Jim beamed out with Sarek from outside the hall. When the glitter died down, they were in a large room done in warm colors and filled with unobtrusive machinery. Several parts of the room were concealed by the soft opaque glow of positionable, non-sound-permeable forcefields, and quietly dressed Vulcans passed through the room checking the various pieces of the machinery or looking into one or another of the field-shielded cubicles.

McCoy put his head out through one of them, as if looking around for something—a bizarre effect, as if he had put the front half of him through a wall—and seeing Jim and Sarek, beckoned urgently to them. They stepped through the field after him.

T’Pau lay there unconscious in a Vulcan-style diagnostic bed, with Amanda and Spock on either side of her. Next to Amanda, a woman in a soft brown tunic, with long dark hair, was looking at the diagnostic panel: her face suggested nothing about what she thought she saw. “How is she, Doctor T’Shevat?” Sarek said.

“She has been slipping in and out,” said the doctor. “This is normal for her condition, but it is not a good sign.”

McCoy nodded, and looked over at Jim. “Liver failure,” he said. “She’s past the point where even the healing trance would do her any good.”

“She has forbidden it to be initiated,” T’Shevat said, looking around at them all. “Her declaration of refusal of ‘heroic measures’ has been on file with us for ten years. She has specified the medications she will allow herself to be given, and the procedures she will allow us to perform. But beyond those, we are helpless to take action.”

She looked at McCoy, and he nodded in agreement. “It would need more than heroic measures,” he said to Jim. “She would need a liver transplant, and her immune system isn’t up to it, even with retroviral immunosupport.”

“I will be within call if I’m needed,” T’Shevat said, and she slipped out through the field.

Jim looked down at T’Pau sadly. She looked extremely thin and worn, the skin tight against the bones of her face, the eyes sunken: even the piled-up hair seemed to have lost its gloss. “They could at least have given her a private room,” he said softly.

“That kind of privacy—has never been my concern,” said the tired, cracked voice. T’Pau’s eyes opened, and she looked up at him. “So,” she said.

She looked around at the others: the motion made it plain that even that little movement cost her. Her eyes came to rest on Sarek. “I regret—my lapse in timing…” she said. “I was attempting to forestall this collapse as long as possible. It seems—there are things—”

Her breath gave out: she lay there a moment, getting it back. “You are not to think of that,” Sarek said to her. “Matters are going as well as they can be expected to.”

“They are not,” she said. “There is this small matter of T’Pring.”

“Do not think of that now—”

“If I do not do my thinking now, it will do you little good later,” T’Pau said, and there was a touch of the old snap in her voice. Then she lost her breath again. McCoy looked concerned: Jim noticed that her color was changing slightly, shading into a darker green. It made him nervous.

“Now,” she said. “Sarek, you have asked my counsel about what should be done with this material. Your plan is subtle.” She breathed hard. “It is too subtle. Subtlety and acts hidden in the dark were the root of this plan. If you feed it on more darkness, it will only prosper. You must tell the truth about it, and at once.”

“Simply give the information to the media?” Sarek said.

“Sometimes simplicity—is best,” T’Pau said. “Do as I bid!”

Sarek bowed to her.

“The truth—is able to care for itself,” she said, and ran out of breath again. “But it must be set free. Release the information immediately.”

“I will do so.”

But Sarek did not move. T’Pau was looking at Spock and Kirk, standing together by the side of her bed. Jim looked at her and had one of those sudden odd visions that one sometimes has of another human being. Sometimes one looks at a friend and sees them as they will be when they are old. But Jim gazed at her and saw her when she was young…and breathed out, slightly glad he had not met her. They might have killed each other, or been the best of friends: there was no telling.

“Yes,” she said. And she smiled a little: an astonishing look on that face, that usually seemed if a smile might crack it. “When first I saw thee two together, I thought that I should see one or the other of thee die. Now see how incorrect thought traps us in the end; for I little thought that I should see thee two together again, but that the death should be mine.”

Jim wanted to say something like “You’re not going to die,” except that it would have been so patently absurd, and besides, it seemed like an insult to refuse to acknowledge what was going on. “I would have liked to know you better,” he said. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance.”

