SUMMARY: The tale of the first Vulcan-Human pair bonded 'normally'--at
age seven.

NOTE: This story does not belong to any regular Star Trek series.  The
characters and many details of Vulcan culture are purely the product
of my overactive imagination.  Consider it mainstream-lit'ry-flavored
fanfic.  Time wise, the story begins in the mid 2350s and the final
events are roughly contemporaneous with DS9/Voyager.

[NC-17] WARNING: This story is not erotica but does contain material
of an adult nature, including blunt description of a rape.  Though the
act is neither glorified nor sanctioned, I do recommend parental
consideration before permitting teens to read it.  Those who have
suffered sexual violence themselves and find literary descriptions of
same to cause flashbacks or panic reactions should pass on this.

DISCLAIMER: Paramount owns the universe; the following is a piece of
non-profit fanfiction.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is
coincidental.  Those wishing to post this story to homepages or other
web sites (aside from the a.s.c archive) should obtain the author's
permission and retain both this disclaimer and the warning about the
adult nature of the material.




                          WISDOM AND BEAUTY
                           Macedon, c1998


              And watching Helen climb the stairs
              they spoke in undertones to one another:

             'We cannot hate her, it is no surprise
              if armored Troians and Akhaians should
              so long have suffered the agonies of war
              for one such as this.'

             'Divinity.  The woman is a goddess to the eyes.'

                                           Homer, ILIAD 3:183-90
                                           (trans. mine)



     The greatest irony of her life lay in the fact that she was born
on a world where her beauty was irrelevant.
     Or perhaps that was her salvation.  She was almost nineteen years
old before anyone thought to tell her she was beautiful.  By then, her
personality was fixed.  She lacked either the arrogance or uncertainty
of the extremely attractive and did not second-guess the motivations
of the men around her, or of the women.
     Which is not to say she lacked arrogance, but it sprang from
different vanities.
     At six, however, she was all brown legs and brown eyes, sitting
in the sandpile from her father's latest excavation trench.  She was
sifting for artifacts with the other camp children, offspring of the
ShiBaran archaeology team.  It was cool in the shade cast by the tent
above, the white sides rolled up to admit stray breezes.  Glass
rattled in the bottom of her sifter, revealing itself slowly as rocky
sand poured through.  She held it up--a bright bit of clear blue with
gold painting--and spoke to the big boy sitting on her left.  "Iskha-
nah kathori se, Solon-kam."  Some Kathori glass for you.  Her Vulcan
was as fluent as any of her companions'.  It was her native language.
     He took it from her fingers and studied it with a surprisingly
practiced eye for his seven years.  "Middle Dynastic period III-B." 
Then he set it amid the rest of his pile, which had grown to a
considerable size.
     Lacking abundant water, Vulcan also lacked extensive clay-beds. 
Ceramics had never developed on a widespread basis.  Early containers
had been made of stone or tightly-woven reed, not pottery, and were
soon replaced by glass: first cast, then blown.  Vulcans were already
practicing the art of glass-making when humans were just starting to
settle the Euphrates-Tigris river valley.  Solon's pile consisted of
pieces as old as Archaemenid Persian, but of a quality equal to late
Roman.  Had a passer-by stopped to ask, he could also have dated them
all and explained the process of their creation.  Human children
memorized dinosaurs.  Solon, child of Vulcan archaeologists, memorized
ancient Kathori dynasties by their art.
     His companion had more eclectic interests to match her eclectic
heritage.  She was fully the offspring of a United Earth, boasting the
blood of at least five continents and a few islands.  Her mother's
family tree included Maori, Tai, Malaysian, Arab, Somalian, and a
renegade Brazilian.  Her father called himself Onondaga though in fact
he had more French and British in him.  Still, it was enough Onondaga
for the tribal rolls in the twenty-fourth century, and with the great
Mohawk Chief Theyendanegea, Joseph Brant, among his ancestors, no one
was inclined to challenge his claim.
     Like many children of mixed race, she had managed to inherit the
best features of all her ancestors though, even at seven, this was not
immediately evident.  Perhaps it was prescience then which had led her
father to give her the name Helen.
     The face that had launched a thousand ships.
     That Solon would become her husband simply completed the joke. 
Solon was a good Vulcan name.  It was also a good Athenian name, and
had belonged to the man called "the sage of Greece" by Plutarch. 
Solon the wise ranked up beside Solomon in all his glory.  When it was
announced later that same year that Solon would be bonded to Helen,
one Terran wit was heard to quip: and so does wisdom marry beauty.
     Both Vulcans and Greeks would have approved the sentiment.  Yet,
and despite their evident closeness, their bonding had not been a
foregone conclusion even if in retrospect, it seemed so.


     Beauty was not Helen Brant's only legacy, and certainly not the
one on which she learned to rely.  The child of third generation
academics, intelligence was her birthright.  Precocious, she walked
early, talked early and had a fearsome fondness for questions: the
sort of child a parent boasts of or dreads.  On Vulcan, curiosity is a
virtue.  Unfortunately, Helen also had an uncanny talent for asking
the wrong question at the wrong moment and a chancy grasp of 'private'
at best.  That was a cardinal sin.  But because she was young, and
bright--and her father much-respected--those subjected to her childish
cross-examinations tended to tolerance and a dry Vulcan amusement. 
Proper questions were answered; improper were ignored.
     For all her human volubility, however, Helen was Vulcan-bred. 
She grew shorter than she might have, on Earth, but stronger, her
lungs and chest cavity larger: the result of higher gravity and
thinner air.  Unless engaging in particularly strenuous activity, she
had no need for the regular Tri-ox injections to which non-native
humans were subject.  She also learned to control extreme expressions,
laughing only rarely--though she smiled often.  Her father had made no
effort to fix Vulcan stoicism in her.  David Brant was accepted so
thoroughly because, while following most of the tenants of Surak and
being among the few Terrans to possess full Vulcan citizenship, he
never tried to be a Vulcan.  He could usually be found on a dig by
listening for his chuckle or spotting the cloud of sweet smoke from
his pipe.  Kinikinik herbs.  Sacred or not, pure tobacco offended
Vulcan noses.
     Like his daughter, he considered Vulcan his home and had grown up
in ShiKahr.  Climbing over the ancient monuments at the modern city's
heart, David Brant had developed a fascination with Vulcan history and
had become the first human to matriculate from the prestigious Science
Academy with a specialty in Sakal-Kathori archaeology.  His daughter's
early toys were piles of bronze coins and reconstructions of marble
figurines.  She learned Sakal at the dinner table like the child of
classicists might learn Latin or Greek.
     She was six when it became evident that she had a gift for it.
     Like everything else, she read early.  Writing was slower; her
child's hands had not yet developed the necessary muscle control.  But
she was reading children's books--in Vulcan of course--by four.  By
five, she had added Federation Standard.  By six, she was reading
simple Sakalin inscriptions on the monuments at her father's worksite. 
One afternoon as she read off magistracies from the grave stele of a
man three-thousand years dead, her father's colleague Saval said, 
"She will be an epigrapher."  Vulcan humor.  The kind non-Vulcans
usually missed.  But later, it was remembered that he had predicted
it.  Akal'dhen.  Vulcans gave no credence to fate but they did have
the concept of a chance foretelling.


     From the beginning, Solon was part of her personal orbit: milk-
brother, childhood playmate and sometimes-protector.  Neither had
other siblings and they became known about the ShiBaran dig as "the
twins" for the fact both had wavy black hair.  More Vulcan humor as
they were not even of the same race, much less the same womb.  They
did share the same mother--he by blood, she by informal adoption.
     She never knew her real mother.  Her father had met Jamilla al-
Farris at a conference.  Though raised on Vulcan, David Brant was no
monk and al-Farris had a good measure of the beauty she bequeathed her
daughter.  Their fling resulted in an unexpected pregnancy; even in
the twenty-fourth century, accidents could happen.  Raised on Vulcan,
Brant had Vulcan views on abortion not required by medical necessity
and begged al-Farris to carry the child to term for his sake.  She
agreed, but left the ShiKahr hospital the day after her daughter was
born, never having seen the child.  "It'll be easier that way," she
had said.  Nineteen years later, she would change her mind, but for
the moment, the infant was given into her father's care.  And Brant--
who may have wanted her but knew nothing about caring for her--turned
in desperation to his colleagues who had a year-old son: the same
Saval who would later predict Helen's career, and T'Syra, his wife. 
Vulcans were accustomed to extended families and Brant simply moved in
with them.  Helen was nursed at a Vulcan breast and, after he got over
his initial envy, Solon came to regard the small round-eared creature
who had invaded his house as his personal responsibility.
     If precocious described Helen, Solon was slow.  He spoke late and
in laconic phrases, and moved with care--in part because he was a big
boy and feared breaking things.  He preferred to concentrate on one
matter at a time and thought through his options before committing
himself to any, in contrast to his quicksilver milk-sister.  Because
of this, it was easy to mistake him for dull, or mentally deficient. 
He was neither, as his test-scores repeatedly proved, yet the unwary
were occasionally fooled.
     Some of his tendency to verbal lassitude owed to the fact that his
world was visual.  The forms of things interested him, and he began to
draw almost as soon as he could hold a stylus in his hand.  Yet his
real talent proved to be in sculpture, particularly of the glass he so
loved; he might have made an artist had he not been intent on pursuing
archaeology.  Instead, he became a leading expert in ancient glass-
blowing techniques which he understood by practice as well as theory. 
But all that was in the future.  At seven, he was still too young to
venture into the dangerous apprenticeship of glass-blowing and had to
content himself with collecting and indexing the sherds of ancient
containers.


     "Is that the last of them?"
     Solon looked up.  Helen was perched on the edge of his camp bed,
watching him where he sat on the floor before a partitioned box of
glass sherds.  She still wore the loose unisex shift of a child,
baring her long legs.  Her arms were wrapped around them.  Though not
yet bonded, he had recently passed his khas-wan and had to wear the
trousers and tunic of a man.  He envied her the shift's freedom. 
"Yes," he said now, in answer to her question.
     "Tomorrow we leave for your cousin's bonding."
     "Yes."
     "Are you excited?"
     "Excitement is an emotion."  But he was parroting what his
parents had said to him when he forgot himself and jumped or ran or
whooped.  He was an adult now; he supposed he should sound like one.
     She huffed.  "We never have gotten to see a bonding before.  Last
time, we had to stay home with the babies."
     "True."  He stood, picking up the box to return it to his little
desk in the corner.  She followed, momentarily wishing him the more
communicative type.  It was difficult even for her to tell what he
thought sometimes.  Standing on tip-toe, she peered over his shoulder
as he bent above the box, then reached in to pick up a particularly
pretty sherd of red glass.  He snatched it away from her, returning it
to its proper place.  "Leave it.  You will mix them up."
     "I can remember which square I took it out of!"
     "You did not, the last time."
     "Only because *you* stood right over me, watching.  It made me
nervous."
     He peered at her.  "I have told you, when you become nervous--"
     "'Count to ten and step past the feeling.  Concentrate.'  I know! 
But that does not always work."
     "It would, if you would concentrate harder."
     "No, it would not!  I am *human* and *hopelessly* emotional."
     Hearing the edge in her voice, he turned to face her.  "Who said
that to you?  Not me."
     She did not want to answer, but it never occurred to her to lie. 
"Parla," she said, then stared fixedly at the bare floor of the little
camp shelter.
     He set a hand on her arm.  Not yet bonded, he was still permitted
to touch but in a few months, that would change.  He could not imagine
it, somehow.  "Being human is not a fault.  It is who you are."
     "I wish it was not!"
     "That is not logical.  Your father does not wish he were not
human."
     "I know."  Abruptly, she plopped down cross-legged on the floor. 
He seated himself beside her, close enough that their knees brushed. 
"But I do wish *I* was Vulcan," she said.
     "Why?"
     "Vulcans are better."
     This took him aback.  It was not that he was unaware, even at
seven, of the subtle bigotry some of his people displayed towards
other races:  a belief that contact with the Federation had somehow
contaminated the purity of Vulcan culture and logic.  He had overheard
his own mother denounce it as ignorant and anti-Surakian.  But he had
not thought that Helen might have come to believe it in any small way.
     "That is not true," he said now, more fervently than he usually
allowed himself to be since donning a man's trousers.  "Humans are not
better and Vulcans are not better.  They are simply *different*.  My
mother says this is so.  And Surak himself said that difference is not
necessarily better or worse, but simply different."
     She listened to him with chin on drawn up knees.  Now, she asked,
"Would you want to be a human?"
     He frowned.  "No."
     "See?"
     "See what?"
     "See, you do not want to be a human, even if you could be, but I
would like to be a Vulcan."
     "*That* is not an argument," he said.  "I do not want you to be a
Vulcan.  I like you as a human."
     Having said that, he realized that both 'want' and 'like' were
expressions of emotion, yet as they were also true statements, he let
them stand.  Early exposure to humans and the liberality of his own
parents had generated in him a certain degree of tolerance for and
recognition of his own feelings.  At seven, he was now expected to
control them, but that did not mean erasing them.
     Helen was more disconcerted by his admission than he was--not
because of his word choice.  She had simply assumed that he tolerated
her humanness, not that he might actually like it.  "I did not know
that," she said.
     "I am fond of you, milk-sister.  As you are also human, then it
stands to reason that I cannot be fond of you without also being fond
of your humanness."  He turned his head to meet her eyes.  "I do not
wish you to be a Vulcan."
     She smiled and hugged his neck; he hugged her back.  For a
moment, they were reunited by the same need for contact which had led
her to crawl into his bed at night when they were younger.  But he was
too conscious of his newly-adult dignity, and too aware of the fact
their touches would soon have to end altogether.  He pushed her away. 
But after she left, he sat down on his bed to consider proper revenge
on Parla.  If not by nature a vindictive boy, bigotry bothered him
and, where his milk-sister was concerned, he tended to cast himself in
the role of paladin.


     They took flitters from the dig site into the little city nearby,
where transporters beamed them back to ShiKahr.  The bonding ceremony
was to be held at the ancient holding of T'Syra's family.  She did not
belong to a particularly high house, but not a humble one, either; the
holdings were extensive enough to include an old mine and a village. 
Solon's four-times-great-grandmother lived on the estate, together
with two of her widowed daughters.  The three old women used only four
rooms of the ancient villa, but for a betrothal, the entire clan
descended and the place bustled as it must have done before modernity
had turned Vulcan society mobile and its families mostly nuclear.
     Brant and his daughter had been here off and on several times in
the past six years since moving in with T'Syra and Saval.  At first,
there had been some hesitation with regard to the humans in their
midst, but with time, the two grew familiar.  The swarm of young
cousins liked the stories Brant told them in the courtyard.  So did
the adults, as it kept their offspring out from underfoot.  T'Syra's
clanmother was rather fond of Brant, in fact, and had come to regard
him and his daughter as yet one more pair of chicks to be tucked under
her ancient wing.  No Vulcan could really quite conceive of life
without a clan so it was natural to absorb the occasional stray human,
and Brant was Indian enough in his outlook to seek a foster-tribe as
part of his identity, even if they all had green blood and pointed
ears.
     Helen enjoyed the trips since it gave her a chance to escape her
tutor in order to play.  Vulcan children no less than human had their
games, some traditional, some invented on the spot.  And city children
released into the hill country for a holiday were inclined to run a
bit wild, even if well past the age of their khas-wan.  It was not
unheard of to catch a hastily-swallowed giggle; fights were thankfully
far rarer.
     But this clan gathering was not for a regular festival, and the
children were kept tightly in check lest they destroy the extensive
decorations in their maraudings.  Brant found himself telling a lot of
stories as he was not much use in other venues.  He had been to
betrothals before becoming part of the clan, but there was much he did
not know about the preparations.
     The day finally arrived, promising to be fair and mild, though
mild by Vulcan standards would have been a hot afternoon in Oklahoma. 
People were out of bed and readying themselves before sunrise. 
Tradition demanded that the two betrothed meet as the sun came up over
the land, symbolic of the start of their lives together.  Helen had a
new dress for the occasion and was almost too excited to stand herself
or be stood by others.  Even Solon crossly said, "Calm down," as they
walked out through the dawn air towards the family koon-ut-kalifee,
the place of marriage.  Bells tinkled on ringers and ankles and the
chains of censers carried by the boy-groom's escorts.  He was allowed
three kinsmen and a personal friend, if he wished.  The girl-bride was
allotted the same but would arrive from another direction in company
of her own clan.  As hers was the lesser house, she would become part
of the vru'Tchai clan, just as Solon's own father had when he had
married T'Syra.  Though every clan was presided over by a clanmother,
the rules governing marriage and clan-adoptions were much more
complex, concerned with social hierarchy as much as gender.  If equal,
the male entered the wife's clan.  Otherwise, the partner of lower
status joined the clan of the partner of higher status.
     Both processions arrived at the koon-ut-kalifee precisely at
dawn, emerging to the other's sight gradually through red morning
mist.  The surreal effect was heightened by the silence, and by the
ancientness of their costumes.  Perched on a sedan chair, Solon's
clanmother led their own procession while the bride and bride's mother
headed theirs, the bride guided along by the hand as she was hidden
completely from sight by sheer-spun metallic veils so thin they
floated about her.  "How pretty!" Helen whispered.
     "Shhhh!" Solon replied.
     The throne-chair of Solon's clanmother was set down inside the
ring of koon-ut-kalifee.  The groom's father led him forward to kneel
before her, then the bride's mother led the bride.  The parents placed
their children's hands in her ancient one and the bride's mother drew
back the plethora of fluttering gold and silver veils to reveal a dark
oval face beneath.
     She is as brown as I am, Helen thought, pleased.  Most of Solon's
relatives were pale like him.  The bride's clan was darker.
     The clanmother placed the groom's fingers on the bride's face in
the proper spread for a mindmeld, then did the same with the bride's
fingers on the groom's face.  Her own hands lay over each of theirs. 
"Sorl.  Nara.  These children are offered today by their houses to be
joined after the fashion of our ancestors.  Woman holds the life of
man.  He is born of her, she gives him suck, and grants him life again
when his blood burns.  He is fire, she is quenching sand.  Thus it was
from our beginnings, thus it will be for all our tomorrows."
     There was silence for a span of ten breaths.  Helen counted hers. 
Then the boy, barely above a whisper, said, "Parted from thee and
never parted, ever and always touching and touched."  In a somewhat
stronger soprano, the girl repeated the same.
     Solon's clanmother released their hands.  "It is accomplished. 
Sorl and T'Nara are now made one, bound to return to this place when
his need calls them together once more."
     Reaching up, the little groom solemnly pulled the veil down over
his bride's face, then she was whisked off to be secreted among her
own.  Once, she would not have been permitted to see him again until
the day of their marriage but such strictures were long past and these
two would find themselves back in the same schoolroom later that week. 
Yet for this day, the old ways held and she would be kept apart from
him.  The festival was not for them, in any case; it was meant to bind
two clans.  Both processions turned to head back to the vru'Tchai
villa where the reception waited.  If the walk out had been solemn,
the walk back was not.  The two clans were expected to intermingle,
the host clan making the other welcome.  Taking advantage of the low
buzz, Helen whispered to Solon, "We walked all this way just for
that?"
     He shrugged.
     She swept back stray braids with an exaggerated gesture.  "Well
if I am to walk all that way to your betrothal, I had better get to
carry one of the censors, at least."
     "You cannot.  You are a girl."
     "So?  I am your best friend, and you said this morning that the
groom gets to have his best friend."
     "It has to be a boy."
     Her sigh was grand.  "Even if your best friend is not a boy? 
That is illogical."
     "It is tradition.  Tradition is not always logical, but it is the
way it has always been done."
     "So who will you choose?"
     "I do not know yet.  I do not wish to talk about it."
     Solon did not, in fact, wish to think about it at all.  He knew
his parents intended to use this trip home to discuss with clanmother
his potential bondmates.  The whole idea frightened him a little,
though he did not want to admit that to himself, either.  Every young
boy and girl faced this same ordeal at seven; every one had to trust
his or her parents to choose wisely.  Though he had never been told,
he knew his parents would endeavor to find the best match for *him*,
not just for the clan.  Their own marriage was more than satisfactory
to them both.  They were...happy, and he knew they wanted him to be,
as well.  They had even promised to listen to his own opinions of the
girls who had expressed an interest in his suit--a concession not
always granted.  Yet his anxiety remained.



