his ancestors, the billions who had died.
Forgotten were his own people, who had sent him on this impossible task, hoping desperately that he could save the billions that remained.
Forgotten were the newcomers and their own tales of the creature's depradations.
Forgotten was everything but the literally paralyzing fear that the creature would return.
And then, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting, it did return.
But nothing changed for Kremastor.
Cowering in the nothingness of limbo, he could still do nothing but wait, hoping desperately that his renewed torture would soon end, that somehow he would be allowed to end his existence.
But then, although he hadn't believed it possible, the terror began to intensify.
Slowly, with great deliberation, the creature entered Kremastor. Now, apparently not satisfied with simply enveloping him, it merged with him.
His last sanctuary, his own mind, was lost to him.
And then, as the possession became complete, he felt the creature moving within him, altering his mind, devouring his consciousness, turning him into a hollow shell in which it would take up permanent residence.
And still he remained fully aware, unable to suppress even the tiniest fragment of the horror and revulsion that consumed him.
And his ship began to move.
The creature now had full control.
Kremastor could only observe, helpless, as the ship abruptly emerged from the nexus, its maelstrom of energies once again vivid and tumultuous in his sensors, not pale and ghostly as they had been in that other place.
Without hesitation, the ship turned.
And the device Kremastor had waited all these millennia to use suddenly came to life.
An irregular pulsing spread almost instantly across the nexus as the energies that drove it began to oscillate in the deadly feedback the device had initiated.
And as the pulsing grew stronger, Kremastor's mind finally was able to focus on something besides the paralyzing terror that still gripped him.
He could focus on the fact that, though he could not himself complete his mission, the creature was, impossibly, completing it for him.
And in the midst of the terror, a kernel of exultation began to grow as he saw the pulsing of the nexus continue to grow stronger, its energies being driven deeper and deeper into the oscillatory pattern that would soon destroy it.
And as the exultation grew, the nexus, like an increasingly variable star suddenly going nova, erupted outward in one final, all-consuming pulse.
And then he and the creature and the nexus were gone forever.