She referred to an unadorned rectangular stone of some porous rock, perhaps two meters wide and three long, strangely scarred in places. It was an attractive jade green, unlike any type of stone Cleante had heretofore encountered on this world. As she did with each new discovery, she reached to touch it, finding to her surprise that it was damp beneath her fingers. A thrill of horror shot through her and she snatched her hand away, comprehending.
"Executions!" she gasped, expecting to find the blood of Vulcans clinging to her fingers. "Like the Aztecs on my world. T'Shael, how many?"
"Hundreds of thousands here alone," T'Shael said, and her voice took on a mourning note. "Ritual sacrifice not even redeemable by religious impulses, for we had no gods that demanded it. Poets and warriors, newborns snatched from the breast, all to gratify the base blood-lust of our own!"
She swayed slightly on her feet, lost in a kind of trance that frightened the human. Cleante reached out impulsively to touch her, knowing from past experience that she risked rebuke.
"T'Shael! It was your ancestors, thousands of years ago. Not you!"
"It is in all of us," T'Shael mourned. "Kept in check, but ever remaining. This place, this stone drenched with the blood of our own, with the blood of Surak, must remind us."
She seemed to shake off her trance, turning toward the human.
"You found the stone damp to your touch. Do you wonder why? Such blood was spilled here that it can never evaporate. The heat of the sun draws it to the surface that we may touch and be reminded, that pilgrims may come and add some portion of their own blood to that of the ancestors. This is, as you might say, our hairshirt."
"Are you a pilgrim, T'Shael?" Cleante asked carefully.
"That is not for you to know," T'Shael said abruptly, and Cleante laughed, nervously, irreverently.
"The trouble with not being able to lie, my Vulcan instructor, is that you fall prey to well-placed questions."
She grew sober. She could seize T'Shael's hand and, assuming the Vulcan would permit it, search for the mark of her personal blood-letting, but even she was not that rude. Nor did she need the physical evidence of a moral stance she could not comprehend.
"But why?" she asked plaintively.
"If you must ask the question then you cannot understand my answer. It behooves you to remember that you are human. Perhaps I have revealed too much to one who understands too little. That is my error. But you would do well to keep your place."
Cleante was silenced. It was clear that the lesson was over for today, perhaps for all time. Without another word T'Shael moved off in the direction of the settlement, not bothering to see if her merely human companion cared to follow. Cleante did, but she could not keep pace with the long and effortless Vulcan stride and soon lagged behind, the backpack digging into her shoulder blades, the sun even in the late afternoon making its presence felt.
I should hate you! Cleante thought, glaring doggedly at T'Shael's indifferent back, receding from her in the shimmering heat. You're morbid and cold and Vulcan arrogant; you instruct me out of duty and not out of care. I should hate you!
Then why do I keep coming back here with you, trying to understand you as much as I try to understand your world? What is it about you?
She was so furious she did not notice the change in the atmosphere until a sudden hot wind nearly knocked her off her feet. She glanced up at the still-unfamiliar sky and found that it was not its characteristic dull red color. It was suddenly filled with rapidly-massing storm clouds, leaden and lowering, and the temperature was plummeting. The wind turned cold, and it was hard to stand against it.
My first rainstorm on Vulcan, Cleante thought, shivering with excitement as she did with any new experience. She wondered if there would be lightning.
An ear-splitting crash answered her question and she grew alarmed, searching for shelter, thinking of tornadoes. She was midway between the settlement and the ruins; there wasn't so much as an outcropping to hide her. The parched desert plants about her flattened themselves against the desert floor; there was no shelter, none. Blowing sand stung at her. Cleante panicked.
Allah akbar! she prayed, instinctively reverting to her childhood's religion, though she didn't expect it to save her. She started to run toward the settlement, knowing it was too far, her arms flung across her face to protect her eyes from the sand.
She felt herself shoved face down into the sand as someone intervened between her and the elements.
T'Shael had come back for her.
There was rain now—cold, hard, needlelike rain, and hailstones several centimeters across. Cleante could see them pounding the sand around her, churning it into an oozing mire that threatened to smother her. She felt nothing. T'Shael sheltered her, taking the storm's fury upon herself. Cleante began to struggle.
