Chapter Eighteen


"MR. SPOCK'S HERE to see you, Chris."

Chapel moved her head a little, so that she could see the chronometer, and her breath escaped her in a little sigh. It was twenty-one hundred hours thirty. It was foolish—and selfish beyond words—to feel hurt that he hadn't come earlier, for she knew that something very strange had taken place on the ship which could not be accounted for, even as she had no clear recollection of what had happened to her, though she knew in her bones that she had nearly died.

But she did feel hurt.

"Thanks, Diana, yes. Ask him in."

Somewhere, buried under a tangle of drugs and pain, lay a dim impression that she'd wanted to talk to Ensign Lao about something important, but about what, she couldn't recall. Uhura had told her that Lao was in sickbay, too, suffering the effects of a severe phaser hit—source unknown—and what appeared to be the aftermath of sleep-deprivation and stress.

She thought there might have been a phaser-line blowout but couldn't imagine why she and Lao had been the only ones nearby when it happened.

"Nurse Chapel."

He stood in the doorway, the brighter light of the corridor outlining sloped, slightly stooping shoulders in blue, glistening on smooth black hair. Hands behind back, head tilted just slightly to the side in a characteristic pose. She remembered the first time she'd seen him, standing beside Mr. Kyle at the console of the transporter room when she'd beamed aboard—remembered Captain Kirk introducing them. She remembered the first time she'd heard his voice.

She'd been too preoccupied with Roger—with her hunt for the man she had loved—to give him much thought. That hadn't come until later.

"I am glad to hear from Dr. McCoy that you are recovering."

Chapel nodded, and moved to hold out her hand to him, but she felt too weak to make much of a gesture. In any case, a true Vulcan, Spock tended to avoid physical contact.

"I don't…remember clearly what happened." She was surprised at how strong her own voice sounded. She suspected she looked appalling, haggard and gray and thin, her face printed with the spoor of dreams she could not now recall, but if she did he made no comment. There was only calm interest in his dark eyes, reserved and neutral and very slightly abstracted, as if his mind were on some other problem.

Natural, of course, for the science officer.

He was silent for some time before replying. "Of everyone on the ship, it is not expected that you would."

"Everyone…?"

"There seems to have been a…a most curious and widespread… disorientation. Whether this is the result of the phaser burn-through, or of some unknown type of radiation given off by the star Tau Lyra when it went into flare-up…"

"Tau Lyra?" The name snagged in her mind, a shock and a small, cold stab of grief. Surely she had dreamed something…?

Spock regarded her with sharpened interest. "The star Tau Lyra entered a brief phase of core instability some time in the past five days," he said. "We are now in orbit around its third planet, taking up what artifacts we can find of the civilization there."

He frowned, as if something worried him, and Chapel felt swept by inconsolable sorrow. There was no need to ask what had become of any civilization whose primary had "entered a brief phase of core instability."

"I dreamed…" she began. But the dreams were gone. Only the image of a broken, froglike doll floated to the surface of her mind, then sank at once into darkness, never to be retrieved again.

"There have been some…most curious effects," Mr. Spock went on. "All ship's logs have been excised for a period of five standard days, during which approximately half of the crew is able to recall events—the commonplaces of routine duties. Unfortunately, when compared, none of their stories agree—both the Engineering and the Security bowling teams, for instance, have clear memories of winning the final tournament match. And Dr. Maynooth and several of the physics technicians report the 'impression' that one of our probes in the Crossroad Nebula reported a small planetary system there, for which neither data nor probe coordinates can be found."

He remained for five or ten more minutes, conversing mostly on the subject of what might have happened during the so-called Time-Out, and his efforts to put together a theory of what had taken place during the missing days. Chapel offered a few suggestions about brain-chemistry testing and magnetic analysis of the rec-room game chips for possible clues, and the self-consciousness that had sometimes existed between them melted away; they had, as she was drawn into it, one of the better conversations of their awkward friendship.

Only as Spock was preparing to leave for a meeting with Kirk on the subject did Chapel say, "I know my logical abilities aren't anything next to yours, Mr. Spock, but if I should come up with anything that sounds like an idea I'll let you know."

