Chapter 39

Storan ascends as the summer sun is fading into a softer autumn haze, though he's barely able to walk when he returns from the desert, and he collapses as T'Sai places the symbol of ultimate logic around his neck. Whispers echo through the sanctuary meldspace like sand on the wind — a previously undiagnosed case of pa'nar syndrome has ended his journey in its final steps; he has unexpectedly entered his Time and been banished from Gol; he has been overcome by his final trials and died in the night — but, Spock is gratified to note, his engagement with rumor and intrigue is dispassionate now, distant, and fed only by a scientist's curiosity. When the news arrives from the Elders that Storan has recovered, though he will be obliged to spend his convalescence in the more temperate climate of the coastal village of his birth, Spock finds that he greets it with equanimity: it is information, nothing more. Storan is his comrade and a gifted practitioner of the Disciplines, and his loss to the ranks of the Kolinahru would have been eminently regrettable, but death is the inevitable consequence of bodily decay and it is illogical to mourn that which cannot be altered.

T'Kel receives his explanation without reaction, hands folded in her lap, face impassive, and, when Spock has finished speaking, she tells him that his journey is approaching its close.

He inclines his head. The information is not unexpected. "May I begin my preparations, Master?" he asks.

Her answer comes without hesitation: clear, considered and certain. "You may," she says.

T'Cora no longer makes any effort towards shielding her emotionality when they meld. They have not spoken about what passed between them in her retreat, but it would be illogical, now, to proceed as before and, he thinks, now that she devotes less of her psi-energy towards concealing her shame, she is able to apply the principles of Kolinahr more effectively and her progress is accelerating. The measure of resentment that she harbored towards him in the weeks following the storm has dissipated in the face of her increasing proficiency in the Disciplines and, gradually, they have arrived at a place of understanding, of respect, so that when they meld it is no longer a function of their pursuit of Truth, but an acknowledgment that this is a process that benefits them both. Their minds, as it transpires, are more similar than dissimilar and they fortify each other when they are joined. In another world, Spock thinks, they might have made suitable bondmates.

She reads the change in him immediately and he is aware of her consternation as the link develops, but it takes her a moment to discern its source.

/Ah, she says at last, as the buried knowledge flows into the meldspace. It is time.

He expects an air of bitterness, perhaps chagrin, but there is none. An edge of sadness, a faint haze of vicarious satisfaction, and a deep cloud of regret, but her habitual antagonism has long since vanished. Perhaps, he thinks, she has finally found her footing on the long path ahead.

/I will begin my preparations at first light, he says.

T'Cora nods.

/Your success is an example to those who struggle to find their way to Truth, she tells him. Your journey has been difficult, but you have prevailed. This is as it should be.

There are no secrets in the meldspace. She sees the boy that he was, the man that he became: the knowledge of his difference, the understanding that there was no place in the universe that Spock could call his own. And he sees the truth of her words, the openness, the honesty. She does not seek to flatter him and she does not seek his approval: her words are fact, nothing more, and he must accept them as such.

/One day, says Spock, I will say as much to you.

She acknowledges his answer impartially: it is a recognition of her progress, and she receives it in the manner in which it was bestowed.

/Will you permit me to help you weave your robe? she asks.

And there is no hesitation, no question and no equivocation in Spock's mind; the answer comes as easily as the breath in his lungs.

/It would be my honor, he says.

-o-o-o-

"She's straining at her leash, Mr. Decker," says Kirk, and the new captain's smile, so like his father's, covers a hunger that Kirk knows very well.

"Yes, sir," he says. "Just like the rest of us. This latest delay has come as a blow."

Kirk considers putting a fatherly arm around the young man's shoulders, but thinks better of it. He's not that old, no matter what his bones might have told him after his run this morning.

"She'll fly, Will," he says. "Let's just see what we can do to keep her in the air when she does, all right?"

