Tara

Part 1 of 2

On the day that James Kirk made his log entry, Sarah woke shortly after dawn. Through the plastic screening on the window of the room she shared with her child, she could see the sky--very pale green just above the treetops. The research station, a portabungalow adjacent to a greenhouse and a miniature kennel, had been built in a clearing on the edge of Tower's Ring, but on the opposite side of the mountain from what had, at the time, been Tower City. From the front porch one could see the narrow beach leading to the bottomless green lake. The beach clearing stretched half a kilometer in either direction; at its ends, a rain forest curved to the water's edge, circled out and around behind the greenhouse and the kennel, and then back down to the water's edge again. At night, when one or both moons peeked over the Tower's shoulder, the beach was white as a field of unmelted snow. In the daytime, the sun beat down so unmercifully that the windows had to be closed and the sunshades drawn against the relentless white-hot reflection of sun off sand. But at dusk and particularly at dawn, when the cool of the night still lingered in the clearing, it was like a deep wooden bowl with a white bottom. Overhead, the sky was the color of springtime's first haze of buds on faraway Earth.

Spock and Sarah had found the clearing and the deserted biological research station a few days after they had left the cave for the first time. The station was locked up and well stocked with thoroughly contaminated supplies, suggesting that the occupants had gone to Tower City for the day, but on the wrong day. The cages in the kennel were full of the disintegrating remains of small animals and large insects which had no doubt been research specimens. Cleaning the cages had not been a pleasant task, but it had been something to occupy the time.

Still not fully awake, Sarah turned and looked over at Jill's cot. As she had sensed, the child was gone. On a star gazing expedition, no doubt. Spock would not take the child into the forest before sunrise, and there was little to see from the beach but the sky and the mountain. And Jill would not venture out alone.

Sarah rose and braided her hair, now almost waist-length in back, into one long braid. That done, she dressed as she had every day for almost four years, in an off-white tunic and dark pants that had apparently been the uniform of the technicians at the station. It was the only clothing that the recycler would extrude. She and Spock had been able to set the controls for their own sizes, but the basic materials and style were unchangeable. The source of replacement footwear remained a mystery to them, and both of them had long since grown accustomed to walking barefoot in the sand, even as Jill did.

When she came to the front porch, the stars had paled and disappeared in the dawn sky, although one white moon still peered around the mountain. Shadows lay across the sand, but somewhere a bird had awakened and was calling, perhaps to its mate.

Jill and Spock were sitting on the sand, facing the lake, their backs to the bungalow. As Sarah came onto the porch, the child turned to look up at her companion. As she did so, the breeze caught her fair hair--the long, straight, lushly unkempt locks of a child whose hair has never been cut--and blew it forward around her face. Impatiently, she smoothed it back behind her ears--a characteristic gesture, rather well coordinated for a child of three and a half. But many of Jill's gestures were her mother's, and many others Spock's, for they were the only other intelligent sentients she had ever seen. Sarah knew now that she herself often smoothed her hair back in exactly that way, although she had never been aware of this until she saw Jill doing it and wondered why. The child's position on the sand--cross-legged, elbows on knees--exactly duplicated Spock's. As with Spock, it was an attempt to keep unusually long legs under control. For Jill's height genes were her mother's: when she stood up, as when she spoke, she seemed several years older than she was.

Her skin, like Sarah's, was tanned. Her eyes, like her father's, were hazel. There was a light sprinkling of freckles across her nose, which she now wrinkled in disbelief as she turned toward Spock. Sarah thought her rather uncommonly beautiful, and suspected that Spock did too.

"What'd they want to do that for?" The clear little voice drifted across the sand to Sarah, who wondered if Spock too could hear, in memory, another voice demanding Explain....

Spock's answer was inaudible, for Sarah was behind him and to his right, and Jill was immediately to his left. But it was apparently quite detailed. At first, Jill listened, totally absorbed. Then her eyes wandered, and she spied Sarah on the porch.

"Mother." It was less a greeting than a simple acknowledgment of Sarah's presence, generically in a class with the Vulcan manner of answering the vidphone. Nor did Jill get up and run to her mother, attempting to fill her in on the morning's lesson. But as Spock continued with the informal lecture and Sarah joined them, sitting down on the other side of Jill, the child snuggled comfortably against her, even though her eyes remained on Spock. And Sarah, laying her arms gently around her child and resting her chin on Jill's head, marveled at the accuracy with which children receive unspoken messages. Spock was the center of Jill's life, the sun around which all else revolved. Yet Sarah had never seen the child attempt to touch him, let alone embrace him. Nor, to Sarah's knowledge, had he ever forbidden her to do so. But the message was there.

