THE VISIT

Part 2 of 2

Neat as a pin. How well he remembered his own childhood, when his Vulcan alter had insisted on an orderly room at bedtime while he himself had often longed to simply crawl into bed and clean up in the morning.

T'Ara slept quietly and deeply, wearing a plain, toga-like Vulcan sleeping robe in contrast to Jill's pajamas. (For tonight. Tomorrow night, he knew, Jill might wear a flowered nightgown.) Unlike her sister, this child of his did not sprawl on her stomach, her covers rumpled, perhaps with one foot sticking out from under them, perhaps with her mouth slightly open. T'Ara slept like a little princess, on her back, arms at her sides, her dark hair center-parted and drawn smoothly behind her delicately pointed ears. She looked relaxed rather than rigid, but would probably not move between the moment she closed her eyes and composed herself for sleep and the moment she awoke. In the space between her ears and her shoulders, the ends of her hair still flipped stubbornly this way and that instead of lying straight. But other than that one relatively human touch, she appeared totally Vulcan. Only her father, gazing down at her, fully understood that two children slept there in one body, and that one of them might even now be dreaming very human dreams.

He stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind his back and his emotions in chaos. Human though he was, the Vulcan attitude of profound parental protectiveness for his offspring had been deeply ingrained in him, and was now sharpened by his almost uncontrollable need to express his human love in human ways. She was a beautiful child, and she was his. At that moment, he wanted more than anything to take her in his arms and tell her how proud he was of her. And yet, remembering his own conflict-ridden childhood, he knew that he could never subject his own child to such an unbearably intense emotional experience. T'Ara would be raised as a Vulcan. Both he and Sarah had concurred with Sarek's opinion that the ritual of a life decision was not really appropriate for a child who was so dominantly Vulcan physiologically; had the often tragic results of bringing a part-Vulcan child up as a human been known when Spock was a child, he would not have been given that option. That choice had given them both a responsibility not to make T'Ara's life more difficult than it was. Sarah, he knew, was discharging that responsibility with integrity. Even all human, he could not intentionally do otherwise.

But still he stood beside his child's bed wishing, as every human does occasionally, that things were different. He barely heard Sarah come to the door and stand there watching him, and was almost startled when she whispered, "She won't break, you know."

"No," he answered softly. "I can't wake her. But--oh, Sarah, how I envy my father. How I wish this child of mine were really mine."

He had spoken with deep weariness rather than with uncontrolled emotion. But he heard her catch her breath in utter astonishment, and realized that whole and entire, he would never have expressed that thought aloud, even to her.

"What's happened to you?" Her eyes were wide with fear once more. "Spock, please--"

"I will." For a moment his gaze returned to the face of his child, still sleeping peacefully. Then he moved toward his wife, again experiencing a piercingly sweet emotional and physical longing that he refused to control. For once in his life he would go to her without thought of the consequences, refusing to think about what price his alter--or perhaps even his own conscience--might exact of him afterwards. Sarah, at least, would understand. Sarah, at least, could not be hurt.

As he moved toward her, Sarah thought that he was about to speak again. But instead he gathered her up in his arms, carrying her easily the short distance to their bedroom, pushing the door closed after him with the heel of his boot. Laying her on the bed, he stepped away briefly, removed his boots and stripped to the waist as she began to forget what it was that she had wanted to ask him. But when he lay down beside her still partially clothed, she realized that her question would be answered before they satisfied their mutual hunger--more swiftly than it could be answered in words and on a much more fundamental level.

The touch of his fingers was light but firm, familiar, reassuring. She was sure now that the worst was over, and that they would soon be one in love....

His truth seared her like a blue-white flame, the pain tearing at her so that she could not even cry out. Even Jim Kirk, who had experienced a similar rending asunder, could not have grasped what Sarah understood in an instant of deep rapport. Spock, who had spent his life searching for a way to integrate, had awakened from a phaser stun totally disintegrated, the ties between the two halves of his personality severed and throbbing with unbearable psychic pain. Since it was only the human part of him that lay with her, his face a mask of remembered agony in the half darkness above hers, it was only his pain that she could really share--the feeling of being stripped of his control, for eternal moments facing the possibility that he might have been left with no control at all. In a flash of telepathic comprehension, she understood that his very sanity had been threatened those first few days, and that only his intelligence had eventually drawn him back, step by step, from the brink of madness.

