“I do not need refuge,” James began.
“Wait,” Kirk said urgently and came off the bed, shakily, but came to them, came and put his hand on James’s arm. “Before you say it—Hell, I can see it. I can see her. But your life is here, your friends, family—more.” He looked at Spock. “We can’t do this to him.” He looked back to meet James’s eyes. “This is the real crunch of the premise of identical doubles, identical real men. It’s a problem even of metaphysics. I don’t even see that there’s a right of the original—and I want to claim that right so badly that my teeth ache. But you have every right to everything that is mine—life, property, place, command, friends, family, more; to my—memories: yours, ours.” He straightened his shoulders as if they would break. “No difference. Yet, I know I can’t offer to—go off into the night. How could you?”
James drew a breath to the bottom of his lungs, feeling suddenly that the recognition of the right was a sanction and seal of acceptance, and the straight answer a form of respect which somehow lifted a weight. “I can’t,” he said with the same respect. “But for me it would not be—night.” Somewhere he found a smile, and he touched the Commander’s arm. “That has to be the answer,” he said, feeling his way. “From the moment of—division—there is a difference. A man is his memories. Omne died before he would give up the memory of this day. And I would, too. It is mine. Whatever the pain, it is a part of me now—the only part which is entirely mine. As yours is entirely yours, whatever we have shared. There are things we have not shared: Spock’s acceptance of me, his refusal to regard me as expendable, even after he knew that you lived. The Commander, and how she kept the trust.”
James straightened his own shoulders and looked into the eyes which matched his. “Those are mine. They make the choice possible—not only because it is necessary. Jim—will you take my word?”
Somewhere the matching face found the same smile. “Always, James.”
James turned to the woman beside him. “Commander, will you?”
She lifted her head. “Always, James.”
He reached up to touch her face, brush her hair back from the swift, lifting ear. “That should be-almost—long enough,” he murmured.
Through his fingers he almost thought that he could feel the fire of her mind, and he knew that he could see it in her eyes. “Why don’t I know your name?” he said. She would know the one he meant, the private one which Spock had said once still meant “dawn of springtime” in the ancient tongue their peoples had once snared.
“You will,” she said, and her eyes promised that he would know much more.
He nodded and turned to the others: Spock—well, there was nothing which could be said to Spock, and nothing which needed to be; Jim—it had been said; McCoy, doing his best not to hover anxiously, and failing.
James grinned. “Take your time with the ear job this time, Bones—” he jerked his head toward the Commander and Spock,—or we’ll never hear the end of it.”
“We never will anyway,” McCoy grumbled, rallying. But his hand seemed to be shaking and he steadied it on James’s shoulder. “There’s no pleasing anybody around here.” He reached to touch Jim, too. “Thank God,” he said.
And he seemed to have gotten the last word again.
But as they moved to go out, James heard Jim say softly, “Stay a moment, Spock.”
The Vulcan turned back, and James felt a moment of hollowness which was more than just the medication creeping up on him. But it would be the first moment Jim had had to be alone with the Vulcan, It was Jim’s right, their right. They looked natural together, as if they were about to settle down to a command problem.
James made himself walk through the door, and in a moment McCoy had him in a small treatment room and had slapped him with another hypo. He tried not to eavesdrop through the link, but he was aware of Jim’s saying something about checking on the message from the delegate commission, which James doubted was what he wanted to say at all.
James found the Commander holding his hand, and his vision was dimming. “I’m in your hands,” he murmured a little ruefully.
“Yes,” she said with satisfaction.
But as he dropped off, his mind was not entirely with her; it kept drifting off along the link, and he almost thought that he felt another mind entering—Jim? But that had to be an illusion. Still, it would have been Jim’s right… He couldn’t quite feel Jim’s body anymore—the drug was soothing, dimming Jim’s pain.
James drifted off… difference, when he woke there would be even a different face…
CHAPTER XXII
When he woke, there was—and James wasn’t quite used to it when he went to Jim.
Quite? Would he ever get used to it?
He would, he told himself firmly. The Commander had held a mirror for him, as firmly, and briefed him on how it had been done. She and Spock and Bones—quite a team; she had risen through the ranks as a science officer, too, it turned out. He almost hadn’t followed her explanation: it was more than he had bargained for. Not only the ears, the eyebrows, a subtly different face—so subtly that he couldn’t entirely pin down the difference. Still his face, but changed by one or two crucial millimeters. And they had found answers to questions he hadn’t dared to raise. An injection transplant of bone marrow cells quick-cloned from Spock; they had determined somehow that the Human factors in Spock’s blood were compatible with his own, and the Vulcan ones were sufficiently different not to give him the collywobbles or anything—he hoped. She hadn’t said collywobbles. She’d said his immunity had been shocked into adapting to the Vulcan elements. And the bone marrow cells would produce enough Vulcan blood cells with their strong pigmentation factors so that he would bleed green. A little off-green, possibly, since it still had to be mostly his blood, and it wouldn’t stand medical examination, but it wouldn’t give him away at the first scratch or blush.
Then, a subcutaneous injection of Vulcanoid skin pigmentation-producing cells, also cloned from Spock. And spray-injected all over. But maybe he wouldn’t sunburn now.
Hair—a more normal cosmetic process, self-renewing color from the roots out. But they hadn’t tried to go dark—more a copper gold color. There were fair Romulans. She said they were “highly prized.”
He didn’t like the sound of it
He didn’t ask.
He put the thought aside.
It remained to show Jim—the difference.
James moved through the door.
Jim wasn’t sleeping—hadn’t slept at all, Bones had complained—and of course he could feel now that James was coming, as James could feel that he wasn’t sleeping.
But his eyes were closed and he looked drawn; pain still reverberated in the resonance, and it wasn’t James’s pain.
Jim had put Omne’s big black robe on over his uniform. Was he having a chill? But James couldn’t feel it.
What he could feel was a kind of waking nightmare, and he knew which one.
Jim didn’t turn it off as James crossed to the diagnostic bed, didn’t open his eyes—then did both deliberately, looking at the new face.
James put a hand over Jim’s eyes, closing them gently. “Don’t look at me just yet. Get used to the idea. Finish with the—dream.
I’m finished with it,” Jim said flatly.
“I doubt that either one of us is going to be finished with that for a long time,” James said. He softened his voice. “Don’t go Vulcan on me now. Haven’t we both been deviling a certain Vulcan about admitting to his emotions? And now we both have to admit that we can cry. Hell of a universe sometimes, isn’t it?”