Jim sat in his cabin on theEnterprise the next morning, gazing at the small data screen in annoyance.

Jim fumed quietly. On one hand he was very glad to have seen the message—it certainly confirmed what T’Pau had been saying—but on the other hand, he wanted more and more to know who Bugs was.

Not that he could find out, of course. Here was one of the places where the crew’s privacy had to be respected utterly: otherwise the whole system of the BBS lost its value. Speech here, at least, had to be free.

And pretty free it is,Jim thought, annoyed. He kept paging through the messages. There were many agreeing with Bugs, annoyed at being considered a “bloody sword.” There were some who refused to take the quote seriously at all, and others who suspected it had been taken out of context, and one who pointed out that Bugs was probably in violation of copyright by transcribing the message from the Vulcan information service without obtaining permission. But the last reply to the message brought Jim up short:

How about that,Jim thought, and gazed at the screen with interest.

Llarian. Now who would that be? And what’s the reference? It sounds familiar somehow.Jim chewed absently on the one knuckle of his folded hands.But he or she or it has a point. “A skillful employer remains low.” Who in Vulcan has enough power and influence to get something like that into the information services?

He started to shut the screen down, then paused for a moment and reached out to touch the communicator toggle on his desk. “Bridge. Communications.”

“Communications, Uhura,”came her cheerful voice.“Good morning, Captain!”

Jim rubbed his head ruefully. He still had a touch of headache from the party last night: the high gravity seemed to have that effect on him. “More or less, Nyota,” he said. “Screen dump coming in to your station. Have the computer run a check on it. I want to know which Vulcan news service it came from, the name of the author, the date, any other information you find pertinent.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Ready.”

Jim touched the key to instruct the desk screen to dump its contents to the Communications board. “Got it?”

“It’s in. Will advise, Captain.”

“Good. Kirk out.”

He stood up, stretched, rubbed his head again. His knees still ached, too.I could always have Environmental get me a grav neutralizer, he thought…then rejected the thought immediately. Vulcans probably thought Earth people were weak and delicate enough as it was: why help the image along by showing up in a neutralizer? He would take their gravity with the best of them, and be damned to the whole lot of them.

Still, his head hurt. He reached down to the communicator toggle on his desk. “Sickbay.”

“Sickbay,”said a cheerful voice.“Burke here.”

It was Lia Burke, McCoy’s head nurse since Chapel had started working full-time on her doctorate. “Lia,” Jim said, “where’s the doctor?”

“He’s gone downplanet already, Captain. Said he was looking for something.”

That made Jim blink: McCoy was not exactly an early riser by preference. “Did he say what?”

“He said if you called and asked, I was to tell you he was going to buy a gross of paperweights with snowflakes inside them. Sir.”Lia sounded mildly bemused.

She’s not alone,Jim thought. “All right. Listen, I need something for my head.”

“High-grav syndrome,”she said immediately.“I can prescribe you a little something for that. Come on down.”

Jim put an eyebrow up. “Nurses can prescribe?”

There was a brief silence on the other end, and then a laugh.“Are you living in the twentieth century? Sir. Of course we can.” There was a brief, wry pause.“We can count,too.”

“Noted,” Jim said. “I’ll be right down.”

When he got to sickbay, Lia was scribbling something with a lightpen on a computer pad. She was a little curly-haired woman, very slender, almost always smiling; it took something particularly grave to remove that smile. “Captain,” she said, putting down the pad and picking up a hypospray. “Here you go.”

“Am I allowed to ask you what it is?”

“Would you ask Dr. McCoy?” she said.

Jim considered. “Probably not.”

She gave him a cheerful shame-on-you! sort of look. “Well, then. It’s just hemocorticovilidine; it thins your blood out a little.”

“Thins it out?When I’m going to Vulcan? Get away from me with that thing.”

“Too late,” she said, and it was: the spray hissed against his arm. “It simply changes the density of your blood plasma slightly, on demand from the air pressure on the outside, or lack of it. The problem on these high-grav planets is similar to high-altitude syndrome some ways.” She put the hypo away. “But you should drink extra water while you’re down there.”

“Lieutenant,” Jim said patiently, “there’s a problem with drinking extra water on a heavy-gravity planet…. ”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Tell me about it. But unless you want your head to ache, you’d better do it.”