But in the mirror of his memory, she also saw the face of his Vulcan alter--the other half of him whose absence had been as obvious to her mind as the absence of half his body would have been to her senses. Unable to touch the Vulcan's mind, she could only surmise the depth of the anguish she now saw in those haunted eyes.

But then the vision began to slip and slide, out of focus. Dimly she realized that both she and her human lover had risen above themselves telepathically, had gone to the absolute limit of their human capabilities in order to achieve as complete a rapport as possible. Yet, fundamentally, they were far out of synch; the bonding link, established and strengthened for years between the entire Spock and his wife, stretched like an empty road between their minds--a road that they had formerly walked sure footed, but which was now almost inaccessible. Temporarily, at least, her bondmate did not exist as a single entity, and there was simply no way she could reach him as bondmate and husband. Instead, she had momentarily, and at the cost of great psychic energy, achieved deep rapport with a human mind whose configurations were essentially those of a stranger. That rapport was now thinning and weakening. Soon, she realized, it would be gone, and mentally fatigued as they were, they might not even be able to achieve the almost reflexive emotional empathy of their initial embrace in the garden. And as that realization dawned on her, she knew that it was dawning on him as well.

She realized then that they were both panicking, unable to face losing the rapport their love had fed on since Tara, and yet losing it all the faster because neither of them could control the panic that was destroying it.

Because they were both only partially clothed, the barriers to the physical union they were both aching for were relatively easily disposed of. But even that took time, time that their swiftly waning mindlink would not allow them. She was reminded briefly of another joining, mindless and with no rapport at all. But that memory passed almost immediately, for it bore no similarity to what was happening to them now--two bodies striving desperately to compensate for the dying mindtouch as well as to satiate physical desire, somehow failing more completely in the former even as they approached the latter. They climaxed almost at the same moment, the faint thread of mental contact snapping under the strain. And they were each alone.

Almost weeping at the bitter irony of what had happened to them, she tried with all the strength she had left to hold him to her physically. But she knew that too was useless. Even all human, he was infinitely stronger than she was. For a moment he rested, trembling, his face hidden against her throat. Then he began to pull away.

"And where will you go?" she asked desperately. "Will you run away and hide again because love has to be learned?"

Too much, she thought, watching him. Whole, he could control. But separated out, he could not even cope. He looked like a ghost of his former self already.

Gently she eased herself out from under him, and without a word went to the wardrobe where she kept her sleeping robe and the one he wore at home. When she returned to the bed, grimly modest, he was sitting on the edge, leaning on both arms, his head bent.

"Put this on, then," she said quietly. He raised his head, stared at her for a moment, and then complied. "Now sit down here with me," she went on in the same even tone, crawled nimbly to the center of the bed, and sat with her feet tucked under her. "We're going to talk this time, my love. No more running away when things go wrong. You've showed me what you want--what your humanity--" There were tears in his eyes. "Come here," she said softly, sure that she would have to coax him, perhaps even beg him. But with a heartbreakingly despairing gesture of capitulation, he stretched out and hid his face in her lap, laying his arms around her gently, almost fearfully.

For a time they were silent, he fighting tears that he would not permit himself to shed, and she with her head bent, her hair falling forward and almost brushing his shoulder as she lightly touched his hair, the tip of his ear, the upswept slope of his eyebrow with gentle, caressing fingers. Make a wish, my darling. And her own eyes burned. For she knew that in her heart of hearts, she had wished him all human more than once.

"It wouldn't have to be like that," she said finally, softly. "How can I make you believe that it wouldn't have to be like that?"

He did not answer, and she knew that he would not. His own words to her, long ago on Tara, came back to her once again: If I came to you as I did then, I would not be Spock, but someone else. And she knew that he now believed that he had conclusively proved his own hypothesis.

"It wasn't wanting each other that made us strangers," she said helplessly. "It was--" Your humanity. Again her eyes burned with bitter tears. For it was his humanity that she had always believed would one day make them one.

"Humans believe in fairy tales," he said indistinctly, his voice muffled against her. Slowly, wearily, he turned on his back, took one of her hands and pressed it briefly to his lips. "Shadows are real, and men are shadows, and this--harrowing experience that we have just weathered together is supposed to be a kind of self-creation."

"Cynicism doesn't suit you, my love," she answered with attempted lightness.

"Doesn't it?" he asked wryly. "Sarah, I have now made love to three women in my lifetime, and very shortly afterward, each of them was miserable. An odd sort of self-creation." He sighed deeply. "If I may say so."

