Cleante scrambled to her feet to encounter the most attractive Vulcan male she had ever seen. He seemed quite young, perhaps younger than she, though it was impossible to tell with Vulcans. He was slight and not very tall; his eyes were at a level with her eyebrows, and they were the color of amber and Vulcan serious. Cleante smiled; she could not help herself.
"I am called Sethan," he said. "The cat is called I-Letyah. Despite her birthplace, she is quite Terran. Quite given to emotion."
If he weren't Vulcan, Cleante might have thought he was joking. She could not take her eyes off him.
"She's beautiful," she said of the cat, whom Sethan had retrieved from under the workbench and was stroking gently. "Is she yours?"
"She belongs to this place;" Sethan said, putting the cat down on a table, where she picked her way among tools and wood shavings with great delicacy. "Some years ago, Salet the Gifted One was presented with an Earth feline by a human, who also had the gift of music. I-Letyah is a descendant of that feline. You will see many in the street of the crafters. The Gifted One had a fondness for them. He said their dignity was worthy of a Vulcan."
You must have been a child when he died, Cleante thought. If you were even born. Yet you speak of him with such reverence. What an extraordinary being this Salet must have been!
"You're very friendly—for a Vulcan," she blurted out before she could stop herself. She did not apologize as she would have with T'Shael.
"I am accustomed to the ways of humans," Sethan said cryptically. "Would it please you to have a guide as you observe our work here? She who is my grandparent would desire it."
He indicated the ancient T'Sehn, who was still deep in communication with T'Shael.
"If you're not too busy," Cleante said, enjoying the moment. She held her breath, knowing exactly what the young Vulcan would say next.
"The Vulcan knows there is a time for everything," Sethan said by reflex, and Cleante tried not to laugh.
"The varieties of wood we use are several," Sethan explained, beginning with the first step in the crafting of the ka'athyra, which was logical. "In ancient times only shaforr or Eridanian teak from the polar forests was used, its rarity making the ka'athyra a costly and highly valued creation possessed only by the most distinguished, and by the innately gifted such as Salet, who had such treasures bestowed upon them by virtue of their performance.
"As a result of our commerce with other worlds, of course, the crafters began to experiment with other kinds of wood, though the backboard is still fashioned almost exclusively of our precious shaforr. Salet the Gifted One introduced the use of Terran birchwood for the soundboard. It is the principal wood used in the crafting of your Earth's violin, if I am not mistaken."
"I wouldn't know," Cleante said dreamily, her inquisitive fingers caressing the silken grain of the unfinished teakwood as she savored its raw, heady fragrance. "Is that why your grandmother's instruments sound different from anyone else's?"
"It is one reason," Sethan said, his eyebrows expressing his surprise. "You are most perceptive—"
"—for a human," Cleante finished for him. How did one go about seducing a Vulcan? she wondered whimsically.
"I meant no offense," Sethan said gravely.
"None was taken," Cleante smiled at him. "I was only teasing."
"Indeed," was Sethan's reply as he led her to the computer complex in one corner of the shop.
"After the initial cutting of the components and after each crafter has completed the preliminary finishing, the sonic integrity of the soundboard is tested here," the young Vulcan explained, indicating any number of complex readouts which Cleante could not begin to interpret. "Each soundboard, having been cut from the living wood, has its own unique molecular structure which affects its vibrational potential. This may sometimes be compensated by altering the thickness of the backboard or the correlative positioning of the anterior chord-pegs, and it will ultimately determine the adjustment in disposition of the resonancer, which is the true mark of the crafters' art. The tensile quality of the strings, the purity of the lacquers used in finishing and the number of coatings of lacquer are of course other variables which … I am boring you."
Cleante was startled out of her reverie.
"No," she protested. "Not at all. I'm anything but bored; I'm—overwhelmed. It's so complex. And each of you crafts your own individual instrument from beginning to end, no piecework. I'm amazed at that kind of skill. And you seem so young!"