“All right,” he said, and thanked her, and headed back to his cabin.Well, I should head down to Vulcan and stir around a little, see some people and things. Then go visit with Sarek and Amanda. They’ve only invited me to their house about ten times.

…But paperweights? What’s Bones up to?

Leonard Edward McCoy was a researcher at heart. The tendency had almost kept him out of active practice, when he first got his M.D.: the year of pure research he had done at Cornell had come close to spoiling him. But when it came down to the crunch, he liked people better than papers and test tubes and lectures: and he had dived into practice and never looked back.

But every now and then a nice juicy piece of research came his way, and when it did, by God he got his teeth into it and didn’t let go until he was satisfied with the answers. And a nice one had fallen right in his lap yesterday. It had that perfect feeling about it, the kind of feeling he had when as a kid he would be out in the north forty and find a big flat rock that heknew had lots of bugs under it.

It was Shath that did it to him. Not that the son wasn’t just the most irritating thing he had come across in a long time: but the man’s body language was wrong, completely wrong. On seeing himself and Kirk, the guy had actually had to leave the room for many minutes to regain his composure. It would have been unusual in a human: it was positively shocking in a Vulcan. And the reaction was not to him, McCoy felt certain, but to Kirk.

He had considered going up to the consulate and demanding to see the man again, fabricating some story about a change in schedule or something, to talk to him a bit longer and make sure of that aversion reaction, or the lack of it. But then Bones considered that it would probably be wasted effort: likely enough Shath would be able to cover up the effect this time. No, McCoy would get his information in other ways.

He spent a little time in his cabin that morning calling up detailed maps of shi’Kahr, the little city nearest the Science Academy, and found what he wanted—the electronic equivalent of the public library. He could have gotten into it from the ship, via downlink from the main computers, but he had no desire to attract quite that much attention. Discreet inquiry was what he wanted, not an electronic snatch-and-run mission that might leave the librarians feeling annoyed.

He then indulged himself in a little bit of subterfuge and went rummaging in the packages he had brought home from his shopping trip yesterday.A word or two in Spock’s ear was a good idea, he thought, as he took out the somber tunic and breeches and boots he had picked up. They were all in a soft tan beige color, very inconspicuous, and Spock had told him that the cut was such as a student or scientist might wear for either work or relaxation. McCoy slipped the clothes on, tapped one of his closet doors into reflectivity, and turned from side to side to admire himself. He really did look rather good: the slight cape hanging from the shoulders somehow made him look about ten pounds lighter, which he didn’t mind at all. And this suit of clothes would definitely attract less attention than a Starfleet uniform. Most people knew his face best in conjunction with his uniform anyway. But in this getup he was just one more Terran on Vulcan, out for a day’s research—there were quite a few Earth people working at the Science Academy.

He stopped in to check sickbay, found everything well, and then beamed down to the streets of shi’Kahr. It was just past dawn there, and the town was getting lively: the very early hours, before things got too hot even for the Vulcans’ liking, were when much business and marketing were done. Depending on the nature of one’s work, one might start at dawn, work through till noonish, break till three for a siesta, and then start up again and not leave work till well after dark.Or, he thought as he strolled through the streets,being Vulcans, they might just work for four days without stopping, and then take a day off, and then —back to it. The stamina of these people! You have to admire it—and wish you could have some yourself….

The town reminded him, in some ways, of some university towns he had been to in upstate New York: but there was also a strange resemblance to the roofed arcades of Berne in Switzerland—thick stone walls with wide arches cut in them, sheltering the windows and doorways of shops and houses. In places the arcades were two-tiered, and most of them were of a handsome golden stone with a wide grainy texture: McCoy suspected it was a very effective insulator. The pathways under the arcades were wide, and there was room to stroll comfortably, sheltered from the sun and wind, and look out through the arches at the little parks and plazas one passed. The Vulcans seemed to be great ones for tiny parks, each one always with its fountain; and never the same kind twice. Little whispering waterfalls, fine misty sprays, strange carved beasts with water pouring out of them, once even an ancient millstone with water bubbling up out of the hole in the middle, he saw them all on his way to the library.

This turned out to be a noble building of the same golden stone as most of the rest of the town, but this one had a portico borne up on tall smooth pillars, all of which had the slightest swelling at their centers. The effect was actually to make them look straighter than if they had been built perfectly straight. The trick was one with which McCoy was familiar from ancient Greek architecture, and he smiled at the familiarity as he passed into the shade of the portico and into the library.