"Get off me!" she shrieked into the wind, sand filling her mouth and nose. Gasping for breath, she twisted to look up at the face of the Vulcan whose spare body arched tensile-strong over hers. She could feel the hailstones pounding T'Shael's back through her own spine. "I'm all right! Don't—"
"Silence!" was all the Vulcan said, her eyes clamped shut, head bowed against the onslaught so that her lank hair whipped in Cleante's face. Her stronger hands pinned Cleante's at the wrists and held her down. Great branches of lightning slammed the ground on either side and Cleante understood T'Shael's wisdom. If she had continued to run through this …
Cleante stopped resisting until the storm did. She did not have to struggle to free herself now; T'Shael rolled away from her almost immediately.
"Just what the bloody hell did you think you were doing?" Cleante demanded, springing to her feet, trying futilely to clean great clumps of wet sand from her face and hair and sodden clothing.
"You are inexperienced in the vicissitudes of our climate. I must confess that I, too, was caught offguard. It is early in the season for such storms," T'Shael responded indirectly. She managed to look dignified though she was in worse shape than her companion. The sun returned blindingly, mocking their dishevelment, "It was my considered opinion that your safety superceded our mutual aversion to physical contact."
"I have no such aversion!" Cleante shouted at her, stamping her feet in her rage. "It's you and your damned Vulcan propriety. You who don't want to be touched. But you'll take the brunt of the storm for me, endanger your own life for a mere human whom you don't even especially like!"
"What has that to do with it?"
Cleante lost her anger in the face of such dispassion.
"T'Shael—I'm sorry. Oh, why do I always find myself apologizing to you? Are you hurt?"
"No," T'Shael replied, though not entirely honestly. Her back was a mass of assaulted nerve endings, but a light trance would ease the throbbing. "Is it of importance to you?"
Cleante looked at heroin amazement.
"How can you ask me that? Of course it is! As obnoxious as you are, I'm concerned about you. It was obviously important to you to save me from the storm."
"There was no logical reason not to."
"And that's all it means to you?" the human demanded, wanting it to mean more, wanting her concern, her caring, to be reciprocal.
"Should it mean anything other?"
"I give up!" Cleante threw up her hands dramatically, disguising her pain. T'Shael's intention was never cruelty, but her words hurt all the same. "If I try to thank you I suppose you'll explain how it would have been illogical for both of us to suffer the effects of the storm. But why my well-being is more important than yours I don't understand."
"It is not," T'Shael said flatly. "You are the guest on my world, and the comfort of the guest must precede all else."
"'Must,'" Cleante echoed. "How I envy you the simplicity of your life!"
She plopped down indifferently in the muck and began taking things out of her backpack, inventorying them for storm damage. The 'pack was filled with sand; she'd expected that. The dried fruit she never got around to when she got lost in T'Shael's l
ectures was in the bottom, well-sealed and quite undamaged. The tricorder had not fared as well; it had been on top of the 'pack and the sand had penetrated the casing. The tape was ruined. An afternoon's labor, T'Shael's labor; Cleante had merely listened—destroyed. Nerves shattered from the whole experience, Cleante began to curse, tears of frustration in her eyes.
T'Shael listened, understanding only some of the invective (sexual functions and the words for them were of no more significance to her than references to unnamed persons of dubious parentage, and what a human would call blasphemy had no bearing upon the Vulcan concept of the All) but certainly recognizing the mood that evoked it.
"You speak of the simplicity of my life," she said, attempting to calm, to divert Cleante's attention. She took the dysfunctional tricorder out of her hands and removed the tape, unreeling it centimeter by centimeter, blowing the sand away and allowing the tape to dry in the now cooling breeze. "Please explain."
"When everything is so black and white, how easy it must be to choose!" Cleante said bitterly, still shaky. She wiped the tears from her Byzantine eyes with the heel of her hand.