Spock regarded her in surprise. "The ideas you have already given are as good as any presented at Science Department briefings," he said. "Indeed, I have never considered you as anything less than brilliant—certainly your work as Roger Corby's student, at least the work with which I am familiar, bears this out."

"You read my work with…with Roger?" She wondered why it had never occurred to her that he might.

"Of course." Spock tilted his head. "In my opinion," he added slowly, as if reminding himself that Roger Corby might still be a sensitive subject with her, "within a few years you would have surpassed him, had you continued your studies rather than abandoning them to seek him."

She started to say, I had to …but could not finish. I loved him.

But when she had finally found him, or the android he had built to house his mind and personality, he had built for himself an android geisha, petite, submissive, gorgeous, and, as Uhura put it, dumb as gravel. Which sort of indicated, thought Chapel wearily, what he was looking for in a woman.

She closed her eyes, and drifted into sleep.

A little to her own surprise, she found herself in the observation lounge on Deck Ten. She was in her civilian togs, sweatshirt and tights, which meant it must be very late at night—she frequently wore them to do research, when she couldn't sleep.

Over this past year, there had been many nights when sleep did not come easy.

It had to be late, she thought. The ship's lighting was dimmed to night-watch power, a soft twilight gentle to the circadian rhythms of men and women forced to live for months at a time in an artificial environment, and conducive to late-night thought. With the lights dimmed in this fashion, the starfield on the other side of the crystalplex walls of the lounge seemed to fill the room, to fill eternity: burning diamonds sunk in the chasms of the sea, velvet and fire.

For some reason, she was with a Vulcan boy.

In the detached peace of her dream—for she knew that she was dreaming—she wondered if this were Spock as a youth, but even as she wondered she knew it simply wasn't Spock.

He wore a robe of gray toweling, Starfleet issue, knee-length and ugly, and he wore it like a knight's cloak, a king's robe. His black hair was tied back in a tail, as thick as her forearm and nearly as long, down to the center of his back. He walked with his hands clasped before him, one hand holding the other wrist, with all of Spock's withdrawn bearing, but in his case his reserve was not intimidating but conducive of something close to pity. His hands were marked all over with cuts and scratches, as if he'd wrangled with a huge cat.

"It is absurd to say I miss him," the Vulcan boy was saying. He walked to the windows; Christine followed, and thought she saw, in the deep seas of night, something dark hanging in the deeper darkness to port and below the ship itself, something huge that did not catch the light. "We are in mental contact, but that isn't the same." A wry smile touched his lips. "Certainly it is illogical for me to worry about Nemo the way he worries about me. But then, illogic is the foundation of empathy."

"Is it?" asked Christine. She felt she ought to know who Nemo was; felt, moreover, that she ought to be shocked, disconcerted, at his words. What was it about Nemo, she wondered? Someone had once told her who that was and she had been horrified.

"Of course." The Vulcan boy looked back at her over his shoulder. "At least, for empathy with someone other than another Vulcan. We are trained to think clearly, and to put the dictates of reason above the clamor of the heart. To empathize is to accept on the partner's own terms, to drink of that partner's soul and dreams, whatever they might be. Vulcans do not do this lightly. Afterward, one knows more than one would like to. Frequently, one feels…stained."

He looked away from her for a moment, stroking the leaves of one of the many plants that grew in boxes among the gray-upholstered couches and chairs of the lounge. His skin had an unhealthy pallor, as from long sickness, and there were pain lines in the corners of his dark eyes. She wondered who he was, and why she dreamed about him. Why she felt she knew him, in some ways better than she had ever known Spock.

Christine frowned, trying to understand. "But Vulcans are capable of bonding," she said. "That is…" She hesitated, not knowing quite what she wanted to say or if she wanted to go on. "Mr. Spock…" She could barely say his name. "…is—friends—with the captain, however much he avoids admitting it."

He is capable of love, she thought. He is.

"Friendship is not the same," said the Vulcan boy, his dark eyes meeting hers levelly. "It is not friendship of which we speak. You know that."

She knew that. He had read her feelings for Spock, when she had covered his hands with hers, trying to quiet the terror of his dreams. She wondered now how deeply he had seen into her own dreams.

