and to give you my sabre. It takes me over the mass allowance.”
Mandala accepted the sabre with the dignity due to it: it was an old sword, and a finely-made one.
“Thank you,” she said. She bent her head down, resting her face against her knees, and he thought she was crying.
“Mandala, hey, I’m sorry—”
Shaking her head violently without looking up, she grabbed his wrist to stop the apology. When she did raise her head, he saw that she was laughing so hard she was in tears.
“No,” she said. “ I’m sorry. It’s beautiful, I’m not laughing at the sabre, only I am, sort of, if I were quick enough on my feet I’d give you—” She glanced around. “Ha, there!” She pulled the heavy ring off the middle finger of her right hand. It was a naturally-formed circle of a stone like ruby, very much the color
of her hair, even to the same golden highlights, at the facets. Except when she was practicing judo, she always wore it. She slipped it on his little finger.
In shooting for her promotion to lieutenant commander, one of the subjects Mandala studied was psychology, including its history. Smiling, she told Hikaru about another century’s theory of sex and symbols: swords and sheaths, locks and keys. When she was finished, he laughed with her at the quaint ideas of a different age.
They looked at each other soberly.
“Did you mean it, what you said before ...”
“I very seldom say anything I don’t mean,” Mandala said. “ Haveyou changed your mind?”
“I... I don’t know.”
“It won’t make things any easier for you, but I wish you would.”
“I’ve been falling in love with you ever since you came on board,” Hikaru said. “But I’m leaving —”
She put her hands on his shoulders. “If you do change your mind it won’t make things easier for me, either. I love you, too, Hikaru, as much as I’ve fought it, and I don’t know if we’re going to be sorrier if we do make love—or if we don’t.”
Mandala stroked his cheek, the corner of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. He leaned toward her and she responded, kissing him gently, her hands spread against his back.
“You can’t imagine how often I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered. She unfastened his shirt and drew it up over his head, caressing his sides with her fingers. She watched him pull off his boots and his pants; again, she admired his compact athlete’s body. She lifted the bedclothes for him to get in beside her, and as he lay down and turned toward her she drew her hand up his thigh, to his hip, to his waist. Her fingers made slow swirling patterns on his skin, and he shivered. Hikaru kissed her face, all over, small warm kisses; he caressed her and stroked her hair and kissed the scar on her shoulder as if he wanted to take away all the pain it represented. Mandala bent over him and let her hair curl down to touch his shoulders. Cautiously at first, then playfully, then joyfully, they loved each other.
Jim Kirk sat in the officers’ lounge, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. He felt depressed. The door slid open and Dr. McCoy beetled in.
“Mornin’, Jim,” he said cheerfully, his southern accent strongly in evidence, as it always was when he was under the influence of several drinks, or of a hangover. Kirk could not tell which it was, and he was in no mood to put up with either.
“What a night,” McCoy said. He got himself a mug and sat down across from Kirk. “What a night. The same for you, too? You look like I feel.”
“Yes,” Kirk said, though he was not really listening. “It was quite a night.” He had spent most of it on the subspace communicator, trying to clear away the red tape for Sulu’s transfer, and now he was beginning to think he had made a serious mistake. Perhaps if he had not been so efficient, Mr. Sulu would have
changed his mind.
“I thought so,” McCoy said. “I sure hope you had as good a time as I did.”
“As good a time—?” Kirk went back in his memory over what McCoy had been saying, and realized that since the doctor had only just come back from Aleph, he had no way of knowing about Sulu. In fact, Kirk had seen neither hide nor hair of McCoy since meeting him and his veterinarian friend in the park the day before.
“Bones, what are you talking about?”
“Well—I admit I’d had a few when I ran into you yesterday, but you weren’t that subtle.”
Kirk just stared at him.
“Jim, boy, you really looked happy. I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so good. Now, you know I think more constancy in some matters wouldn’t hurt you one bit—”
Kirk could not stand it when McCoy got avuncular, especially this early in the morning.
“—so it’s a real pleasure to see you with an old friend.”
Kirk realized what McCoy had inferred. For some reason it irritated him, though, to be fair, McCoy had no particular reason to think anything else. Besides, why should Kirk care what McCoy thought about his and Hunter’s friendship? The truth was no one’s business but their own.
“You’ve got the wrong idea, Bones,” Kirk said.
McCoy slid into the bantering tone by which, all too often, the two men avoided discussing anything that was really important.
“What, Don Juan T. Kirk, Casanova of the space-ways—”
“Shut up!”
McCoy looked at him, startled out of joking, realizing that everything he had said so far this morning was as close to perfectly wrong as an imperfect human could devise.
“Jim,” he said quietly, all traces of the good old boy abandoned, “I’m sorry. I knew you and she used to see a lot of each other, and I just assumed ... I didn’t mean to bring up anything painful.”
Kirk shook his head. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even an unfair assumption, given my usual behavior.”
“Do you want to talk about it? Or would you rather I slunk away, as best I can with my foot in my mouth?”
“Hunter and I are friends. She’s one of the best friends I have. We used to be lovers. We aren’t anymore. She’s a member of a partnership family—”
“Oh. Well. That explains it.” “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even begin to explain it.”
“Jim, now I am beginning to get confused.”
“Partnerships aren’t usually exclusive relationships. Hers certainly isn’t. There are nine people in it now, I think—nine adults, I mean. Four or five of them have careers like Hunter’s, that keep them away most of the time. But with the larger group, the kids have some stability. I met Hunter’s daughter a few years back...” At first they had not got along too well; he was not used to being around children. At least he had realized in time that his patronizing manner insulted her, and that she despised him for it. Once he started treating her as a reasoning human being, they began to work out a watchful friendship.
“Her daughter!” McCoy said, surprised. He had not considered Hunter in any but her Starfleet officer incarnation, and he was nearly as startled as he would have been if Jim Kirk himself had started telling stories of his kiddies back home.
“It isn’t that often that you meet someone whose father you almost had a chance to be,” Kirk said.
McCoy took a long swallow from his coffee mug and rather wished it had something stronger in it.
“I nearly joined Hunter’s group, Bones. After I met them the first few times, they invited me—they invited me three different times, over four years. I felt comfortable with them. I liked them all. I think ...
I think I could have loved them all.” He stopped and did not continue for several seconds. When he did, his voice grew very quiet. “I thought I wasn’t ready for such a big step. I kept turning them down. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I wouldn’t be ready even now. Maybe I made the right decision. But most of the time I think that saying no was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”
“It’s never too late to correct a mistake.”
“I don’t think I agree with you about that,” Kirk said. “But anyway they never asked me again after I started to wonder if I should have accepted.”
“You could ask them.”
Kirk shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It would be such bad manners that they’d almost have to say no.”
“But if the partnership isn’t exclusive, and you and she are still friends—”