The topic of discussion was Earth's failure, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, to follow several successful moon landings with the establishment of a lunar base. Listening, Sarah wondered if the child really understood that it was Terra's single moon that was being discussed, or even if she really grasped the meaning of "moon." Yet Jill's attention was completely focused on Spock.

Who was it, Sarah wondered, who had taught him so well how to teach the young? Even when she had joined them, there had been no perceptible wavering of his attention from Jill. (Perceptible to the child, that is. Sarah had been totally aware that part of his consciousness had reached out to make her welcome.) His eyes were weary and shadowed, for he was still recovering from an attack of a malaria-like fever that had ravaged him for days while Sarah and Jill had remained mysteriously (perhaps humanly) untouched. While ill, and now during his convalescence, he had finally permitted himself a short beard and allowed his hair to grow a bit longer; the additions gave his gaunt face a slight fullness that Sarah thought extremely becoming, but he still looked too thin and far too pale to suit her. Yet as he spoke, he gave the child his full attention, not as a lesser being who was privileged to receive the gift of his knowledge, but as an equal whose right it was to share it. Unlike so many teachers that Sarah had known, he gave the impression that it was not the teacher or even the knowledge that was important, but the student. And watching him, Sarah found herself at last able to give words to the feelings that had stirred in her as she tended him in his illness and then joyfully watched him rally and begin to recover.

Several times of late, she had tried on the idea of being "in love" as one tries on a new style of clothing, only to discard it as appealing in its way but not appropriate to the occasion. Neither profound affection or physical attraction seemed to adequately explain the ties that bound these two who had, in a very real sense, died and been reborn together, come out of darkness into the sunlight together, delivered a child together, and built a life together after the death of a world. She had not realized what was happening to them until he hovered near death, seemingly beyond the help of either her medical skills or his own healing techniques. During the last hours before the fever broke, she had known that he would surely die if she left him even for a moment, and known that he had known that too. Yet even when he had finally slipped into his first real sleep in days, she had been unable to find words for the utter peace and joy that filled her. Being "in love," it was said, was an uncertain thing, forever in flux. But there was no uncertainty here....

He paused, hunting for a word, looked from Jill to Sarah and smiled a little--a smile quite unlike the Spock she had met aboard the Enterprise a lifetime ago. Plucked out of his professional milieu and away from his home world, he was, she knew, continuously restless and often bored to death. But the smile said as clearly as words: It pleases me to have you near. Sarah had seen it many times without recognizing it for what it was. But now she did recognize it, and as their eyes met above Jill's head, her own feelings found words as well: You are my reality. I could no more live without you than I could live without breath. If this be love, then I love.

She knew instantly that he had somehow perceived her thought, and that the perception was intensely pleasurable to him. One eyebrow arched almost humorously, but his smile was now joyful as well as tender. Yet that very tenderness now struck an echo off a memory long past, and she seemed to hear herself saying I remind you of someone.

He shook his head slightly, a barely noticeable movement. "Then, yes," he said softly. "Now, only Sarah."

Jill looked up, glancing from one to the other. "Did I miss the beginning?" But Spock deftly drew her back to thoughts of worlds and their moons, and soon she was asking with equal interest: "Will we ever see Earth's moon?"

"I believe," Spock answered gravely, "that we may not."

Jill waited patiently. But when Spock did not elaborate, she asked, "Aren't you going to say probabilities?"

"If you wish." He smiled again, almost in spite of himself, and Sarah sensed that he was no longer enjoying the conversation, that perhaps their silent communication had turned his mind to certain unavoidable consequences of their enforced isolation. "At present there is a probability of 36.4 percent that none of us will ever see any moon but Aldrin"--he indicated the pale crescent just visible over the Tower's shoulder--"and Armstrong. In any case, there is a probability of less than 10 percent that any starship will come here as long as the Kiso...." He hesitated, fully aware that one of his listeners was less than four years old. "As long as conditions remain as they were when your mother and I were marooned here. However, the chances increase with each passing year that other variables may affect the situation." He frowned slightly, and Sarah remembered a story he had told her while they were still in the cave--a story of two races, each half black and half white, fighting one another to annihilation. "In that event, you may see Lunaport in your lifetime--or any other moon you wish to see." Suddenly, he laid his hand lightly on Jill's head. "It is my hope that you will," he finished, no longer impassive. And Sarah was reminded of the little princess who asked for the moon, and of the king who loved her too much to say no.