"Mr. Spock's friendship with the captain would—and will—remain the same were they to be assigned to different vessels for ten years, or twenty. When I return to my own time, though I shall never see you again, we shall remain friends."

"Yes," said Chapel softly, knowing it, meaning it. "Yes, we shall."

"Love is different. In friendship—the kind of friendship Mr. Spock bears to the captain—there is no drive to proximity." His voice hesitated over the words. "No sense of peace in presence which vanishes with absence—illogical, but true. No hunger." He turned to look back toward the stars, toward the half-guessed dark shape looming in the wan glow of the Crossroad's streaming dust clouds.

"I do not know whether this is something the Consilium had to instill in me, or whether the process of bonding simply released what most Vulcans keep buried so deeply within themselves that they have forgotten its existence, its very name."

The starlight picked sudden lines of sadness on his forehead, in the corners of the too-young mouth.

"I do know that bonded as I am—illogically caring as I do—I am not a proper Vulcan. It is true that very few Vulcan empaths go ashore on their homeworld, and those who do, lie about what they feel."

Then the scene slipped away, and she was wandering through the darkened corridors of Deck Six, the lumenpanels dead slabs of cinder above her in blackness. All around her she heard, glimpsed, people blundering in the dark. Someone moved through a doorway ahead of her, glanced back over his shoulder as he vanished, and she saw that it was Roger. How she knew him in the dark she couldn't be sure, but the set of those broad shoulders under the blue-and-green canvas coverall could not be mistaken, the graying fair hair, the wide-set, intelligent blue eyes.

She cried his name, hurried after him, bruising her shoulder on a corner, stumbling into an unseen obstacle that hurt her shins. Doors refused to open for her that had closed behind him; she had to go around, up and down blind corridors, with the voices of other searchers muttering on all sides, the muted scuffle of footfalls everywhere in the dark. They're trapped, she thought. We're all blind and trapped.

Another figure passed her, dimly seen. Again, though she couldn't tell how, she identified the black hair, blue shirt, the flash of a gold Fleet insignia. She would know the movement of his body, the way he held his back, anywhere, fifty years from now. She called out, Spock, but there was no sound in her throat. Fearful, desperate, she started after him, her bootheels clattering on the deck, her heart thudding with fear that she would lose track of him, lose him completely. Like Roger he moved ahead of her, leaving her behind in a blackness as dense as the voids of space. She followed him as she had followed Roger, wanting only to know that she would be safe with him. That she would be safe somewhere.

Then a glimmering form materialized out of the darkness before her. She hurried to catch up, crying out a man's name, and this time instead of retreating the figure came toward her, reaching out for her as she held out her arms.

Only when she reached it did she realize it was a mirror. The shadowy image that held out its arms to welcome her was herself.

"Naturally, it was necessary to implant pseudomemories in certain key members of the crew." The fat, daffodil-colored savant widened his huge eyes at Germaine McKennon, as if surprised she hadn't considered the matter for herself. "How else would we gloss over the loss of five days?"

"Why wasn't I told?" she demanded pettishly and thrust the tiny reader away from her, with the report it bore. "You said nothing would be changed, and now I discover you have changed things. . . ."

"Nothing which matters, Domina. Truly." Cymris Darthanian folded his hands, dipped in that little bow that made him appear even more insignificant and humble than he was. McKennon had ordered robes made for him in the colors of the Consilium, gray and white—his own loose-woven, brightly dyed garments from the burned-out slagheap of Tau Lyra III were already shabby, and with missions as short as they were, there were few laundry facilities on ships of the line.

"For the most part it is a technique akin to restoration of a damaged video image, duplicating what is already there. Most of the crew will believe that they went about their usual business for the past five days. Anyone who has ever worked in any sort of government installation," he added wryly, "will know how difficult it is to tell one day from the next under such circumstances. For the rest, they will conjecture…" He spread his lower pair of hands. "But to what end? What, after all, are dreams?

"Their conjecture will not affect Christine Chapel's decision to leave Starfleet and enter the Institute of Xenobiology. It will not affect her research into the nanosurgery of the central nervous system, or her eventual discoveries on the artificial augmentation of psionic receptors. It will not affect her founding of Starfield Corporation, and the research which at last saves the Federation from the effects of the plague."

