Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

If only he were a completely different person, Hunter thought. If only I were, too. Then it would have worked out perfectly.

Strolling toward his office, Ian Braithewaite stopped and stuck his head into the office of Aleph Prime’s public defender.

“Hi, Lee, how you feeling today?”

“Better,” she said. “I must have started to get a bug, but it’s gone now.”

“Good.”

“Anything interesting coming up?” she asked. “I’m tired of pleading fines for drunken miners. Why don’t you turn up a good smuggling case?”

“Don’t I wish,” he said.

“Want to go for coffee later?”

“Sure,” Ian said. “I’ll meet you after court.”

He went on down the hall and to his office, to start in on his moderately heavy load of massively boring cases, day after day, always the same.

Without a sound, without a motion, Mandala woke. She went from deep dreaming sleep to complete wakefulness in an instant. She felt cold, with the sweat of fear.

Almost as quickly as she awakened, she remembered where she was: her own cabin, on the Enterprise , her new assignment. Not back in the patrol, not in the midst of a fire-fight. She rubbed the ache beneath the scar on her left shoulder. She must have strained the old break during a workout. She really should find time to regrow the bone. It was silly to put up with the discomfort. And this time the twinge of pain had prodded memory and brought on her nightmare.

But it was just a nightmare. She had faced and overcome its dangers just as she had beaten other perils, real ones, and the struggle and victory had suffused her with a fierce joy.

Hikaru slept peacefully beside her. The faint light gleamed on his shoulders. He lay face-down with his head pillowed on his arms, turned toward her. Yesterday, they had both realized they wanted, and needed, to spend as much time together as they could, even if he were soon to leave the Enterprise .

He was so gentle ... Mandala did not like to think of him hardened by the violence he would encounter in his next assignment. But she could not say so to him. Her reasons were too selfish; and she would, in effect, be telling him to give up his ambitions.

He might be strong enough to come through the experience unchanged. It was possible. But it was about as likely as his chances of advancing farther without making the transfer at all.

She pushed away the depressing thoughts, for she still felt exhilarated by her dream. Her heart beat quickly; she was excited. She leaned down and kissed the point of Hikaru’s shoulder. She kissed the corner of his jaw, his ear, his temple. His eyes opened, closed, opened.

He drew in a long breath. “I’m glad you woke me up.”

“I’m glad you woke up.” She brushed her fingertips languorously up and down his back. He shivered. “You got me out of some nightmare,” he said.

Bad?

“It seems like it... but I can’t remember anything about it, now.”

She moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulders, cuddling him. He hugged her tight, burying his face in her long loose hair, until he had shaken off the unease, and began to respond to her.

She leaned over him, letting her hair fall down in a curtain around them. When it tickled his neck and shoulders, he smiled. She caressed him, drawing warm patterns with her fingers and cool ones with her ruby ring.

“You are so beautiful,” Mandala said, and bent down to kiss him again before he could think of anything to say.

Jenniver Aristeides and Snnanagfashtalli sat across from each other in the duty room, playing chess.

They both preferred the classical two-dimensional board to the 3-D versions; it was somehow cleaner and less fussy, but it retained its infinite complexity.

“At least if I ask Mandala Flynn for a transfer she won’t spit in my face,” Jenniver said.

“No,” said Fashtall. “She is not like the other one, she is not the spitting type.”

“It’s just that I have such a hard time getting anybody to believe I don’t like to pound people into the ground every chance I get.” Jenniver shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame them.”

Fashtall raised her sleek head and gazed across the table at her, the pupils in her maroon eyes widening.

“ Ibelieve,” she said. ‘They will not say they do not believe you, when I am around. And no one will spit in your face.”

“He never actually did, you know,” Jenniver said mildly. “He couldn’t reach that far anyway.”

“Mandala Flynn’s predecessor is gone,” Fashtall said. “And Mandala Flynn is our officer. If she does not give you a transfer to Botany, she will tell you a reason, at least. I do not think she will hold you in place longer than she must, if she knows you are unhappy.”

“I’m scared to talk to her,” Jenniver said.

“She will not hurt you. And you will not hurt her. Have you watched her, at judo? No ordinary human on the ship could defeat her, not even the captain.”

“Could you?” Jenniver asked.

Fashtall blinked at her. “I do not play fair, by those rules.”

The Changeling laughed. Reflecting that Fashtall had far more sense of humor than anyone else gave her credit for, Jenniver moved her queen’s pawn.

After a moment, Fashtall growled.

Jenniver smiled. “You’re not even in check.”

“I will soon be. Driven by a pawn!” She made another irritated noise. “You think a move farther ahead than I, friend Jenniver, and I envy you.”

She suddenly turned, the spotted fur at the back of her neck rising, bristling.

“What is it?”

“Something fell. Someone. In the observatory.”

Fashtall bounded out of the duty room on all fours, and Jenniver followed, running easily in the absurdly light gravity. She passed Fashtall and reached the observatory first.

Mr. Spock stood swaying in the middle of the dimly-lit room, his eyes rolled back so far they showed nothing but white crescents, his hair disarrayed, blood running down the side of his face from a gash in his left temple, and, most strangely of all—once Jenniver noticed it—out of uniform, wearing a flowing, dark-brown tunic rather than his uniform shirt. She hurried toward him: her boot crunched on a shard that cracked like plastic. She hesitated, afraid as she often was that she had inadvertently damaged some fragile possession of the frail people around her. But the floor was littered with the amber fragments: whatever the damage was, it was not something she had caused.

Spock’s knees buckled and Jenniver forgot the broken bits around her: she leaped forward and caught the science officer before he fell. She held him up. Fashtall rose on her hind legs and touched his forehead.

“Fever,” she said. “High—much too high even for a Vulcan.”

Spock raised his head. “My observations ...” he said. “Entropy ...” There was a wild, confused look in his eyes. “Captain Kirk—”

“Fashtall, you go wake up Dr. McCoy. I’ll help Mr. Spock to sick bay.”

Snnanagfashtalli’s white whiskers bristled out: a gesture of agreement. She sprang over the broken instrument and disappeared into the corridor.

“I am all right,” Spock said.

“You’re bleeding, Mr. Spock.”

He put his hand to his temple; his fingers came away wet with blood. Then he looked at his sleeve, brown silk, not blue velour.

“Let me take you to sick bay,” she said. “Please.”

“I am not in need of assistance!”

She thought she was being cruel but she could not think of anything else to do but obey him. She was supporting most of his weight: she let him go, as slowly as she dared so he would have as much chance as she could give him to keep his feet. But as she had feared, his legs would not support him. He collapsed again, and again she kept him from falling.