Then he withdrew his hand and stood up, again expressionless. And both of his listeners knew that the lesson was over. When Jill scrambled to her feet, eager to shadow him, he shook his head. "Remain with your mother," he said gently. "I shall be in the hovercraft this morning."

He did not look at Sarah as he spoke, and she knew his meaning even though they had never discussed his use of the hovercraft he had guided by remote control to the lake shore just before he and Sutek had entered the cave together. The craft was solar-powered, and had remained functional. Over the years Spock had used it infrequently, at first perhaps only once every few months, for there was nowhere to go and nothing to see except miles of rain forest and one relatively small crater. But the little craft was literally the only thing in the world that Spock could fly--he who had spent almost half his life exploring the stars. And so, at times when a human male would have paced the beach, raging at the fates that had deprived him of the life on which his intellect thrived, Spock took to the clouds.

Sarah understood the need that drove him there, and frequently felt it herself. But this morning, as she watched him stride down the beach to where the hovercraft sat in the sand, she began to wonder if it was more than boredom that troubled his mind and heart today.

As the sun rose above the trees, she and Jill breakfasted on a bland, filling fruit much like a banana and a porridge-like concoction that she had learned to make from ground nuts and water. Then, with the leftovers in hand, they went to the kennel to feed the few animals they kept there at the moment--a bird with only the stumps of wings, a small squirrel-like creature with no legs, and another born blind. Although the Kiso had murdered every humanoid on the planet but for three, others had remained to suffer. Most of those mutated by radiation had already died off. But a few had lived to reproduce, and still their descendants appeared from time to time in the clearing. Their numbers dwindled as the years passed, and these days the kennel was sometimes nearly empty. But neither Spock nor Sarah had ever been able to leave a deformed animal to die unprotected, and Jill had become quite skillful at finding tenants for their private zoo.

This morning the child fed the animals while Sarah watched idly, her mind on other matters.

She realized that, to another human, her present situation would seem incomprehensible if not ludicrous. She had spent four years in isolation with a healthy male who had barely touched her hand in all that time, and who would shortly--if he was not already doing so--begin to suffer the tortures of the damned at the prospect of their inevitable sexual union. T'Loreth's instruction in the attitudinal aspects of the sexually mature Vulcan had been extensive and detailed. Sarah knew that, to a male raised as a Vulcan, sexuality was a violation of the self, a ripping away of control that was necessary for the preservation of the race. How such a psychic aberration had developed in an otherwise rational society Sarah could not imagine, and even T'Loreth was vague on the subject. But the cause was not her problem; Spock's attitude was. To be trapped by one's biology and stripped of one's rationality was bad enough. But now, when she knew that Spock wanted to make love to her on purely human terms, he found himself on the verge of an enforced, non-human sexual relationship with a woman he had come to love. Small wonder that he sought solitude for meditation. And small wonder that Sarah was caught between loving empathy and helpless exasperation....

She suddenly realized that Jill had opened the cage occupied by the legless squirrel and laid her hand gently on the animal's tiny head. At first she thought that the child was about to stroke him. But when Jill's hand did not move, her mother was seized by a deep uneasiness.

"Jill," she asked, moving closer, "what are you doing?"

"Listening to Chedo." Jill used the name Spock had given the creature. But her voice had a dreamy quality that Sarah did not like.

Quickly, she went to the child and removed her hand from the cage, closing the door. "What do you mean, listening?"

"Like Spock listens," Jill answered serenely.

"Did he say it was all right for you to do it?"

Jill smiled a smile that took Sarah back four years. "I didn't ask him."

"Why not?"

"I knew he'd say no." Innocent stare. Why do you think?

For a moment Sarah had the impression that she had actually heard the last four words, and bit back a quick rejoinder: Don't be smart.

Jill blinked.

What foolishness. What Jill had been thinking was more than obvious, and what Sarah had been thinking was no doubt just as obvious to the child. And yet.... "You will not 'listen' to animals," she said firmly, fighting a dread that she could not define.

"Why?"