He remembered her, the only glimpse he had had of the woman whose research would save a galaxywide civilization…and whose heirs would consolidate the unexpected harvest of technological reward and unbelievable wealth to forge the weapons that would destroy his world and the minds that would fire them. Stringy and awkward, as all these humans appeared to be, he remembered her lying broken on the high bed in the strange-smelling healing-place, surrounded by her friends. He knew too little of the history of this timeline to recall whether she would ever know what others did with her work.

Somewhere, sometime, someone would say something to her that turned her feet from the current dead end on which she walked, to the new road of a different life. No one could tell when, or where, or who.

He could only touch her memory, and wish her well.

The Domina slouched back into the softness of her leather desk chair, turning a stylus over and over in her fingers, the silver click of it small as the snapping of bone on the obsidian hardness of her desk. Beyond the viewscreen—piped in from the bridge, but in all respects resembling a vast, dark picture window—the pastel gas-giants of Earth's system glowed against the blackness, orange or green-white, necklaced with moons or crowned with dazzling rings of ice.

Sometimes at night Cymris Darthanian would weep out of sheer exhaustion, torn between his grief for his family, for his people, for the world he had grown up on for ninety-seven years, and the wonder and delight of this dazzling and unlikely universe into which he had been catapulted.

It was very difficult to realize that Yoondri—Tau Lyra—his home—had been a charred ruin for two hundred and fifty years already, suddenly, in the blink of a yagghorth's hellish inner eye.

Iriane was out there somewhere, he thought. They were all out there, the descendants, the inheritors, of those friends and fellow-prisoners he'd last seen rushing onto the Savasci's shuttle as the great steel doors of the bay slipped closed. The re-makers of his civilization. The new savants of the Yoons.

Soon, Dylan Arios would be contacting them, for help against the Consilium.

Needless to say, the world to which he, Darthanian, had directed the attention of this woman before him was very far away from the Crossroad Nebula. If no trace of a colony was found, well, it had been nearly three hundred years.

The only ones who had known Yoondri were his brother-savants here on this ship, and Iriane. He prayed for her nightly, hoping that the burden of her rage would burn itself out, as he prayed for the lifting of his own. Sometimes, in the living inner whisper of his mind, he would hear her far-off singing.

In time, they would meet.

"You're sure?" McKennon's voice was the sulky voice of a spoiled and vicious child.

Cymris Darthanian nodded. "Trust the unreeling of the future, Domina," he said quietly. "Events befell because it was their nature to fall that way. Duplicate the conditions, and they must and will fall that way again."

This was, he knew, an unmitigated lie—and absolutely preposterous for anyone who knew anything about the composition of Time. He had sensed, in his brief conversation with Dylan Arios, that the renegade Master knew it, too. The past was the past, but futures were infinite. The node at the Crossroad had been a major one, with branches of possibility leading in every direction. In some futures, he knew, he himself and the other sages had not escaped the cataclysm of Yoondri; in others, the shuttle with its survivors had not made it out of the Savasci's hull. In others it was, in fact, Dylan Arios who had fired those torpedoes into the sun; Dylan Arios as he would or might or could have been, had other events changed or branched the treed bundles of pasts and futures along the way.

In one or two, it was James Kirk.

"There are a thousand thousand infinite futures," he said softly to the woman seated behind the desk against the glowing backdrop of those alien stars, the woman who was so young to have acquired such power, and who held the power without the wisdom that true savants acquired along the way. "But each of us possesses the key to only one." He bowed low, to take his departure. "Your servant, Domina."

Another unmitigated lie, he thought, amused, as he left her presence. But she wasn't going to find that out until it was much, much too late.


"…so, I got tired of this after a while and I went out and bought the oldest, junkiest, nastiest old planet-hopper I could dig up." Ed Dale's big hands, callused and strong but well-formed as a woman's, gestured expansively, and the grin on his face was like the sun coming up. "I mean, this thing should have been made into a planter in some city park about fifty years previously. You'd need a slingshot the size of the Galactic Courts Building to get it out of the atmosphere."