"I am twenty-one-point-sixteen Standard years," Sethan said without the usual Vulcan demur on matters of personal privacy. "And merely an apprentice. I have studied the crafters' art since my seventh year, but am not yet permitted to begin a ka'athyra of my own."
Cleante was not sure how she felt about that.
"Then what is your place in the scheme of things?" she asked him, wanting to listen to his voice, wanting of course to learn as much as she could about Vulcan music and its instruments, but wondering at the same time if Crafter T'Sehn or any other were her guide, would she be as interested?
For the first time in her nearly two years on Vulcan, Cleante realized how little she knew of the basic facts of life on this cryptic world. She had had glimpses of family life—staid, elegant couples walking with their one or at most two offspring in the museums and public gardens, conversing softly, side by side but never touching, the children if anything more solemn than their parents. Only the very smallest, infants under the age of two or so, behaved like human children—chattering and animated and endlessly inquisitive. Something indefinable happened to them after this age to transform them into miniatures of their parents.
If there were courting couples, Cleante had never seen them. She had never noted their absence until now. She had observed the deference paid to all elders, whether stranger or close relation, as if great age automatically incorporated the venerable into some vast extended family. She had seen an occasional sloe-eyed graceful female heavy with pregnancy, somehow rendered more graceful, more dignified in her fecundity. And was there anything more aesthetically pleasing than the sight of a Vulcan female with her newborn at the breast, unashamedly providing nourishment for her child wherever and whenever it was required, seated beside a hot spring or beneath a shade tree or walking the tranquil pedestrian ways, the child cradled in a soft sling over her shoulder and a look of perfect serenity on her genteel face?
But where did it begin? Why was there never any mention in Vulcan literature, or at least the literature Cleante had read, of courtship customs or marriage rites? How did Vulcans choose their mates?
One could hardly imagine them forming casual liaisons; the very concept of a love partner was incongruous. How then did they choose a life partner, someone with whom to procreate their lithe, delicate-eared, inquisitive offspring? Why was it never spoken of? One could only assume the choice to be grounded in logic. Some form of genetic selection, perhaps, in which the individual was computer matched with the eugenically optimum partner? Cleante shuddered to think of it. Perhaps that was why she had never asked.
How did Vulcans choose their mates? And could a Vulcan choose a human?
"Then what is your place in the scheme of things?" Cleante asked Sethan, wanting to hold his attention, to learn more about him.
"The computers are my responsibility," he said. "Also, it is the duty of the apprentice to keep the workplace clean and in order."
"Sweeping wood shavings can't be much of a challenge to someone as talented as you," Cleante said. "Someone who is of a crafters' family," she added, trying to put it in a Vulcan perspective instead of an egotistical human one.
"All here have done as much in their apprenticeship. There is no shame in such labor," Sethan observed with a touch of pride. "Further, I have one other task which supersedes all else."
Cleante bit her tongue and followed him to a part of the workshop she hadn't noticed before. It was a separate, soundproof room plentiful with tools and dusted with wood shavings like the main room,
in the center of which, not quite completed, stood an obviously Terran keyboard instrument.
The human studied it. An old-style manual piano? No, the shape was wrong, and amateur though she was Cleante noticed the double keyboard. She knew as much as the next person about contemporary Terran instruments, most of which were computertronic and practically played themselves, and as an archeology student she knew the really ancient ones. But this fell somewhere between. What was it, and what was it doing in a Vulcan crafters' shop?
"It is a harpsichord," Sethan answered her puzzled look.
"This particular model being styled after those of your Earth's sixteenth century, Old Calendar."
"Of course," Cleante said, as if it had merely slipped her mind. She most especially did not want to appear humanignorant in his presence.
"There is a common misconception that the ka'athyra is somehow akin to Terran stringed instruments such as your harp or violin," Sethan was explaining, familiarly caressing the harpsichord's flank as he had stroked the cat. "It is often referred to by those who do not understand as the 'Vulcan harp.' Because of its association with extemporaneous music it has even been compared to the guitar, a much inferior instrument. The outworlder does not understand that the Vulcan does not differentiate between 'classical' and 'popular' music. It is all music. And if the ka' athyra has Terran relatives, they are the sitar, and the harpsichord. The dynamic principles are the same."