"But you're not whole. You're not yourself. You can't take this experience as representative--"

"He said I'd be sorry." A small, painful smile. "He said we'd both regret this, you and I. I thought it was because he knows you better than I do. But it wasn't. He knows me better than I do."

There was no use arguing, she knew. Human though he might be, the man who lay with his head in her lap was a Vulcan born and bred, a grown-up child playing truant from himself only to come face to face with the hard facts of his own ethic--an ethic that insisted that uncontrolled emotion is unhealthy and can lead to nothing but unhappiness for all concerned. Every direct experience he had ever had with seasonless human sexuality had substantiated that ethic. He was unalterably convinced. There was no use arguing. And yet--

"Why did you come here tonight?"

The look of utter longing that he gave her almost broke her heart. "I wanted you to know," he said softly, "how much I want you."

She had expected him to answer simply I wanted you, and had not been at all sure how she would reply. Even the Vulcan ethic acknowledged the reality of emotions and physical needs, and so his admission could not in itself have been lovingly used against him. But the answer he gave and the way in which he gave it told her that somewhere deep within him he knew the truth that he was not yet nearly able to understand, let alone admit--that he knew intuitively that his desire for his woman and hers for him was not a dangerous emotion to be acknowledged and controlled, but a priceless gift to be shared. And she wondered briefly if, had his humanity never been separated out, he would ever have grasped that even intuitively.

"Why did you want me to know?" she asked, knowing that he must come to it himself, but wanting to make sure that there was in fact a question to be answered. "If wanting me is illogical and therefore wrong, why was it so terribly important to you that I know it?"

"I don't know." He moved away from her and sat up on the edge of the bed, his back toward her. "I don't know." It was only a whisper.

"Remember that, my love," she went on softly. "And when you're whole again, make him remember that you came to tell me something but you don't know why. Someday the two of you together might be able to answer that question." She was silent for a moment, hoping that he would indeed remember. Then: "Are you very tired?" He nodded, bowing his head. "Then I think it would be safe for you to share my bed, don't you?"

Slowly he turned to look at her, obviously not sure what she meant.

"As long as we're well-dressed," she added matter-of-factly, but unable to keep from smiling a little. "Please let's lie down. I'm not going to attack you, and all things considered, I think the two of us bedding down separately like a couple of virgins would be--highly illogical."

The quiet smile he gave her then was so open and so vulnerable that for a moment she wondered if they were as safe as they thought they were. But a few minutes later, settled comfortably against him and within the curve of his arm, she was sure they were both far too tired to risk repeating the psychic upheaval of their earlier attempt at lovemaking. He was obviously relaxed, and his breathing was even and normal.

Human normal.

A chill touched her, and suddenly she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

"Sarah?"

"The synthesis," she whispered. "The rejoining. There were doubts in your mind."

"We must attempt it," he answered quietly. "There is no other way."

She lay still, fighting the fear. The knowledge of what had happened to him on Fornax II had come to her immediately before an emotional experience that was indeed harrowing; her mind had accepted the information, but after the first shock, her emotions had been otherwise occupied until now. His mind had transmitted the scientific facts, including the knowledge that his alter was even now at work on the last steps of the necessary research. But the research was not even complete?

She could not cry, or even make a sound. His death yawned like a chasm at her feet, even more immediate to her emotions than her own and far more horrible in its implications. She had always known that he faced death often. But not like this. Not when the only alternative was a sundered half life, forever separated from self. There was no choice, and she knew it. But the research was not even complete?

She would have known instantly if they had been en rapport, and was sure they were not. But he obviously knew that she was close to breaking, and why. Putting both arms around her, he drew her close against him, comforting her silently with his nearness. He made no attempt at empty words--did not try to tell her that everything would be all right, not to worry, or anything else that any other human might have said. But somehow his own calm, unquestioning acceptance of the necessity of his rejoining with his alter seemed to radiate outwards until she was enveloped by it and soothed at the deepest levels of her being. It was not telepathy, she was sure. Mental contact was still almost impossible for them. The only similar experience she could remember had taken place long ago, when she had fallen asleep in a dark, airtight cave on a planet decimated by an atomic explosion--fallen asleep at last because an almost total stranger had been there too, close by, not even touching her, but reassuring her by his presence that, frightened as she was, she was not alone. Only half of him was here with her now. But for these few moments at least, half of him was more than enough.