"It's dangerous." Jill had never been taught about "naughty" or "bad." But she had been well taught about "dangerous."

"Why is it dang'rous?"

"Well--let me think how to explain it." How to explain it? "Let's finish feeding the animals, and then I'll try."

But Jill's attention wandered immediately. "Can we go swimming?"

"I suppose. But wait for me." Still working on the problem of explaining the dangers of unskilled telepathic communication with animals to a child of less than four, Sarah fed the other creatures and turned to find that Jill had already left the kennel.

She was almost certain that the child would not take to the water without her. Jill had been taught to obey immediately any orders that had to do with the lake or the forest. Infractions were speedily punished by relatively prolonged confinement indoors, which Jill hated. But she was growing more independent by the day. Sarah quickly closed all the cages, more against the invasion of predators than to confine the occupants, and headed for the beach.

She rounded the corner of the bungalow and stopped short, unable to find her voice.

This was not the first time that the gigantic insect that had cured Sutek's blindness had ventured across Tower's Ring for a visit. The year that Jill was two, the creature had come often to inspect their dwelling, never venturing very near, but obviously curious about how these strange two-legged animals were arranging their lives. They had never actually seen her swim the lake, just as they had never really learned whether she had tunneled out of the mountain while the surface was still radioactive. But somehow she got across the lake and back again, for she now spent most of her time inlaying the Tower with her eggs. She appeared not to be ill or crippled in any way. Jill had grown accustomed to seeing the creature on the mountain, and even the sight of her moving slowly up the beach was no more unusual than the sight of an aircar landing would have been to a child in a normal environment on a civilized world. So it was not surprising that this particular human child should view an ant as long as a man is tall with more curiosity than fear.

But never had Jill and the huge insect approached each other as closely as they had this morning. When Sarah came around the corner, the ant was almost close enough to Jill for her antennae to touch the child's forehead.

Sarah choked back a cry, her mind filled with conflicting impulses. Stand still, Spock had said. Don't frighten her. But she's so close to Jill. Never had the creature harmed anything, large or small, as far as they knew. But she's so close. And Sutek was dead.

At that moment, the animal's holding maxillae reached out and grasped Jill, even as they had grasped Sutek.

"No." Sarah took several steps forward. "Let go of her." Still moving slowly, she continued forward. "Let go of her."

The creature immediately released Jill and moved meekly away, apparently puzzled but not frightened. The child stood still, hugging herself as though she were chilled, facing away from Sarah and toward the ant.

"Go away now. Please go away," Sarah repeated steadily, coming between Jill and the ant. Then she looked at her child, and forgot everything else.

Jill's eyes were blank. There was neither recognition nor intelligence in them.

Without thought, Sarah caught the child in her arms and sank down on the ground, gathering the limp little body close. Her medical training might have suggested half a dozen different treatments for a small child in danger of death. But none of them occurred to her. She knew only that her child was slipping away, and she hung on literally for dear life.

And in that moment she knew quite clearly that Sutek had fallen backwards out of life because there was no one to hold him in it, that death had swallowed him up because there was no one to stop the fall. But later, when she remembered that insight briefly, it seemed irrational, and she forgot it again--only to remember it years later, when it was she who was falling into the abyss.

Finally, finally, Jill's arms went around her neck, and she knew that her child was safe. She found herself murmuring incoherently, her face buried in Jill's hair. And she thought, My God, what am I doing? This child was dying.

"I had arms." Jill's breath came in gasps that were like sobs, but there were no tears. It was Sarah who was crying. "I had arms!"

"Little one, you still have arms. It's Chedo who--no, listen--"

But the child was hysterical now. In despair, Sarah slapped her face, and then held her tight until the hysteria subsided. Then she discovered that Jill had no memory at all of anything that had happened after the ant touched her, least of all of anything she had said out loud.

By the time Sarah thought to look for her, the creature had disappeared.

That night, Sarah and Spock did not walk on the lake shore as they often did after Jill was asleep, but stayed close to the bungalow, listening for the child to cry out in her sleep.

"Tell me again exactly what she said." Spock had stretched out prone on the sand next to where Sarah was sitting, a position he now assumed more and more frequently as his former life grew more distant and the psychic claims of this new world more immediate. But he was not at ease. He remained propped on his elbows, his eyes on her face.

