Spock was dead.

The company of the Enterprise gathered together on the recreation deck to remember their friend.

Dr. Leonard McCoy, ship's surgeon, moved half a pace into the circle. As he raised his glass in a final toast, he glanced at each of his compatriots in turn.

Admiral James Kirk and Dr. Carol Marcus stood on either side of Carol's grown son, David Marcus. David was Jim's son, as well, unknown until now, but now acknowledged.

Commander Uhura, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Commander Pavel Chekov, and Hikaru Sulu, recently promoted to captain, had clustered together along one arc of the circle. Every member of the ship's company showed the strain of the harrowing past few days, except Lieutenant Saavik. Her Vulcan training required her to be imperturbable, and so she appeared. If her Romulan upbringing gave her the capacity to feel grief or loss or anger at the death of Spock, her teacher. McCoy could see no shadow of the emotions.

McCoy had known the rest of the ship's company, the trainees, only a short time, not even long enough to learn their names. He knew for sure only that they were terribly young.

"To Spock," McCoy said. "He gave his life for ours."

"To Spock," they replied in unison, except for Jim, who brought his attention back to the ship from some other time, some other place, a thousand light-years distant.

A moment after the others had spoken, he said, "To Spock."

Everyone else drank. McCoy put his glass to his lips. The pungent odor of Kentucky bourbon rose around his face. He grimaced. The liquor was raw and new straight out of the ship's synthesizer. He had nothing better. The Enterprise's mission had been an emergency, an unexpected voyage into tragedy, and Leonard McCoy had come most poorly prepared.

He lowered the drink without tasting it.

"To Peter," Montgomery Scott said. His young nephew, Cadet Peter Preston, had also died in the battle that took Spock's life. Scott made as if to say more, could not get out the words, and instead drained his glass in one gulp. Again, McCoy could not bring himself to choke down any liquor.

When all the glasses had been refilled, David Marcus stepped forward.

"To our friends on Spacelab," he said.

McCoy pretended to drink. He felt as if the alcohol fumes alone were making him drunk.

When no one else came forward to propose a toast, the quiet circle dissolved into small groups. Almost everyone had begun to feel the effects of the liquor, but the drinking was a futile effort to numb their grief.

Whose stupid idea was it to have a wake, anyway? McCoy wondered. Who thought this would help? And then he remembered, Oh, right, it was me and Scott.

He orbited the serving table. It gleamed with an array of bottles. He picked one up, paying little attention to what it was, and filled another glass. McCoy and Scott had spent all day preparing for the wake. The synthesizer had tried to keep up with their programming, but it was badly overloaded. Ethyl alcohol was a simple enough chemical, but the congeners any decent liquor required were foreign to the ship's data banks. Everything smelled the same: strong and rough.

Montgomery Scott beetled toward McCoy, stopped, and gazed blankly at the table full of half-emptied bottles. McCoy picked one at random and handed it to the ship's chief engineer.

"That's scotch," he said. "Or anyway, close enough."

Scott's eyes were glazed with exhaustion and grief.

"I recall a time, when the lad was nobbut a bairn, that he..." Scott stopped, unable to continue the story. "I recall a time when Mr. Spock..." He stopped again and drank straight from the bottle, choking on the first gulp, but swallowing and swallowing again. Obsession and compulsion drove him. He and McCoy had planned the wake and insisted on holding it, though it was foreign to the traditions of most of the people on board and quite alien to the traditions of one of its subjects.

"This isna helping, doctor," Scotty said. "I canna bear it any longer."

McCoy climbed onto a chair. Looking down, he hesitated. The deck lay ridiculously far away and at a strange angle, as if the artificial gravity had gone on the blink. McCoy steadied himself and stepped up on the table, placing his feet carefully between bottles bright with amber. Then he remembered an alien liquor called "amber" by Earth people. He had not ordered it from the synthesizer because it required the inclusion of an alien insect to bring out its fullest flavor, like wormwood in absinthe. McCoy felt vaguely sick.

His foot brushed one of the bottles -- quite gently, he thought -- and the bottle crashed onto its side. It spun around and its contents gurgled out, spilling across the table, splashing on the floor. McCoy ignored it.

"This is a wake, not a funeral!" he said, then stopped, confused. Somehow that sounded wrong. He started again. "We're here to celebrate the lives of our friends -- not to mourn their deaths!" Everyone was looking at him. That bothered him until he thought, Why did you get up on the table, if you didn't want everyone to look at you?

"Grief," McCoy said slowly, "is not logical."