He leaned across Varos's table, one elbow on the final printout of the Crossroad mission report. Behind him, Jupiter smoldered red and amber, a Polyphemus eye of wounded rage in the dark. A veil of asteroids sparkled like a chain of diamonds beyond Dale's shoulder, clouds of interstellar dust glimmered around his head. A careless war-god, a displaced Viking, joyful only to be alive. His voice had the slight slur it got when he'd had a couple of ales—like most Earthmen, he had little tolerance for ale.

"I did just enough work on it to get the engines running, lifted off, and headed back to that 'exclusive country club' of theirs, that 'private Elysium'…"

Varos reached out and keyed off the holo as the sensors in the corridor signaled someone approaching. He slipped the tiny cube out of the player and replaced it in its box, at the back of his desk drawer.

It was the only holo he had of his friend, telling that same absurd story of boyhood pranks and youthful wildness. Varos knew he should be ashamed for still digging into that bleeding wound.

But friends did not forget their friends.

McKennon had let him die.

The Consilium had let him die.

McKennon had forced him, Varos—Dale's sworn friend, his blood brother, the man whose life he had saved in the filthy swamps of Deneb—to turn away from Dale as he lay dying, ripped to bloody shreds but savable. Savable had they gotten him into a freeze box quick enough.

But she'd wanted Dylan Arios, wanted James Kirk. And there were more security chiefs in the Fleet.

Hatred—the bitter heat at the core of the Romulan nature—was iron in his belly, sulfur and salt in the cut wounds of his heart.

The Consilium would pay. They had the power of pleasure and pain over him, but he knew there were techniques to overcome that. His will was his own.

Anger is the heart of the will, his grandfather had said. Friends do not forget their friends. Varos had always thought himself a Fleet captain first, a Romulan second. Now he saw that this was not true.

It was Karetha's step in the corridor, and he touched the opener as soon as the uneven tread came to a halt. Many of the crew, especially the Secondaries, were terrified of her, more and more so lately. Dale had never been. "Come," Varos said, his voice welcoming.

She started to hiss a greeting, then recovered herself. Her head came back and her eyes returned to being a woman's eyes. An old woman, tired and troubled; wrapped in the soft black robe she wore off-duty, her black hair braided down her back, as it was when she slept. She took a seat in the chair Dale had usually occupied, and sat instead of crouched, which she did sometimes now when she forgot.

She said, "I weep with thee, Captain," and he nodded, and held out his hand. Her nails were like claws, long and hooked. She and Khethi—so named after the smallest species of sand lizard on their world—played scratching games and she didn't like always losing to him.

"You're abroad late."

She sighed and ran her claws through her hair. "I slept some, after the jump," she said. Her hands were smutted with chocolate and there was a coffee stain on the front of her robe. She had been neater, years ago. "In the jump—and afterward—Khethi…was with me about all he had learned from the yagghorth of the rebels."

"The yagghorth of the rebels?" Varos sat up straighter, interpreting the odd, roundabout speech she used to describe her dealings with her insentient partner's thought processes.

Stun only, McKennon had said. As if more would hurt a yagghorth.

Karetha nodded. "I did not realize that Khethi missed his own kind," she said softly. "He is—Khethi is…" She frowned, unable, as always, to divide what the yagghorth said or thought. Varos had discovered over the years that most empaths made up their own languages, their own terms for communication with their counterparts, is most frequently being substituted for says or thinks. It was difficult for them, he gathered, to think in any coherent terms except shifting colors and the smells of the stars.

Her hands moved a little, fingers cricking like the echo of claws. "He is not entirely of his own kind anymore," she said. "As I am not. There are… Romulan parts in his mind, as there is now a good deal of yagghorth in me. Yes, I know it," she added, and her smile was a woman's, and sad. "He was—pleased—to encounter Nemo, this yagghorth of the rebels. Thoughts passed from mind to mind. Khethi…" She hesitated, struggling to say what she had come to say.

"Khethi will join the rebels." She brought the words out very quickly, as if hoping Varos wouldn't actually hear. Then she flinched, as if expecting a blow, or worse. Knowing, thought Varos, that to tell any Fleet captain this would be signing Khethi's termination papers—Khethi, whose life meant more to her now than her own.

