"In other words," Krazz concluded, looking at Kalor under his eyebrows. "They just died. Let the Roms play at dissection all they want with these three; it earned them nothing with the blue one. And there's nothing here either they or the Feds can pin on us. Let them both puzzle over it, eh, Kalor?
"It should keep them guessing, my Lord. "Krazz was in a magnanimous mood. He poured the dregs of last night's liquor on the floor and kicked the bottle unceremoniously into a corner, pleased when it shattered. Give the ugly one something to do when she arrived with her scrub bucket. Krazz yawned, stretched, scratched his stomach and belched prodigiously, opened a fresh bottle and poured the first drink for his lieutenant.
"Now for the second report," he wheezed contentedly, smacking his lips over the first drink of the day. "'The one we will encode and smuggle out directly to our own security people—the few who are not in Tolz Kenran's employ. I trust you have given it the full benefit of your analysis, Kalor?"
"My Lord may judge for himself," Kalor said, handing it to him with an absence of overt reaction that would have done a Vulcan proud.
He had found uncanny satisfaction in compiling this report, in the painstaking thoroughness with which he had documented each phase of the Deltans' deaths, the behavior of the human and the Vulcan. He was particularly intrigued by the Vulcan's telepathic intervention; the tharavul enslaved on Klin planets had their psi-centers excised, and he'd never had opportunity to observe their telepathy firsthand. The study had absorbed him more than anything else he could remember.
He watched his lord poring over the report. Krazz was a slow reader; he mouthed the words as he read, pausing from time to time to grunt or chuckle or pour himself another drink. When at last he had finished he grinned like a fat, malicious baby.
"Excellent, Kalor. Excellent! Every contingency covered. A step on the road to your own command, perhaps a military governorship. Who knows—perhaps they'll give you Delta once we've conquered it."
Krazz laughed at his own joke until he was in danger of toppling out of his chair. Kalor allowed himself a moment of stiff amusement, then grew serious. As far as he was concerned, his experiments had only begun.
"With my Lord's permission, there are the two remaining prisoners. I have been studying their responses to the deaths of the hairless ones, but there are a number of further experiments—"
"Yes, there are, aren't there?" Krazz grunted, an evil glint in his eye as he thought of Cleante without the Deltans and their strange chemicals to interfere. His pleasure was shortlived. He handed Kalor a freshly-decoded dispatch. "Unfortunately, they'll have to wait. It seems our Rihannsu allies are due to pay us a visit."
Eight
THE HUMAN WAS having another of her nightmares. She sat bolt upright in her bunk as she often did now, eyes fixed on some unseen horror in the enveloping darkness. Before the scream left her throat the Vulcan—who scarcely slept at all anymore—was beside her.
"T'Shael!" the human gasped as if she were suffocating.
"Here," the Vulcan said.
The human drew several deep shuddering breaths before she could trust herself to speak.
"It was there again," she said at last. "The emptiness, the falling. I was free-falling through endless space. It was cold and I was alone and there was nothing to hold onto. No stars, just nothingness. And then, then I heard Krn. He was crying and I was trying to find him and I felt so empty. More alone than ever." She stopped, wrapped her arms around her knees, defenseless. "T'Shael, I don't know how much more of this I can take. If it keeps up, I swear I'll go mad!"
"This would seem a normal human response to the events of our recent past," T'Shael suggested. Consciously or not, she began to stroke the human's tangled hair, which hadn't been combed in months. With a sudden pragmatic purposefulness—though as a student of xenopsychology she would not deny its therapeutic value—she began to rake her long fingers through the tangles, unknotting them patiently strand by strand where the matting was extensive. "It will perhaps lessen with the passage of time. I profess, however, that I do not understand this human fear of solitude. This almost metaphysical terror which—"
"Oh, T'Shael, I'm so exhausted! No philosophy tonight, please?"
"Forgive me," the Vulcan said, pursuing her task in silence.
The two surviving Warrantors were a sorry looking pair.