"She said, 'I had no arms,'" Sarah repeated, believing it. "It was because she'd been 'listening' to Chedo. Somehow --"

"It is not logical, Sarah, for her to have associated the mutant chedo with an insectoid creature unless there was some reason for her to connect the two."

"I don't know what really happened. I was just too terrified. But she seems all right now."

"Indeed." But he was frowning.

"Doesn't she?" Spock raised his eyebrows slightly as she appeared to question her own statement. "Oh, Spock--if you could have seen her." She closed her eyes momentarily, and they were silent. Then: "You could find out what really happened to her."

"No," he answered firmly. "Only the parent is permitted contact."

"Jill isn't a Vulcan child." When he did not answer, she went on gently, "She'll probably never know her own father until she's grown up, if then...."

The thought was so clear that it almost seemed that she had thought it herself. She turned to stare at him, but he looked away. They were silent for several moments, and then she said quietly, "No. It's not irrational. He would come back if he thought you were alive."

"If he were going to return, it would have been long before this." Spock's voice was very low, but he had turned to look at her again. "The Enterprise sensors are much more sophisticated than my tricorder. He would have known when the radiation would dissipate."

"Maybe he's under some kind of orders not to come here."

The smile was so brief that she barely had time to be astounded before it was gone. She had never seen him smile like that. If he had been all human, he would have laughed out loud.

"Perhaps."

"Spock--"

"It's been almost four years, Sarah." He was no longer smiling, but there was no conviction in his voice. Only confusion. Again she perceived his thought clearly: I know he is coming back. Yet he does not come. "The radiation was gone in four months. If he were going to return here, he would have done so long ago." Utter confusion.

"That's not what you really think."

"Think?" he repeated softly.

"Not what you believe, then."

"What I--'believe' is irrelevant."

"Because it's not logical." No answer. "You--think we'll never leave here."

He looked up then, directly into her eyes. "Are you suggesting that I was not predicting as accurately as I could this morning?"

"Of course you were. I'm sorry. But Jill might be grown up by then. It'll be too late to find out...." Her voice trailed off. This discussion was not going to get them anywhere, on track or on tangent. As long as the words too late had been said, this was as good a time as any to settle matters between them. "Just like it'll be too late for you."

He lowered his head only slightly, but it was enough to put his face in shadow. Yet she could see that his jaw was tight, and she looked away, out across the lake now turning black under the black sky. Tearing at his privacy was like tearing at his soul, and she hated it.

He moved then--rolled over and sat up all in one motion, shifting his position so that he too sat with his back against a low rise in the ground just off the porch, making an edge for the beach. But as he leaned back, he reached out, his fingers brushing hers for just a moment--lightly, gently. There was very little of the conventional human lover in that touch, and nothing at all of sophistication, or intimacy, or calculated eroticism. Clearly, he simply wanted to touch her, and that quite urgently.

When she could speak again, she asked unsteadily, "Is there a Vulcan word for 'love'?"

"Yes." A long pause. "It is a semantic analogue only. 'Love' has many imprecise connotations." Another pause, but Sarah knew that he was genuinely trying to think his way past the language barrier. "You could not pronounce it," he finished finally, barely above a whisper. "Nor could I explain it in your language."

"In Vulcan, then." He looked at her sharply, and she continued in his language. "In Vulcan I speak awkwardly but understand much."

He stared at her for a moment, and then began to speak. She understood little more than half of the actual words, for many of them were abstractions that she had never encountered in her work. But, as she had that morning, that she understood much more than the words he spoke aloud.

Finally he was silent, his gaze holding hers. Seeing that he was still deeply troubled and now unable to continue, she knew that she must speak to rid him of any misapprehension.

"Please don't worry about me," she said with great gentleness, knowing what her words would do to him, but knowing also that they must be said. "I'm a physician, Spock. There's nothing else you have to explain to me that I didn't know before I left Vulcan."

His eyes went bleak, but did not shift away as she had expected. When he finally spoke, it was with difficulty. "I should have preferred that you had been given a real choice."

"But I have chosen." Half expecting him to pull away, she reached out and touched his cheek. "You knew that this morning."

He gave no audible answer, but extended his hand toward her face in a manner uniquely Vulcan. And Sarah bowed her head, her joy gone.

"Please don't. I'm not a telepath. I'm psi-null."

"Oh, Sarah," he answered gently, "what nonsense." When she looked up, startled: "We have been intermittently en rapport for weeks." He touched her chin lightly, tilting it upwards. "Your barriers are very strong--stronger than any I have ever encountered. You only lower them unconsciously, and only with me--perhaps with Jill too. But you can learn to do it consciously. Will you try?"