Nothing about the Enterprise feels like his anymore. Kirk realized as much the first time he made this trip, twelve weeks into her refit, when he discovered that he couldn't pick her out of the huddled masses of metal shells crowded into the orbital drydocks until her insignia came into view. He'd always thought he could find her in an empty sky just by the hum of her engines, but, it turns out, stripped of what made her familiar, she's just another vessel, an empty hulk of tritanium alloy that he doesn't quite know.

It makes it a little easier to stand at the airlock each time, smile plastered to his face, and ask for permission to come aboard his own damn ship.

She's re-emerging in stages now, the silver lady that stole his sleep more nights than he can count, and it's an effort, as he follows Decker along the stripped, gray-washed corridors, not to reach out a hand and brush his fingers along the walls as he walks. She has a heartbeat again, wanderer's soul awakening from its long sleep, and there's a restlessness to her halls and walkways that feels like more than the passage of a couple of hundred hurried feet. The truth is, Kirk is no more convinced than Decker that these latest modifications to the matrix restoration coils are strictly necessary, but R&D will keep coming up with improvements to their improvements, and she's not so patched up yet that they can't cram in another couple of circuits where it won't show. Scotty's had a few words to say about it in Kirk's hearing; no doubt, Decker has heard several more.

"I know she'll fly, sir," says Decker now, as they round a corner and Kirk finds himself, abruptly, at the entrance to the recreation deck, which is very much not where he thought they were. "It's just that we were hemorrhaging staff before the latest setback, and now, on top of everything else, it looks like I've just lost my science officer to the Reliant. I've got a great bridge crew and I'd like to keep it that way — I'm just not sure how much longer I can hold this team together on a promise."

"Lieutenant Commander Fazekas' transfer was nothing to do with the ship's readiness, Mr. Decker," says Kirk, though he doubts it sounds any more convincing now than it did when he heard it directly from the officer in question. "Captain Liu needed someone with a working knowledge of Kinarian marine ecology. That's why you lost him."

"Yes, sir," says Decker, with a patience that would very much seem to vindicate Kirk's suspicions. "But if we'd been in deep space — as we were supposed to have been five weeks ago, sir — Captain Liu would have had to find someone else. And I'd still have Fazekas on my staff."

Kirk purses his lips around a grin. Decker was not only the right choice for the Enterprise, he was a damn near perfect choice. He's Kirk, ten years younger, and with slightly floppier hair.

"I'll find you a new science officer, Will," he says.

"I have a list of names," says Decker. "Ranked in order of preference."

"Yes," says Kirk. "I'm sure you do."

He has already made the decision not to be around when the Enterprise launches. It's not that he holds onto any particular resentment anymore, and it's not that he thinks he's going to find it difficult, particularly, to watch her go — she's ready now, and he wouldn't keep her caged up any longer than she needs to be. It's just that it doesn't feel right, somehow, to stand on the Centroplex and shake hands and slap backs and trade tired jokes and good wishes, and then watch her take her leave of Terran HQ from the wrong side of the glass. It's not the way the story's supposed to play out, and that superstitious part of him that will forever remain an explorer wonders if there isn't something unlucky about allowing a ship to leave port under the gaze of envious eyes.

But a man who spends his life in his office is a man who stockpiles leave at an alarming rate, and it occurred to Kirk last week, as he was glancing through an old volume of Shakespeare that he thought he'd lost until it turned up, unexpectedly, at the bottom of one of the boxes that he hasn't gotten around to unpacking yet, that there's a whole planet beneath his feet that he's barely seen. The disconnect, when it hit him, was startling: he's crossed the barrier of the galaxy itself, he's made First Contact with worlds where no Human feet had ever before trod, he's traveled backwards through time itself and into the shadowy dimensions beyond our own, and yet he's never been to Europe. It's time, Kirk thinks, to do something about that. Verona, Athens, Vienna, Rome: they are pinpoints on a map, names on a page, woven through with mystery and romance and tragedy. He wants to make them real.