Their hands were raw and roughened by the endless drudge-work. It took two far longer to complete a task once undertaken by five. T'Shael, despite the events of their recent past, continued to clean for the Klingons, for a Vulcan will ever keep a pledge, regardless of to whom it was made. Their feet were callused by months without shoes, their frequently-washed uniforms stained and threadbare from the same harsh soap that coarsened their skin and turned their ragged unkempt hair to tangles in the human's case and a limp lustrelessness in the Vulcan's. The monotonous diet also took its toll. Cleante's lips were cracked and covered with cold sores; her gums bled. And T'Shael, though she did not speak of it, had forgotten what it was like to be warm.
"Oh, why don't they kill us and get it over with!" Cleante cried suddenly, pulling free of the Vulcan's ministrations, infuriated beyond reason.
She rushed at the transparency, pounding it with her fists and startling the dozing guard, who grinned at her stupidly.
"Damn you, Kalor! Why don't you kill us and get it over with?" she raged. "We know it's your doing! Krazz is too stupid to be as … as evil as you! You're a monster, Kalor! We don't want to live in the same universe as you! Why don't you finish the job you started?"
She was out of breath, powerless, beating her fists against the unyielding transparency. But the diplomat's daughter realized the futility of her actions, saw what a sad ridiculous figure she presented, turned away from the door and the staring guard, hugging herself and sobbing helplessly. She had half expected T'Shael to restrain her somewhere during this outburst and would have welcomed it. She was surprised and disappointed to find her unmoved and merely watching.
"I—can't—stand it anymore!' the human sobbed, collapsing on the bunk, folding in on herself. "I want it to end. I don't care how. Even death is better than this!"
T'Shael said nothing, but resumed her task as if there had been no outburst, no interruption. The guard grew bored with watching and resumed his dozing as she had known he would. What little privacy the captives could salvage had always been won by virtue of the guards' predictability.
The Vulcan's hands were deft and steady. Having untangled the last strand of the human's hair to her own satisfaction, she began to braid it into a number of neat intertwining plaits which somehow stayed braided without benefit of hairpins or other fastenings. The effect was aesthetically pleasing and seemed at last to have calmed the human; T'Shael wondered why she had not done this before.
"Do you truly wish death?" she asked when she thought Cleante was calm enough to answer. She heard Cleante sigh.
"Not really. Not in the sense that our Deltan friends chose it," she said. "I just get so—so angry. Don't you ever get angry, T'Shael?"
"Anger at injustice is natural to all intelligent species—" the Vulcan began.
"—but to give evidence of anger is not the Way of the Vulcan," Cleante finished for her, almost laughing. It reminded her of the old times, the getting-to-know-each-other times, the safe times, before all this. She grew serious. "Do I wish death? No. I have a little more courage than Jali—I think. Do you miss them, T'Shael?"
"Yes," the Vulcan admitted. No need to burden the human with the depth of her mourning. Nor with her knowledge of the extent of Kalor's intentions, of the odds against their survival.
"Do you think Kalor will try to kill us now?" Cleante asked, and the Vulcan's hands faltered against her susceptibility to well-placed questions.
"None can know the future," she said evasively.
Cleante turned to look at her as she completed the last braid.
"That's not good enough, T'Shael."
The Vu
lcan looked at her gravely.
"She who asks the question must be prepared to accept the answer."
"I see," the human said after a long moment. "T'Shael, have you ever been afraid?"
The question caught the Vulcan offguard, and she examined her soul carefully before she answered.
"Not for myself," she answered truthfully.
"But for someone else?"
The question was a direct invasion of her privacy. Salet, my father, T'Shael thought, overcome by an old memory. He whose soul was music, whose fate was chronic illness and an early death—
Stop! she commanded herself, and answered the human's question.
"Sometimes."
"If I were in danger—if you thought I might die—would you be afraid for me?"
"Need you ask that?"
The human took the Vulcan's hands between her own.
"How cold your hands are!" she marvelled. "Are you ill?"
"It is cold here," T'Shael said vaguely. She knew what the human would say next, and she could not—
"I wouldn't be afraid of anything, T'Shael, if I knew you were there to be strong for me. If you and I were t'hy'la."