Cleante faced her biggest fear about the whole experience. Was it possible that T'Shael had been able to read her mind, had received some involuntary telepathic impulses as they clung to each other in the churning rain and sand? There were corners of Cleante's mind even she did not want to examine too closely. The thought of that morally incisive mind reaching into hers …
"How little you understand!" T'Shael said at last, and Cleante was not at all sure what she meant. The Vulcan handed her the tricorder, which was in perfect working order. She got to her feet and surveyed the landscape. "We must wait until the excess water has run off. There is a danger of quagmires."
Cleante laughed wildly. "Quagmires!" she repeated as T'Shael only looked at her. "A perfect emblem for our relationship, instructor mine." Her face hardened. "I wanted a friend. Instead I was blessed with a standup, prerecorded lecture on Vulcan archeology. Lucky me, audience of one for the invaluable wisdom of the reknowned T'Shael of Vulcan!"
T'Shael absorbed the insult as if it had not been uttered. "Your words were that you desired an instructor," she pointed out reasonably. "Had I known your requirement was friendship I should not have presumed to fulfill it."
"Why?" Cleante demanded. "Because I'm so mean to you? Or because I'm only human?"
T'Shael considered. Were she victim of her usual reticence she would have withdrawn from this conversation long ago. But there was need here, a need to which she could not help but respond. The comfort of the guest precedes all else.
"My words were not 'only' human," she began carefully. "You are human. That is fact. And even as I, as a Vulcan, do not presume to understand the human heart, so I ask that you do not presume too readily to having knowledge of the Vulcan heart."
Cleante nodded, accepted it, humbled again.
"I only want to learn, T'Shael."
There was a child's plaintiveness here. T'Shael looked thoughtfully into the Byzantine eyes and was startled by what she found there. It was a hunger. A reflection of her own hunger—the insatiable hunger to know. How could she not respond?
T'Shael started to speak and could not. If Master Stimm was correct, if that which was good led to tranquility of soul …
She looked down and away from the Byzantine eyes to hide the hunger in her own.
They returned to the Old City to find citizen and outworlder alike out in force, removing the ravages of the unexpected storm. Vulcan cities were deflector screened against the worst weather, but a severe storm could sometimes slip through before the screens could snap on. With typical Vulcan efficiency, everyone who was able participated in the cleanup.
Some swept away the sand and debris filling the pedestrian streets with long, silent brooms. Others followed in their wake to scrub down the usually immaculate cobblestones, replace uprooted plants in the public gardens, and repair whatever the fierce wind had damaged.
T'Shael relieved an ancient female of her broom.
"In your place and in your honor, Venerable One," she said, and the old one nodded her acknowledgment, tottering off slowly. T'Shael looked hard at Cleante, daughter of the High Commissioner who, except for the digs, never got her soft hands dirty.
"If you would learn," the Vulcan said, a suggestion of challenge in her soft voice for the first time in their relationship.
Biting her tongue—humility was never her strong suit—Cleante sought out another elder, who was scrubbing the cobblestones on his hands and knees.
"In your place and in your honor, Venerable One," she said in slow and careful Vulcan, kneeling beside him to await his acknowledgment.
She did not dare look up to see the approval in T'Shael's eyes.
Three
"IF I KNOW Jim Kirk," Commodore Mendez said, "he's going to be the first one to jump on this thing."
"Then it's your job to rein him in, Jose," Admiral Nogura said. "This is no time for seat-of-the-pants heroics. You tell him that from me."
The years had not dealt badly with Jose Iglesias de Mendez. The stern, heavy-jowled face might have acquired a few more creases, his hairline might have receded a bit further, but the ice-blue eyes were as clear as ever, as was the steel-trap mind.
His long stint as commandant of Starbase XI and the surrounding sector hadn't diminished his reputation as a hardass, but he was still above all an eminently just man, and that reputation was legend as well. His repeated refusal of promotion or another starship command only emphasized his awareness of his own abilities and his place in the scheme of things. He liked being a paper-pusher. If he sometimes envied the reckless charisma of a Jim Kirk, the rainy-day twinge of a few old phaser scars earned in close scrapes quickly dispelled the feeling, Galloping around the cosmos was a game for the young, or the slightly mad. Jose Mendez was neither.