Kirk leaves Decker on the bridge of his changeling ship, where wires still spill in complicated knots from open panels and technicians color the air with invective in a dozen languages as sparks fly from trailing filaments, and beams back to HQ with a head full of thoughts. Whatever her new captain may think, the Enterprise's captivity is nearly at an end, and, when she streaks out into the black unknown once more, it will lay something to rest for Kirk. It's time to let her go, he knows, but the knowledge is heavy, uncomfortable, and it feels less like settling a ghost than letting something precious slip away forever. It feels like watching something die.

Maybe it'll be different when she's finally gone. He hopes so. He has too much still to do to waste time on regrets.

-o-o-o-

The weaving room is built to catch the daylight: set at the far end of the sanctuary's north wing, its walls are filled with wide, high windows that open onto the plateau on three sides and filter the glare through pale linen drapes, thin as tissue paper, that billow softly in the slight breeze. It is little-used in the summer, when the heat of the day rises early and the bright, sun-soaked air catches and holds it from morning until dusk, but in the winter, when the gardens are tended and the millet has been ground, acolytes pass the early afternoon cross-legged on the mats that scatter the sand-dusted floor, loom strap wrapped around their lower backs, spinning the rough fabrics that clothe the Kolinahru and their followers. The gentle, rhythmic thud of beaters against weaving lines, the clack of rattling loom rods against the floor as shuttles glide through warp threads: these were the sounds that sang the year to a close for Spock as he took the first steps along his Path.

But srashivu do not weave. Their days are spent outside the sanctuary walls, deep in the trance that slowly, gradually, washes away the traces of their past life, like water over bedrock. The robes Spock wears in his desert retreat — a simple tunic of gray wool, with a plain, undyed smock to cover it — were fashioned by other hands, just as he once wove the robes that sheltered srashivu before him as they made their way towards Truth. But when an acolyte at the end of their journey returns from the sands of Gol, freshly purged of emotion, they are reborn into the ranks of the Kolinahru, and their old clothes, torn and heat-stained and shaded red with desert dust, are taken and burned in a fire of elmin'lak, mevak and sh'rr. The robes they wear as they set out to keep the last watch on the night before they ascend to the altar, then, are completely new, never before worn, and woven by the acolyte's own hand in the long weeks of preparation that signify the end of their journey. When a srashivu takes up the loom again, it's because their final trial is near.

The trance comes easily now, and the plain brown cloth that will form his tunic requires little input from his conscious mind: the shuttle moves without instruction, the heddles part the threads, the warp rods rise and fall, and his mind is free to trace the edges of the Disciplines while his eyes drift, unseeing, over the lengthening roll of thick-spun fabric that coils around the end rod on his lap. A low breeze rattles the curtain weights as he works, slapping them against the rough stone sills, and the early afternoon sunlight spills like warm buttermilk through the thin fabric, settling into his robes like tepid water, and casting long shadows behind him and to the east. Outside, bleached by contrast, the gardens stretch and simmer in the afternoon heat, the earthy scent of warm leaves and late blossom drifting through the unglazed windows and calling up memories of childhood contentment that will soon belong to another man.

T'Cora's loom lies to his left, untouched during her hours of meditation, and Spock can see the beginnings of the heavy, intricately patterned cloth that will make up a section of his smock. The design has meaning only to her, and he doesn't look for it in their melds; it's enough to know that, when he climbs the path to the altar, he will carry with him a part of her story, stitched alongside his own into the fabric on his back. If there is anything left in him to regret, it is only that he will not be able to help her weave her own robe when the time comes.

It is acceptable, T'Kel assures him, to retain some measure of ambivalence, to know doubt or even distress as the long desert walk approaches. The body's emotional core may cry out as it drains away to nothing, and it is often the case that the final trial becomes an avalanche of sorts, a sensory assault that can drown the unprepared: nothing but the solid fortification of meditation and Discipline will see him through the last hours of his bondage before he is reborn to pure logic. This is a source of some comfort. Having come so far, having labored so long in search of freedom from the face that haunts him, to fall at the last hurdle to a knot of anxiety in the pit of his stomach and the sense that he is, once again, followed by an unquiet voice from somewhere inside himself that he cannot reach, is more than he can bear to contemplate.