     Helen decided, with the logic of children, that it was up to her
to make the little bride feel at home in House vru'Tchai.  They were
the same color.  She completely forgot, for the moment, that they were
not the same race.
     The bride was in one chamber, the groom in the other.  Members of
both clans moved back and forth between, offering congratulations and
visiting with one another.  Most of the congratulations were being
given to the bride's older womenkin.  Helen found it easy enough to
eel up to the little platform where the bride sat, still covered in
her veils.
     "My name is Helen," she said, plopping down on the platform and
carefully settling her dress skirts.
     Some of the veils fluttered, crept up a bit.  "How did you get in
here?" the girl asked.
     Helen blinked.  "I was invited."
     "You are human."
     "Yes.  So?"
     Veils fluttered back from the girl's face.  Wide dark eyes stared
at Helen.  "You belong to the clan of my husband-who-will-be?"
     "Sort of.  My milk-brother does."
     "Ah."  The human anomaly thus placed in the order of things in a
way the bride could understand, she fluffed her skirts and veils about
herself and then scooted down a step so she could sit face-to-face
with her well-wisher.  "I have to stay here; it is what is done.  My
mother-sister was to bring me some tlori juice, but she has not been
able to leave long enough to visit the refreshments."
     "Shall I bring you some?"
     "It would be appreciated."
     "Then I will be right back."
     Getting through the crowd was not much problem.  Getting one of
the adults to recognize her and fill her order for two glasses of
tlori juice was more of one, but finally she had the little glasses
and headed back.  "Here," she said, handing T'Nara a glass.  They sat
then, sipping juice neatly and discussing school lessons, ignorant of
the amusement of the adults around them.
     "T'Nara has a companion already, I see," said T'Nara's mother to
a woman of House vru'Tchai.  "An unusual one."
     "Indeed.  Helen is a stranger to none for long."  The reply held
equal parts dry wit and fond vexation.  "She is human.  Her vocabulary
does not include 'restraint'."
     When Helen ran out of things to ask T'Nara, she headed back to
the groom's chamber to find Solon.  He was playing Scatters on the
white tile with a clump of cousins.  Dropping down among them, she
announced, "When it is my turn to be betrothed, I do not think I shall
have quite so many veils.  T'Nara said that her mother insisted, but
she kept tripping over them on the path this morning."
     Silence.
     At last one of the cousins, a girl three years older than Solon
and already betrothed, said, "*Your* betrothal?  You will not be
betrothed."
     "Why not?" Helen asked.
     "You are a human."
     "So?  Humans have married Vulcans before--even Ambassador Sarek
did."
     "That was different.  They were already adults.  Vulcans are not
betrothed to humans."
     Helen glanced at Solon, who sat perfectly still, gaze turned
inward.  The conversation was dragging to light a half-formed wish
which he had buried inside himself, a wish too unheard of for him to
have named.  Ignorant of his mental turmoil, Helen felt only a touch
of annoyance at his silence.  It made her snap.  "But if a human grew
up on Vulcan, why should she not be betrothed like anyone else?"
     Silence stretched.  Dark eyes darted, seeking support for what
seemed to them a self-evident truth.  "It just isn't done," the girl
said finally.  "Humans don't need to be bonded."
     Another cousin spoke up then, a boy from a conservative branch of
the family.  Like human families, Vulcan clans did not necessarily
enjoy blanket agreement on politics or social issues.  This one's
parents had expressed private doubts about the Brants.  "Who would
*want* to bond to a human anyway?"
     "I would," Solon replied almost before he could think.
     Had they been human children, they would have laughed to cover
their discomfiture.  Instead, they shared glances again and subtly
withdrew from him, as if he carried some virulent contagion.
     Recognizing ostracism, he rose and walked away.  Helen leapt up
after him.  They passed through the gathering room outside, onto the
broad peristyle porch where adults were visiting in small clumps,
enjoying the breeze coming down off the mountain range.  There was no
real privacy in the busy villa today.  He sat down on the porch steps. 
She sat beside him, silent, knowing that he would talk when he was
ready.  Or not.  But badgering him would only make him order her to
leave him alone.
     The conversations of adults rose and fell in unsteady cadencies. 
She caught a snatch of one, then another: "...according to the latest
research, that hypothesis..."  "...word came down from administration
last week..."  "...T'Marta insists that Sarril will improve his...." 
Beside her, Solon had picked up a lorl seed-case from the steps and
was methodically splitting it down the middle with his thumbnail.
     After a long time, he said, "I meant it."
     She followed his reference.  "I know.  Would they let us, do you
think?"
     "No."
     "Why?"
     At first, he said nothing, then, in a low voice, "Because you are
human."
     He glanced over in time to catch her blink rapidly.  She told
herself she would not cry.  She was too old now to cry.  "I thought
you said my being human was not a bad thing."
     "It is not.  But that does not mean there is no difference
between us."
     "But if adult humans can marry adult Vulcans, why can I not be
betrothed to you now?"
     He shrugged.  "It has never been done."
     "There is a first time for everything," she said and stood up,
brushed sand off of her dress skirts and went back inside the villa, a
purposeful look on her face.  Curious and mildly alarmed both, Solon
followed.  She was making a bee-line for their parents who stood with
several members of the other clan, describing finds from the latest
trench at ShiBaran.  Helen stopped at her father's side and waited. 
The adults would recognize her when they had finished.
     Solon came up behind her.  "What are you doing?" he whispered. 
She ignored him.
     Finally, T'Syra turned to look down at her.  "Yes, Helen?"
     Helen drew herself up; she had used the few minutes while waiting
to formulate the best way of putting her request.  She wanted to do it
properly, so she had decided to phrase it in the way she had overheard
them discuss Solon's other potential mates.  Normally, a boy's family
offered for a girl, but a girl's family could invite a suit from a
particular clan.  That seemed the logical approach.  "This one wishes
to invite you, honored parents, to submit Solon's suit to this one's
father, so that he might consider Solon as a possible bondmate for
this one's betrothal."
     It was a mouthful for a girl not-quite-seven. 
     It also brought every one of the listening adults to a full
mental stop.  T'Syra might have dropped her tea glass had Saval not
steadied her hand; Helen's father stared at her with his mouth open
for a full five seconds.  This development was nothing any of them had
foreseen, though perhaps they should have.  The members of the other
clan prudently and politely disappeared.  Solon himself had blanched.
     T'Syra exchanged a glance with David Brant, then knelt down so
that she could speak face to face with Helen.  Whatever amusement and
shock she was feeling, Vulcan manners demanded that she treat Helen's
request with all due politeness and consideration.  It was not the
Vulcan way, to dismiss children as non-persons.
     "This one is honored by your invitation, Helen Anevay," she said. 
She glanced up at her husband, as if pleading for help; he just raised
his eyebrows.  This was hers to answer, as the mother.  So she turned
back to face her son and the utterly serious human child who was
asking for him.  Her mind raced, the demands of tradition arguing with
logic.  Were Helen Vulcan, they would have offered for her without
bothering to make any other offers, and no doubt Brant would have
accepted the suit.  It was a perfect match.  But Helen was not Vulcan.
     *Does it matter?*  The question came from Saval, who had followed
her thoughts.  *Look at our son, my wife.*
     She did.  Too young yet to control powerful feelings, his wants
and terrors chased across his face while his eyes remained fixed on
Helen.  "My son," she said.  "Do you wish this also?"
     He flicked his glance to hers, to see if she really wanted his
answer.  She kept her face blank but open.  Finally, he said simply,
"Yes."
     At that she glanced up at David Brant.  She knew him well enough
to guess his thoughts.  He was of Vulcan no less that they; though
betrothal had been denied him, it was still a part of the culture in
which he had been raised.  It seemed perfectly normal to him--to a
point.  That point was his daughter.  For Helen, betrothal was not
necessary.  Why lock her into a pairing about which she might later
change her mind?  Yet simultaneously, why deny her the right, force
her to be different in this as in so much else?
     Finally, T'Syra turned back to Helen who had waited patiently,
used to the Vulcan tendency to weigh decisions.  "This is a matter
with many facets.  It will take time to consider, and much discussion. 
Betrothal is not a human custom--"
     Helen did a daring thing then: she interrupted.  "With respect,
t'kari T'Syra, it is not an *Earth* custom.  I may be human, but I am
not Terran; I am Vulcan.  And I wish to marry Solon.  He wishes to
marry me.  I can state for you why it is logical--"
     Holding up a hand, T'Syra tucked her chin down and let her
silence rebuke the girl.  After a full minute, she said only, "The
logic of it will be considered--the logic of *all* aspects of it.  I
did not say 'no'.  But I have not yet said 'yes', either."
     For the moment, Helen would have to be satisfied with that.



                                 II.


     Nothing more was said about Helen's request during the rest of
the visit, but each of the adults mulled it over privately.  Almost
from the moment Helen had spoken, Saval had decided that bonding Solon
to Helen was the obvious choice.  His wife was less sure.  It was not
that she doubted Helen or Solon's wishes, but she did doubt that her
clanmother would agree to the match or that, if clanmother did agree,
it would be fair to the human girl.  Helen knew no more about pon farr
than any other child her age, which was to say, not much.  She could
not make the decision to endure it.  Since her biology did not require
that she must, nor provide her with the strength to do so, T'Syra
believed it unfair to inflict it upon her.
     And yet, and yet....
     Her son wanted Helen, and Helen wanted him.  The two had been
raised together, taught the same values, shared the same experiences,
had complimentary personalities.  T'Syra and Saval could look for
years without finding such a perfect mate for their son.  Was it right
to deny the bonding merely because she was not *sure* Helen understood
the full implications?  But if Helen did not understand, how could
T'Syra lock her into suffering the pon farr...?
     It made a hopelessly circular argument which T'Syra could not
seem to escape.
     "Tell her," Saval said one night after they had returned to the
ShiBaran site.  "Explain it to her.  Let her choose."
     "She cannot possibly understand--"
     "Can any of us, until we endure it?"
     "But we had no choice.  She does."
     He had sighed--a grand gesture for him--and left the room.
     Knowing his wife would go round and round with the matter until
she made herself ill, Saval had decided to approach Brant about it. 
Brant had stood with him when he had married T'Syra; more importantly,
Brant had sat with him for three days before while they had awaited
T'Syra's return from her then-current assignment.  Brant had seen more
of the madness than most humans; he had helped Saval keep his mind on
other things.
     He found Brant in the little garden behind the site shed, tending
white sage, one of the few Terran plants which grew on Vulcan with
minimal help.  He looked up as Saval knelt in the sand beside him. 
"T'Syra is concerned--perhaps overly concerned--by the pon farr.  She
does not wish to subject Helen to that which she need not suffer."
     Brant took his pipe out of his mouth, tapped ashes into the sand,
then slid it into his breast pocket.  "Human males have their own
version of the madness, friend.  It just hits us at sixteen, not
twenty-six."  He chuckled.  "It might not kill us, but it can sure
feel like we're gonna die if we don't get some."
     Saval sat down.  They had known one another twenty years but
Brant could still embarrass him.  Usually intentionally.  Brant was
grinning.
     "So, it is not a matter of concern to you?"
     Brant turned back to his sage.  "I never heard T'Syra complain
about you.  Solon isn't going to hurt her, Saval."
     Frowning, Saval drew in the sand.  He could not look at Brant and
say this.  "There is a certain...roughness...which can accompany it. 
Solon would not intentionally injure her, but he might unintentionally
do so.  Humans are fragile."
     Brant had paused again to consider this new information.  "How
badly?"
     "It is difficult to say.  Likely only bruises, and perhaps only
the first time.  One learns to...control it.  The less she resists,
the less he would hurt her."
     Brant spoke with humor.  "She's not likely to resist him, Saval."
     "He would not be himself.  He might frighten her."
     At that, Brant snorted.  "Helen's not afraid of much of anything
--certainly not of Solon, whatever his mental state."  Then he grinned
at his friend.  "I'd be more worried for Solon than about him.  Indian
women have minds of their own."
     Saval answered with a raised eyebrow.  "So," he said, "you are
not adverse to the match?"
     Brant shook his head.  "Didn't say that.  I'm not adverse to it
because of the madness, no.  I'm not sure what I think, otherwise. 
There aren't many boys I'd rather see Helen marry.  Solon's good for
her, and he's not threatened by her.  I just...dislike the idea of
making a choice about her future."
     "It seems to me that Helen is the one making the choice.  As you
yourself said, Indian women have minds of their own.  None of us
suggested it to her.  Neither, apparently, did Solon."
     Brant chuckled.  "She does have a way of standing us all on our
ear, doesn't she?"
     "A shultah."  A dust-devil.  Or Vulcan for a wild child.
     "And you want to inflict her on your son?"
     "I believe my son would have it no other way."


     Thus it was decided over sacred sage, and sealed in humor, that
Helen Brant would be betrothed to Solon ch'Saval vru'Tchai.  They had
only to get the clan mother's approval.  That came easier than any of
the three adults might have expected, though Helen herself seemed to
take it as a matter of course.  Apparently the clanmother had, as
well.
     Three months later, Helen--wearing considerably fewer veils than
T'Nara--was led to koon-ut-kalifee by her father.  There, her hand was
placed in their clanmother's, and her mind linked to Solon's for life. 
The match caught media attention, not because those involved were
especially important but because their pairing was the first of its
kind.  Short articles appeared on the second and third screens of
various newsnets: a curiosity for a week.  Then interest faded. 
Helen, Solon and their families went on with their lives.
     Eleven years later, while running searches in old media tapes for
something else entirely, Jamilla al-Farris stumbled over news of her
daughter's betrothal.  For a full fifteen minutes, she sat stunned. 
Then she rose to make a series of calls that would bring her back into
David Brant's life, and that of the child she had given up almost
nineteen years before.