"I see," Cleante said, though she did not. She peered inside the instrument, baffled by its complexity of strings and plectra. "And you're constructing this yourself?"
"It is my third," Sethan said, his voice devoid of any self-aggrandizement; the Vulcan does only that which it has been given to him to do. "Though it is only a simple eight-foot. The Gifted One was master of the sixteen-foot. I have not yet that gift."
"I see," Cleante said again, out of her depth. "You can build something like this from the ground up, but you're not permitted to construct your own ka' athyra."
"Of course not," Sethan said reasonably. "That is far more difficult."
Neither was aware of T'Shael's silent presence; she seemed to materialize suddenly before the near-finished harpsichord. Sethan stood to one side in deference, much concerned with her opinion.
"If I may—" the introverted one began, her long and elegant fingers poised over the keyboards.
"The honor would be mine," Sethan said formally.
T'Shael played a rapid series of arpeggios and nodded her approval.
"Your skills progress, Sethan. The Gifted One would be pleased.
"Sethan's maternal parent learned the crafting of the harpsichord from Salet," T'Shael explained for Cleante's benefit. "Sethan himself has studied the craft on Earth, among those few who still practice it."
"That's why you get along so well with humans," Cleante smiled at the young Vulcan, watching out of the corner of her eye to see how T'Shael would react.
"Terrans seem to prefer computer-linked instruments almost exclusively at present," T'Shael addressed Sethan as if the human had not spoken. "Strange that it is the Vulcan's duty to preserve the dying art form of another world."
"All honor to the Gifted One for his perception of this," Sethan said deferentially, and T'Shael lowered her eyes in acknowledgment.
Cleante found herself growing restless. She'd forgotten the Vulcan penchant for becoming absorbed in a single topic to the exclusion of all else.
"It is still preserved in its place of honor," she heard Sethan say and wondered what he could possibly be talking about. "Though she who is my grandparent would have it returned to the dwelling of the Gifted One, perhaps as the centerpiece of some manner of shrine."
"Such is the devotion of the venerable one," T'Shael acknowledged.
Cleante thought if this exchange of courtesies went on much longer she might scream.
"I should like to see it," she heard T'Shael say.
Sethan nodded and led them up a winding staircase to a kind of balcony just under the rafters of the high-ceilinged shop where, sheltered by a rich velvet-colored arras as if it were in fact part of a shrine, stood another, completed harpsichord.
This must have been Salet's, Cleante realized as Sethan reverently swept the arras aside. She had only to look at T'Shael's face to be certain.
The introverted one placed her long and elegant hand against the sounding board in the sign of the ta'al, communing with the instrument if not with its creator. Neither Cleante nor Sethan made a sound.
"My father is dying," T'Shael said to T'Pei her mother rising from the couch where the healer had advised her to rest after her donation of blood for her father's transfusions. Her voice was edged with something heretofore unknown to her; a human would have called it anger.
T'Pei said nothing, but came and sat in her daughter's place, awaiting the healer who had hurried off to tend to Salet in this latest crisis of his disease.
"The healer's prognosis gives him less than eleven-point-two months of life at his present rate of deterioration," T'Shael continued. "Yet you who are his wife abandon him."
T'Pei had deigned to remain at her husband's side for slightly more than a year following Intrepid's first voyage, if only because pon farr made it necessary and because the starship was in drydock for refitting for that amount of time. The master scientist had resumed her position as provost of the Vulcan Science Academy in the interim, but both the starship and its science officer were due to depart on a second voyage within days. T'Pei had been offered personal leave to remain with her dying husband and had refused it. Her duty aboard Intrepid, as she saw it, was the greater good.
Now she sat erect on the couch, her cold black eyes impaling her adolescent offspring with the intensity of her disapproval. T'Shael returned the look without flinching.