The sheds open, the shuttle moves, the beater tightens the weft. Cloth emerges, coarse-woven and simple — the cloth of a man of logic — and Spock's journey is nearing its end. He will be Kolinahru. He will set himself free. He will carve out the only future he can from a past he will lay to rest.

He will not allow his ghosts to claim him.

-o-o-o-

"Rumor has it," says Lori, lowering herself into one of the leather armchairs across the room from Kirk's desk, "that the Chief of Starfleet Operations suddenly remembered there's a big old world outside the Presidio. That can't be right, can it?"

Kirk, whose eyes have drifted out of focus as they scrolled through the seventeenth instalment in a vicious battle of words that has broken out between Vice Admiral Girvan and the Ga-Rulian attaché over the phrasing of a commemorative plaque in one of the Centroplex conference rooms, and which involves Kirk simply, as far as he can tell, because it does, glances up from his terminal and smiles.

"Admiral Ciana," he says. "How far, exactly, does your network of spies extend?"

She grins. "You were married to me for a whole year," she says, "and you still have to ask me that?"

He acknowledges the truth of her words with a wry twist of his lips, and unfolds himself from his chair to make his way over to the synthesizer, where there's a half-full pot of coffee that's still fresh enough to serve. Lori's hair is shorter now than it was when they were together, hanging loose about her shoulders where once it would have been scraped back off her face into a complicated knot, and her skin is shaded with a healthy bronze glow from a New Year's excursion to Risa with Ostergard. She looks good, Kirk thinks, but he keeps it to himself.

"Coffee?" he says.

"Sure," says Lori. "No cream, though."

"No cream?"

"New Year's resolution. So — come on, Jim. Italy?"

Kirk hands her a cup as he carries his own back to his desk, dropping into his seat and darkening his terminal with a word. "I haven't decided on the destination yet," he says.

"I see." Her grin widens, but she covers it with a sip of coffee. "That sounds a lot like the kind of vacation that never gets out of the planning phase."

Kirk's not 100% certain that they're at a place where gentle teasing is back on the table just yet, but he buries the faint trickle of irritation that rises irrepressibly from that part of him that's still stuck in the last months of their marriage.

"I'm simply aware," he says, "that Federal crises have a habit of failing to develop until just after I've submitted a leave request."

"Yeah," says Lori, with the conviction of a woman who had originally planned her visit to Suraya Bay for last September. "About that…"

Kirk feels an eyebrow arch as he leans back in his chair, coffee cradled against his chest. She has, he knows, just come from a meeting with Nogura, Boudin and Strong, and the reason he knows this is because Strong, on a call with Kirk yesterday morning, was surprised to hear that Kirk hadn't been invited too.

"A little premature, isn't it?" he says, and his voice is pleasant but his gaze is pointed. Lori meets it without hesitation, which is fair enough, he supposes. She's doing him a favor and she knows he knows it.

"What's that?" she says.

"This hitch in my vacation plans you're going to tell me about. Doesn't it usually wait until they're finalized?"

His ex-wife grins: the golden smile that lights up her face, the one that once made him think he was in love with her. It doesn't much matter that he never was; that smile still makes him wish he could be.

"There's no hitch," she says. "It's hardly even an update. But I thought you ought to know just the same — they've confirmed the origin of the signal. It's definitely Ilion."

This is not exactly news, of course: he's been expecting to hear as much for several weeks now, and the main surprise is how damned long it has taken the information to filter back to Fleet Ops. Kirk smiles, though it's largely stripped of humor, and sets his mug down on his desk, steepling his hands.

"I believe," he says drily, "that Admiral Boudin was the only man in Starfleet who thought it might have come from somewhere else."

A loaded twitch of the eyebrows tells him exactly where Lori stands on the subject, but she's too consummate a player to put that kind of thought into words. Instead, she says, "You'd be surprised, you know."

"I doubt that."

"Now now." The grin widens. "Don't be cynical, Admiral Kirk. It doesn't suit you."

