The Lady Amanda had her hands folded behind her back, cobblestone at her feet and a bundle of tulle around her shoulders. Earth was beautiful. The air was cool and rich and moved quickly. The top point of the golden gate bridge was protruding from the pea-soup fog, and she couldn't stop staring at it. It was twenty-two seventy-two and the middle of September. If she could see the sun it would have told her about early afternoon. Goosebumps were cropping up along the skin of her arms, and she was in heaven. She hadn't been on Earth in over twenty years, and the geography of Starfleet Headquarters was a mystery to her.

She wandered with her head held high for the remainder of the afternoon, and soon it began to rain. The rain fell diagonally and collected in puddles. Sarek would scold her for not asking for help, but she was only human. The rain landed on her face and ran into her collarbones.

The coldest winter I've ever spent was a summer in San Fransisco.

Amanda smiled. The garden was filled with transparent benches and star-gazer lilies and japanese maples. The colors were brilliant ones that she seldom saw protruding from the ground. She found herself in a courtyard, nestled between three buildings set lower to the ground than one would expect. They were constructed of titanium/steel and concrete. The buildings were each connected by transparent sidewalk, under which ran a marshy stream floating with foliage that Amanda could no longer identify. The building she was nearest to was marked "Engineering," and Amanda thought, "Expendable."

She spotted a young cadet crossing the courtyard, his boots making faint ringing sounds against the metal walkway. He was dressed head-to-toe in cranberry red, his ears were round and slightly too big for his head. "Excuse me," she said as he passed her. He stopped and swiveled to face her.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"I'm here for Admiral Kirk. Would you be so kind as to direct me towards his workplace?" The cadet chuckled and pointed toward a building on the other side of the garden.

"He's in the Command building, usually. The higher-ups are on the third floor, but I couldn't tell you what direction to go once you got there. Sorry, Ma'am." He walked away. Amanda shivered and crossed her arms over her stomach, making sure to tuck her hands into her elbows. She saw koi fish slowly meandering under her feet.

Vulcan had no water above ground except that in volcanic hot springs, and the fish who lived in their toxic pools were either microscopic or horrendously ugly. Autonomic Regulation among the Vulcans allowed them to survive on collected rainwater for generations until the first to practice distillation. The emergence of such technology so early in evolution had always intrigued Amanda. Was it the inherent intelligence, or the primal instinct for survival? Did the technology that kept them, as a species, running stem from one part of their brains or the other? If the supressed component of the Vulcan mind was that responsible for their early survival, was Surak wrong?

Towards the dawn of their relationship, their first mindmeld revealed these thoughts to Sarek. He was, of course, outraged. His brow furrowed, he looked at her and those brown eyes were drenched in disapproval. "Surak was right," he said. "Surak saved our species."

"What if he came sooner?" Amanda asked. She was convinced that that was the moment he realized that he loved her.

She laughed. All this from pretty fish?

She climbed the steps to the door of the Command building. The doors were open. She stepped into a room that smelled like metal and cologne. The ceiling was high and transparent. Amanda kept her hands behind her back, sleeves in triangles between her fingers.

She explained to an officer behind the double doors that her name was Amanda Grayson, wife of Sarek, Ambassador of Vulcan to the Federation. and then asked him why he had yet to be replaced by a robot. He said, "I dunno, I'm probably less expensive," and scanned the small metal ID chip in her arm. It was starting to show through her skin, along with all the veins and arteries and digitally inserted rods.

She tried not to bump into people. It was surprisingly quiet, only the sound of work boots on mirrored tiles and the occasional mechanic beeping. She didn't know quite where she was or where she was going. After all, she hadn't known either of those things since she left the docking station. Her aversion to asking for directions still plagued her, and she waited for someone to approach her, but no-one did.

There was a large transparent yellow banner over a flight of stairs, each of them without any apparent connection to the floor, reading Semper Exploro, search always. Amanda wondered why they still had stairs. It seemed like they should have just replaced them all with small elevators, or something. She lifted her skirt a few centimeters and kept to the right. The rain was sticking to the windows and mingling with itself, running in rivulets when it got too heavy for the surface tension. When it rained on Vulcan, the droplets fell like large rocks would on Earth.