"Bones," Jim Kirk said from below and slightly behind him, "come down from there."

Even in his odd mental state, McCoy could hear the edge in Kirk's voice. Twenty years of friendship, and Kirk was still perfectly capable of pulling rank. McCoy turned and staggered. Jim grabbed his forearm and tightened his grip more than necessary.

"Whatever possessed you to say such a thing?" Kirk said angrily. Even the anger was insufficient to hide the pain.

"Don't know what you mean," McCoy said. Permitting Admiral Kirk to help him, he stepped down from the table with careful dignity.

David Marcus had inherited his mother's tolerance for alcohol. He had drunk several shots of some concoction as powerful and as tasteless as everclear. Despite a certain remoteness to his perceptions, he felt desperately sober. His hands remained rock-steady, and his step was sure.

McCoy and Scott had insisted, cajoled, ordered, and bullied until nearly the whole ship's company congregated in the recreation hall for this ridiculous wake. Alone or in pairs, people stood scattered throughout the enormous chamber. Across the room, Dr. McCoy and Admiral Kirk exchanged words. Kirk looked both angry and concerned. McCoy adopted a belligerent air.

They're both completely pickled, David thought. Fixed like microscope slides. James T. Kirk, hero of the galaxy, is drunk. My illegitimate father is drunk.

David had not yet quite come to terms with the recent revelation of his parentage.

"Dr. Marcus--"

David started. He had been so deep in thought that he had not noticed Captain Sulu's approach.

"It'd probably be easier if everybody just called me David," he said.

"David, then," Sulu said. "I understand that I owe you some thanks."

David looked at him blankly.

"For saving my life?" Sulu said, with a bit of a smile.

David blushed. He automatically glanced at Sulu's hands, which had been badly seared by the electrical shock from which David had revived him. The artificial skin covering the burns glistened slightly.

Sulu turned his hands palm-up. "This comes off in a couple of days -- there won't even be any scars."

"I almost killed you," David said.

"What?"

"It's true I did resuscitation on you. It's also true that I did it wrong. I'd never done it before. I'm not a medical doctor, I'm only a biochemist."

"Nevertheless, I'm alive because of what you did. Whether you erred or not, you kept me from death or brain damage."

"I still screwed up." Like I may have screwed up everything I've done for the last two years, David thought.

"It might not matter to you," Sulu said. "But it makes some difference to me." He turned away.

David blushed again, realizing how churlish and self-centered he had sounded. "Captain... uh..." He had no idea how to apologize.

Sulu stopped and faced David again.

"David," he said, carefully and kindly, "I want to give you some advice. When we get back to Earth, you and your mother are going to be the center of some very concentrated attention. Some of it will be critical, some of it will be flattering. At first you'll think the abuse is the hardest thing to take. But after a while, you'll see that handling compliments gracefully is an order of magnitude more difficult." He paused.

David looked at the floor, then raised his head and met Sulu's gaze.

"But I need to learn to do it?" David asked.

"Yes," Sulu said. "You do."

"I'm sorry," David said. "I really am glad you're okay. I didn't mean to sound indifferent. After they took you to sick bay I realized I'd done the procedure wrong. I didn't know if you'd make it."

"Dr. Chapel assures me that I'll make it."

David noticed that Sulu avoided mentioning McCoy, but thought better of saying so. He had stuck his foot in his mouth far enough for one day.

"I'm glad I could do something," David said.

Sulu nodded and walked away. David had not noticed if Sulu drank during the toasts, but the young captain appeared to be completely sober.

He might be the only sober person on the ship right now, David thought.

But then David saw Lieutenant Saavik, all alone, watching the party without expression. He watched her, in turn, for several minutes. Back on Regulus I, she had told him that Spock was the most important influence in her life. He had rescued her from the short, brutal life that a halfbreed child on an abandoned Romulan colony world could look forward to. Spock had overseen her education. He had nominated her to a place in the Starfleet Academy. He was, David supposed, the nearest thing she had to a family. That was a delicate subject. She seldom discussed how the cross that produced her must have come about.

David walked up quietly behind her.

"Hello, David," she said, without turning, as he opened his mouth to speak.

"Hi," he said, trying to pretend she had not startled him with her preternatural senses. "Can I get you a drink?"

"No. I never drink alcohol."

"Why not?"

"It has an unfortunate effect on me."

"But that's the whole point. It would help you loosen up. It would help you forget."

"Forget what?"

"Grief. Sadness. Mr. Spock's death."

"I am a Vulcan. I experience neither grief nor sadness."