Cleante felt the Vulcan flinch and tightened her grip on her hands so she would be constrained by politeness at least and not pull away.
"I understand what it means now, T'Shael," Cleante said intensely. "Remember when you said 'The concept of love is written large in Old Vulcan literature'? I went to the ancient sagas and read as much as I could. You know my Ancient's less than perfect even with computer-assist. It was a struggle, but I kept at it. And I kept coming across that word.
"Thy'la! It sang! The texts around it cried out with beauty, and I had to know! I searched for it in every lexicon and couldn't find it. I thought it might be one of the Unspoken Words and asked my professors. I got that chilling Vulcan silence and the old dodge: 'The Vulcan understands.' The other side of which, though your people are too polite to say so, is 'The outworlder need not know.'
"I didn't dare ask you; I didn't know how I'd react if you refused to tell me. So I put it out of my mind. Until Krn said it.
"T'Shael, I understand now! And if we're going to die at Kalor's hands it's going to be horrible, I know it! He'll think of everything he can to make us suffer, but I can accept that, T'Shael. Even torture. Even death. If only I knew you were there to be strong for me. Oh, T'Shael, please!"
She was on her knees on the floor and T'Shael, who of all the captives had ever been most successful at ignoring the guards, glanced quickly at this one and found him slumped against the transparency, mouth gaping, quite asleep. Were she human, she might have been relieved. She turned her gaze on Cleante and something wrenched inside her. The time grew closer. How could she explain?
"Cleante, please!" she whispered hoarsely, she who never asked anything of anyone. "Do not ask this of me now, I plead with you! I cannot—"
"T'Shael!" the human almost screamed, remembering the guard just in time. "The reasons you gave me back on Vulcan don't make any sense now! We may both die, T'Shael. No reason outweighs that!"
"The reasons I gave you on Vulcan are as nothing compared to the reason I cannot give you now!" T'Shael said.
"It is that I am one who cannot aspire to such friendship," T'Shael had said to Cleante on Vulcan during the safe times, the getting-to-know-each-other times. "I must remain alone, that is all." (The fact that I harbor the potential for terminal illness is not for you to know, my human companion.)
"I will be your friend, T'Shael," Cleante had said despite all deflections of her overtures. "Whether or not you choose to be mine."
And the Vulcan had continued the tuning of her ka'athyra while the human sat quietly and watched, the intensity of her emotion slowly dissipating, the soft sounds of the harp restoring the tranquility of the moonless Vulcan night.
"Your hands are never still," Cleante said at last with a kind of wonderment. "Play something for me?"
It was a request she had made often before, as often as T'Shael had asked her to sing some old Earth ballad or other. Neither was self-conscious about her gifts in the presence of the other. But this night the Vulcan had refused.
"No," she said, a word abrupt and uncommon to her, putting the ka'athyra back on its shelf with finality. "I must consider what you have asked of me. Perhaps tomorrow I will begin to show you something of what you wish to know."
T'Shael would say no more. Mystified, Cleante had walked back to her own flat through the silent streets of the settlement, watching the soft streetlights activated by her body readings lighting the way before her and extinguishing themselves in her wake in silent fanfare. She was too excited to sleep, wondering what new mysteries of the Vulcan, and of one Vulcan in particular, were about to be unfolded to her.
They were in a part of the city Cleante had never seen before. New architecture blended harmoniously with some quite old, all of it seeming to rise organically amid tranquil parks and airy meditation halls, broad softstone pedestrian streets, museums and art galleries, shops and libraries. It was typical of any Vulcan metropolis, with one significant difference. This part of the city of T'lingShar radiated music.
Countless small shops displayed row upon row of Vulcan and outworld instruments, sheet music and synthesizers; subdued notices announced a seemingly endless series of concerts and recitals in public theaters, gardens and private dwellings. There were odors of exotic woods and resins, a Vulcanly muted cacaphony of instruments being tested and tuned, stray arpeggios escaping from porticoes and open casements. The very windchimes, melodious throughout the city, were here refined to an exquisitely lyrical quality. Where elsewhere they might simply announce the hour, here they sang it.