She knew how much it meant to him, and partially understood how much their commitment would suffer if he could not reach her telepathically. And so she nodded--and suddenly began to perceive exactly what he had meant by strong barriers.

She had been an only child who had lost her parents when she was eight. When her mother's brother and his wife had taken her into their family, she had suddenly found herself living in a fairly small house with two adults and six other children, all telepathic broadcasters. She had learned quickly to defend her sanity, as well as the only privacy she had--the privacy of her mind. By the time she had arrived on Vulcan years later, her mind was so completely shielded that even Vulcans were unable to perceive her presence. And because she had succeeded so well in defending herself, reversing the process was sheer agony.

In the end, she could stand the contact only for a moment--but not only because of the psychic stress of the effort. From Spock's mind she received only one image: that of a woman's upturned face, framed in a fur collar, her hair tossed by a relentless wind. But the visual image was not isolated. Along with it she perceived Spock's remembered anguish in full measure. She understood immediately that it was remembered anguish only, and that he now felt a gentle, lingering sadness rather than pain at the memory. But the visual image made the contact too much to bear for more than a moment. For the face she saw in his memory was her own.

She came to herself sitting in the sand, weeping, her bowed head against his chest as he gently stroked her hair. The contact had already sensitized her immeasurably to him. She was aware that he had learned much more of her than she had of him, and that his new knowledge had given him great joy. But still...."Oh, Spock, is it Sarah you've chosen? Are you sure?"

"You will know, Sarah. Be patient. You will know my mind and my heart soon enough." Again he raised her chin, using his other hand to brush the tears away. "Don't cry. I told you--now, only Sarah." And there was no sadness in him now. He seemed happier and more relaxed than she had ever seen him.

"What is it? Please tell me."

"I will." He was not smiling, but his eyes were alight, as though a heavy burden had fallen from him. "You did love each other in a way, you and Jim. I do not understand...how. But it wasn't--it didn't happen the way I thought it did."

Incredulous, she shook her head. "Did my whole life pass before you or what?"

"It is a true memory, and a happy one."

"True...?"

"One you will not forget." A pause. "No, Sarah, I am not jealous."

"Why?" she asked, prepared to be told that jealousy is not logical.

"You did not choose him," he answered serenely. "You chose me."

For the next month, Sarah was totally involved in the unique experience of adjusting to two sets of memories instead of one.

She had assumed that the major adjustment would be to having another person almost continuously "reading" her mind. She had not anticipated this with much pleasure, and was disturbed by the fact that Spock was aware of her apprehension regarding her mental privacy but not unduly concerned about it. A Vulcan might accept the necessity of sharing his private thoughts with a mate, and she was doing her best to accept it as well. But it was not easy, and she wondered at his uncharacteristic insensitivity to her ambivalence.

But once the bonding link was fully established, she realized that he had not been insensitive, but merely biding his time. The total sharing of all thoughts that she had anticipated simply did not happen. The link was largely empathetic; physical contact, even a brief touching of hands, usually brought the mate's thoughts into focus, and with that an awareness that one's own thoughts were being shared as well. Strong emotional concord seemed to act as a conduit, even without contact. But she soon found that her thoughts were still largely her own, even when he was nearby. She was always keenly aware of his mood, to a much greater degree than she had been before the bonding. But she was still very much her own person, and felt some remorse at the memory of her unjustified assumptions.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked once.

But Spock merely raised an eyebrow. "Would you have believed me if I had?"

Only gradually did she realize that she now carried all of his memories in her unconscious mind, even as he now carried hers. The major events of his life had been consciously perceived. She knew the anguish of T'Pring's rejection, the horror of Jim's apparent death, the pain of Spock's long estrangement from his father, even the sting of Amanda's slap and the muted agony of the hours that followed it. She also knew how I-Chaya's tongue felt, what a Vulcan child learns at the time of his initial bonding, even the size and atmosphere and lingering sounds and smells of Sarek's house in ShiKahr. But other things came to her consciousness more slowly.