     "She wishes me to *what*?"
     "She wants you to visit her."
     "*Why*?"
     "She says that since you intend to pursue archaeology, you ought
to have some exposure to the Terran variety."  Brant paused, puffed at
his pipe.  "She is one of the leading Terran specialists on nomads and
pastoralists.  Her work at sites in the mid and southern Negev has
attracted Interstellar notice.  It was after one of her lectures on
nomad-built standing stones that we first met, in fact."
     He and his daughter were sitting on the ragged, pitted steps of
an old Kathori burial cairn.  Around them, the rocky brown desert
pavement spread out: west towards the cliffs, east down into the wadi
valley and the small town of ShiBaran.  Red haze blurred the north and
just behind them, to the south, was the main excavation site, the
unearthed glory of ancient Aqqal-tel.  Twenty years of David Brant's
life had gone into that project; headed now into the twenty-first, it
was nearing completion.
     "But I do not wish to leave!" Helen protested.  "I wish to see
the site opened."  It would be a major media event, promising both
recognition for Brant and the all-important publicity to secure
funding for future digs.  "Besides," she went on, "Solon has just
begun his thesis research.  He will forget to eat if I do not put food
in front of him--and he cannot come with me.  All his evidence is
here, on Vulcan."
     Brant grinned at a mental image of his daughter hand-feeding her
bondmate; some days, that was probably what it took.  Then he sobered. 
"Actually, Solon wasn't invited.  Only you."
     That both silenced and irritated Helen.  In eighteen years, she
and Solon had never spent more than a week or two apart, and that only
when he had to travel to distant museums in order to consult their
glass collections.  She could not imagine traveling all the way to
Earth without him.
     "There's an interstellar archaeological conference in eight
months; it's to be held in Rome.  I've received invitations to it on a
regular basis for the past five years."  He stretched out his legs,
brushed at dust on the right one.  "This year, maybe I'll send you to
present for ShiBaran in my place.  It would be good for your vita, and
your mother is right.  You should at least see Earth."
     "But I do not *care* about Earth!  It is not my home."
     Brant studied her.  "It may not be your place of residence, but
it's where our ancestors are buried.  You should see it."  He turned
his face up to the red Vulcan sky.  It was a proud face, Indian
ancestry betrayed not in coloring but by a certain broad flatness,
high cheekbones, and the faint fold of flesh above small dark eyes. 
"You should meet your mother, too."
     Helen wrapped her arms around her knees, set her chin on them and
considered this.  "I shall talk to Solon," she said finally.
     Brant just smiled.


     Helen's relationship with Solon had matured into a peculiar
symbiosis.  Outsiders might have called him hen-pecked.  In truth,
Helen simply enjoyed organizing mundane daily details and, as Solon
did not, he was content for her to organize his as well as her own. 
In matters of import, she always sought his advice--depended on it, in
fact.  "Of course you should go," he told her that evening.  "She is
your mother.  It is your duty."
     "She is not my mother."
     Solon set down his PADD, then leaned back in his chair to regard
her thoughtfully, hands laced together over his abdomen.  "She carried
you for nine months, with all that entails."
     "And for that I owe her some duty?"
     "You know that you do."
     She flounced out without another word; he watched, knowing he had
won the point.  Yet whatever he had said to Helen about duty--and he
did believe in what he had said--he was not completely sanguine about
this sudden invitation.  In his experience, humans rarely did things
for no reason even when their behavior seemed irrational, and he
wondered what reason Jamilla al-Farris had for contacting her daughter
after eighteen, almost nineteen years.  It troubled him particularly
that he had not been invited to accompany her, though perhaps that
owed more to ignorance than rudeness.  He should not--as his mother
would say--make assumptions in the absence of proper data.  Rubbing
his chin, he nevertheless wondered if there might be some way to
rearrange his schedule so that he could follow Helen to Earth. 
Perhaps he could compress his research and take a few weeks of
personal time.  Flipping up the comm unit in his desk, he toggled the
connect and placed a call to his academic advisor.


     "You will arrive in Rome in two weeks?" Helen asked, for perhaps
the twentieth time.
     "I will."
     Helen nodded, glanced over her shoulder to the front door of the
tiny university flat which she shared with Solon.  Her father, who
would take her to the shuttleport, waited in the hall beyond, giving
the two of them privacy for their goodbyes, though the real goodbyes
had been made the night before: a light touch of fingertips on faces,
after which they had parted to spend the night chastely in separate
beds.  But neither Helen nor Solon had felt any lack of communion.
     Now, he raised the fore and middle fingers of his right hand; she
crossed them with her own.  A shivery flutter raced through them both
like flame under the skin: improvident surge of reckless feeling
rather than any conscious thought.  It left them both as flushed as a
passionate kiss.  She turned, departing without any further exchange. 
None was needed.  When the door closed, he hugged himself, bereft--and
she had not even left the building yet.
     We have been too much together, he thought, and was forced to
admit that his father's advice to spend more time apart had been wiser
than he had credited.  Such admissions came hard to Solon.  He was as
obdurate in a choice made as he was slow to reach one, though in
truth, it had never been a conscious decision to cleave so to Helen. 
Anything else had simply never occurred to him.  She was not the
center of his life; she was something much more fundamental: the
ground of his being.
     And one day she would die and leave him completely alone.  He had
never before let himself consider that truth, but it hit him now with
a physical force that drove the breath from his chest.  He would watch
her grow old and die, his own life less than half over.
     Abruptly, he turned away, back to his terminal and his research. 
Some matters were better not considered.  But that night, he slept
restless on his single cot, missing the soft sigh of her breath in the
dark and dreaming of shadows and shattered glass.


     The metropolis of modern Rome sprawled over both banks of the
Tiber like a mismatched scatter of red-topped legos, narrow old
blacktop highways winding out from it in a drunken spiral.  All roads
led to Rome.  Bella Roma, the eternal city.  Helen pressed her nose to
the port glass as the shuttle banked and came in from the south over
the Tyrrhenian Sea.  To the west, a dark line on the horizon marked
the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.  A single MagLev tunnel bridge
ran out to them over the water.  The dark specks of pleasure boats
marred the sea's surface like black threads in Navajo turquoise.  She
had never seen so much water in her life.  Solon would be astonished.
     Her mother was waiting for her outside customs, though Helen had
sent word that such was unnecessary; she was perfectly capable of
locating her hotel herself.  She recognized Jamilla al-Farris from a
holo the woman had sent; she had sent none in return, preferring that
much control over a situation into which she had been forced against
her will.  Nevertheless, her mother knew her immediately; there were
no other young human women exiting customs, dressed in Vulcan robes. 
They approached one another carefully, like a pair of sehlat bitches
edging along a garden fence.
     "Helen Brant?" her mother said, making it more question than
statement.
     "Dr. al-Farris," she replied.
     Despite the stunting effect of Vulcan gravity, she was still
taller than her mother.  Jamilla al-Farris' features were as difficult
to categorize as her daughter's, with the proud hawk nose of her Arab
ancestors and the almond eyes of her Tai-Malaysian-Maori mother.  Her
chocolate-brown skin was mildly mottled, a flaw sometimes found in
mixed-race offspring.  It made her appearance interesting rather than
ugly.  Helen almost envied her the piebald complexion, not realizing
that Jamilla al-Farris very much envied Helen's own smooth cafe latte
and the shocking beauty al-Farris herself had lost to the vicissitudes
of time and desert sun.  That envy insinuated itself like a spot of
rust under bright paint; unseen, it would spread until it peeled the
surface.
     al-Farris plastered a smile on her face and brushed back a stray
lock of hair.  "I've reserved you a room at Caesar's Palace--"
     Helen bit her tongue to avoid a remark on the hyperbole of the
name.
     "--and we have dinner with the conference organizer and several
of my colleagues this evening.  Tomorrow, we'll see the sights and the
conference opens the day after that.  You can submit a copy of your
paper to the organizer tonight; you've been scheduled to speak on the
fifth day, late in the afternoon.  Not a choice time, but for a
graduate student, it's an honor to present at all."
     Her mother spoke quickly in accented Standard and a slightly
shrill voice while ushering Helen through shuttleport crowds.  Helen
absorbed the waterfall of information and the unfamiliar surroundings
without comment.  She did not say that she had no desire to be here in
the first place.  She wondered if her father had told her mother that,
or if he had mouthed all the usual, polite Terran platitudes that she
was delighted to come and humbled by the opportunity to present at a
professional conference instead of a mere graduate affair.  To use a
Terran colloquialism, she could care less.
     In the face of Helen's silence, her mother continued to chatter,
mostly about work, sometimes about colleagues, and only occasionally
about the peculiarities of Terran culture.  It was the latter that
interested Helen the most.  If it were true that instinct recognized
home, then Helen decided she must be an alien changeling.  Nothing
about Earth felt right.  Even the air was thick in her lungs.  She
took small breaths, to avoid hyperventilating.  Only the Mediterranean
quality of light, when they emerged from the building, fell on her
eyes with any degree of familiarity: as bright and clear as morning
over Vulcan's Forge.  But the color was wrong, all white instead of
orange.  It evoked a shattering pang of homesickness.  Water-logged
Earth was an alien world to Helen Brant.


     Though no one would call Helen intellectually slow, there were
gaps in her socialization by human standards.  That she should be so
tardy in recognizing her mother's ulterior motive for inviting her to
Earth could be blamed on her ignorance of Terran mating customs.  She
simply did not realize that the three young male graduate students
invited to dinner that night along with her mother and her mother's
colleagues were there for Paphian purposes.  Nor did she recognize
their tongue-tied attempts at conversation as awe at her beauty.  When
her mother asked later what she had thought of them, she said simply,
"They seemed too stupid to be working towards advanced degrees.  Solon
knows more than all three of them."  Frustrated, al-Farris had
retreated to ponder a new tactic.
     It was not that Helen knew nothing of romance.  In her early
teens, she had suffered a period of lovelorn pining fed by a steady
diet of young-adult holonovels and her own puberty.  She had dreamed
of passionate kisses and ardent declarations but entertained no
subject for her fantasies besides Solon.  Given to neither of these by
nature or race, but distressed by her inchoate unhappiness, Solon had
replied in a medium and manner which had suited him.
     He had sculpted her.
     Vulcans rarely depicted the human form.  No proscription forbid
it but dictates of custom went far in Vulcan society.  Nevertheless,
Solon had sculpted Helen, in fine blue glass and exquisite detail that
bared all the minute physical flaws which so troubled her adolescent
ego.  A perfect likeness.  Upon seeing it, she had burst into tears. 
It had taken a week, Solon's hang-dog expression, and her father's
sharp rebuke before she had understood.  To Solon, her 'flaws' were
merely marks of individual uniqueness: what made her more than a
mannequin.  The figurine became her talisman, occupying a corner of
their shared dresser.  She touched it when she needed to be reminded
of what love saw.
     Thus spoiled by Solon's artistry and honesty, the hollow flattery
heaped on her by her human peers struck her as crass, or escaped her
notice entirely, and the parade of young men which her mother directed
across her path throughout the two-week conference found her by turns
arrogant or obtuse.  They continued to try because she was also, quite
simply, stunning.  Each one hoped to be the Paris who could steal her
heart.


     "Jan Braulik sent these."  Jamilla al-Farris displayed the vase
of roses which had been delivered to the hotel room while her daughter
had been at a panel, arguing lettering bore-depth in second-century
imperial Roman inscriptions.  Now, Helen reached for the vase, turned
it round once and set it down on the sideboard with a solid thump. 
She went into the bathroom to take down her hair.
     Her mother followed.  "Aren't you going to read the card?"
     "No."
     "Why not?"
     "Because I know what it will say: he wishes to have dinner with
me.  I do not wish to have dinner with him.  It is an unresolvable
situation, and therefore better not encouraged."
     "Why won't you go to dinner with him?"
     Helen dropped three gold combs on the sink counter, freeing a
cascade of tiny beaded braids.  "His motivations are not academic."
     "He's a nice young man!"
     "He is self-involved, conceited and quite wrong-headed about the
dates on early Risan proto-geometric pottery.  He barely received his
doctorate.  He also seems to think that I am...available.  Or can be
made so if he persists long enough."
     She turned back to the mirror and began twisting her braids into
the crown of a Vulcan-style tiara for that evening's banquet.  It was
the last night of the conference and al-Farris had nearly despaired of
saving her daughter from the ill-advised engagement David Brant had
made for her in childhood.  al-Farris had thought the matter would be
simple: bring the child to Earth and expose her to the attentions of
human men in her field, others like herself who could feel desire. 
Helen would immediately recognize the folly of her father's
arrangements and seek her mother's help in dissolving them.
     Instead, it seemed that Helen Brant was in love with her Vulcan
and content to adopt a match made for her at seven.  But Jamilla al-
Farris was not convinced.  She had never been a woman to surrender a
pet theory easily--a virtue or a vice in her vocation, depending on
whether one agreed with the theory.  In this case, she believed her
daughter to have been brainwashed.  Why Vulcans should so wish to bond
one of their own to a human that they would go to the trouble of
systematically brainwashing a seven year old was not a question her
human ethnocentrism led her to ask.
     Now, she entered the bathroom to lean against the counter so that
she could see her daughter's face.  "Jan Braulik knows far more about
Risan pottery dating than you.  He also comes from a long-time
academic family and has a prestigious post-doc; you should be
flattered by his interest in you, a graduate student."
     Her daughter dropped both hands from the tiara, stared.  "You
would *encourage* this suit?  I am otherwise bonded!  And Solon will
be here tomorrow."
     It was this immanent arrival of Solon which caused al-Farris to
press now.  "Yes, you were bonded: a decision made for you--unwisely--
at seven.  You shouldn't be constrained by it."
     Helen continued to stare.  "It was not made for me.  It was my
own choice."
     al-Farris threw up both fine hands.  "How could you possibly be
expected to know better?  You were seven years old!  You'd never dated
a human man, never spent any time on Earth!  It was irresponsible in
the extreme for your father to permit such a...travesty."
     "You were not present at the time to be privy to my thoughts. 
Nor have you ever met Solon.  How then can you make pronouncements
regarding my fitness to select him as a bondmate based solely on my
age?  You may name my father irresponsible, but your assumptions show
you to be patronizing and foolish, both."
     Neither prudence nor tact had ever been among Helen Brant's
social repertoire, and the jealousy which al-Farris had suppressed
upon their initial meeting resurfaced now.  She slapped her daughter. 
"You prideful, ungracious bitch.  It would suit you right if someone
took you down a notch.  I just hope I'm around to see it."  And she
stomped out, headed back to her own hotel room.


     Golden Jan Braulik would have made Paris jealous; certainly he
made many of his colleagues so and was the subject of occasional catty
remarks about plastic surgery.  In fact, he came by the blond curls
and flawless features honestly, but all nature's blessings had been
squandered on the external.  Helen Brant was correct: he had passed
his dissertation defense mostly because his committee had invested too
much time in him to admit to having made a mistake in permitting him
to pursue an advanced degree in the first place.  It also helped that
three of his four committee members were female.  Braulik was not
ignorant of his physical effect.
     And because he was not ignorant, he could not fathom why it had
no impact on Helen Brant.  That had never happened to him before.
     He knew about her Vulcan fiance; all of them did.  Word had
spread among the young set pursuing her, followed by assurances from
her mother that the match had been made when they were both children. 
Helen had been duped into it, al-Farris had said.  Braulik wondered,
might even have decided that al-Farris was wrong, but his pride was
involved now.  Women didn't turn down Jan Braulik.
     So he had engaged in a bit of covert research on Solon ch'Saval
vru'Tchai.  The result had surprised him.
     "He looks like a wrestler."
     "A *wrestler*?"
     "Yeah.  Big dumb jock type: thick neck, lantern jaw, shoulders
out to here"--Braulik gestured in demonstration--"a caricature."  Then
he downed his third martini of the evening, turned the empty glass in
manicured hands.  He and his three companions leaned up against the
bar and watched the older generation of archaeologists hobnob and
drink and edge for precedence like chance-met dogs.  He refused to
participate.  Conference banquets were always like this, and to
Braulik, the only way to win at the game was not to play.
     "He can't be too dumb," said one of the others with him.  Tall
and freckled and possessed of flaming red hair, he was a caricature in
his own right.  "Not if ARCH TODAY published one of his papers and he
hasn't even got his degree yet.  'Sides, I never met a dumb Vulcan." 
He had drunk rather more than three martinis.  "They must kill the
defective ones in the womb."
     "He doesn't deserve her," Braulik said.
     "But who's gonna argue with him if he looks like Hercules?"
     "He's ugly," Braulik added.  He said this not because it was true
but because he wished it were.  In fact, Solon was unremarkable: thin
lips; long, hollow-cheeked face; prominent nose above his wrestler's
neck.  And if Vulcan ears were usually thought elegant, Solon's were
no exemplar: oddly-shaped and lobe-less.  Yet his nose, if prominent,
was also straight, and the thin lips had a fine curve. It was a face
of advantages and disadvantages--the kind a mirror shows most people
each morning.
     What tipped the balance were his eyes.  Upon bringing up the
small holo, Jan Braulik had hated Solon ch'Saval immediately for his
eyes.  Solon's body might be a wrestler's, but his eyes were a poet's:
Byronic or Byzantine, depending on one's descriptive preference. 
Braulik's eyes were his worst feature: small and close-set and icy
blue.  He had decided that Helen Brant preferred her Vulcan because of
his eyes.  In fact, Helen had never considered either Byronic or
Byzantine as adjectives for Solon even at the very height of her
romantically-inclined adolescence.  His eyes had nothing to do with
why she loved him and, because this was beyond Jan Braulik's
comprehension, he had no hope of ever wooing her away from her
Menelaos.
     But there were many versions of Paris' abduction of Helen, and
she did not flee with him willingly in all of them.
     "Maybe she just needs a little convincing," Braulik said now, "a
little more forceful convincing," and he ordered another martini.