“I too,” Spock said: and then reached out and took her hand.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. And she looked around at them all, and said, “I shall go now. There is no use waiting to see when it will happen.”

Sarek took a slow step forward. “No,” T’Pau said. “You do not need this gift, son of my house. You will be Head of House now, and you would have difficulty dealing with mykatra, I think. No.” She turned her head, looked up at Amanda. “I think we will do well together, my daughter. You have the necessary training from Seleya to manage the Gift once I have left it to you: and it will qualify you as Eldest Mother of the house, whatever others may say. Best to so manage matters. If you consent—”

Amanda’s eyes were full of tears. “Of course I do,” she said, her voice quite steady. “Let it be done so.” And she leaned close.

T’Pau reached up one shaking, wrinkled hand to Amanda, who took it and pressed it gently to her face. For a moment, both their eyes closed. The withered lips whispered something inaudible. Amanda nodded.

Then there was no movement, but they knew she was gone.

Slowly her breathing stopped.

Amanda let go the hand, laid it on the coverlet, straightened up slowly. “It’s done,” she said.

The doctor looked in, looked at them.

“She is with the Other,” Sarek said.

T’Shevat nodded. “I grieve with you,” she said. “All Vulcan will grieve with you.”

“Did she leave instructions with you?” Sarek said.

The doctor nodded. “She is to be cremated and the ashes scattered on the sands of the Forge,” she said.

“We will see to it, then.”

The doctor bowed and left. One by one, they all stepped through the field and stood outside it a moment. “Now what?” McCoy said.

“Now we carry out her instructions,” Sarek said. “But first…we tell her world that she is gone.”

“No, my husband,” Amanda said, very firm. There was an odd note in her voice, and everyone looked at her.

“What?” Sarek said, surprised out of politeness.

“No. You must tell them about T’Pring’s plotting first…and you must tell them who has been notified.Then tell them about T’Pau. She would not want—would not have wanted it otherwise: she would not like it, to have her personal life take precedence over the proper running of the government.”

Sarek looked at Amanda as if he had never seen her before…then nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let us be about it.”

They left the clinic, Jim and Spock last of all…and Jim was wondering a great deal about the small, odd smile on Amanda’s face.

The first piece of news threw the planet into an uproar. There were accusations, counteraccusations, denials, carefully worded protestations of innocence, and much dust thrown up to confuse the issue by people who wished to seem as if they knew nothing about it. The debates went on: Jim declined a second session of testimony, feeling he had already said what he needed to.

The second piece of news brought the planet to a standstill. The streets grew silent, and mostly empty of people; the news services did little but talk, in a muted way, about her life: some shut down entirely. Her will was read later that day, including the request for cremation.

Jim went with the family, that night, to the Forge. The cremation had been handled earlier in the day, and when they beamed out, Sarek was carrying a small, pale green porcelain container, exquisitely made, which Jim had seen in the house and not recognized.

What none of them were expecting, when they arrived, were the three million Vulcans gathered around the edges of the Forge. They went on around the miles-wide curve of the desert seemingly forever, the largest single gathering of people in the history of the Federation, all silent, all waiting. Jim was staggered. He looked over at Spock, who shook his head, wordless, and at Amanda, who smiled, slightly and gently, and shook her head too.

Sarek stood there awhile, in the silence, listening to the wind blow: and finally came the sign he was waiting for. There was a bulge of light against the horizon, a curve, a dome, growing, ruddy, shining.

Sarek stepped forward. “Here is what is left of her,” he said to the night. He did not raise his voice, but all the hairs stood up on Jim’s neck as he had a sudden sense of the sound of that voice being passed from mind to mind, at faster than lightspeed, right around that great desert, held in every mind at once, and echoed so that he heard Sarek’s words in millions of individual voices, but all silent. It was overwhelming: he found it hard to bear. He glanced at his fellow humans. Amanda seemed untroubled, and McCoy was standing there with his eyes closed, perhaps in prayer.