Inside everything was utterly modern—computer carrels and voice accesses were everywhere. The floor looked like the same golden stone as the walls, but McCoy was fascinated to find that it appeared to have been treated with something that made it spongy-soft: sound fell dead in it. He nodded a greeting to the librarian at the front desk and headed on past him toward the carrels.

He did not trust his typing in Vulcan. He stopped by one of the keyboard carrels and peered at the keying area: it had more keys and levers and switches than he wanted to see, so he passed on to a voice-activated carrel and sat down. Softly he cleared his throat, praying that his accent wouldn’t be too outrageous for the machine to understand.

“General query,” he said in Vulcan.

“Acknowledged,” said the machine. Bones winced. Its accent was the Vulcan equivalent of BBC Standard Received: pure, cultured, and somewhat intimidating.

“Public events,” McCoy said. “Cross-index to registry.Koon-ut-kalifi. Familial name uncertain. One participant for cross-index: Spock cha’Sarek. Go.”

The machine thought about this for a second, then brought up a picture of the Place of Marriage and Challenge: Spock, McCoy, and Kirk in the background, T’Pau on her litter, and an assortment of spear carriers and extras with bell-banners and various implements of destruction. McCoy shivered at the sight of the place, and was surprised at his own reaction.What a horrendous day that was…and what a naughty thing I did. He smiled a little.And worth it. “Confirmed,” McCoy said. “Display list of participants.”

Obediently it did so. And there it was: Shath cha’Stelen hei-Nekhlavah, age 43 standard years.How about that, McCoy thought:I hit his age right on. Maybe Spock is teaching me something after all. “Query,” he said. “General information, Shath cha’Stelen.”

Another page of information came up. Most of it was not very interesting: information about education, occupation, a commcode.Not that I’d want to call him up and invite him on a night out: no indeed. But at the bottom was a little list of Affiliated Organizations. McCoy had the carrel’s printer note them all down, and then he began to go through the files and pull down some of the organizations’ most recent publications. The names were mostly very innocent: the Institute for Interworld Studies, the Study Group on Nonvulcanoid Species, names like that. But what McCoy noticed, as he began reading their newsletters and papers, was that none of the organizations Shath belonged to liked humans very much. One of them was of the condescending let-them-swing-in-their-trees sort: the others were outright smear rags—there was no kinder word for them.

McCoy sat back after about half an hour of reading, very upset, actually shaking a little.This is not something I wanted to find out about Vulcans, he thought.There are Vulcan bigots. Right here where Surak taught, and died. He shook his head. “Damn.”

“Null input,” the computer said politely in Vulcan.

“Sorry. Cross-reference. Lists of membership of all the above organizations. Star or otherwise indicate members who are also members of other listed organizations.”

“Working,” said the machine. “Output?”

“Print.”

“Acknowledged,” said the machine, and began spitting out truly astonishing amounts of the fine thin plastic that Vulcans used for printout. McCoy watched with amazement as it piled up.

The printing did not stop for nearly twenty minutes. When it did, there was a stack of printout some three inches thick, all in very tiny print, and McCoy shook his head. “Solid duplication also,” he said.

“Working,” said the computer, and after about three seconds spat out a data solid at him.

“End.”

“Credit authorization, please,” the machine said sweetly.

McCoy rolled his eyes, felt around for his down-planet “cash” solid, stuck it in the slot, let the machine click and whirr and deduct however much money from it. It spat the solid back at him almost with the air of a machine unsatisfied with the amount of money spent. “Hmf,” McCoy said to it, pocketed the solid, picked up the printout, and headed out.

He made his way to the little restaurant where they had been before. It was open early, as most Vulcan restaurants and refectories were, for the day-meal. “Lasagna, please,” he said to the waiter, and started going through the printout. It was going to be a long morning.

Or so he thought. Five minutes into his reading, he found a name that brought him bolt upright in his chair. Very soon thereafter he found it again, and again.

“Damn,” he said. “Damn.Damn.”

After a long time he put the printout aside and ate his lasagna, even though he wasn’t sure he had the appetite for it anymore.

The world dissolved from sparkle to solidity around Jim as he beamed down. He found himself in a little park, like many he and Spock and McCoy had seen the day before. This one Spock had described to him in detail: there were three paths that wound out of it, and Jim was to take the one that led off to the left, toward the old city wall.