                                 III.


     "God, it's not fair.  It's just not fuckin' fair!  The woman is a
goddess and she shows up here dressed in *that*."
     The offending garment was gold and turquoise and slinky.  Lame. 
It glittered.  So did the one wearing it.
     The dress had been her mother's idea, selected for precisely the
effect it was producing.  Every head in the banquet hall had turned,
watching Helen descend the stairs into their midst like some dark-
skinned Aphrodite.  In that moment, Jan Braulik wasn't the only man
present who would have considered violence to possess her.  And her
mother wasn't the only woman who would have loved to see her taken
down a notch.
     Helen was ignorant of both reactions.  Despite the quarrel with
Jamilla al-Farris, she had worn the dress out of obligation.  Her
mother had bought it for her, for this occasion, and duty required
that she honor gift and giver by fulfilling the intended purpose.  Had
she, in fact, *understood* the intended purpose, wild horses could not
have driven her into it.  She handed her black wrap to a waiting
attendant, exposing enough bare flesh to cause Jan Braulik's red-
headed companion to groan in a cliched agony.
     "Stay put," Braulik said to the small circle of young post-docs
who surrounded him like an academic halo.  Setting down a fourth empty
martini glass, he made his way through the crowd into the circle which
had opened around Helen.  Pretty women drew attention.  Exquisite ones
put it off.  Shunned out of awe, or envy, Helen Brant gripped a black
sequined purse and observed the other banqueters, rescued by Vulcan
reserve from appearing somewhat pathetic.  Jan Braulik was not subject
to the same apprehensions as other men.
     "May I get you something?" he asked, leaning over her shoulder. 
Viking genes gave him height enough to speak directly into her ear.
     She jumped, swung around.  "I beg your pardon?"
     "May I get you something--to drink?"
     In Helen's opinion, he stood entirely too close.  In Braulik's
opinion, he wasn't standing close enough.  It took a concentrated
effort to keep his eyes above the promising swell of cleavage.  Like
everything else about her, it was perfect.  Braulik had never liked
his women either overendowed or bony.  "They have wine," he went on
now, "red or white.  Or something a little stronger, if you prefer."
     "I *prefer* not to ingest alcohol, thank you."
     Braulik could be gracious.  "Something else then?"
     She met his eyes.  "Yes.  Solitude."
     It took him a moment, and her deliberate step backwards, for him
to understand.  He had been snubbed.  In front of friends and academic
superiors both.  Golden Jan Braulik had been publicly snubbed.
     One disadvantage of a peaches and cream complexion was that it
flushed well.  At least he managed to keep his smile in place while he
said--too softly to be overheard--"You'll regret this, ice bitch."
     "I think not."
     He left her, had a fifth martini.


     Paradoxically, Braulik's failure encouraged others: knights bound
on rescuing the princess from the dragon--though had either of the
gentlemen in question attempted to don actual armor, he would have
fallen over helpless.  At seventy-nine and eighty-two, a suit of iron
was beyond even their collective strength.  Ian Buchannan and Shusaku
Aoyama had been a team--on the field and off--for fifty years, and had
known Helen Brant's grandparents.  Age, familiarity, old-fashioned
charm, and a differing orientation granted them license.  They sat her
between them at dinner and entertained her with tales of her father at
five.
     After one such tale, and at a nod from his partner, Buchannan
leaned back, sipped Earl Grey, and said casually.  "That's a lovely
dress, duckie.  Wherever did you find it?"
     "My mother bought it for me," Helen replied.  "It was a gift, for
the banquet tonight."
     Buchannan and Aoyama exchanged another glance.  Both had known
Helen's grandparents, and both knew Jamilla al-Farris, too.  Aoyama
poured more green tea for Helen, handing it to her with Japanese
graciousness.  "A word of advice, my dear.  Not all gifts are given
for the right reasons."
     Helen's glance was sharp.  "Explain."
     But Aoyama merely smiled and nodded faintly to Buchannan.  "It's
a lovely dress," Buchannan said again.  "It's also, shall we say, a
*suggestive* dress.  It encourages admiration of your charms--and not
the intellectual ones, either, I fear."  He tipped his tea cup in her
direction, winked.
     Helen was slow about such matters.  She was not stupid.  One hand
involuntarily flew to a bared shoulder.
     Aoyama was nodding.  "Bees seek flowers.  Sometimes they sting."
     Abruptly irritated with herself, her mother, and the male of the
species generally, Helen snapped, "What I am wearing should not matter."
     "No," Buchannan agreed pleasantly, "it shouldn't.  But if the
universe ran on 'should,' we'd have discovered Atlantis, who built
Stonehenge, and the Alexandrian Library by now.  Alas, I fear human
men are slaves to the eyes, duckie--Vulcan men, too, even if they
refuse to admit it.  Still, most of us did learn our manners.  We may
like the flowers but we try to buzz about politely.  Yet as my dear
Shusaku pointed out, some sting."
     Offended and infuriated at once, Helen asked, "So I must adjust
my attire for male weakness?"
     Buchannan set down his teacup.  "We all adjust our attire for one
reason or another.  Clothes serve several functions, among them, to
send social messages.  You're a flower, m'dear--an orchid among
flowers.  As long as you don't mind being admired, then by all means,
find a pretty vase.  And that dress *is* a pretty vase."  He winked
again.  "We just wanted to be sure that you realized as much."
     After that she understood too well the glances--bold or covert--
cast her way, and was too self-conscious to enjoy the banquet.  She
retired within an hour, her ostensible excuse that Solon arrived early
on the morrow.  In truth, she wanted to get back to her hotel and
remove the damned dress.  It would be returned to her mother tomorrow,
along with the hotel room key and a curt farewell.  Unfortunate, that
Solon would arrive on Earth only to travel back with her to Vulcan. 
That evening, all she wanted was to go home.  She was tired of Earth,
tired of wet rich air, of a foreign tongue and foreign script, of too
much green, and of too alien a set of customs.  Red Vulcan sang to her
across sixteen lightyears.


     It would never have occurred to her to worry about walking back
alone after dark.  This was Earth, not some colonial backwater.  She
might have taken public transportation but even with her black wrap
around her shoulders, she preferred the soft dark anonymity of the
narrow Roman streets to the bright glare of the train station.  The
orchid had been admired enough for one evening, thank you very much.
     Now, she had stopped to admire something herself: one of the many
old fountains in the city, a small one half-hidden in a cul-de-sac off
the main thoroughfare.  The fountains of Rome most reminded her of
Vulcan, especially on a warm night like this one.  Craving solitude
and the familiar sound of falling water, she sat down on the basin
edge, turned her face up to the heavens and closed her eyes.
     A shadow blocked the light of a far streetlamp, caused her to
open them.  Jan Braulik stood above her.  He was still dressed in his
formal tuxedo but the ascot was askew and his face had the puffy
quality of the very drunk, his eyes sunken like clams.  He smelled of
gin and vermouth.  "Prefer the company of the fish in the pond?"
     "If yours is the other option, then yes."  She started to rise. 
"I shall absent myself from the vicinity."
     His foot slammed down on the edge of the fountain basin.  It
caught a fold of the black shawl, stopping her.  Irritated, she tried
to pull the shawl free.  "Move!"
     He didn't reply.  Nor did he move.  Two of his friends drifted
out of the shadows to join him--one the red-head.  They cut off her
escape in any direction except backwards through the water--not that
it occurred to her yet to run.
     "We decided you needed an escort," Braulik said.  "It's dangerous
on the streets."
     "It is not, and I have need of no such thing."
     Reaching down, he hauled her to her feet--without removing his
foot.  The shawl ripped.  "It's for your own good, woman."
     "Release me!"  She jerked at the arm in his grasp, pulled close
her ruined shawl and black purse with the other.  "I said release me!"
Her voice was rising.
     "Shut up."
     "Jan--" warned one of the others, glancing about nervously.  No
one was visible nearby but some of the windows over balconies above
might be open to catch the Mediterranean air, and the main street was
only fifty meters away.  A dull white-noise roar of human occupation
drifted back to them.
     Braulik considered his companion, then spoke to Helen.  "Say
you'll let us walk you back and I'll let you go."
     She was still holding herself as far away from him as possible. 
"I have no reason to bargain with you and no wish to be accompanied
anywhere by you, either."
     "You just can't make anything easy, can you?"  He let go of her
arm long enough to get a hold of her hair, pulling her in against him
until she could feel the bite of steel in his other hand.
     "Shit, Jan!  Are you crazy?" said the red-head.  "Put the fucking
knife away."  He started to back off.
     "You're not going anywhere," Jan told him.  The third young man
had stepped in behind to block any retreat.  "You were eager enough to
come with us, back at the banquet.  What'd you think?  That she'd fall
on her ass and spread her pretty legs as soon as you asked?"
     Helen was too surprised by the knife in her side and Braulik's
words to react immediately.  It was only beginning to occur to her
that she might be in mortal danger; almost two centuries of Federation
peace had lulled her like a deer in virgin woods.  Braulik leaned close
to blow in her ear with obscene intimacy, then whisper, "We're going
to take a little walk and you won't scream or try to run away--or I'll
drill a hole in your rib.  Now march, bitch."
     Numb and dumb with terror, she let them steer her into an alley
barely more than a crawlway: steep, faceless stucco walls above.  No
windows.  Over and over, her mind howled protest but the sound never
reached her lips.  This couldn't be happening; women weren't assaulted
in the streets of Rome, or any other Earth city, in the second half of
the twenty-fourth century.  Violent crime had been eliminated--or so
Federation propaganda would have liked visitors and citizens alike to
believe.  In fact, women were still raped by acquaintances or career
superiors in Rome and elsewhere on Earth with depressing regularity. 
Rape wasn't a crime born of want or greed--things the Federation
claimed to have eliminated.  Nor was it a crime of passion.  It was a
crime of frustrated pride, and rage, and the callous objectification
of another human being.
     Despite being flimsy, Helen's dress didn't come off as easily as
Braulik and his companions had assumed.  It was designed to give the
impression that certain parts of her anatomy were about to pop out,
not to permit those parts to actually do so.  They used the shawl to
gag her and twisted her tiara into cuffs to hold her hands, then had
to hack a slit in her dress with Braulik's knife.  At some point,
strength returned to her limbs and she fought them.  Braulik used the
knife hilt to knock her half-senseless, then two of them held her
while a third took his turn.  Braulik went first, of course.  When he
pulled out, there was a thin streak of red on his limp cock.  "Cherry
juice!"
     The scent of blood excited them, like sharks.  Four and a half
million years of evolution had not bred out the predator instinct. 
Having sated themselves, they found a bottle--broken at the neck and
discarded--and used that.  "Can't permit littering!" the one who had
discovered it said.
     As Braulik had first shoved his way inside her, Helen had tried
to twist her body, close her thighs, contract the pelvic floor muscle,
anything to stop the invasion and push him out.  Futility was not a
lesson she had learned as a child.  She learned it that night.  After
a while, she lost track of pain as a consequence of specific acts.  It
expanded to fill her consciousness: she was a body of agony in a sky
of torment.  It went on and on.  As long as she lived, she would never
forget it.  There was not even the relief of screaming.  The reflexive
opening of her jaw only gagged her with her own shawl.  Since dying
wasn't a mercy granted to her, she endured, tried to step outside the
body which suffered, let her mind wander to odd thoughts.  She had
never sailed; she would like to sail once on that brilliant blue sea
she had seen through her incoming shuttle window.  She focused on
this, shut out the rest.
     At the end of twenty minutes, the blood-intoxication wore off her
attackers.  She had ceased to struggle and the red pulsing from her
ruined vagina was merely messy, not exciting.  Their hands were slick
with it, isolated splatters marring dress clothing.  "Jan," said the
red-head, "She's, like, really fucked up, man."  His voice rose in a
panic.  "You really fucked her up.  I mean, you *really* fucked her
up!"
     Reality crashed in on them: boys who have killed their first
squirrel and now face the task of skinning it.  The predators became
young men again, scared by their own violence.  Braulik looked down at
his hands, at the bloody glass bottle.  "Shit," he muttered.  "Shit,
shit, shit."  Then he slashed at Helen with the broken glass, tore one
bruised cheek.  "You bitch!  See what you made us do?"  When she
didn't respond, he struck her again.
     "Is she dead?" the third asked.
     Braulik jerked her chin up, knocking her head against concrete. 
She blinked reflexively but without much awareness.  It was just one
more bruise.  "No," he said.  "But she's going to be soon."
     "We've got to get her to a hospital," said the red-head.
     Broken bottle in one hand, knife in the other, Braulik swung on
him.  "Are you nuts?  Do you *want* to end your career in New Zealand? 
No?  Then you'll do what I tell you and keep your goddamn mouth shut." 
He glanced at the half-comatose figure on the pavement at their feet. 
"You're as guilty of killing her as we are.  We can't leave her.  Call
this the coup de grace."  He buried his knife in her chest, off-center
but still nicking an artery.  Blood spurted.
     "Shit, Jan!"
     Braulik hadn't expected so much blood.  It burst out all over his
white shirt-front.  A few spots might have been concealable.  Not a
great red stain.  Enraged, he stabbed her five more times till the
others pulled him off.
     "Enough!" the third said.  "Look at her--she's dead.  Let's get
the hell out of here and get you cleaned up.  And toss that knife and
bottle to the bottom of the Tiber."


     Helen Brant was not dead.  Braulik's initial aim had missed her
heart.  The ones that followed, guided by rage rather than anatomical
awareness, had pierced her abdominal cavity: stomach, intestines,
pancreas, uterus.  She was still alive when Braulik and the others
fled.  Adrenaline and some spark of that survival instinct which
nature grants to all her creatures rolled her onto her side and gave
her strength to free her hands from the makeshift cuffs, crawl to the
mouth of the alley and halfway out into the cul-de-sac, if no further
before blood loss rendered her unconscious.  It was far enough.  One
of Rome's ever-present dogs, flopped in the fountain lee, heaved
itself up and came to investigate.  Luckily for Helen, the dog was
well-fed and tame and more inclined to be disturbed by the blood-smell
than to take a bite out of the wounded thing bearing it.  The dog
began to howl, which brought people to investigate.
     Helen was in a hospital trauma ward under a medical tunnel seven
minutes later.  Had it taken eight minutes, she would have died.


     Solon knew something was wrong.  His spaceliner had dropped out
of warp just beyond Pluto's eccentric orbit and was making its stately
way at one-quarter impulse power in towards the third planet.  This
close, and with a bond as old and deep as theirs, he could feel eddies
of disturbance.  But as Helen was not a telepath, he had no idea what
was wrong.  His ship was not due to dock for another three hours, then
customs would take an hour more, after which he had a seventy minute
wait on a shuttle connection and another two hours in flight.
     He was not inclined to wait, pressed the bell for a cabin
attendant.


     "Raped?  What do you mean she was *raped*?"  Jamilla al-Farris
faced the ER attending and tried to decipher the stream of words
pouring at her.  They caught in mental molasses and stuck there,
refusing to arrange themselves into sense.  "This is Earth."
     The attending scratched her nose.  "I know.  I'm sorry."  After
an awkward pause, the woman hurried to explain, more comfortable with
data than emotions.  "Ms. Brant was gang-raped by three men, then
assaulted vaginally with a sharp object and stabbed six times in the
chest and abdomen.  Not to mention miscellaneous bruising and cuts
from being beaten.  The assault clearly wasn't pre-planned, or not
pre-planned to any significant degree.  The perpetrators left behind
sufficient body fluids for a DNA ID.  She's out of immediate danger,
but her condition is still critical."
     "Can the police find the ones who did it?"  An academic, al-
Farris was more comfortable with data, too.  And while Helen was her
daughter, Helen was also a virtual stranger.  al-Farris' horror was
generic rather than personal.
     "It depends," the attending said, tapping thoughtfully on her
PADD with a stylus.  "If their DNA is on record anywhere, sure.  If
not, the investigation may take longer.  When she wakes, the police
will want to talk to her."  The woman looked up.  "I understand she
was raised on Vulcan?"
     "Yes," al-Farris said.  "Yes, she was."
     "Then she might have better observation skills than most humans. 
We'll have to see what she can tell us."
     al-Farris nodded distractedly.  The attending's question had
reminded her: she had a call to place, to David Brant.  And the girl's
fiance was supposed to arrive this morning, too, but al-Farris didn't
know the time.  Well, if the boy was a grad student, presumably he had
brains enough to figure out what to do if no one was there to meet
him.  al-Farris ran a hand over her face and left the family room
where physicians delivered bad news, headed back to the main waiting
room.
     As she passed the lift, its doors opened, expelling a young
Vulcan male, his face frozen in a mask of panic barely mastered.