"I prefer to call it 'realism,'" he tells her. "As far as I'm aware, it doesn't usually take Boudin's department the best part of a month to determine the source of a sub-space distress call. I'm certain it never has before."

"That's not fair, Jim," says Lori. The smile has disappeared, replaced by the cool steel of command. "You know it's not. That signal is poorly aimed — if it's aimed at us at all — and it's erratic. I'm still not prepared to put my hand on my heart and say it definitely didn't come from a natural source. There's no reason to think it's a distress call."

"There's an excellent reason to think that it is," says Kirk coldly.

"And that," she says, "is why they're keeping you out of the loop for now. Jesus, Jim — you play a better game than this."

"If this were anybody else," says Kirk, "we'd have scrambled the nearest light cruiser to the edge of the system by now."

"Maybe. Maybe not. They've agreed to send out a couple of sensor probes, see what they report back. Whatever you might think, Jim, nobody in the Admiralty wants Starfleet to stick our heads in the sand right now. We've just got to make damn sure we know what we're doing before we do it, that's all."

"Fine," he says. "My vacation can wait a couple of weeks. I haven't made any definite…"

But Lori is already rolling her eyes before he's finished speaking. "Jim, we're months away from anything on this," she says. "Maybe it's something; maybe it's nothing, but whatever — it's barely a blip on the radar screen right now. I didn't tell you so you could rush off to fight the good fight — I told you because I thought you should know. Please don't make me regret that."

Kirk looks up sharply. "My leave plans are my concern," he says.

"Sure," says Lori evenly, though her eyes flash fire. "Until someone wants to know why Admiral Kirk is still sitting at his desk in San Francisco instead of sipping Campari Sodas in the Piazza San Marco, and why he's asking a bunch of questions about something he's not supposed to know about yet. Then it kind of becomes my concern too, don't you think?" Her gaze is steady, relentless, defying him to look away. "Right now this is nothing. And I wouldn't have said anything to you if I didn't think I could count on you to be discreet."

He meets her stare and holds it, and there's a long moment where the silence could go either way. But she's right. She's right, and he knows she is, even if the knowledge does nothing to mitigate the frustration firing in his chest. Kirk purses his lips, turns back to his blank terminal screen.

"I am always discreet," he tells her.

Lori lets her gaze linger a moment longer, but it's thawing around the edges now. "I know you are," she says quietly. A beat, and then she sighs, turns her head towards the floor. "Look, Jim, I know what this means to you," she says. "I do. But you need to let it go right now. It's not the next big thing that's going to come beating at our doors — it's not even in the queue. We've got a protectorate on the edge of a brand new civil war, we've got a possible Romulan incursion on the edges of a major trade route, we've got negotiations falling apart on at least three and possibly five different planets, and we've got the New Humans raising hell every time we so much as put a foot out of place. And those are just the ones we can see coming right now."

"Yes," says Kirk. "I get the same memos as you."

Lori glances up, half-smiles. "Not all of them," she says.

"Oh?" An eyebrow quirks. "Is there something I should know?"

But he knows her better than that and she knows it. The smile widens, turns into a grin.

"Plenty," she says. "But nothing that won't keep until you're done taking holos of the Sistine Chapel."

Despite himself, Kirk finds an answering smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "I told you," he says, "I haven't decided on the destination yet."

"Oh, come on," says Lori. "That's not what my network of spies are saying."

"Then perhaps," says Kirk, "you need to find some new spies."

Lori shrugs, but her eyes are laughing. "Italy, Luna, Ganymede — wherever, Jim," she says. "Just go. Get out of here. Take some deep breaths, go for walks, eat food that didn't come out of a computer. You look like you haven't seen direct sunlight since last Fall."

He's not sure how Luna or Ganymede is supposed to help with that, but he lets it go. "I've seen sunlight," he says.

"It doesn't count," says Lori, "if there's an office window in the way." She drains her mug, sets it on the table. "And don't give me that I spent five years on a starship in deep space routine either," she adds before Kirk can open his mouth to protest. "I've read your logs, Mister. You made planetfall more often than you leave this building."