He also knew that as a Fleet captain, he should hit the Summons button at once, before the yagghorth vanished, as the Nautilus yagghorth had vanished from the red-lit darkness of the Savasci's hold.

He remained still, listening, watching.

"Khethi…wanted me to tell you," she said softly. "I do not understand why it was in him that you should know."

No, thought Varos, settling back in his chair. Under his stillness the anger raced hot, a scalding river. But Khethi understood. Khethi, whose heart was the heart of the Savasci, whose mindless awareness spread through the ship's fabric like the web of the swamp-spider, which could cover forty square kilometers in its deceptive silvery fragility.

He found himself wondering, not for the first time, just exactly what Khethi knew.

"And you?" he asked gently. "What do you want?" They were speaking in the up-country Romulan dialect they shared. After years of Federation Standard, it was still the language of their hearts.

"I go where Khethi goes, of course," said Karetha. "Does he choose to be rebel, then rebel I will be."

"Does he know how to find them?"

"I don't know. I think he can go to Nemo again."

"Ah," said Varos softly, and reached out, to take her hand. "Then, my old friend, once we reach Earth and this crew goes ashore, will we all be rebels together, you and Khethi and I. And then," he added, his voice sinking almost to a whisper, "the Consilium will be sorry that it ever ordered the Savasci to enter the Crossroad, or make contact with the ships and captains of the past. They have forgotten now—Kirk and his crew, who answer to no master but their duties as they see them, and the dictates of their judgments and their hearts. And this is as it should be. But I have not forgotten. Nor will I, so long as I live."


It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures, Spock had said to her once. At the time she thought he was referring to the problem then at hand, the appalling drive of Vulcan physiology, which forced him back to his home planet at a time appointed by Vulcan stars and Vulcan genes.

Lying in the twilight borderland on the far side of sleep, Chapel realized that he had been speaking of the relationship between them.

And it was a relationship, she realized. It simply hadn't been the relationship she was after.

And wouldn't be.

There had been times in the past four years when she'd felt that if only she could get to the other side of that impenetrable wall, she'd see the real Spock. But now she knew that if she got around that wall, all she'd see was the back side of the wall.

A fading dream had whispered to her in sleep, a strange dream about walking in the Deck Ten lounge with a Vulcan boy, a boy with long black hair and strange, small cuts on his hands; a boy with a face like a young prince.

There is no drive to proximity, he had said, of Vulcan friendships. And, I am not a proper Vulcan.

Proper Vulcan or not—and she did not recall just why he had said this last—she had understood, finally, the depth of difference it made, to be a Vulcan.

When I return to my own time, Nurse Chapel, I will always be your friend, though we shall never meet again. And, Love is something different.

Her relationship with Spock was far from over. But it was what it was, and would continue, she understood, in the Vulcan fashion—a friendship, distant at times when they were physically distant, but lifelong. If she wanted it that way.

She had given up enough, she realized, pursuing shadows among the dark spaces between stars. Nine years, pursuing one man, and then another who was kind, only to find, upon catching up with them, that they were not what she had dreamed them to be.

In a way, she supposed, she had wanted Spock to be Roger…and God only knew who she had wanted Roger to be. But Roger was only Roger…and Spock was only Spock.

It was time to return to her own work. McCoy would help her—had helped her! God! All the practical experience she'd gotten in xenobiology…! Spock would applaud, with genuine joy, her receipt of her M.D. and her specialized credentials, something she now guessed—had then guessed?—Roger would never have done. Spock would be her friend, her supporter, wherever he was.

Not the comfort that she sought, in her heart of hearts—but comfort, nevertheless.

After supper, when she felt a little stronger, Christine asked for a reader, and ran up the end-of-mission form she'd been putting off from day to day.

RETURN TO CIVILIAN STATUS?

DESTINATION OF OUT-MUSTER?

She typed in FEDERATION SCIENCE INSTITUTE and keyed in for the application to that university. With luck, she calculated, she'd get the okay on it by the time the Enterprise returned to Earth in three months, its mission done.