     It had been fortunate for Solon that the spaceliner on which he
had booked passage was operated by Vulcans or he might have had some
difficulty convincing the attendants of his emergency.  As it was, a
single look at his face had been sufficient.  They had beamed him by
relay-transporter all the way in to Earth from Neptune station.  That
kind of repeated dissolution in quick succession was unsettling to
even veteran space-farers; it had made poor Solon sick to his stomach
for a full fifteen minutes.  Or maybe it was just increasing anxiety
about Helen.  In any case, he had swallowed bile and explained to the
final station operator who he was looking for.  Locating Helen had
required the fifteen minutes it took to settle Solon's nausea and then
some, so by the time he arrived on the emergency transporter pad of
Rome's Central Hospital, he had control of his stomach again...if not
his anxiety.  But by the time al-Farris had finished her explanation--
back in the family room from which she had just come--he was sick to
his stomach once more.  "I want to see her," he whispered.
     "I doubt they'll let you in.  They wouldn't let me in and I'm her
mother."
     Solon--who understood tact rather better than Helen--refrained
from pointing out that al-Farris might be her biological mother, but
she had no other connection to her.  As her bondmate, Solon did,
including such legal niceties as power of attorney.  As far as the
Federation was concerned, he was her husband.  Now, rather than bother
to reply to al-Farris, he simply left her standing in the family room
and went in search of Helen's physician.
     Nevertheless, it was an hour before he was permitted into her
room.  Medical personnel had repaired her body: no bruise remained to
mar her perfect skin, no physical evidence to explain the blasted
blankness of her expression as she sat in a chair, looking out the
hospital window.  Solon found the contrast obscene.
     "Helen."
     She turned her head a little.  Her braids swayed, gold beads
catching florescent light.  She did not otherwise acknowledge him.  He
wasn't sure what he had expected, but not that.  Unfamiliar emotions
fought a war in his chest and belly.  There was moisture obscuring his
vision; it took a moment, for him to recognize it for tears.  So, this
was grief, he thought.
     He moved into the room and came to stand behind her chair, wanted
to touch her, to pick her up and cradle her, protect her now as he had
failed to protect her last night.  Guilt burned.  Carefully, he laid
his hand, fingers spread, on the crown of her head, rubbed his thumb
back and forth over her braids.
     Helen did not respond to that, either.  She couldn't.  It wasn't
in her to respond.  Her middle felt hollow.  One part of her mind, the
part trained in Vulcan discipline, recognized her reaction for shock. 
That did not change it any.  So they stood that way a long time, he
with his hand resting on her hair, she with her eyes turned out to the
city morning and the flash of shuttle traffic passing the hospital
window.
     Finally, he said, "Do you know the identities of...the ones who
did this?"
     "Yes."
     Through their bond, she could feel an unfamiliar, uncontrolled
surge of emotion: Vulcan rage, Vulcan thirst for revenge.  None of it
reached his face or tensed the hand resting on her crown.  "Who?"
     Without turning, she raised her hand.  He moved his own to grip
it, then came around to kneel in front of her chair, raise his other
hand to her face.  She closed her eyes in assent.  He touched her
mind, saw for himself--saw it all.  Felt it all.
     Some say that joy shared is joy doubled, while grief shared is
halved.  Not always.  Overwhelmed, Solon jerked his hand away and fell
back from her, his fair skin hot with shame and fury.  She lowered her
eyes, fearing--for the first time--that he might blame her, that she
might in some way be to blame, in fact.  No longer touching and too
full of his own turmoil, Solon remained unaware of her uncertainty. 
He rolled to his feet with a grace that belied his size and his anger. 
"Have you told the authorities?"
     "Not yet.  They have not come yet to ask me."
     Solon did not reply; instead, he turned for the door and left her
sitting there.  She crossed her arms over her breasts and shivered
once, hard, all over.  He had abandoned her.


     Vulcans had evolved as hunters, with the social hierarchy of
prehistoric tribes and family bands dictated by the physical prowess
of their males.  Strength and courage determined the order in which--
and the amount--one ate; it determined the right to speak in council;
it even determined the right to mate.  Mothers and daughters were
protected fiercely: the jewels of a clan, or the prizes of conquest. 
Even a thousand years after Surak, rape still reverberated darkly in
the Vulcan soul, overwhelming emotional mastery in the one to whom the
raped woman belonged--and who belonged to her.  It was more than mere
damaged property.  The mating bond assured that the humiliation and
fear visited on the woman was visited also on her man.  More, it stood
as an accusation that he had failed in his fundamental duty to protect
and provide, a duty hotwired into him by biology.  Logic had nothing
to do with it.
     Thus, a combination of guilt, rage and pure horror--an emotional
mix as primal as the pon farr--drove Solon into his species' past.  He
became a hunter, a hunter with a prey insultingly easy to track.


     Jan Braulik and his two partners in crime had not separated since
their assault on Helen Brant late the night before.  Fear held them
together, and fear caused them to nip verbally at one another: three
hairless, bipedal pack dogs.
     "What are we gonna do?  What are we gonna do?  What are we gonna
do?"  This from the red-head as he paced the floor of Jan's hotel
room.  He'd been pacing and whining all night.
     "Shut the fuck up," said the third, but in a dull voice.  He'd
been saying that, too, all night.
     Braulik said nothing, just stood in the room's center, drinking
double martinis.  It hadn't taken him long to realize that killing
Helen Brant hadn't solved their problem.  They had to dispose of the
body or the semen they had left in her would convict them.  But when
he and his friends had made their way back--cautiously--to the cul-de-
sac, the body was long gone and they could see bright police tape from
a two block distance.  Too late.  They might have run at that point,
tried to get off-planet before anyone could put out an APB on them,
but fatalism drove them back to Jan's hotel to await the inevitable. 
After all, where could they run?  Outside Federation space, how would
three archaeology post-docs earn a living?  So Jan had showered while
the other two ate, then they had passed the time blaming one another. 
     When the knock came on the hotel room door, all three exchanged a
resigned look, but none moved to answer.  They waited for the voice
calling, "Police, open up!"
     No voice did.  The visitor knocked again.  Braulik blinked, set
down his martini and slowly made his way to the door, weaving a little
from inebriation.  As soon as he opened it, the one waiting outside
exploded into the room, shoving him backwards but keeping him from
falling by a strong grip in his shirt front.  He was swung around and
smashed into a wall.  His head struck hard enough to crack the plaster
in a tiny spiderweb of breaks.  For a moment, his companions stood
dumb, watching.  Then the larger moved to grab the intruder by the
shoulder.  He was flung off like chaff from the winnowing, landed on
the floor against the bed.  The redhead didn't even try.  He fled out
the still-open door.  After a moment, the other dragged himself up,
shook his head to clear it, and followed.
     Perhaps ten seconds had passed since the door had been opened.
     Solon recovered enough of himself then to look at what he held
pinned to the wall.  He knew this was Braulik.  He had seen the face--
self-assured and aristocratic--burned into Helen's mind.  But now he
was able to *see* what he actually held, not what Helen remembered:
puffy skin, flattened curls, red-rimmed eyes wide open with fear. 
Their gazes locked and a spark of recognition displaced Braulik's
drunk for a moment; he knew Solon just as clearly as Solon knew him. 
Triumph twisted his mouth.  Even now, held in a Vulcan's crushing
grip, he was the victor.  Nothing Solon did could retrieve what
Braulik had taken from Helen--and from him.
     In that moment, Solon finally understood Surak: understood at a
level below the liver and deeper than thought.  To kill was to lose. 
If Solon, in his anger, throttled Braulik, then Braulik's victory was
unassailable because Braulik would have succeeded in driving Solon to
that act.  Braulik would be in control, not Solon.
     Solon released him.  Surprised, Braulik slid down the wall to
collapse at Solon's feet, his legs literally unable to hold him up. 
"You are pathetic," Solon said.  It was a statement, not an insult.
     Braulik glanced around the room, saw that he was alone and looked
up again at Solon, smiled like a man with nothing left to lose.  "I
may be pathetic, but I got to her first--so what does that make you?"
     Not following, Solon blinked.  "First?"
     "I got her cherry."
     That baffled Solon further.  "Her what?"
     Braulik crawled up the wall behind him until he was standing
again, nose-to-nose with the Vulcan.  He wobbled still.  "She was a
*virgin*, you idiot.  And *I* took her virginity--not you."  The sound
he made then was more bark than laugh.  "You've been bonded to her how
long?  But you couldn't even get it up enough to fuck her once in all
those years.  What's the problem, Prim?  Impotent?"
     The path of Braulik's thought was so far from anything familiar
to Solon that for several heartbeats, he did not understand Braulik's
point at all.  When he did, the alien insult simply slid by him,
finding no purchase in his own cultural conditioning.  "If you took
her virginity, what did you do with it?"
     "Huh?"  Braulik's turn now to be baffled.
     "If you took her virginity, what did you do with it?"  Braulik
could not answer.  "There, you see?  The phrase is meaningless.  What
matters is that you violated her body against her will."  Solon's jaw
clenched, green rage returning for a moment.  He swallowed it.  "For
that, you will pay."  Again, a statement, not a threat.  Gripping
Braulik by the collar, Solon hauled him out the door.
     "You can't prove anything!" Braulik said, more for form's sake
than because he thought it true.
     "I do not have to," Solon replied, shoving Braulik roughly
between the shoulderblades to propel him down the hallway.  "Helen
survived."
     Swinging around, Braulik gaped; only then did it dawn on him how
Solon had been able to locate him so quickly.
     "You will be tried for the rape and attempted murder of a Vulcan
citizen," Solon told him.



                                 IV.


     Helen sat perfectly still, perfectly rigid, for a long time after
Solon left.  Only her eyes moved, and they only to blink.  She might
have been the glass figurine which Solon had cast.  All her energy was
focused on thinking new thoughts.
     Was she somehow responsible for what had happened to her?  Logic
said "no."  Logic said the attack on her had been rooted in irrational
envy and Helen could not--should not--be blamed for others' madness. 
But guilt is not a logical thing, and the question dogged her.  She
remembered the warning Ian Buchannan and Shusaku Aoyama had given her. 
Provocative.  She had dressed in a provocative manner.  Was it any
wonder if she had been attacked as a result?  Dress like a slut, be
treated like one.
     "No!"  She stood abruptly, sending the chair over with a crash on
the bare floor tiles.
     One of the nurses hurried in.  "Ms. Brant?"
     "I am well," she said without turning, without picking up the
chair.
     The nurse hesitated, eying the chair.  He wasn't so sure but also
wasn't inclined to argue with her.  He closed the door behind him as
he went out and Helen listened to the soft shuffle of his step moving
off down the hall; when it was out of range, she turned and righted
the chair, sat down again in shadows.  A thin florescent light behind
the medbed gave the room's only illumination: white and unforgiving. 
She did not wish to be caught and exposed, so she pulled the chair as
far away into a corner as she could, huddled there.  And it was there
the police found her a short time later.  Two policewomen.  They asked
gentle questions about her attackers.  She gave them full names and a
vivid, precise description of what had been done to her: blunt, stoic,
rebuffing their delicacy, sparing nothing.  Bemused, they recorded her
statement and left.  "Poor thing," one said to the other, "she must be
in shock."
     The second shrugged, replied, "Vulcans are Vulcans, even when
they're human, it seems."
     Back at the station, they discovered that one of the three named
suspects had already been brought in--by the Vulcan fiance, no less. 
The remaining two were rounded up shortly after.  Claims by one that
he had been struck by the Vulcan were duly written on a PADD, which
was subsequently "accidentally" erased.  The suspect hadn't suffered
any lasting damage and if he'd been roughed up a little, it was less
than he deserved as far as the police were concerned.  With the
physical evidence against them and a clear identification from the
victim herself, there was no mystery here.  Matters were concluded
swiftly: rights read, suspects booked and transported to New Zealand
where they would be held until their arraignment.  Case closed.  The
name "Brant" was deleted from the case board.


     But the case was not closed for Helen, or for Solon.  It was a
journey just beginning.
     He returned to her hospital room six hours after he had left it. 
She was still sitting in the far corner, away from the florescent
light.  When he entered, she said, "You came back."  A statement
hemmed by surprise.
     He blinked.  "Of course."  Then he turned away from her to shut
the door, moving slowly as was his wont.  "Jan Braulik is in custody."
     "The police came."
     "I took him to the police station myself."
     "I gave them names."
     Solon turned back then and they just looked at one another, as
unconnected in spirit as in their dialogue.  Solon did not know how to
express his guilt, or his anger, or his fundamental bruising.  He had
been trained to suppress his feelings too well; now they balled up in
his throat and choked him.  Nor did he know how to tell her what he
had done to Jan Braulik, or rather, what he had wanted to do.  Would
she hate him for almost giving into violence?  Or would she hate him
for not doing so?
     For her own part, Helen did not know how to ask what she needed
to know:  Do you blame me?
     So they said nothing at all.  He walked over to the bed, checked
the plastic water pitcher to see if it was full and, seeing it wasn't,
carried it into the bathroom to fill for her.  Then he tucked in the
sheets where they had come loose, smoothed the wrinkles out of the
blanket.  She watched.  Finally, he cleared his throat.  "You should
lay back down."
     "Turn off the light first."
     Glancing back at her, he did so.  Only daylight greyed the room
now, slipping in under stiff lined hospital curtains.  She rose at
last, padding over to the bed--the opposite side from where he stood--
to crawl under the white covers he had just neatened.  Then she lay
with her back to him.
     He wanted to touch her, even as he feared doing so, feared the
explosion of her human feelings inside his head.  He could barely
control his own.  He needed distance until he could master himself. 
But he also needed...something.  Some physical contact to reestablish
their connection, carry them past the unsaid and unsayable.  Peculiar,
how the person he knew best in the universe was also the one to whom
he suddenly found it impossible to voice the deep-down things.  He
feared losing her, a fear beyond pat melodrama.  He honestly would not
know how to live without Helen Brant.  If she had died....
     Abruptly, he sank down on his knees on cold tile, felled by the
full impact of what it would have meant to him.  He needed her, and
pon farr had nothing to do with it.  She drew him, centered and
focused him, gave direction to his life.  She was stronger than he. 
By both race and nature, Solon required a partner.
     The bed rustled and he looked up to find Helen peering over the
edge, her previous apathy banished by confused concern.  "Solon?"
     "I--"  But the words stopped in his throat once more.  He frowned
at the floor, mute with the need to express himself.
     A brown hand extended itself into his field of vision.  "Get up
off the floor, Solon."
     He took the hand.


     They returned to Vulcan, picked up the pieces of their lives as
best they could.  The trial came and went, the conviction surprising
no one.  Logically, that should have been the end of it.  To a Vulcan,
it would have been and nothing was ever said to Helen after about what
had happened in Rome:  Vulcan manners, Vulcan sensitivity, but also
Vulcan inability to deal with her psychic wounding.  Even Solon was
silent.  Her father alone spoke of the matter to her but what he said
was vague, hampered by guilt and inexpressible anger.  His child had
been violated and there was nothing he could do to fix it.  What good
would talking do, except to make her go through the terror all over
again?
     Yet Helen, with the illogic peculiar to humans, felt the silence
as a weight of accusation.  Doubts plagued her, and self-blame.  So did
a new and irrational fear.  All her previous self-confidence fled.  She
no longer felt comfortable being alone, but crowds and company made her
nervous, too.  Solon sensed that something was wrong but had no idea how
to coax it out of her.  Nothing in his upbringing had schooled him to
the gentle art of eliciting confidences.  Instead, he tried to encourage
her to resume her studies and research, work being the Vulcan antidote
to all ills.


     Helen left Vulcan--and Solon--exactly one year from the day she had
lost her innocence (along with her virginity) in a dark Roman alley.
     "But where will you go?" Solon asked, trailing her from one room
to the next as she packed her things, unable to quite comprehend this
collapse of his life.
     "I do not know," she replied, without violence, without heat. 
She was not leaving him because she hated him.  She was leaving
because she did not know how to love him any more.  She did not know
how to love anyone, including herself.  The knowledge had been drained
out of her slowly, like a hidden hemorrhage in the belly that bleeds
away one's life in increments.
     "You cannot leave if you have no destination," Solon tried,
hoping that reason would convince her.
     She was well past that.  "I must go, Solon."  She was tired of her
constant fear; she had to do something entirely on her own.
     "When will you be back?"
     "I do not know."
     "*Will* you be back?"
     "I do not know."  She snapped closed her second suitcase.  She
was not taking much.  There did not seem to be much to take.  She
turned away to head for the door.
     "Helen!"  Pushed by desperation, Solon grabbed her arm, swung her
around.
     Their eyes met.  "Let me go," she said quietly.
     He held on a moment more then, slowly, released her.  She walked
out.  Dumb, he turned back to the empty room and, seeing the blue
glass figurine he had made for her still sitting on their dresser, he
snatched it up and ran out the door.  "Helen!"
     She was at the end of their housing unit hallway, waiting on the
lift.  She turned, an instinctive reaction to her name.  He took three
steps towards her, then gave up on dignity and jogged the rest of the
way.  When he reached her, he handed her the figurine.  "Your forgot
this."
     She took it, looked at it blankly.  The lift had arrived.  He
held the door open to hold it there, and her with it.  Finally she
looked back up at him, handed back the figurine.  "This is not me any
more.  You should have cast it in black."
     He did not move to take the glass.  "No.  It is yours."
     She shrugged and let it go.  It fell to the marble floor between
them, shattered.  He winced; she did not.  Then she stepped into the
lift.  "Goodbye, Solon."