Kirk gives up. "I'd thought of Africa," he says, standing with her as she gets to her feet. "The north coast, perhaps. Some of the old Roman territories."

Lori tilts her head, considering. "You've been reading Virgil again."

"Amongst others."

"There are worse tour guides, I guess. I once followed Confucius around China."

He knows. It's one of the things they learned about each other, once upon a time, but Kirk's not sure he can remember all the stories he's ever shared with her, either, and so he's not about to let her know that it's a tale she's already told. Their past remains contested ground.

So, instead, he says, carefully neutral, "You'll keep me updated?"

"Sure," says Lori, and her easy, even tone tells him that she hasn't caught the note of caution in his. "I'd tell you to keep your communicator on, but I know you better than that. If I hear anything you need to know, you'll hear it too."

That's a pretty heavy qualification, but it's not unexpected. Kirk decides to let it slide. "Thank you," he says, and, if the sentiment is somewhat equivocal, he knows she'll understand.

The door glides open onto the muted buzz of the corridor beyond: the businesslike bustle of Fleet Ops central command in the calm between crises. On the threshold, Lori closes her hand in a brief grip around his lower arm, their standard post-marital gesture of leave-taking, and Kirk feels the skin beneath her fingers react as it always does: a brief frisson of energy layered in a residual attraction that has never quite left, and soft, unnamable regret. He leans against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest, as she steps out into the hallway beyond, but, just as she's about to move out into the tides and currents of Fleet HQ, she hesitates, turns back over one shoulder with a flash of her golden smile.

"Hey, Jim," she says, and her eyes are soft, warm; a look he remembers from better days. "Wherever you end up — make it count, okay?"

Kirk's not sure what that means, but she's gone before he can ask her. And, besides, he thinks, as he steps back into the room, settles into his chair, reopens the communiqué he was reading when she arrived, he likes the sound of it regardless. Maybe there's something, maybe there's nothing. But he's going to be ready for it if it comes.

-o-o-o-

It does not get cold in the temple during the long hours of silent meditation, but in the evening, as the sun drops low on the horizon, the shadows suck the heat from the day in a moment that the acolytes call i'karil, the tipping point between desert sun and desert darkness. They do not talk — at least not to each other — but Spock hears their thoughts in the meld as he prepares to take his leave: the soft brush of envy, the hope, and the background hum of anxiety that wonders if hope is illogical, and what its presence within them might mean for their progress. His robe is stitched and hanging in T'Kel's private quarters; his hair hangs loose at his neck in the manner of the ancients; his tunic is light enough to endure the desert heat, his cloak sturdy enough to shelter him from the desert night. A waterskin hangs from his belt, and his mind is clear. It is time.

T'Kel is waiting for him at the sanctuary gates, a black shadow against the gold and amber blaze of the setting sun. Spock can feel the eyes of the acolytes follow him as he paces the final feet to where she stands and drops to his knees in front of her.

"Spock," she says, and her soft voice echoes against the silence of the plateau. "Your path towards Truth is almost at an end. Are you ready to go into the desert and cast off the shackles of emotion, that you may be born again into pure logic?"

"I am," he says.

"Do you take this journey in the full knowledge of the danger that lies ahead?"

"I do."

"Will you return to this place to receive the symbol of ultimate logic, as our ancestors have returned for generations unnumbered?"

"I will," he says.

"Then go as Spock," she says, "and return as Kolinahru."

The sands stretch out before him, endless and ageless and sinking into shadow. It does not get cold in the sanctuary, but the desert night is merciless and filled with a thousand ways to die, and the sun, when it rises, can scour the skin from the scalp of a man without shade. But T'Sil returned. Storan returned, however broken. And before them were Soras and T'Sina, Venak and T'Ling, T'Faar and Sanekar. Eight acolytes have gone into the desert since Spock's arrival at Gol, and eight acolytes have found their way back to the altar, to T'Sai, to the peace beyond bondage. In ten days' time, he thinks, as he steps through the great gates and into the arid wastes that stretch to the darkening horizon, he will become the ninth. He does not yet know what manner of man will make his way back to the sanctuary when his trial is over, but he does know this: he will gladly trade whatever measure of himself that he will lose, if it means that he will finally be free.