Relaxed now, almost drowsy in spite of herself, she asked, "Why did you do this?" Her hand moved, touching his arm where it encircled her still.

His faint sigh lightly stirred her hair. "I have no logical explanation. Does that please you?"

Yes. But she did not answer aloud. Aloud she said: "Remember this too, then." She closed her eyes, intending only to rest them after a long, long day. But when the moment was over, dawn was breaking outside the window. She was alone in bed, and a slim figure in Starfleet blue stood between her and the light, looking down at her as she awoke.

She sat up, unable to see him clearly because the light from the window was behind him. For a moment the nightmare of his painful sundering seemed only that. He was at the moment simply Spock, first officer of the U.S.S Enterprise, returning to duty, and she his wife.

Recognizing the significance of what she was doing only as she did it, she raised her hand, two fingers extended, knowing that when he was whole again, he would surely remember that she had tacitly acknowledged his entirety even in its absence.

He responded in kind, without hesitation. As their fingers touched, she whispered "Peace and long life, Spock," intensely aware of how uniquely appropriate those words were now.

Temporarily weary in mind and body, the human Spock had slept lightly beside his wife for a time, and had awakened in a state of moderately strong sexual arousal. Sarah had moved away from him in sleep, and he lay still for a while, perversely convinced that somehow, someday, he would be free to take advantage of the delicious intimacy of sharing the same bed with his wife. Now the ghost of psychic impotence haunted him even as physical impotence might have haunted a non-telepathic human male; physical need to the contrary, he hadn't the heart to try again. Remembering, he experienced a psychic aftershock that very nearly demoralized him physically. Both he and Sarah, he realized in despair, were irrevocably spoiled as far as ordinary human sexuality was concerned.

Even joined with his alter during pon farr, with his own reaction to the frenzied compulsive mating conditioned even as the Vulcan's was, he had experienced occasional intimations of the unique psycho-physical ecstasy of mind-linked sexuality freely chosen. And he knew that his alter had perceived this as well. Together, they had as yet been unable to integrate that knowledge with their common ethic, and it had remained until now a thing apart--a memory they did not avoid, but approached with nervous caution, an unsolved puzzle to which neither of them could find the key. But now he realized that they had never tried to find that key together, had always assumed that the solution for one could not be the solution for the other.

Silently he rose and dressed, his mind trying to grasp an insight that lay, like the pre-dawn sun, just below his mental horizon. Then a memory that had lain dormant in his mind these last hours glowed and sprang to life: his alter, seated before their desk computer very nearly at the end of his Vulcan endurance, completely baffled by a totally illogical step in Exar's last notes. The human had come up behind him, glanced at the screen, and the answer was immediately apparent to him. Exar had made a leap of faith on the basis of practical results: of 346 test animals, all 346 had been successfully rejoined as the result of a particular program sequence. Exar had happened on the procedure by chance, and had been totally unable to prove why it worked.

They had stared at the screen together, the human unable to follow all of Exar's mathematics but unalterably convinced that the results were valid, the Vulcan knowing the equations by heart, but unable to reach beyond abstractions to accept the obvious in the concrete.

"Q.E.D.," the human had said finally. "It works because it works. Can't you see that?"

It works because it works.

Now fully dressed, the human Spock stood by the bed, gazing down at his sleeping wife. The Vulcan had commandeered McCoy's lab, rigged a small apparatus and spent several long nights separating and rejoining half a dozen offspring of a Terran white rat and a Sagittarian weaselmouse. Each procedure had worked flawlessly, and still he was not convinced. How could the human hope to convince him on the basis of no success at all?

And was he really convinced himself?

Together, he thought. Together we could understand. He did not know how he knew this. But he knew.

Remember that, my love. And when you're whole again, make him remember.

Sarah had awakened then, and intuitively demonstrated her awareness of Spock's entirety by offering his human self the symbolic sign of Vulcan marital unity. Leaving her at last, he deeply regretted that his alter had not had a chance to experience first-hand the depth of her commitment to them both.

The courtyard was still dark, although dawn illuminated the sky. I-Chaya had been asleep, but opened his eyes and stared reproachfully at his master's humanity, almost as though someone were trying to play a very unfunny joke on him.

"It's all right, old friend," Spock told him gently. "I won't trouble you much longer." And he took a deep breath, savoring the odors of home one last time.

Behind him, the gate clicked.