     For four years, Solon did not hear of or from Helen.  Despite the
broken figurine, he still nurtured hope that she would return since
she had not asked for a dissolvement of their bond.  He clung to this
faith with his habitual stubbornness, refusing to listen to advice
that he should dissolve the bond himself, find a new mate.
     His parents--who knew him too well--had refrained from offering
such advice themselves.  But they grew concerned as time went on and
Helen did not return--time which brought Solon closer to his mid-to-
late twenties and the inevitable descent of first pon farr.  They
tried not to be resentful of Helen, knowing what she had suffered, and
if they ultimately failed in this, they then tried not to transfer
that resentment to her father, old friend and colleague.  Yet instinct
drives parents to side with their children.  A certain chill descended
between David Brant, and Saval and T'Syra, even while David Brant
tried to deal with his own feelings of confusion and abandonment--and
worry.  If Helen did not contact Solon in those four years, she did
not contact her father, either.
     Driven by paternal anxiety, he did what Solon would not: tried to
contact her instead.  She had concealed her whereabouts well but twice
he did manage to locate her.  The first time, while she lingered on
Betazed, he sent her a message.  It came back untriggered, no second
message with it, no explanation, no demand to be left alone.  Nothing. 
He could not even be sure it had reached the proper recipient.
     The second time, while she was on Earth, he went himself.  He did
not find her.  There were still places where people could hide if they
wished and Brant could hardly call in the Civil Investigations Bureau.
She wasn't a missing person precisely, and she was now a legal adult.
If she did not want to, she didn't have to reveal her whereabouts to
her father.  So Brant returned to Vulcan, none the wiser about Helen
than when he had left.  Like Solon, he would have to trust that she
would come back to them.
     Meanwhile, Solon finished his research and received his degree,
then sought a grant to compile a catalogue of all Sakal glass pieces
in museum collections which had previously been published, as well as
those pieces held in private collections where the collector would
admit to having them.  It was a catalogue he had several times wished
existed already while he had been doing his own research.  It was also
a project which demanded little from him, a blessed tedium in which he
could bury his concerns, bury himself.  He might maintain his faith in
Helen, but even Vulcans could suffer from a broken heart.


     Had Helen been a child of the late twentieth century, she might
have explained her four-year odyssey as an attempt to find herself. 
She left Vulcan two weeks after her twentieth birthday, abandoning
the degree on which she had previously worked so hard.  It seemed an
ecclesiastian endeavor now.  Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.  There
were other things she needed to learn, things not academic.
     At some point during her year on Vulcan post-Rome (her life being
divided now into events pre- and post-Rome), she had come to realize,
finally, that she was not a Vulcan.  It might seem a strangely obvious
observation to have waited twenty years, but her childhood desire to
be Vulcan had never fully disappeared.  Instead, as age had shown it
to be increasingly silly, and increasingly unobtainable, verbalized
desire had slunk down into her unconscious mind and covered itself by
nonverbal conduct.  She might not be a Vulcan, but she could *act*
like one.
     Yet, in the wake of her rape, she found that she could not do
even that convincingly.  A Vulcan would have been able to master her
emotions, get past the experience, get on with life.  Helen could not. 
More, she did not want to.  It no longer seemed a worthy goal.  Not
all experiences could be subjected to rational interpretation.  To say
that Jan Braulik had acted out of his own feelings of inadequacy was
correct.  To say that hatred of him would change nothing was also
quite correct.  Yet neither of these truths could erase her fundamental
feelings of confusion and bruising and the deep-seated rage that burned
inside her.  She was frustrated by the Vulcan rationale that since her
anger was not productive, she should deny its existence: kaiidth.
     But how could she be expected to return to the stream of life and
function as before?  How could she say, "It happened," and dismiss it? 
Yet this was precisely what Vulcan philosophy demanded, demands which
trivialized her experience, mocked the elusive something which made
her more than a machine.  Deep down things had been wounded; they
needed time to heal.  Rape was more than physical.  Her soul had been
violated as much as her body and she needed a way to understand the
emotional trauma other than by intellectualizing it, rationalizing it
away.  She needed to name her ordeal in terms which took into account
embodiment and historicity, process and passion: her very humanness--
in the broader sense of the word.  Logic was not enough to make her
whole; it did not provide meaning.  Life happened as much at the level
of the gut as in the mind and she could not live amputated at the
neck.
     She understood all of this instinctively.  Had someone asked her
to explain her reasons for leaving, and her quest, she would have been
tongue-tied.  It took her four years to learn to articulate what had
driven her off her alien homeworld and, eventually, back to the blue-
green planet of her ancestors.


     Cattaraugus Indian Reservation.  L-shaped and located southwest
of Buffalo, New York, it occupied 21,618 acres of Cattaraugus, Erie
and Chautaugua counties, straddled Airway 90 and the old blacktop 438. 
One leg of it touched Erie's shore.  Cattaraugus was one of those
places in North America which had escaped the severe destruction and
deprivations of WW III: an advantage of living in Indian Country in
the twenty-first century.  No one had cared enough to bomb it.  After
the war--a war which had lasted less than 7 minutes--refugees from
what had been New York City had fled west towards the Great Lakes, and
the lands onto which Indians had been driven two centuries before
became a reserve for the white man as well as the red.  By the twenty-
fourth century, reservations were no longer pink squares on a map, yet
Indian Country continued to exist.  Indians had never much understood
lines on maps anyway.  Cattaraugus and Allegheny were the last shreds
of Indian Country in New York state.  Once Seneca, Cattaraugus now
boasted members of all six nations who made up the Iroquois, the
Hodenosaunee, or People of the Longhouses.


     "Are you Marian Daugherty?"
     The woman on the other side of the old-style hinge door simply
nodded, said nothing.  She did not look like Helen had expected.  Her
greying hair was curled and cut short; she wore jeans and a somewhat
frayed maroon cardigan over a flannel shirt in shades of blue and
wine.  Not a feather or bead anywhere.  She also wore glasses: wide-
framed with thick lenses that magnified her small, dark eyes.  Owl
Woman.  That was her other name, the one which didn't appear in the
official records, the one people in town called her.  Indian humor.
     When Helen Brant had first arrived at the William Seneca Building
in Irving, New York, she had not really known what she was looking
for.  Life on Vulcan had taught her to respect family and she had
grown up thinking of Solon's clan as family, but when she had given up
on being Vulcan, she had sloughed off that identification like a false
skin.  She had no interest in learning more about her mother's people,
her mother whom she still partly blamed for the turn of events in
Rome.  That left her father's people.  If she had not heretofore
thought of herself as an Indian, perhaps it was time and past time to
find out what that meant.
     So when she had walked into the office and asked the secretary at
the desk if there was anyone in town who remembered her grandparents,
Leslie and Marguerite Brant, the secretary had exchanged a glance with
a second woman bent over a filing cabinet.  They'd said nothing in
words.  Then the secretary had abandoned her terminal to come out from
behind the desk.  A big woman, she had swept like a battleship towards
the front door, crooked a finger to Helen to follow, and pointed up
the road.  "Follow it till you get to a tree downed by lightning.  The
road forks.  Take the left fork up the hill.  You'll get to a terraced
area 'bout halfway up.  There're a couple farms there.  The second
driveway has a real old hay baler rusting out by the road.  Go up the
drive; it'll take you to Owl Woman's place.  It's her you want to talk
to."  Then without a goodbye, she had gone back inside.  Brusque and
no-nonsense.  The woman might almost have been Vulcan.
     Her directions had been accurate in their way, though Helen would
have preferred a map.  After only one false turn, she arrived at the
farm house of the one the secretary had called Owl Woman.  The name on
the gate read "Marian Daugherty."  The lawn was overrun by dandelions
and needed to be trimmed, and a hound dog lolled on the porch, muzzle
resting on paws.  It had cracked an eye and sighed when Helen had
stepped past, but otherwise had ignored her.
     Now, facing the mysterious Owl Woman, she said, "I am Helen Brant,
Leslie and Marguerite Brant's granddaughter.  The woman at the tribal
office said you knew them.  You could tell me about them."  Reaching
into her pocket, she extracted a packet which she had bought on the
way here.  It held tobacco, a substance almost impossible to find
until on tribal ground.  Now, she held it out.
     The grey-haired woman raised an eyebrow, like a Vulcan, but then
grinned and took the packet, stepped aside in unspoken invitation.  "I
see David ain't forgot everything his parents taught him."  Tobacco
had been offered and accepted.  Helen entered.  The dog on the porch
heaved itself up and followed.
     The living room beyond was quaint and comfortable: two old
recliners with ivory tatted covers on arms and back, a walnut lowboy
along one wall, lace curtains held back by bits of tassel.  There was
also a wall-comm unit, three PADDs discarded on a stained coffee
table, a honeycomb shelf full of clear-tube books and archives, and in
the background, the distinctive click of skulkers eating dustbunnies
in corners.  A mixture of the old and the modern, like most things
Indian.
     Her host took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose,
asked, "Coffee?"
     Turning, Helen replied, "Do you have tea?"  The dog approached
her, pushed a nose into her hand.  Startled, she jumped.
     Owl Woman put back on the glasses, grinned.  "She won't bite ya--
just wants attention.  And I think I can find some tea hereabouts." 
She headed off for the kitchen.  One leg was slightly shorter than the
other, giving her an odd, shuffling gait.  In this day of physically
perfect bodies, or bodies corrected to be so, such an obvious handicap
startled.  Why hadn't she seen a doctor about the leg?  But for once,
Helen remembered her manners and did not ask.  Instead, she stood in
the middle of Owl Woman's living room, patting the hound while she
waited.  After a few minutes, the old woman returned and regarded her
with some surprise.  "Why you still standing up?"
     "I--  I was taught that it is not a guest's place to take a seat
until a seat is offered."
     The woman snorted, a sharp sound of derision that made the dog
whimper.  "Sit down, girl.  Here's your tea."  She handed over a brown
ceramic cup, glaze chipped slightly at the bottom, then plopped into
one of the two recliners.  Helen set the cup on a coaster and herself
in the opposite recliner.  "What do you want to know?" Owl Woman asked.
     But Helen did not begin her questions immediately.  Instead, 
haltingly, she tried to explain her presence there, which in turn 
required an explanation of what she had been doing for four years, 
running around Federation space alone, which in turn required a 
recounting of what had happened in Rome, then of her life before that, 
her study, her father, and Solon.  After the first question, Owl Woman 
had asked no more and her silence had drawn Helen on.  At last, Helen 
fell silent and Owl Woman waited until it was clear she had finished, 
then rose, stretched.  "Come back tomorrow," she said.
     Hands clasped before her like a supplicant, Helen rose as well. 
"Then you'll tell me about my grandparents?"
     Owl Woman smiled.  "It ain't your grandparents you came here to
learn about, enit?  It's yourself."


     Thus, Helen Brant began the most important research of her life:
the study of her own soul.  None of the intellectual skills which she
had acquired as a child could help her.  This research was conducted
from someplace below the solar plexus, with tools that stretched the
capacity of the heart.
     "Why do you keep that old hay baler?" she asked one day as she
and Owl Woman made their way up the gravel driveway that led to the
farmhouse.  Despite the woman's lame leg, she got about quite well and
preferred to walk if she could.
     Now, she cast a sideways glance at Helen.  "You think it's an
eyesore, eh?  Trash."
     Helen's brows hopped once and she half-shrugged, mouth pressed
together until the full lips thinned to white.  "Well, it does not
work," she pointed out.
     Smiling, Owl Woman turned to the wire fence beside the drive,
gestured Helen over.  She held up a bit of wire to make a space big
enough for Helen to slip through, then followed as they waded through
the thistle-choked remains of an alfalfa field until they reached the
archaic baler's side.  At their approach, a pair of wrens exploded
skyward.  "Look here," Owl Woman said, pointing into a nitch beside
the steps up to the operator's seat.  A nest had been built in the
shadows there, the backs of three baby wrens visible as they huddled
down in an instinctive attempt to escape notice.  Owl Woman walked
around to the baler's rear and pointed to a pair of gopher holes. 
Obviously a point was being made, but Helen was not sure she grasped
it.  "You mean you have left the baler here because wrens use it to
nest?"
     "And gophers."  Owl Woman straightened, hands on hips hiking up a
side of the rust cardigan, her one constant article of clothing.  "A
thing is trash only when it stops being used.  This might not bale
hay, or alfalfa, but the wrens like it, and it's a good road mark,
enit?  Helped you find the house."
     Helen shrugged.
     Owl Woman cocked her head, making her look for a moment like her
namesake.  "You've spent too much time in a white man's world, girl:
disposable, replicated culture.  When a thing stops being good for
what it was made for, you toss it in an incinerator.  Makes your mind
dull, makes you blind to possibilities.  Not everything has a single
purpose, and not everything that's old is trash."
     Nostrils flairing, Helen reared her head back.  "I would never
say it was--I was taught to respect my elders.  And," she added
rebelliously, "*you* have a replicator."
     Owl Woman grinned.  "'Course I do.  No sense in not making use of
what's useful, neither."  She turned away and headed back to the road
beyond the fence.  "What's new ain't necessarily bad.  It's how you
use things."  She stopped then and glanced back at Helen.  "Learn to
see.  You walk around with your eyes shut, Helen Brant."


     Owl Woman's words had struck Helen.  *Did* she walk around with
her eyes shut?  She had not thought so.  Raised on Vulcan, she had
thought her powers of observation better than most humans; that
wasn't what Owl Woman had meant, obviously.  Frustrated, she asked Owl
Woman about it again.  "You say I do not see--but I am unsure how I am
supposed to be seeing that is different."
     They were walking again; they walked most places around the small
town of Irving.  Now, Owl Woman shaded her eyes and waved to two men
seated on a bench in front of the post office.  One wore a postal
uniform.  They waved back.  If most mail travelled electronically
these days, some things--like packages--needed old fashioned delivery.
     Finally Owl Woman spoke.  "You see what you expect to see, not
what's there.  Most people have in their head already what makes up
the world around them, so they don't ever quite *see* it.  That's what
I meant.  You saw a road mark and a wren's nest as a hay baler and,
since it weren't up to baling no longer, you figured it was junk. 
You didn't see what it *was*."  She twisted her mouth and chewed at
her bottom lip.  "I think you do that a lot: see what you expect to
see.  That's why they caught you like they did.  You wasn't seeing
'em, seeing what they was up to."
     Helen blinked.  "Seeing *who*?"
     Owl Woman turned for the steps which led up to the local grocers. 
"Jan Braulik and his friends."
     Struck momentarily dumb, Helen remained rooted on the sidewalk,
then with five strides she caught up to Owl Woman.  "You're saying it
was my fault?"  This came out angry because it was what she secretly
feared to be true.
     Owl Woman stopped just before the grocery door.  "Your fault? 
Which part you claiming?  Don't take on what's not yours.  Your fault
for not seeing, yes.  Not seeing gets you in trouble.  But let the
rest of the fault stay with Jan Braulik, where it belongs."  And she
went into the store.


     Helen's second lesson was learned over a dog.  The bitch hound
who lived at the farmhouse (Owl Woman never said she owned her) had
managed to slice her back on a loose nail beneath the porch.  It had
festered.
     "You should take her to a veterinarian," Helen said while she
watched Owl Woman examine the infected wound.  Owl Woman ignored her,
got up and went inside the house to fetch a knife and put it in a pan
of water on the old-fashioned gas stove.  The dog followed, and Helen
followed the dog.  "What are you doing?"
     "Getting ready."
     "Getting ready for what?"
     Owl Woman didn't reply, poured herself a cup of coffee instead
from the pot which she kept perpetually warm by the sink.  Then she
found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and several towels.  When the
water was boiling, she fished out the knife with a pair of tongs and
gripped it in a hotpad while she collected the bottle of hydrogen
peroxide and threw the towels over a shoulder.  Finally she led the
dog over to a stepping stool which she used to reach items in higher
cabinets, sat down and caught the bitch between her knees, backside
facing her.  The dog waited trustingly.  "Hold her collar," Owl Woman
said.
     Seeing what her teacher intended, Helen took a full step back. 
"You plan to clean it *yourself*?"
     "Sure do.  Get her collar."
     "She might bite me."
     "Doubt it.  She trusts me."
     "But this will hurt her."
     "'Course it will."
     Reluctantly, Helen came forward and did as she was told.  Owl
Woman worked swiftly, making the cut in swollen infected skin and
swabbing the pus and blood almost before the dog realized what had
happened.  A single yelp and brief struggle was all she had time for,
then she let out a low keening while the lanced area was cleaned.  She
did not bite.  When Owl Woman was done, she bound up the wound to keep
the hound from licking it, then put away her improvised medical
implements.  She spoke with her back to Helen.
     "Nothing heals till the pus is cleaned out.  Better it not get
infected at all but that can't always be helped.  If it does go bad,
you gotta cut.  It hurts."  Finally she turned, faced Helen.  "But
it's better than dying, enit?"