Nor was the individual on Code One Priority hyperchannel direct from Command HQ in San Francisco. No one knew how old Nogura was; his first act as Commander Starfleet had been to delete all references to his age from every memory bank from Earth to Memory Alpha. And nothing in his demeanor—public, private, or after a couple of bottles of rice wine—had ever indicated that Nogura was anything but deliberately, calculatedly, frighteningly sane.
"He's at least going to want a piece of it, Heihachiro," Mendez said. "What am I supposed to tell him?"
"A piece of what?" Nogura demanded, his opaque eyes becoming more inscrutable than ever. "Special Section has been swarming all over Vulcan for three days. Know what they came up with? An exosphere-converted hovercraft with its identicode infrarayed out, derelict in the asteroid belt. Vulcan authorities confirm it was 'borrowed' from the Space Central orbital station. Nothing's ever locked up on Vulcan; anyone with a grain of larceny could walk off with the entire planet. But that's it. A stray 'craft with a few hundred extra kilometers on the odometer.
"And I'll tell you something else—" Nogura went on.
He sounded out of breath, as if the sheer audacity of this thing was getting to him. Mendez watched, listened, fascinated. He remembered Nogura under fire, as captain of the old class-J Horizon when he, Mendez, was a wet-eared ensign. The Ice Man, they'd called him.
And a few years back, when V'ger had come home looking for its daddy and it seemed Earth and Heihachiro Nogura had bought it for good this time, and Jim Kirk's cavalry had come over the hill as usual—Nogura hadn't rattled then, either.
But right now he sounded as if he was close to rattling. Was it just the incredibility of this kidnapping, or was the old boy really past it?
"I'll tell you something else," Nogura was saying. "That 'craft was clean. No fingerprints, paw prints, scratch marks around the starter. No stray hairs or feathers or loose change in the upholstery. No nail parings, cuff buttons, candy wrappers—nothing. Not only do we not know how or why, we haven't a clue as to who. Just what's Jim Kirk going to want a piece of?"
"Maybe an espionage mission,"
Mendez suggested. "Maybe the answers to the how and why and who."
"If Special Section can't come up with anything, how in the Void is Kirk supposed to? Wait a minute. Wait a minute." Nogura's entire face had gone inscrutable; he'd always considered Special Section a bunch of omni-thumbed dunsel-dusters anyway. "Jose, you may just have something there. Let Kirk tell me how under-utilized he is. I've heard the griping. We'll teach him when he's better off. When Enterprise hails in, this is what I want you to do …"
It was a desolate place.
They were hustled out of the cargo hold of the Klingon ship, legs rubbery from drugs and hunger and none knew how many days of unnatural sleep, and into a shuttlecraft of Rihannsu design. Whatever their destination, they had arrived.
"If only I had my chronometer!" Resh sighed as the shuttle lurched out of its bay and into velvet space. He seemed much calmer now, whether resigned to his fate or merely determined to keep his younger cousins cheerful. He was probably the eldest of the group at nearly forty (no one knew Theras's age), with that ageless maturity Deltans acquire for public decorousness and shed like a second skin for sex play. "They must have taken all our valuables when they captured us. I've only now noticed."
"Not all your valuables, cousin!" Krn piped up, poking his elder suggestively and falling into giggles. He had decided somehow that this was an adventure, and was determined to enjoy it.
"Perhaps some control!" Resh said with a touch of sternness. He was preoccupied with what Jali might be discovering at the rear viewport.
"What good is when if we don't know where?" Theras demanded, hissing and coiling in on himself.
There was a mad look in his aquamarine eyes as he measured the two guards against his own potential for snatching a disruptor. He kept glaring at T'Shael, hissing under his breath, trying to draw her into joining him in an attack; even at two against three and weaponless they might succeed with surprise and the Romulans' inability to get off a clean shot in such close quarters. It was the closeness of the quarters that was telling on Theras; he could not take much more of this. T'Shael seemed to be in trance. At least she would not look in his direction.
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