“We give her remains to the night from which we arose,” Sarek said, opening the porcelain container to the light wind that had sprung up. “Surely we know that this is not she; she and the Other know it well. And we wish her well in whatever may befall, till the Moon is no longer, and the Stars are no more.”

The wind carried the dust away into the silence. T’Khut slipped upward in silence, flooding the ocean of sand with light.

“Light with her always,” he said, “and with us.”

And he turned away.

They all went home.

“Number twenty-three,” said the voice. Again, it was not Shath.

“I am Spock,” he said, standing still and erect in the middle of the stage. “I hold the rank of Commander in the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets; I serve as First Officer of theStarship Enterprise. And as regards the proposition, I say: nay.”

The room was quite still. Spock said, “My family are in mourning today, and we are grateful for the many expressions of support which have come to us. But meanwhile, the one whom we mourn would desire that we do the business which has brought us here, and so I have come to see it done.”

He turned a little, to favor another part of the auditorium. “I am in a peculiar position, for many of you will know that I am a son of the tradition that now debates casting Earth out, and also a son of Earth itself. Many voices have been raised against Earth here. I could not allow that to influence me. What matters is doing right, not merely blindly defending what is attacked. That iscthia in its true form: and whatever my heritage, I was trained incthia, and hold it dear.”

He looked around the auditorium. “Much has been said,” he said slowly, “about the tendency of humans to emotion, or our own mastery of it. Little has been said about thepurposes of emotion. It has many—primarily to guide one toward one kind of behavior or away from another. Doing good, brings joy: doing evil, sorrow; and all these emotions we possess, and master, so as not to contaminate others’ mastery with them.”

Spock took a long breath. “We are much concerned,” he said, “with the damage our emotions may do one another. We are right to be concerned, perhaps. There have been many millions of people killed on this planet, over the millennia, due to the lack of management of emotion. But it is possible to overdo this concern: to be overly concerned over what damage our emotions (or management of them) may do others: sometimes even over what damage others’ emotions may do us.

“I am a Vulcan, bred to peace,” Spock said. “Many of us have said that, after S’task, who said it first, even though he was of the first generation of that breeding. I think that breeding was more robust than most of us allow ourselves to believe. It seems too much like ego, like self-aggrandizement, to say openly, ‘We are strong’; and so we pretend not to be, and do ourselves, perhaps, more harm than if we simply admitted our strength and moved on.

“But that pretense betrays our great secret to those who can see: and the secret is that,cthia or not, we are still uncertain about our mastery. We are still, as Surak said, afraid of one another, and of ourselves: afraid that the emotion we so carefully manage will somehow break loose and doom us again.

“The trouble is, it is doing so now. It is doing so, most perniciously, disguised ascthia, as concern for the other’s well-being.” Spock lifted his head. “For some years now I have been privileged to serve with some of the finest beings that any Vulcan could imagine. I came among them most concerned for mycthia, and their safety, due to what seemed like rampant emotion: I saw them as unstable, illogical, potentially dangerous. It took time to find out otherwise. I spent years watching humans wrestle with their emotions: and from their wins and losses alike, I discovered something—that those who wrestle with emotions, learn far more about mastering them than those who seek to hide their emotions, or suppress them. The humans never stop this wrestling, and as such they have mastered emotions for which we may as yet not be prepared.

“We therefore have a great deal to learn from them. But it is entropy’s way to push us away from what will benefit us, and the fear that we should have cast out is once again attempting to betray us. That fear makes us look so hard at the entropic nature of emotion, its power to drive us apart, that we ignore its ability toresist entropy, its power to draw us together. As we were drawn together last night.”

Everything was silence. “It is illogical to ignore such a power,” Spock said. “It is illogical to turn away from another species which has taught us so much about our own fears, and our own hopes, and has shared so many of its fears and hopes with us. I shall not turn my back on such a species. I may not: I am of them. My choice is made.” He looked around the auditorium again. “For you, perhaps, there remain only decisions. I would remind you, though, that the word for ‘decide’ is descended from older words meaning to kill; options and opportunities die when decisions are made. Be careful what you kill.”

And he stepped down from the stage, to silence.