He took that path, walking slowly. It was a pleasant park: the “grass” was some sort of tough dun-colored growth, broken with tiny, delicate trees with feathery maroon-colored leaves. They looked, in fact, almost exactly like giant feather-dusters. Out of curiosity Jim went over to one and touched it…and was very surprised when the entire branch folded its leaves away and rolled itself into a tight spiral.

“Sorry,” he said, and then laughed at himself.Do Vulcans talk to trees, I wonder?

Slowly the branch unrolled and unfurled its leaves once more. Jim restrained himself from touching it again—no reason to make a plant crazy—and headed down the path that led toward the old city wall. It curved broadly, to parallel the wall. Now he recognized where he was: he followed the curve of the path, and sheltered from view by an outcropping of rock, he saw the house.

It was fairly large by Vulcan standards, though not as large as one might expect the house of the Ambassador Extraordinary to Terra to be. It was built all on one level, as most of the houses here seemed to be: Vulcans seemed to have an aversion to blocking away others’ view of the sky. The place, in fact, with its surrounding wall just higher than eye-height, looked rather like something one of the old “post-modern” architects might have built, with curves rather than sharp corners. But at the same time it had a look about it of the old Roman villas: a house that looked inward, rather than outward, and kept its secrets and its privacies to itself.

He went up to the gate in the wall and touched the annunciator plate. “James Kirk,” he said when it glowed.

“Jim,” came Amanda’s voice, very cheerful, “come on in.” The gate swung open for him.

A narrow path bordered with stones led to the front door of the house. It opened as he stepped toward it, and there was Amanda, wearing a coverall, rather stained around the knees, with a pair of pruning shears in her hand. “Welcome!” she said. “Come in and see the garden! I’ll give you the two-credit tour later. Or Sarek can do it when he gets back from town. Would you like something cold to drink?”

“Yes, please,” Jim said. Amanda guided him in through the front hall. It was large, and the rooms were built on the open plan: the living area and dining area and kitchen were all one clean, beautiful sprawl of rough or polished black stone, and the rear wall was one large window with dilating panels that gave on the garden.

“Here,” Amanda said, stopping by the drinks dispenser in the kitchen. “Water? Something carbonated?”

“Soda water would be fine.”

“I’ll join you.” Two glasses slid out from behind a panel. “Cheers,” she said, lifting one of them in salute, handing him the other.

They both drank thirstily. “Oh, that’s much better,” Amanda said. “I worked up such a thirst. Come on this way.” She led him out the dilation, into the garden. Most of it was raked sand and gravel, but one patch about thirty feet square was given over to rosebushes. Several were in profuse bloom: some had no bloom at all, having been cut back.

“That’s amazing,” Jim said. “I’m still astonished those things will even grow here.”

“Oh, they do well enough,” Amanda said. “It’s no worse than, say, Arizona would be, as long as you keep them watered. And they seem to like the spectrum of a white sun a little better than a yellow one. You know what will really grow wonderfully here?” She pointed off to one side, where some small new plants had been set in. “Tomatoes. They’re pigs for water in this climate; they need a soaker at their roots all day. But you should see how they look after a couple of months. I have to hand-pollinate them, but I don’t mind that.”

Jim shook his head. “You’ve been pruning the roses back pretty hard,” he said.

Amanda nodded. “We haven’t been here for two years, remember,” she said. “We have a gardener who comes in and takes care of things, but he’s best with the native Vulcan plants, the succulents over there, and the sandplants. I don’t think Vulcans really understand about roses: they think they’re delicate. But to bring out the best in them, you have to be mean to them.” She clicked the shears meaningfully.

“I have trouble believing you could be mean to anything,” Jim said.

Amanda looked at him kindly. “Flatterer,” she said. “Come here and sit down in the shade.”

They went over to a bench under a pergola smothered with some kind of leafy vine. Amanda settled herself on it and looked out at the garden. “You know,” she said after a moment, “there were a lot of times when we were raising Spock that I felt I was being mean to him. At the same time I felt I had to: Sarek and I agreed that Spock needed to grow up as a normal Vulcan child, with the disciplines that Vulcan children have to deal with. If we had been on Earth, it might have been different. Earth people are a little more flexible about such things. But Vulcans expect…” She broke off, then looked a little bemused. “They expect you to be very conservative. Everything has to meet the status quo…everything has to be the same.”