Cleante was not aware that she was holding her breath, drinking everything in. She was aware that she was smiling, something she tried not to do in unfamiliar Vulcan situations. But none of the Vulcans they passed in the streets seemed to notice, nor to engage that particular non-noticing mode that so irritated the human under other circumstances. They were simply too absorbed in their work to concern themselves with the blatant emotionalism of one lowly outworlder.
A change had come over T'Shael as well. It could not be called excitement or anticipation, surely; there was no sudden spring to her long, easy stride, no lightness in the expression on the familiar somber face. But there was some intangible difference in her manner. It was as if she, melancholy pilgrim, were one with this place. As if here, as nowhere else, was where she belonged.
"You are of course aware that all of our world's manufacturing and heavy industry have for centuries been conducted in the asteriod belt which surrounds the mainland," T'Shael was saying. "Only that which neither despoils the environment nor disturbs the tranquility of our world is permitted onworld. Music crafting is one such exception."
With that she led Cleante down a narrow cul-de-sac and through a side door of one of the shops.
It was actually one huge, high-ceilinged room, with every available space utilized in some aspect of the manufacture of the ka'athyra. Cleante marveled as always at the purring silence of Vulcan machinery. What in a human workshop would be the racket of robots, clatter of hand tools, insistent hum of computers and noisy banter of human voices, were here reduced to a soft whirring, the gentle rasp of minute handplanes against raw wood, the occasional murmur of subdued Vulcan voices. There were computers here, incredibly complex ones, and robots for the rough work of cutting and shaping, but the final workmanship was the product of the expertise of deft and meticulous Vulcan hands.
Perhaps a dozen crafters, mostly female, from young adults to the very ancient, labored over individual instruments in various stages of completion. As T'Shael entered the workshop, though she made no sound and in no way drew attention to herself, all activity ceased, and the crafters looked to her in silent acknowledgment. The eldest, a white-haired female bowed with age, whose gnarled hands seemed incapable of the delicate work they had that moment set aside, came to gr
eet the newcomers.
"Peace and long life, child of the Gifted One," she said to T'Shael in a voice so soft Cleante could barely hear her, her ancient hand suddenly graceful as she raised it in greeting. Her dark eyes glittered with a special light.
"Live long and prosper, Crafter T'Sehn," T'Shael replied solemnly and with a suddenly augmented dignity such as the human had never seen about her usually retiring person. It was as if she were some offshoot of royalty returned to the family estate to visit her retainers, Cleante thought, banishing the thought in the same instant. Vulcans made no such class distinctions. All were equal in the All. And yet—"We have come to observe only. If the time is inconvenient—"
"To her whose father was Salet?" the ancient one asked incredulously. "Never, T'Shael-kam. As your father honored us with his presence, so you and your guest are ever welcome."
Unobtrusively and as if by some hidden signal, the others had returned to their work. T'Shael brought Cleante forward.
"This is Cleante al Faisal. She seeks to study our way." She glanced at Cleante to indicate her confidence that the human would do nothing to disgrace her. "This is T'Sehn, most gifted of the crafters of T'lingShar, as T'lingShar is most gifted in music of all the Vulcan. She alone was crafter to my father throughout his life, and crafter to the renowned Senor before him."
The ancient one neither shied from the praise nor took any glory from it. She had done with her life only that which it had been given to her to do. Her glittering eyes fixed on the Terran with quiet curiosity.
"I am honored, Crafter T'Sehn," Cleante the diplomat's daughter said formally.
"Our place is yours," T'Sehn replied, her ancient hands describing the all-encompassing gesture that was uniquely Vulcan and which Cleante had seen T'Shael make so often. "You are free to observe and question as you wish."
She then motioned the two to accompany her. With perhaps the slightest trace of pride she took an obviously quite new ka'athyra from its place beside her workbench and placed it reverently in T'Shael's hands.
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