Faulty as his human telepathic abilities might be, he knew at once who had stopped dead just inside the gate, his own Vulcan mind suddenly seething with anguished confusion and that was almost horror. Their Vulcan parent/child relationship had ended forever when Spock himself became a parent. But those long years of deep mental rapport could never be completely forgotten, and Sarek's immediate presence was as palpably recognizable to Spock as the essence of home.

For a moment his fingers tightened around his communicator. But he was not eighteen now. Even all human, he could not run this time. Yet when he turned to face his father, he could not help but back away. Sarek must not touch him, he knew. The agony in those dark eyes told him that his father had already perceived the truth, although certainly not its cause. Telepaths though Amanda and Sarah were, they were both untrained, both human. And neither of them had spent decades involved in a unique relationship with the mental configurations of the entire Spock. Only his father could sense his essence, even as he sensed Sarek's, and even without physical contact.

Sarek's hand reached out, to comfort or to confirm his own perceptions. Spock could not tell which, and he was fairly sure that Sarek did not know either. He was more disturbed than Spock had ever seen him, and physical contact with its accompanying heightened awareness was perhaps more than he could bear. And yet, almost instinctively, he sought it.

I-Chaya had lumbered to his feet. And now he whimpered--a moan of vicarious, quasi-intelligent empathy such as would never be heard on Earth except from a human throat. And in his concern lest the rest of the family be frightened, Spock momentarily forgot to apologize for being human.

"Stay!" He stepped quickly to the sehlat and laid his hand on the animal's head, forgetting also that this move might well cost him his arm or even his life, remembering only that if I-Chaya screamed, two little girls could no longer be spared at least a share of the suffering he had caused by coming home. "Kroyka!" he repeated--and realized for the first time that he had been speaking in Vulcan even as he thought in English.

And I-Chaya stayed--rigid, but silent and unmoving under his master's hand.

Not daring to remove his hand just yet, Spock met his father's astounded gaze. "All will be well, Sarek," he said--in Vulcan, quite steadily, speaking deliberately as adult to adult. "Trust me." Then, carefully, with a silent telepathic command to the sehlat, he removed his hand and stepped away.

Sarek dropped his outstretched hand. And then, slowly, he raised it again, palm vertical, fingers spread, his gaze still holding his son's. Silently, Spock returned the salute.

They faced each other a moment longer, each aware that prolonging this painful confrontation would serve no logical purpose. Then, using his communicator, Spock quietly summoned temporary annihilation.

Just before he dematerialized, he experienced an irrational urge to stay, to comfort and reassure his father as he had Sarah. But his Vulcan-bred intellect knew that Sarek did not need his comfort or his reassurance. In asking for his father's trust, he had conveyed his own certainty that he could handle the matter unassisted. And the Vulcan expression translating All will be well was not empty reassurance, but a statement of significant probability. Thus he had already conveyed all the necessary information, and in addressing this father as Sarek, he had also notified him that questioning would invade the privacy of an adult. Sarek, he knew, would take no offense at this. It was Spock's right, however grave the circumstances.

Yet once he materialized aboard the Enterprise, reaction set in. He was all human, and the experiences of the last few hours had taxed him almost beyond endurance. The sight of Jim alone at the console released a flood of emotion that he could barely control, and he stepped off the platform in a daze, exhausted.

"Are you all right?" Jim came toward him quickly.

"It's no good," he said helplessly. "Apart, neither of us is any good."

"I'd argue that," Jim answered quietly, "but you don't look like you're in any shape for an argument." Apprehensively: "Do you want to just stay in here for a few minutes?"

But the touch of his hand on Spock's shoulder had already had its effect.

"No," he answered, and suddenly he was just normally tired. His father had trusted him, even all human. Surely he could trust himself. "I'm all right, Jim. Thank you."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"You already have"--he smiled a little--"my friend."

After he had left her, Sarah got up and stood for a moment, undecided. It was still barely dawn, and some time before the rest of the household would be up. But she could not sleep again.

Her almost automatic offering of the two-finger touch to the human Spock had abruptly reminded her that there was another who had not shared her bed. Now she began to pace slowly up and down the room, her arms folded across her breast, unable to banish the restlessness that she could barely define. She had seen the human Spock as a separate entity, held him in her arms and been comforted by him, spent the night at his side--even touched his mind, however briefly and traumatically. But of the Vulcan she knew very little--except that he had been left alone while someone else made love to his woman.

It didn't matter, she told herself firmly. Once the two were rejoined, it would not matter. For the entire Spock would remember this night at home as though he had been whole....