-o-o-o-

It's early evening when the airtram touches down in the Ras al-Tin quarter, and the air is fresh with a gentle breeze that drifts down across the roofs from Lake Mariot, hidden in the hills above, and carries with it a hundred scents of the city at dusk. To the east lies the fifteenth-century citadel of Qaitbey, nestled comfortably into the eastern corner of the harbor from which, in the time of kings and legends, the lighthouse of Pharos rose like a spear into the Egyptian sky; to the west, Alexandria, or at least this small section of it, crowds onto a narrow stretch of land that was an island, then a peninsula, and finally a raised bed above the empty Mediterranean basin, where fields of wheat and corn sway in the wind and jostle for space with fallen palaces and ancient treasures.

Kirk steps onto the sidewalk, tarmac softened by the day's sun, and flips open his communicator in case it's stopped working in the seven minutes since he last checked. It flashes to life with a series of reassuring beeps, but nothing more: no messages, no missed connections, no word from the world he's left behind. He knew there wouldn't be, of course, but information, as it turns out, is habit-forming, and he feels stripped, dispossessed, adrift without it. But, in the end, he guesses, he trusts Lori to hold up her end of their agreement: he takes the damn vacation, she gets to decide if a blip on the radar screen is the sort of thing he needs to know.

He has booked a room in the old palace quarter — the Bruchion, buried beneath salt water for almost a millennium before the hydroelectric plant at Gibraltar finally drained the seabed — and the tram's navigation program tried very hard to deposit him at its doors, but Kirk insisted: he wanted the walk. He's here to see the city, and not just with his eyes: he wants to feel its heartbeat beneath his feet, to feel the hum of three thousand years of history rise through his bones, his muscles, the blood in his veins. He wants to turn his head and see the shades of men and women whose names have been carved into myth in the faces that pass him on the street; he wants to hear the echo of drums and legions and great ships on the water; he wants to smell oil lamps and incense and the smoke of a hundred burning books. He wants to feel like he's one link in a chain that stretches into infinity; like he's part of something bigger than himself.

Marrakech was beautiful, woven through with a rich, old-world charm in its hidden gardens and quiet arches that spill into great muqarna-hung alcazars of blue and white tile. Casablanca's Art Deco splendor hints at the faded romance of days gone by; Carthage was like being suspended from a great height over a deep canyon of years. Everyone he has spoken to about this trip has had a different recommendation — you must see Timbuktu, it's like stepping into the pages of Leo Africanus; the medina of Essaouira is just so peaceful and beautiful, an oasis by the sea; Lalibela is simply breathtaking, you can't afford to miss it — but it's Alexandria he has been waiting for, he thinks. A phrase from Shakespeare, never far from his mind as the tram closed in on the city of the Ptolemies, drifts through his head as he walks: Egypt, thou knew'st too well, My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings, And thou shouldst tow me after. Something about this place speaks to his soul.

These streets were designed by Alexander the Great and walked by Cleopatra and Caesar and Antony. In the old palace harbor, the greatest library then known to mankind caught fire and burned as a brother and sister struggled for supremacy. In the barren desert to the east, Augustus met and ended a legend, and in the bay before him, inside a splendid monument long-destroyed and reconstructed now in holographic light, a queen in despair put an asp to her breast and waited for the long sleep to claim her.

Hers was a love that spanned an empire, two worlds united by a connection that time and war and death could not sever. Apart, they were diminished; together, they were greater than the sum of themselves. Little wonder it has moved poets and playwrights to literary ecstasies for the two thousand years that have passed since they were laid together in a tomb now lost to the sea; it describes everything that is best about the Human spirit, everything that makes him proud of who he is.

And Kirk looks up into the darkening skies above, where a pale white star, nestled into a winding constellation that was named in this very city, is just beginning to peek through the gathering dusk.

END OF PART III