                                  V.


     Solon,

          Please come to the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, New
     York Province, Earth.  Helen Brant needs your help building
     a dam.

                                              Sincerely,
                                                 Marian Daugherty


     A *dam*?  Solon stared at the mail on his screen.  A dam.  What
did the stranger mean, that Helen needed his help to build a dam?  Did
the word have some symbolism that he was missing?  For that matter,
who was Marian Daugherty and how had she gotten his address?  From
Helen?  Did Helen want him to come, too?  The letter left him full of
questions but two things he knew for certain: where he could find his
bondmate, and that he would go to help her build her dam.
     It did not take him long to pack.  He probably should have called
his parents to inform them where he was going, but did not pause long
enough to remember, nor did he give any thought to his cataloging
project.  It would still be there when he returned.  Four years of
waiting had rearranged his priorities.  


     Owl Woman took Helen to a creek running through a field along the
sack of the property; seven cows were pastured there.  The creek was a
tributary of the Cattaraugus river and the banks were steep.  "It wants
a dam to raise the water level so the cows can get in there to drink.
I can't build one--the leg, y'know.  I was hoping you might do it."
     "Of course."  Helen judged it only fair to assist her teacher in
concrete ways in exchange for the teaching.  She had been cleaning Owl
Woman's house, too.  So now she climbed down the bank to examine where
the creek exited the pasture area.  A dam here would certainly raise
the water level in the pasture area, perhaps even make a small lake
for the cows, but the creek ran wide and deep--not the ideal place for
a dam.  She set about discovering how to get around that and spent the
rest of the afternoon canvasing online libraries on the topic of civil
engineering.  The following morning, however, Owl Woman said, "You
don't need no book to build a dam.  You need rocks and brush."
     "Actually, I believe I shall need concrete blocks and quick-dry
cement."
     Owl Woman grinned.  "Ain't ever seen no beaver with a bag of
cement."
     "I am not a beaver."
     But Owl Woman just waved her to follow.  When they reached the
creek, Helen found the banks near the fence hip deep in boulders and
underbrush.  "Did you do this?" she asked, surprised, thinking of the
woman's lame leg.
     "Naw.  Had Aaron Masterson's three grandkids bring 'em up
yesterday while you had your nose in a computer screen.  Can't build a
dam with reference clear-cells."
     Helen pursed her lips but refrained from pointing out that one
could, indeed, learn *how* to build a dam with reference clear-cells. 
Did her teacher really expect her to use boulders and twigs?
     Apparently so.  "You go on back up to the house and get your work
clothes on.  I'll make us some lunch."
     It took Helen three days to realize that she was not going to get
anywhere on the dam with the materials she had--at least, not alone. 
She would work most of the day but every time she got three quarters
of the dam up, the pressure of the current would dislodge rocks and
brush and destroy her progress.  Water was inexorable.  She spent half
her time resupplying for materials lost, and she should have said
something to Owl Woman about the impossibility of the project on the
third day, but it had become a battle between her and the creek.  She
had never surrendered easily.  If Owl Woman wanted a dam made out of
boulders, she would get it.


     Solon arrived late in Gowanda, New York, seven days after he had
received Owl Woman's letter.  The ongoing war with the Dominion had
slowed normal ship traffic; it was a dangerous time to travel in space
but he had given no thought to that just as he had given no thought to
informing his parents as to where he was going.
     Cattaraugus Reservation sat northwest of Gowanda, up Indian Hill
Road along Cattaraugus Creek.  Public transport to and from the town
of Irving ran only twice daily, and there was no transporter station
there.  Put out by the inconvenience and impatient after four years of
uncertainty, Solon was disinclined to wait for morning.  The woman at
the Gowanda transporter station suggested he walk across the street to
the Crystal Diner.  "Some of the guys from the rez like to eat there. 
Maybe you can catch a ride back with one of them."  Solon thanked her
and left.
     The Crystal Diner defined "greasy spoon."  If there was, indeed,
anything crystal in the establishment, it was hazed over by a thin
film of tallow.  Mostly, though, the place sported decor in formica
and chrome and split red vinyl seats repaired with ductape.  The two-
dozen customers turned to look as he entered.  Conversation broke off
and, given the way he was being stared at, he doubted if half the
patrons had ever seen a Vulcan before.  After a moment, conversation
resumed quietly and a young waitress with hair teased six inches
straight up and a nametag which read "Carley" came over to ask "Can I
help you?" rather than "A seat for one?"  She must assume him lost. 
Her curiosity was evident in her face.
     He spoke quietly.  "I am looking for transportation out to the
reservation tonight.  I was told I might find someone here who would
be willing to take me into Irving."
     She looked him up and down.  "What you want in Irving?"
     "I was invited to come by a Marian Daugherty."
     "Owl Woman asked for you?  Don't that beat all."  But she shrugged
and stuffed a menu PADD in her pocket.  "Follow me."  And she led him
around past the corner of the diner counter to a table occupied by
three middle-aged men, all with the same characteristic stamp of
feature which David Brant bore.  Indians.  They were drinking coffee
black while two played chess on an old fashioned 2D board.
     "Redeye.  This guy says Owl Woman asked him to come out to the
reservation.  You'uns got room to take him back when you go?"  Her
dialect betrayed a Western Pennsylvania upbringing.
     The one called Redeye studied Solon a moment, giving away nothing
in his expression, as if observation were a form of poker.  Then he
nodded.  "Think we can manage that.  Have a seat, son."  Solon did so. 
Redeye stuck out a hand which, after a brief hesitation, Solon took. 
"Jim Redeye.  That's Nathan Locke and Carl Bennett--he's president."
     "President of?"
     "The Seneca nation."
     "I thought Indians had chiefs?  Helen's ancestor was a chief." 
He realized after a moment that they would have no idea who Helen was. 
"Helen Brant," he clarified.
     Bennett spoke to the other two.  "That's the pretty little dark
girl staying up at Owl Woman's place."
     "I wouldn't call her little," Locke replied with a grin.  "She's
taller than you are, Carl."
     Bennett ignored this, spoke to Solon.  "How d'you know her?"
     Living with Helen had taught him the value of occasional
imprecision, and he had no wish to explain the Vulcan practice of
bonding to strangers.  "She is my wife."
     All three men sat forward and looked at him.  "Well," was all
Redeye said.  They returned their attention then to the chess board
and their coffee, offered him some of the latter which he took for
politeness sake but did not drink.  It smelled old and burnt and
bitter.  They had never answered his question about chiefs.  Locke and
Bennett finished their chess game, Bennett beating the other man
soundly.  He turned then to eye Solon.
     "You never said what we can call you."
     "Solon."
     "Vulcans like chess, I hear."
     It wasn't a question, and Solon did not bother to correct "like." 
"Some do," he replied.
     "You play?"
     "Upon occasion."
     Bennett twisted the board sidewise so that half of it faced
Solon.  "You want the white or the black?"
     Solon had tried to keep from fidgeting while the two men had
finished their game, but now he stared at the board, aghast.  How long
did they plan to stay here?  But he swallowed his irritation--it was
unbecoming--and selected the black queen, began to set up his side of
the board.  It should not take long to defeat Bennett; then perhaps
they could go.
     It took him almost two hours.  The sun had set outside, the
coffee in the cup at his elbow stone cold, before Bennett tipped over
his king in an admission of defeat.  "May we leave now?" Solon asked,
the first impatience he had permitted himself to display.
     The three men glanced at each other, back at him.  Jim Redeye was
grinning.  "I guess we kept him long enough, cousins."  And he made a
little shooing motion with his hand at Solon, who stood.  He followed
the three out of the diner around towards an old low-altitude hover-
hauler.  Apparently, it belonged to Bennett.  "You can ride in the
cab," Locke told him, and vaulted over the side of the bed, sat down
on a bench and belted himself down.  Redeye followed.  Solon climbed
into the hauler-cab as Bennett went around to the operator's side.
     Mostly, they drove in a silence which suited Solon's taciturn
nature but once they had reached the little town of Irving, Bennett
ventured, "What does Owl Woman want with you, son?"
     Remembering that the waitress with the gravity-defying hair had
called her by that name too, he said, "I assume Marian Daugherty and
Owl Woman are the same person?"
     "Yup.  Nobody knows her calls her Marian--'cept her old man
before he kicked off."
     Solon nodded.  "She invited me to help build a dam."
     Dark eyes crinkled with humor, Bennett glanced over at him.  "A
dam?"
     "Yes."
     Bennett just laughed.
     "Do you understand the significance of her request?"
     "Nope.  But then, Owl Woman likes to be mysterious sometimes. 
It's a female thing."
     "Who is she?  It would seem that she is well-known."
     "She's the Owl Woman," Bennett replied enigmatically, then would
say no more.  Used to Vulcan secrets, Solon could respect Indian ones.
     Bennett deposited him and his luggage at the foot of the gravel
driveway up to Owl Woman's farmhouse.  Then he toggled the window down
and leaned out.  "I'll see you 'round, and a word of advice.  If Owl
Woman says jump, don't argue with her, ask how high.  Comprende?"
     Solon blinked.  "I suppose."
     "Good."  Bennett leaned back in and closed the window, drove off. 
Solon turned to the house.


     "It's not time."
     "I beg your pardon?"
     "It's not time," the woman with the large glasses told Solon. 
"She ain't ready for you.  You got here slower than I expected, but
then, it's taking her longer than I expected, too--so she ain't ready
for you yet."
     Irritated once again, Solon pinched the bridge of his nose. 
"When will she be 'ready'--and what am I to do in the meantime?  Where
am I to stay?"
     "She'll be ready when she's ready," Owl Woman replied.  "Right
now, she's sleeping.  You wait here.  I'm gonna call a friend, send
you up to her place for a day or two."
     She shut the door, leaving him to wait alone on the dark porch in
the cool of an autumn night.  To describe his reception as bizarre
would not begin to cover it, but her letter of invitation had been
equally odd and he recalled Bennett's advice: don't argue with her,
ask how high to jump.  All right, then.  For the moment, he would
comply.
     She returned in three minutes, "Come on," and led him up the
gravel roadway.  She had a limp.  How peculiar.  When they reached the
same place where Bennett had let him out, she pointed further up the
hill.  "About a mile thataway, first driveway on your right.  Bob and
Katie Schleisser.  They's white folk but solid good; ancestors have
lived hereabouts for seven generations.  They'll keep you till I call
for you."
     "Why can I not see Helen now?"
     "Because like I said, she ain't ready."  Then she tilted her
head.  "Trust me, Vulcan boy."
     Solon had been raised to honor his elders.  He bowed his head to
her and started up the road.


     "Has Solon contacted you?"  It was T'Syra's voice over the comm
line.  There was no visual.  Vulcans used visuals only about half the
time.
     David Brant took his pipe out of his mouth and leaned his chair
back on two legs.  It was a habit his Vulcan colleagues found amusing. 
"No.  Why?"
     "He is not at his flat, nor has he been to the university or to
any museums in eight days.  No one has seen him at all."
     Brant dropped the chair down.  "Did you check the hospitals?"
     "Oh, yes.  He is not there, either.  I am not certain he is still
on the planet at all."
     Brant thought about that.  "Where would he go?"
     "I do not know."  What neither said but both assumed was that
wherever Solon had gone, it probably had to do with Helen.  "David,"
T'Syra said after a moment, "Solon is twenty-five, by your Standard
calendar."
     "Yeah, so?"
     "Solon is twenty-five, almost twenty-six," T'Syra said again,
doggedly.  Brant didn't answer and, after a longer pause, she added,
"How old was Saval when we married?"
     Brant had to think about it, then replied, "Twenty-six."
     "Indeed."  And she hung up.
     "Shit," Brant said to the dead comm line.


     "I've had it!" Helen yelled, clambering up from the creek bed to
confront Owl Woman where she sat in an old lawn chair high on one
bank, sewing something in ribbon.  Helen's braids had come half down
and hung in her face; one brown cheek was streaked with darker dirt,
along with her hands and clothing.  "I've had it."
     "You used a contraction."
     "*What*?"
     "You used a contraction.  Ain't never heard you use a contraction
before."
     Frustrated and baffled both, Helen glanced off downriver and blew
out in a huff, wiped at the sweat on her forehead.  Her fingers left
black streaks there to match the one on her cheek.
     "I cannot build the dam by myself," Helen said after a moment. 
"Not with boulders and brush!"
     Owl Woman glanced up, face sly.  "Oh?"
     Something in the tone alerted Helen.  "You knew it all along,
didn't you?"
     But Owl Woman simply stood up.  "Let's go home.  I need to start
supper."
     "What about the dam?"
     "What about it?"  Her teacher folded her chair and tucked her
ribbonwork under an arm.
     "You wanted me to build you a dam!"
     Owl Woman nodded, then turned and headed up the path back to the
farmhouse.  "We'll come back tomorrow."
     "We have *been* coming back every morning for six days and I am
no further along than at the end of the first one!"
     "Tomorrow, you will be," Owl Woman called back.


     They arrived at the creek a little after dawn.  Helen started
when she realized someone was already there.  Squatting on the bank,
balanced on his heels, was Solon.  She didn't know what to think, spun
first to Owl Woman, who merely blinked, then back towards Solon.  He
had raised his head to look at her from tired, intense eyes, like some
faded icon in an ancient basilica.  "How did you get here?" she
demanded.
     "By spaceliner," he replied.
     His Vulcan literalism annoyed her.  "There's a war going on!"
     "Indeed.  It was not the most rapid passage, from Vulcan to
Earth."
     "I didn't invite you!"
     Solon nodded past her towards Owl Woman.  "She did."
     Helen turned on her teacher.  "What gave you the right?"
     "You said yesterday that one person couldn't build the dam. 
There's your help."
     Helen put her back to them both.
     "You're angry," Owl woman said.  "Angry at the world.  Why don't
you go breathe with the cows a while?"
     "*What*?"
     "Go breathe with the cows.  Lay down on the earth and listen.  If
you're quiet, maybe she'll tell you something."
     Helen turned towards Solon for support.  "You see how much sense
she makes?  First she wants me to build a dam from boulders.  Now she
tells me to go breathe with the cows!"
     "I believe she refers to a form of meditation."
     Making an exasperated sound, Helen stalked off--towards the cows. 
She wasn't sure how one was supposed to "breathe" with them, but she
knew that, at the moment, she certainly had no desire to remain in the
company of either Owl Woman or Solon.  So she plopped down amid the
seven bovines and laid back in the long grass.  Owl Woman had said to
listen to the earth, but Helen felt more like hitting it.  In a pique,
she did so.  It felt good.  She hit it again, then again.  She lay
there and fought the earth until she was exhausted.  The cows ignored
her.  When she was quiet again, the tears came.  Five years of tears
ran out into the land of her ancestors, turned the dirt into mud under
her left cheek.  Around her, resting cows breathed in and out, grass-
sweet.  She began to breathe with them.  The earth was warm from the
sun of Indian summer.  She could hear the heartbeat of her mother
beneath her and like an infant at the breast, sated with milk, she
slept at last.