She found a black nameplate reading Adm. James T. Kirk on the seventh door after stepping off the stairs at the third floor and selecting a hallway at random. Amanda stood in front of it for a few minutes before she pressed the buzzer with the outstretched index finger of her seldom-used right hand. It opened immediately to a brightly sunlit room that smelled of coffee and pine sol. Amanda stepped over the threshold and it closed behind her with its customary swish. Her heart was pounding in her chest, she should've paused a moment longer before opening the door, he was in the middle of something.

James T. Kirk looked up from his PADD and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Lieutenant, I hope you've got… oh."

Amanda's right hand resumed its position in the crook of her left elbow.

Kirk left a holographic page half-turned and took his feet off the table. "Mrs. Sarek, you're one of those people with the uncanny ability to know when someone needs you, aren't you?" He slid the stylus back into place in the side of his PADD, "so what brings you here?"

"Please, Admiral, my name is Amanda," she said, cocking her head slightly to the left. "And I most certainly do not know when people need me. I simply know when I need people. Human people, specifically."

"Of course," he said, staring at her. At that moment, and for the three weeks preceding it, Amanda Grayson was Jim Kirk's favorite sentient being in the entire galaxy.

"It seems like you haven't left this room in quite a while."

"I can't say I have." Kirk stood up, set his padd beside a traditional two-dimensional chess board, and tugged at the hem of his uniform.

The room had a large bookshelf that spanned the length of the largest wall lacking a window. The books were arranged by century, then topic, then author, and finally, as opposed to date written, in order of personal preference from left to right. Some of the spines were cracked, and she could tell that they were loved deeply, and others had been kept in the best of condition. Amanda wondered whether Kirk had done the breaking in, or if previous owners had. She ran her finger along the twentieth century, until she found one that felt as rough and rigged as a binding could be. "You loved this one?" She stood on her toes and selected a compilation of Aldous Huxley, settled back down and turned the pages between her fingers.

"Yes."

"Brave new world. I love this book. It reminds me of high school. I love Terran literature, it's so refreshing. It's amazing to me how eloquently humans can express their thoughts and feelings, how they view the world and what it's becoming," she said.

"Do Vulcans write novels?"

"Not that I know of. I'm sure there's someone somewhere, but they'd never get published, not in a million years. They love foreign fiction, though. It's a sick fascination, I guess." she chuckled the thought and tucked the book back into its respective spot, jammed tight between more new and unused editions. The sun was setting, she could see it blazing red under the blanket of clouds. She padded across the room, still looking out the window. There was a pair of three powder blue armchairs in the corner of the room. She didn't know how to broach the subject. It was still just as painful for her as she imagined it was for him. Lost in thought, she stood for a while before deciding to sit down in the chair closest to the window. Kirk followed her, and placed two mugs of replicated black coffee on an opaque triangular table.

Amanda picked the one closest to her and held it with two fingers under the handle. She couldn't think of a gentle way to put it, because from all angles it was ugly. So she put it bluntly. "We're not going to avoid talking about it forever, so we might as well do it now, and get it over with. I flew all the way out here to this lowly star system of yours in a commercial shuttle, and I'm not leaving until you tell me how you're doing and what happened."

"I take it Spock arrived on Vulcan?" Jim had his forearms on his thighs, his head tipped down.

"Last week. He got there last week, and Sarek found out about it. I don't know what was going through Sarek's head. I think he was planning something, I think he let me know what Spock was doing so I would come back to Earth. He might've just slipped up, but I don't think so. He might've wanted me to spend some time with my own kind, he might've wanted me to talk to you. Either way, I did what we both wanted or I did what I needed to do."

Jim was trying to avoid making eye contact with Amanda, too much concern and too deep and intent and too pale. "You're his mother. I can't imagine."

"It does carry with it a slight feeling of rejection, but all his humanity was just as much your fault as it was mine."

He looked at her, briefly, and then returned to studying his hands. "I wouldn't say that."

"Ha! Of course you wouldn't." Amanda was smiling, showing her teeth. It was Spock's smile, which Jim had only seen once.

"Captain! Jim!" Spock's hands on his shoulders, his lips stretched ear-to-ear. He was spun around, almost banging into McCoy's desk, and then the smile faded. "I'm pleased to see you, Captain. You seem uninjured. I am at something of a loss to understand it, however."

He didn't know what was so funny and didn't care. Old frail gorgeous Amanda was sitting in his office and smiling a smile that he would never see again.