An official stepped up right after him, a slender little woman with the first curly hair Jim had seen on a Vulcan. “I must inform you now, you here and the audiences on the various nets,” she said, “that the threshold number of notifications to stop debate has now been received. Voting on the motion will begin immediately, and conclude in one solar day, or twenty-two point one Federation standard hours. Thank you all for your attention.”

Jim got up from his seat as many other people did. Beside him, McCoy stretched lazily, and stood up too. “Now what?” Bones said, as Spock came up to them.

“Now,” Jim said, “we wait.”

They spent the night at Sarek and Amanda’s, eating and drinking and talking, and occasionally bringing up the news on the computer to look at it. There was nothing about the vote: there were no “returns” as such. All the information was correlated in one central computer at shi’Kahr, and would be released only when the vote was complete, late the next afternoon.

But there was quite a lot of other news, mostly relating to T’Pring’s undercover smear campaigns. “I see that she and Shath are ‘assisting the authorities with their inquiries,’ ” Jim said, sounding faintly satisfied.

“You mean she’s in the clink,” McCoy said. “Serves her right.”

“Doctor,” Spock said, sounding faintly offended, “it has been a long time since any form of custody here has gone ‘clink.’ ”

Bones laughed. “I still can’t bring myself to be particularly upset,” he said. “The poisonous little creature. I hope she doesn’t bite anyone while she’s there. They’d probably have to have something amputated.”

“Doctor…”

“All right, all right.”

Amanda and Sarek were out sitting in the garden together, talking in low voices; Spock was toying with the computer keyboard. “You look nervous, Spock,” Jim said.

Spock looked at him sidelong. “Emotion again…. ”

“And after your wonderful defense of it today.”

“I was not defending it,” Spock said. “Whatis, and is valid, does not need defense.”

Jim chuckled. “All right. Listen, can you get me an uplink to the ship from there? I want a look at the BBS.”

Spock thought a moment. “That should be no problem. Wait a moment.” His fingers danced over the keys.

McCoy was looking at a watercolor hanging on one blackstone wall, a beautiful semi-abstract of spring flowers native to Earth. “Sweet peas,” he said. “How long has it been since I saw real sweet peas?”

“Talk to Bio,” Jim said. “They have some seeds, I think.”

“No…I mean a whole field of them. Waving in the breeze and smelling wonderful. That beautiful sweet scent.”

“Talk to Harb Tanzer. He may have something on file.”

McCoy rolled his eyes.

“Ready, Captain,” Spock said. “It will be wanting your password.”

Jim sat down and tapped at the keyboard for a moment, giving the command to find out whether he had any messages waiting.

The computer screen said:

        Those bold in not daring will survive.

          Of those two, either may benefit or harm.

        But who can know why?

          Even the enlightened find this difficult.

        Does not contend,

          yet skillfully triumphs,

“Now what the devil do you make of that,” Bones said from behind him.

“Do I readyour mail over your shoulder?” Jim said, amused. He sat back in the chair. “I’ll tell you what I think of it. I think someone’s telling me to have a quiet night, because everything’s going to be fine.”

“Hmf,” Bones said, and wandered off. But Jim rocked a little, there in the chair, and smiled.

The next afternoon found them all in the living room together again, waiting for the announcement about the vote. The news was practically blathering, in the meantime, full of the details on the corruption investigation and revelations of the briberies; but none of them had any ears for it. They waited.

Finally, at exactly one Vulcan day after Spock had stepped down from the stage, the image in the tank flickered, and they found themselves looking at a simple 3D display of letters and numbers. Jim couldn’t read them, since the translator worked only on the spoken word. But McCoy read it out loud.

“For secession: five billion, four hundred million, three hundred eighty thousand, six hundred five.

“Against secession: nine billion—”

Jim whooped. Sarek leaned back in his chair. Amanda grinned, and McCoy grinned too, and squeezed her hand.

Spock looked over at Jim and put up one eyebrow. “I seem to have won my side bet,” he said.

And he turned to McCoy. “I believe the correct phrase is, ‘Ante up.’ ”