"Neither my presence nor my absence will alter Salet's fate," the master scientist said in measured tones. "At least give the pretense of subscribing to logic, my erratic offspring! I have fulfilled my biological duty as wife, though little good it did the Gifted One in his present illness—"
T'Pei stopped herself; such intimate matters were not for her daughter's ears.
"It is at any rate none of your concern."
The healer arrived then to draw blood from T'Pei for additional transfusions, curtailing further conversation. The master scientist departed on Intrepid's final voyage, and the child of the Gifted One returned to the care of her father.
She could have consigned Salet to an infirmary where his care might have exceeded what she could provide, but she did not. He was Salet the Gifted One, and he must remain within the context of his creativity, of the crafters' shop, of the constant flow of distinguished visitors—musicians and composers and crafters and musicologists from his world and others—or what life remained to him would be devoid of meaning.
T'Shael was adept now at giving her father the medications and transfusions he required; it was no longer necessary for the healers to trouble themselves. She supervised the crafters' shop, that the name of Salet might continue to be attributed only to instruments of the highest quality.
She took care of her father's physical needs, feeding and bathing him when he could not manage for himself. She screened his visitors and made them welcome when he was strong enough to receive them. She transcribed his compositions when he was too weak to do so himself, and when he found sleep impossible she sat in the darkened sickroom amid the odor of incense and played softly on her ka'athyra that he might at least find peace in meditation. She was daughter, nurse, companion, hostess, housekeeper and secretary—all but wife, in all areas save one.
In addition she continued her studies, earning two graduate degrees in linguistics before her sixteenth year, continuing also her meditations with Master Stimm, though only because this pleased her father. Already she was visited with the hunger that was to culminate in her reaching out to Cleante—the hunger to know the ways of other beings, and to examine the Way of the Vulcan in light of that knowl
edge.
It was the reaction of a visitor to her father's wasting illness that first evoked the curiosity that was to become the hunger. The visitor was a Terran, a distinguished musicologist from the United States of Africa whose melodious voice and elegant mannerisms had intrigued T'Shael from childhood.
He had taken her aside when she was a small one, using her innate musical ear to teach her Ibo and several other tonal languages from his part of Earth whenever his travels took him to T'lingShar. It was he who had brought Salet the gift of the cat who was to become ancestor of Sethan's ILetyah. He was the first human T'Shael had ever encountered, and he fascinated her.
The African came away from a visit with the Gifted One, knowing it would be his last, with tears coursing unashamedly down his dark face.
T'Shael had never seen tears before. Her first concern, powerful enough to make her presume upon the Terran's privacy, was that her father's honored friend had been taken ill.
"T'Kahr Anekwe?" she asked, addressing him with the Vulcan word which among other things meant "teacher," for such he had been to her. "Are you ill? What remedy can be offered for what afflicts you?"
"There is no remedy, child," the musician told her. "My affliction is known as sorrow. I look upon your father whom we all cherish and who is soon to be taken from us, and my heart overflows with grief."
T'Shael wondered at this. Vulcans understood that death is but a passage from one mode of life to another, and surely her father would be free of suffering in the mode he approached so nearly. Yet perhaps what the African described was akin to the aching hollowness she experienced but could not give voice to whenever she looked upon her father.
T'Shael experienced no such aching hollowness when T'Pei her mother died, when the starship Intrepid and the four hundred Vulcans aboard were consumed by a massive intergalactic virus. She awoke before dawn one morning to the far echoing sound of a harpsichord, and followed it to her father's studio.
Salet had been helpless to move for weeks; the healers, assuming his illness to be in its final stages, had shaken their heads and gone away. He had long since outlived the limits their knowledge of the disease had given him, clinging to life beyond all known medical parameters, none could determine how. He should not have been capable of dragging himself from his sickbed to his studio, much less of sitting upright at the keyboard or of engaging his mind for composition; nevertheless he had done so. T'Shael observed him from the doorway in a kind of awe.
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