And Amanda smiled. “It doesn’t make much sense in terms of the IDIC, does it? Sometimes I think things have slipped a little.”

Jim nodded. “I can see your point.”

They sat there in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the wind, which was not too hot to be unpleasant as yet, and much softened by the wall around the garden. “May I ask you something?” Jim said.

“Ask.”

He gestured at the garden. “You’re pruning the roses as if everything was going to turn out all right, later this week…. ”

She gazed at the roses and then let out a long breath. “Well,” she said, “I’m a gardener. No matter what happens, the roses need pruning.”

Jim smiled.

“But you’re right,” she said. “I’m worried.” She turned the shears over in her hand, studying the blades. “If the vote for secession goes through,” she said, “the ban will certainly fall on me. The government will certainly not be in a mood to allow exceptions—certainly not at the highest levels: it would be seen in some quarters as nepotism, favoritism. I will have to leave Vulcan—or Sarek will.”

Jim shook his head. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Oh, there’s nothing fair about it,” Amanda said, “but if the vote goes for secession—” She sighed and looked around at the garden and the house. “I gave up one home, a long time ago,” she said softly. “I suppose I can manage it again.”

“Giving up a home isn’t the same as giving up a husband, though.”

She nodded. “We will find somewhere else, I suppose,” she said. “The Federation would be glad to have Sarek. And Spock certainly is in no danger of losing his present job.”

“Lord, no.”

“But at the same time,” Amanda said, “think of it from Sarek’s point of view. To have to leave your homeworld forever: never again to see the rest of your family: to be an exile on cold damp worlds, never to feel a sun that’s warm enough—or if you do, to have it shining on you in a strange sky—” She shook her head.

“You must excuse my wife, Captain,” said Sarek, coming into the garden and slipping out of his over-tunic: “she is obviously exercising the Scots part of her heritage, which she has described to me as ‘predicting gloom an’ doom.’ ” He laid the overtunic neatly over the back of another bench nearby and sat down.

“Did your business go well?” Amanda said.

Sarek nodded. “As well as could be expected. The town is becoming positively tense. At least, so I would describe the atmosphere, having seen it on Earth many times: I have never seen the like here before. But then, the like has never happened.”

“Tomorrow we start debate?” Jim said.

“Tomorrow. Some of the less, shall we say, ‘loaded’ testimonies will come first. K’s’t’lk, various other scientists, economists, and so forth. Then the people arguing for ethical reasons. Then the professional liaisons—such as ambassadors and starship captains.”

“Sarek,” Jim said, “about last night—”

“It happened,” Sarek said, “but I would not advise you to tell anyone else about it, save for Spock and the doctor. That one prefers to keep her doings quiet, and it is usually wise to respect her wishes.”

There was a soft chime from inside the house, and an amplified voice said, “It’s McCoy.”

“Speak of the devil and you see his horns,” Jim said.

“Let us not get intothat again,” Sarek said, rather emphatically.

“Doctor, come in!” Amanda said, and got up to greet him at the door.

“The doctor sounds winded,” Sarek said. “I hope he is not unwell. The heat can take people by surprise here.”

Amanda ushered McCoy in a few moments later. He was sweating and was wearing an expression that Jim had seen on him before—a combination of excitement and dread. “Bones, are you all right?” Jim said.

“No,” McCoy said, and handed Jim a thick printout. “Look through that.”

Jim did, mystified. McCoy turned to Sarek. “I was out following up a hunch I’d had,” he said. “These anti-Federation, anti-Terran organizations that have been around the past century or so: I was doing some reading of their latest publications this morning.”

“No wonder you look distressed,” Sarek said, with an expression of distaste.

“It gets worse. I pulled their membership lists and did some correlation. Shath,” McCoy said to Jim, “he’s prominent. But you know who else is?”

Jim stared at the printout, looking at a circled name on one list. “T’Pring,” he said. And turned several pages. “T’Pring. T’Pring.”

He riffled through the rest of the printout, then folded it back up and laid it aside. They all looked at one another: Sarek looking nonplussed, Amanda amazed and angry, McCoy apprehensive, Jim simply astonished.

“I think we’d better call Spock and let him in on this,” McCoy said.

Jim nodded while Bones got out his communicator.

Dear Lord,he thought.T’Pring.

Hell hath no fury…