     When she woke, she found Solon sitting quiet, watching her a half
dozen feet away, his arms about his drawn-up knees.  "How long have
you been there?"  She sat up.  The sun was past noon.
     "Four hours, seventeen minutes."
     "How long have I been asleep?"
     "I do not know precisely."  He shifted position.  "I do not think
we shall build the dam today."
     "She doesn't give a damn about the dam."  Then she laughed at her
own pun even though it wasn't particularly funny.
     He shook his head a little.  "You sound different."
     "Do you wish I sounded like I used to?"
     "It is pointless to pursue the past.  What is, is."
     She shoved herself to her feet so abruptly, several of the cows
started.  "It is not pointless!" she screamed.  "What do you think
makes the present, Solon?  I can't just erase what happened to me!  I
can't just forget it, no matter how much you wish I would!"
     He rose more calmly, held out a hand.  "I did not say that I
wished you would."
     "Maybe not, but you act like it."
     "Forgive me.  That was never my intention."
     "Do you blame me?"
     "What?"
     "Do you blame me, for what happened?  Do you blame me for getting
raped?"
     Solon could not have been more shocked if she had slapped him. 
His first reaction was an aggravated "Of course not!" but he bit it
back.  Instead, he said simply, "No."
     And Helen believed him.  Fervent denial would have struck her as
tantamount to agreement.  Solon's 'no' convinced in its simplicity.
     She sat down again crosslegged amid the cows.  He came over to
sit directly opposite her, but did not touch her.  "You never talked
to me about it," she said.  "*We* never talked about it."
     "Is that why you left me?"
     "Not really.  I just...needed to get away.  Why didn't you ever
want to talk about it, though?"
     "I did not know what to say to you.  I have no eloquence of
speech."
     "I didn't need eloquence, Solon.  I just...needed to talk."
     "I will listen."
     She laughed a little and turned her head aside.  "It's a little
late for that."
     "Is it?"  Something edged the words, some hint of desperation. 
Even Solon's phlegmatism had its limits.
     After a while, head still turned away, she began.  "I suppose I
should have taken more precautions the night it happened.  Owl Woman
says I don't always see what is right in front of me."
     "You cannot blame yourself."
     "I don't--not precisely.  But she was right.  I don't always see
what I should.  I should have recognized what my mother was up to, and
I should have taken more precautions with Jan Braulik.  Perhaps in the
end, it would have made no difference, but I have to see how I may
have contributed to the situation.  I don't blame myself for what *he*
did, though."  She turned, searching his face.  "Do you understand? 
There's a difference between guilt and responsibility.  I couldn't
separate them, so I took it all as guilt.  I couldn't get rid of the
guilt until I recognized what I had done to contribute, so I could see
things as they really were.  That's what Owl Woman was trying to teach
me: to see what really happened, not what I thought happened.  Still,
I needed to know that you didn't blame me, either."
     "I do not.  Nor am I convinced that you are responsible in any
way, either."
     "You're still confusing guilt with what I may have overlooked,
Solon.  Like I said, they're not the same.  Seeing how I contributed
doesn't excuse what they did to me.  But maybe it will keep it from
happening to me again."  She paused, then said, "The police told me
you hit one of them."
     Solon shifted, uncomfortable, his expression that of a man who
has swallowed a bite unchewed.  "I did."
     "Tell me what happened.  I know you went to Jan's hotel.  I know
you were the one who brought him in to the police.  But you never told
me what happened."
     He had never told her because he had been afraid: afraid she
would resent him for not finishing what he had begun, or for beginning
it at all.  But she was owed the truth.  He offered his hand to show
her his memory of that morning, but she pushed the hand away.  It was
their first touch in over four years.  "No.  *Talk* to me, Solon. 
Don't use the meld."
     He folded the rejected hand back into his lap with the other,
stared down at them as he spoke.  "I...left the hospital to find him--
to find them.  I wished to kill them for what they did to you."
     When he did not immediately continue, Helen prompted, "Why didn't
you?"
     "Because then he would have won."  Frowning, Solon flexed his
fingers.  "He would have won because he would have been in control: he
would have driven me to violence.  Revenge is not victory but defeat." 
He looked up again.  "To walk away is victory."
     "You sound like Surak."
     "Surak was right."
     She leaned back on her hands and stared at the sky overhead.  No
bird crossed it, no cloud.  He waited.  Finally, she said, "You're
wiser than I, Solon."
     "And you are braver.  I do not think I would have survived."
     She smiled a little, self-depreciatingly, and looked down at him. 
There was desperation in her eyes.  "Am I beautiful?"
     The question took him aback.  "Do you mean physically?"
     "Yes."
     His eyebrows hopped once.  "In truth, I had never considered it. 
I suppose that you are.  It is not important."
     Suddenly, he found his arms full of Helen.  She had leapt at him,
knocking him over backwards into the grass and now was hugging him
tight, her face buried in his shoulder.  "Helen?"
     "Take me home," she said into the fabric of his tunic.  "Take me
home where what I look like doesn't matter."
     Slowly, he stroked her braids.  "We have a dam to build first, I
believe."
     She laughed.


     With two people, it took only two days to complete the dam, two
days and several bags of cement even if Owl Woman still insisted that
they use boulders.  "They look better."
     Simple physical labor and the distraction of engineering allowed
them to remember what it was like to work together without pressure to
resolve more esoteric matters.  Helen chattered about her four years
of travel; he listened.  Owl Woman watched them from the bank.  When
they had completed their work late the second afternoon, Helen climbed
out to do a little war dance on the bank.  Or that's what she called
it.  Owl Woman snorted and Solon scratched his head.  When she was
done, the three of them walked back towards the farmhouse.
     Just before they reached the back porch, Helen screwed up her
courage to ask Owl Woman the question she had wanted to ask since she
had arrived.  "Why didn't you ever see a doctor about your leg?"
     Light from the back door flashed off her teacher's glasses as she
glanced over, and the moon illumined her salt and pepper hair like the
feathers of a great grey owl.  For just a moment, the rise and lurch
of her walk reminded Helen of an bird trying to fly with a clipped
wing: earth-bound and domesticated by handicap.
     "Our people, they come to me when they're wounded," she said. 
"They know I know how it is.  They trust me."
     "Like the dog."
     "Yeah.  Like the dog.  It's 'cause of this"--she gestured to her
leg--"that I have the right, and the power, to heal."
     "The wounded healer?"
     "You might say that.  We're all healers now and then, especially
in the places we've been hurt ourselves.  But some of us, the Great
Spirit calls to do the job on a regular basis."
     Helen stopped at the foot of the back stairs.  "You mean you're a
medicine woman?"
     Owl Woman grinned at her.  "What?  You only now figured that out,
girl?"  And she opened the door.  Kitchen light spilled down the steps
like butter, yellow and warm.  "I told you, you don't see what's right
in front of you."



                                 VI.


     Owl Woman's house had three bedrooms, but the first night Solon
had spent there, he had found his bags--brought up from the neighbors'--
set neatly next to Helen's in the same guestroom.  Owl Woman knew they
had shared a flat on Vulcan and must have made certain assumptions.
Yet when Helen had started to explain that they had kept separate beds,
he had shaken his head minutely at her and she subsided.  He could not
have said why he had done that; it was more than politeness.  Still, it
took three days before he gathered courage enough to face his reasons.
     Each night after supper, they had gone out onto the porch to sit
in the swing and talk, like courting teenagers, like strangers.  In a
way, they were strangers.  They had spent four important years apart. 
Helen had changed, as had Solon.  Now they tackled the task of
rediscovery.  He knew he could not afford to be uncommunicative, so he
found his voice, and found her to be a surprisingly patient listener,
not hurrying him, waiting for him to choose the right words.  He could
never seem to find the right words fast enough; that was why he spoke
little.  The moment to speak was usually past before he knew what it
was he wanted to say.  Once, Helen would have finished his sentences
for him.  Now, she sat sideways on the swing, braced against the arm,
feet in his lap, and waited for him to think things through.  Then he
would talk and she would listen.  Or she would talk and he would
listen while he rubbed her feet.
     The topic of sex was avoided.  Never an easy thing for Vulcans to
discuss in any case, Helen's rape had made it harder.  If rape was not
a crime about sex, it was a sexual crime and could hardly fail to have
an impact on her sexuality--or on his.  It already had.
     He was desperately afraid.
     When the pon farr came on him, what would he do to Helen?  Would
he hurt her in his need?  Would he frighten her?  Would he force
himself on her like Jan Braulik had?  The thought of it tormented him,
gave him nightmares.  Logic--and good common sense--dictated that he
approach her before his body forced him to.  Never mind propriety.  It
was for this reason that Solon had silenced Helen when she had started
to protest their sharing a room and bed.  He hoped he might find the
courage to touch her, but as he had told her three days ago, it was
she who had courage.  He had lived his life by passive consent.  Thus,
in the end, it was Helen who initiated things.  Solon merely followed
her lead.
     The night the dam was finished, Helen seemed more jubilant than
usual, more like the Helen of their childhood.  She had won something
at the creek that evening.  They both had.  After supper, Owl Woman
announced that she was going to a friend's house to play cards. 
"Don't wait up," she told them as she closed the door behind her.
     Suddenly nervous at being left alone in the house with Helen--a
transparent ploy to permit them to do precisely what he wanted to do--
Solon busied himself cleaning dishes instead.  Owl Woman used real
ones.  He fed the scraps of their supper to the hound bitch and washed
what was dirty while Helen drifted away into the living room, turned
on music.  When he finished and walked down the short hall to join
her, she was dancing, swaying on the braided rug in the room's center
as if in a trance.  She had changed out of the shorts and top which
she had worn to work in, donned a loose skirt of Indian ribbonwork,
probably the one Owl Woman had been sewing.  It brushed her bare
ankles as her braids swung about her shoulders.  A reading light
behind haloed her form.  She was beautiful.  He wondered why he had
never noticed that before she had asked.  Perhaps because he knew her
too well, her face was too familiar.  Like Helen, he was guilty
sometimes of not seeing what was right in front of him.
     Yet she had sounded so desperately glad when he had said her
beauty did not matter to him that he felt guilty now for noticing. 
Was it wrong, though, to admire the aesthetically pleasing?  If so,
why did he waste time making beautiful things in glass?  Beauty had
its place.  And in the end, a large part of what made Helen lovely was
not the flawless arrangement of features but the spirit behind which
animated them, the life in her which made her dance.
     Sensing his presence, she had turned, held out a hand to him. 
She spoke in Vulcan for the first time since his arrival.  "Come dance
with me."
     Like art, Solon found dance to be an outlet for expression,
another manner of speaking without words.  He took her hand and let
her lead him in a simple folk cotillion they had learned as children. 
It permitted them to touch in controlled, stylized fashion.  When the
song finished, she released his hands but stepped closer rather than
away, looked up into his face.  He was one of the few people Helen
Brant had to look up to significantly.  With two fingers, she traced
the line from his cheekbone to his temple.  Faces so close, she could
not focus on both his eyes at the same time but had to flick hers back
and forth between.  "I feel you.  I know what you want to ask but
can't make yourself."  He raised an eyebrow, though perhaps she did
know; they had been bonded so long, it would not surprise him if Helen
had gained some small ability to read him.  Or maybe she just read his
anxieties in his face.  "Ask me, Solon."
     Still, he hesitated.  "Would you not rather talk on the porch?"
     "It's too cold out there for you tonight.  Ask."  She touched his
cheek again.  "Or are you afraid of me?"
     "I am...afraid...of myself."
     Her eyes narrowed.  "Are you--  Is it your time?"
     "No, I do not think so."
     "Then why are you afraid?"
     "Because."
     It was not a reason, but she knew what his reasons were.  "I'm
not afraid of you," she said, taking his other hand and tugging him
after her, towards the room they shared.  "Come with me."
     So he did.
     They shut the door behind them though no one else was in the
house, then he undressed her, sat on the bed edge and just looked at
her.  It was not that he had never seen her naked before, but this was
different.  "You are beautiful," he said.
     There was not much light in the room, only what came through the
window from the moon and the porch light.  It caught her torso but not
her face; she spoke out of shadow.  "I thought you said that didn't
matter to you."
     "It does not.  But I can still admire."
     She came closer and he laid his open palm on her belly above her
uterus.  Someday, she would carry their child there, a child they
would make by the same act which tonight would renew their bond.  He
had no illusions that sex would be easy, or that it would magically
heal everything, but they could not--should not--avoid it any further. 
Fear was not the best motivator, perhaps, but fear would never be
exorcised until they had done this thing.
     He ran hands over her chest and back, cupped her breasts, soft
and round like two turtledoves, then picked her up and laid her on the
bed so that he could reach her whole body.  He was still dressed and
she tugged at his clothing.  He shed it quickly.  He had been afraid
that without the help of pon farr, he might be unable to consummate
their bonding but that did not appear to be a problem.  She touched
him there, stroked him, and he jerked up his chin, breathing in once
sharply and moving her hand away.  "Wait," he whispered.
     Like Solon, Helen had her own fears about sex, if not the ones he
would have expected or held himself.  She had been honest when she had
said she had no fear of him.  It was her own reactions that worried
her.  Would she find his arousal repulsive?  If she did, she could not
hide it from him, telepath that he was.  Yet when he had stripped at
last, she had felt only curiosity.  There was no desire in her, but
there was no aversion, either.  She had touched his erection, felt
along the shaft till he had begged her to wait.
     Not sure what else to do, and with no more to guide her than dry
academic descriptions, young-adult romance holonovels, and the brutal
experience of Jan Braulik, she rolled onto her back and opened her
legs to him.  Confronted by such a blunt invitation, Solon's erection
deflated.  "What happened?" she whispered, sitting up a little.
     Mute and embarrassed, he shook his head, ran his hand up and down
in the curve between her hip and breast.  "Shhh," he said finally,
covered them both with a blanket.  He was cold.
     They lay in the dark a while, listening to the small sounds of
the house around them: a creak of settling timber, the hum of the
space-heater in the corner.  She had slipped one of her thighs between
his.  With no immediate demands but the feel of her body next to his,
his erection soon returned.  She felt it and pressed herself against
him while he ran hands down her back to her buttocks, pulled her
closer.  Hesitant and clumsy, she kissed him.  After a moment, he
kissed her back.  Still, there was something missing.  She was
jockeying position again to take him inside her, one leg thrown up
over his hip, hands fumbling to direct him.
     "Stop," he said, catching her impatient hands.
     "But you're ready."
     "No, I am not."  Just because he had an erection did not mean he
was ready.  He was not an animal, to cover her immediately and be
finished in an instant.  "Kiss me again."
     She did so.  He found it pleasant but it wasn't what he wanted
most; he pulled back enough to speak against her mouth.  "I need to
touch your mind.  I know you have asked that I talk to you but, for
this, I need to touch your mind."
     She smiled; he could sense it more than see it in the dark.  "I
think we've said what we needed to say."  Her breath puffed against
his cheek.  "It's just too easy to use the mindmeld like a crutch,
Solon.  Some things don't communicate that way.  They need a voice."
     Nodding, he raised a hand to her delicate-boned face, found the
pressure-points.  Shock of contact, all familiar-unfamiliar.  Then
they were falling into one another.
     After that, it was all right.  Awkward, and it seemed one of them
had too many arms until he rolled her atop him, but all right.  Having
her on top was easier: she could not bear his weight holding her down
--it brought back bad memories--and having her on top left his hands
free.  She liked the way he touched her and leaned into him, let her
head hang, completely relaxed, until he was ready to go inside.  Then
he crowded her, filled her too full and she bit her lip in pain.  He
was not rough, but she still clenched involuntarily until he drew her
into his own experience, the pleasure of his physical sensations,
through the meld.  Finally she opened around him and he moved against
her, into her, seeking his source, all his cherished ability to reason
fled until the pressure gave way in an explosion that made him arch
his back, curl his toes and shout out loud.  She watched his face in
wonder, awed that she could give him this.  One day, perhaps she would
be able to share it, but that no longer worried her.  The mystery had
been taken out of it, and the larger-than-life expectations.  With it
had gone their respective fears.
     They cleaned themselves up then and slept.


     They left Owl Woman's house and Cattaraugus Reservation on a
Tuesday morning in October.  The trees were beginning to turn and
during the walk into Irving, Solon picked up several yellow and pink
maple leaves, put them in the pocket of a jacket he had borrowed from
Carl Bennett.  When Helen asked him what he planned to do with them,
he shook his head.  "Perhaps nothing.  But they are beautiful.  Beauty
exists in its own right."


     A week later, they were back in ShiKahr to the great relief of
their parents, all three of whom met them at the shuttleport.  T'Syra
exchanged a fond press of hands with her son while scrutinizing his
face--"You are well?"--but she found nothing hiding there besides joy. 
Menelaos had returned with his Helen.
     "I am well," he replied.
     "There was...nothing amiss...which made you depart without
leaving us word?" his father asked.
     "No."  Ashamed, Solon dropped his chin.  "I regret that I caused
you concern."
     Saval waved it off.  By now, David Brant had joined them, one arm
around Helen.  Less coy than his colleagues, he asked straight out,
"Then you're not in pon farr?"
     Solon blinked, shared a glance with Helen.  "Oh.  Uh--no."  Helen
gave him a secret smile.  The rest was between the two of them.  "No,"
he said again.  "I was simply invited to help Helen build a dam."
     "A dam?" Brant said.
     "Yes.  A Marian Daugherty sent me a letter--"
     "Owl Woman?" Brant interrupted, voice raised.  "How the hell did
the Owl Woman get involved in this?"
     "I'll explain when we get home," Helen told him, tugging him
along by the arm still curled around her.  "I want to go home."
     So Brant led them out of the shuttleport to where they could
catch ground transport back to ShiBaran.  On the way, he said to
Helen, "Three months ago, we unearthed a bilingual inscription which
should interest you...."




                              EPILOGUE



     A glass sculpture dominated the art show, displayed on a central
platform, floodlights pointed up to bring out the sparkle.  The glass
from which it had been cast was perfectly clear, the figure that of a
woman, though the gender was implied in the curve of line more than
anatomically.  Four colored maple leaves had been caught inside the
sweep of hair as if frozen in ice.  It was a portrait, not a likeness,
and like Lysippos, the artist had endeavored to show her not as she
was, but as she seemed: to catch the clarity of spirit from which
sprang her beauty.
     Certainly those who had come to the show, Vulcan and non-Vulcan
alike, thought the sculpture beautiful.  One businessman from Risa
asked how much it cost.  The artist merely pointed to a small sign at
the base: "Not for sale."
     "Some things are 'not for sale' until the right price is
offered," the businessman said.
     "It is not mine to sell," the artist replied.
     "Whose is it then?"
     "My wife's."  The artist gestured to a tall dark woman standing
off to one side, speaking to other patrons.  "It was made for her."
     The businessman whistled.  "Lucky you to have a wife who looks
like that.  Is she the model, too?"
     "Yes."
     The businessman turned back to the artist, handed over a personal
card made of real paper.  "If you ever decide to make a duplicate,
keep me in mind."
     "There is only one," the artist replied.  Bowing politely and
backing away, he went to join his wife.  The card he tossed
surreptitiously in a trashbin.


                           *** Finis ***