But he had not been whole.

In fantasy, she saw the Vulcan in his quarters, resting briefly on his bed. The human, she suspected, had slept little at her side, for he had left the ship at midday, not at evening. It was only now the middle of the evening on the Enterprise, and the Vulcan might well be tired from his work. And if he rested, tired in mind and body, what unwelcome thoughts and dangerous visions might overtake his mind?

She stood still in the middle of the room, eyes closed, arms now at her sides. And it came to her that her fantasy was a shade too real to be only that.

Her telepathic powers were largely untested and wholly untrained, and she knew from recent painful experience with the human that the channels established through the bonding link would be almost totally useless in reaching his alter as well. But she had always been sure that the telepathic abilities of the entire Spock were well equal to those of a full Vulcan, erratic though his control might be. Both of his parents were highly sensitive telepaths, and if Spock's hereditary talents were unreliable in his human half, they might well reside largely in the Vulcan.

A small stab of fear shot through her, a fleeting suspicion that she might be hallucinating, and that the vivid certainty that she was now in at least partial contact with Spock's Vulcan mind was simply wishful thinking. There were no visual images, and nothing even approximating verbal communication was taking place. Yet somehow he was there in her mind--infinitely more alien than his human alter, and yet somehow more familiar.

She had never had occasion to observe Spock on duty aboard the Enterprise since she had become his wife, and had wondered more than once how a person with so many inner conflicts could also be the ultra-efficient scientist and exemplary officer that his reputation signified. But now she understood. The human's mind was quick and curious, frequently exhibiting an acute awareness of the illogical and often humorous subtleties of life--an awareness that delighted her whenever she perceived it. But the human aspects of Spock's intellect were essentially undisciplined and often as unreliable as his psi powers--almost like the mind of a child prodigy who has never quite been taken seriously, even by himself.

The mind with which she was now in tenuous but undeniable contact was to the human's as tempered steel is to quicksilver--shining with the same vital brilliance, but disciplined, balanced, possessed of an alien serenity that was unalterably non-human. Motivations aside, it had been necessary for the human to hold her in his arms in order to comfort and support her emotionally. But the entire Spock, a virtual stranger, had been able to reach out mentally to steady and reassure her during their first night on Tara because of the resources of his Vulcan nature--even as his Vulcan mind steadied and reassured her now, across thousands of miles of space.

Awed and a little humbled, she was able to grasp through this temporary contact that the Vulcan, even as he played chess with Jim earlier and then returned to his work at the computer, had been able to evaluate and examine the bizarre, potentially disastrous sexual triangle in which he found himself an unwilling observer/participant--evaluate it as though it were an explosive device set to blow his personal universe to nothingness. The same literally superhuman objectivity that had helped to make him the best first officer in the fleet--the Vulcan control that was sometimes unreliable even in the entire Spock--now took him inexorably outside and beyond his own emotional involvement even as it would have abstracted the entire Spock intellectually from the fear of his own death had there been a murderous time bomb embedded deep in the core of the Enterprise, and he the only one capable of deactivating it.

The Vulcan did not deny his emotional involvement even to himself. Sarah might have called it jealousy, as his alter had. But no one word could begin to describe his soul-shattering sense of loneliness, of hurt, even of betrayal. Yet side by side with it remained his steadfast refusal to allow his emotions to rule his thoughts, much less his actions. Reason told him that his wife's lover was Spock, even as he was, and a lifetime of discipline enabled him to believe.

Yet she felt a great sense of relief that she had been able to reach him. Even though the contact was tenuous, she perceived that his awareness of it and of her reasons for wanting it had strengthened their bond immeasurably. For a moment it seemed that she could almost see him--that he spoke and she could almost hear. A gentle voice, and deeply tender.

She literally held her breath--even though she knew that any sound she might make would have no effect on her ability to hear the voice that spoke to her now without sound, but with infinite love.

My Sarah, on Vulcan there is time for everything. Even for us.

And the tenuous link threaded away and dissolved--not painfully, as with the human, but with the equivalent of a wistful sigh.

She raised her head then and wiped away her tears, realizing for the first time that the crimsoning sun had smoothed away the night, and that somewhere a bird was calling, perhaps to its mate.

Several days later, she received a brief message. It was a printout, delivered by Starfleet messenger--a piece of paper that she could hold in her hands and reread again and again.

It contained only four words: I am once again.