Often she would wake in the night after seemingly inexplicable dreams. Once she was in the engine room of the Enterprise, standing with Jim and a tall, thin alien, both of them laughing at...a puff of smoke? Another time, she seemed to be inside a mouse hole, with a gigantic black cat pawing at the entrance. A strange, vaguely feminine face nodded benignly as she pushed a wheel chair over barren ground; the man in the chair was a hopeless cripple, horribly deformed. Then there was no one in the chair, and an almost too-handsome figure in Starfleet gold was walking away with a lovely young girl. Another time she was in an arena with McCoy--a gladiator, it seemed. But was that an old-style television camera?

One dream recurred. Jim lay nearby, either hurt or terribly ill. "Don't let them break you," he whispered, and then a cup smashed somewhere and she woke, fighting waves of pain and fear and terrible anger that stayed with her even after she was awake.

But other events in his life were currently far too present in his conscious memory for her to have to experience them initially in dreams.

At her first contact with his memories of Leila Kalomi, Sarah had believed that he had imagined the incident. Only later did she realize that the blurred, fantasy-like quality of those memories was due not only to his abnormal mental state at the time, but also to the fact that he was convinced that the incident would never have happened if he had been in his right mind. She could not fault his logic on that, although she was at once moved almost to tears and exasperated beyond words that he should find it so necessary to obliterate the aura of reality from his memory of his first love. But no Vulcan would have made love to Leila, and Spock considered himself a Vulcan. The conclusion of this unhappy syllogism was obvious: although Spock was intellectually aware of what had happened, his emotions denied it; although he was too honest to tell himself that it never happened and repress the memory, he was able to maintain his Vulcan self-image by telling himself that it never would have happened but for the spores, and unconsciously coloring his memory of Leila with an aura of fantasy.

Not so with Zarabeth. For between the two incidents had come another that had made it impossible for Spock to deny that he was in many ways quite human.

Sarah had been hard put to contain her embarrassed amusement when she first encountered his memory of the Romulan commander whom he had briefly diverted while his captain relieved the enemy of their cloaking device. But she knew that Spock found nothing amusing in the fact that the Romulan had called forth what Sarah had promptly dubbed good old-fashioned lust, largely uncomplicated by the romantic tenderness he had felt for Leila. The experience had sobered him considerably. But his reaction had little relationship to the guilt that a human with similar anti-sexual conditioning would have felt; his concerns were otherwise. There had been no spores on the premises when he had boarded the Romulan flagship. Vulcan biology to the contrary, that had been a near thing, proving him much more human than he had ever believed himself to be.

Troubled but resolute, he had come to a decision. The hypothalamic mechanism that enabled Vulcans to control pain, fear, and anger could also be used to control a half Vulcan's human sexual impulses. Now that he knew the extent of his own susceptibility, he was prepared, and could deal with such a situation in the Vulcan manner.

Had it not been for Zarabeth, Sarah was convinced that she could have argued him out of this position simply by appealing to his sense of humor. But those brief hours in Sarpeidon's ice age had left him with a devastating human guilt that he had never felt before in connection with his sexuality. With Leila he had been in love with love, drunk with the fantasy that he belonged somewhere after a lifetime of belonging nowhere. And when he had left Leila, she had been among friends, with the promise of a new and more worthwhile life. But Zarabeth's icebound cave was no Eden to lure him with false promises, and his time there no dream of Paradise. His memories of those hours ached with regret that was very real, very clear, and not blurred at all: he had left her more alone than she had ever been. Had I been truly Vulcan, I should have left her as I found her. That agonized self-reproach had shaped his future life and his attitudes as significantly as his Vulcan heritage had. For if he had ever doubted that uncontrolled emotion would bring nothing but unhappiness, he did not doubt it now.

In despair, Sarah wished that his attitudes were the result of what Earthmen still called a sex hangup. She could have dealt with that, and even with the peculiarly Vulcan aversion to the rut-like mindlessness of plak tow. But it was not sex that Spock feared. It was the loss of his identity, the loss of his Vulcan sense of self. And that fear was reinforced by both cultural conditioning and intellectual conviction--a combination of staggering proportions.

Yet even in her despair, Sarah was determined to bide her time. Already their isolation had changed him; the Spock who would stretch out on the sand beside her of an evening was not the impassive first officer of the Enterprise, not even the confused half human son of Sarek. And in the weeks since they had first attained telepathic rapport, they had come closer in spirit than they had been before. It seemed to her very possible that the touching of minds would continue to lead to more complete intimacy.

They were both aware that the Time of Mating was approaching--Spock from bitter experience, and Sarah because of her contact with his mind. Outwardly, he appeared completely normal, and no one not mentally en rapport with him would have noticed any change. But Sarah knew that he was experiencing a mild but increasing emotional tension somewhat like a floating anxiety. The cause was entirely physical. Mentally and emotionally he seemed resigned rather than apprehensive. But that resignation was a bit too reminiscent of quiet despair for Sarah to be encouraged by it.

She knew that a decision had to be made before it was too late: whether the two of them should attempt to implant the Genetic Synthesizer that would enable her to conceive.

On the day of their arrival on Tara, she had brought an example of this revolutionary piece of equipment to show the governor-general and his staff. When they had been uninterested because of more pressing concerns, she had dropped the tiny disk into her medical kit, still in its transparent sterile shield, intending to put it back with the rest of her equipment when she had the chance. That chance had never come, and the disk had remained in her medikit with the instruments necessary for its implantation, a procedure as simple as starting an IV would have been to a twentieth-century Terran physician. Unfortunately, however, the location of the implant was the brachial artery of her own left arm, and the procedure required two hands.

"No." Spock's answer was abrupt and spoken aloud when she communicated her wishes to him. They were walking together on the beach after Jill was asleep, and he stopped in his tracks and put both hands behind his back. "I am not a physician, Sarah. What you propose is impossible."

Undeterred, she described the procedure, which she had performed dozens of times on Vulcan. As he listened reluctantly, Spock shifted his gaze away from her, and she knew that he was indeed listening. As a trained scientist, he knew that the procedure would be child's play for him, even without further instruction. And it required only a local anesthetic for her.

When she stopped speaking, he asked simply, "Why?"

"We may spend our lives here." She took his arm, and they began to walk slowly again. "I think we should live as normally as we can--as much like we otherwise would as we can." Silence. Finally she said very softly, "I want to bear your child. A chosen child."

Touching him as she was, she could not fail to perceive the effort it cost him to remain in control. After a moment he said huskily, "My Sarah, that is an emotional reason."

She knew that the possessive had slipped out unintentionally, and that he regretted it. So she forced herself to keep from putting her arms around him and instead laid her cheek briefly against his shoulder. They had come as far down the beach as they ever did when Jill was asleep, and they both turned automatically to retrace their steps.

"Not necessarily. It's part of the commitment--the 'love' as you explained it to me."

"Yes." It was barely a whisper, and they did not speak again. But when they reached the bungalow, they went with one accord to the laboratory.

By the following evening, Sarah knew that they had acted none too soon.

In the gray-green light that followed sunset on Tara, Sarah sat on the edge of Jill's cot, holding the child in her arms as she drifted into sleep. She had explained that the warm drink would make Jill sleep for a long time, but that Spock and her mother would be there while she slept to take care of her. Jill's innocent trust had brought tears to Sarah's eyes, for her emotions were already aroused. She knew that she could choose to mentally tune out her awareness of her mate's physical pain and emotional turmoil. But she had chosen to remain closely linked with him, knowing that her comfort and reassurance was all that stood between him and total isolation and despair.

"Why must I sleep so long?" Jill asked, yawning against Sarah's shoulder.

Sarah thought for a moment, her cheek resting against the child's hair. "There's something very important that I have to do."

"What is it?" Jill asked, her voice already heavy with sleep.

"I can't pronounce it," Sarah whispered. But Jill was already asleep.

She had permitted herself no illusions about the Time of Mating, so she could not be disillusioned. As a physician, she understood the dimensions of the biological imperative that Vulcan's call plak tow, and knew that her mate would probably be incapable of human sexual rapport while in its grip. And so she went to him with wistful resignation as well as loving commitment, telepathically unsophisticated and utterly ignorant of a truth much more fundamental than all of her objective medical facts: if even a relatively superficial touching of minds could cause her to weep with his pain, this deepest of all links could not fail to cause her to burn with his fire.

She could not call it love that they shared, or even desire. Nothing in her human experience had prepared her for the overwhelming need for physical union that consumed them both. But to her great relief as well as his, the violated self was partially soothed, and the spectre of the violated mate partially mitigated, because she too was on fire. In her innocence, she began to hope that once this Time was over, they could be new together without pain, and without shame.

Her innocence, however, was short-lived. For she had neglected to remember that it was not his conscience that would be torn to pieces by the human act of love, but his hard-won sense of self.

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