"You're not all Vulcan."

She ignored the comment. "In order to forget Mr. Spock's death, David, I would have to forget Mr. Spock. That, I cannot do. I do not wish to. Memories of him are all around me. At times it is as if he--" She stopped. "I will not forget him," she said.

"I didn't mean you should try. I just meant that a drink might make you feel better."

"As I explained, its effects on me are not salutary."

"What happens?"

"You do not want to know."

"Sure I do. I'm a scientist, remember? Always on the lookout for something to investigate."

She looked him in the eye and said, straight-faced, "It causes me to regress. It permits the Romulan elements of my character to predominate."

David grinned. "Oh, yeah? Sounds interesting to me."

"You would not like it."

"Never know until you try."

"Have you ever met a Romulan?"

"Nope."

"You are," she said drily, "quite fortunate."

Carol Marcus felt very much alone at Mr. Spock's wake. She sat on the arm of a couch, concealed by the subdued light and shadows of a corner of the room. She felt grateful for the translucent wall that alcohol put between her and the other people, between her and her own emotions. She knew that the purpose of a wake was to release emotions, but she held her grief in tight check. If she loosed it, she was afraid she would go mad.

The pitiful gathering insulted the memory of her friends more than exalting it. Perhaps Mr. Scott and Dr. McCoy believed it adequate for Captain Spock and Mr. Scott's young nephew. But the mourning of a few veteran Starfleet members and a surreptitiously drunken class of cadets, barely more than children, gave Carol no comfort for the loss of her friends on the Spacelab team. She kept expecting to hear Del March's cheerful profanity, or Zinaida Chitirih-Ra-Payjh's soft and musical laugh. She expected Jedda Adzhin-Dall to stride past, cloaked in the glow of a Deltan's unavoidable sexual attraction. And she expected at every moment to hear Vance Madison's low, beautiful voice, or to glance across the room and meet his gaze, or to reach out and touch his gentle hand.

None of those things would ever happen again. Her collaborators, her friends, were dead, murdered in vengeance for someone else's error.

Jim Kirk managed to get McCoy down from the table and away from the center of attention before the doctor had made too much of a fuss, and, Kirk hoped, without making a fool of either of them.

"I think you've drunk too much, Bones," he said.

"Me?" McCoy said. "I haven't had nearly enough."

Kirk tried to restrain his anger at McCoy's juvenile behavior. "Why don't you get some sleep? You'll feel better in the morning."

"I'll feel awful in the morning, Jim-boy. And the morning after that, and--"

"You'll feel worse if you have to deal with a hangover and the results of a big mouth."

McCoy frowned at him blearily, obviously not understanding. Kirk felt a twinge of unease. McCoy generally made sense, even when he had had a few too many. In fact, his usual reaction to tipsiness was to become more direct and pithier. Kirk glanced around, seeking Chris Chapel. He hoped that between them they might get McCoy either sobered up or asleep. Chapel was nowhere to be seen. He could hardly blame her for avoiding the wake. He wished he were somewhere else himself. He had come only because McCoy insisted. Jim supposed Chris had decided that the hard time McCoy and Scotty would give her for absenting herself would be less unpleasant than attending. Jim suspected she was right.

"Come on, Bones," he said. Back in sick bay, the doctor might be persuaded to prescribe himself a hangover remedy and go to bed.

"Not going anywhere," McCoy said. He shrugged his arm from Kirk's grasp. "Going over there." He walked slowly and carefully to an armchair and settled into it as if he planned to remain till dawn. Getting him to his cabin now would create a major scene. On the other hand, McCoy no longer looked in the mood to make proclamations. Jim sighed and left him where he was.

Jim wandered over to Carol. She was alone, surrounded by shadows. They had barely had time to talk since meeting again. Jim was not altogether sure she wanted to talk to him. He did want to talk to her, though, about her life since they last had seen each other, twenty years ago. But mostly he wanted to talk to her about David. Jim was getting used to the idea of having a grown son. He was beginning to like the idea of coming to know the young man.

"Hi, Carol," he said.

"Jim."

Her voice was calm and controlled. He remembered that she had always been able to drink everybody under the table and never even show it.

"I was thinking about Spacelab," she said. "And the people I left behind. Especially--"

"You did fantastic work there, you and David."

"It wasn't just us, it was the whole team. I never worked with such an incredible group before. We got intoxicated on each other's ideas. I could guide it, but Vance was the catalyst. He was extraordinary--"

"Spock spoke highly of them all," Jim said. It surprised him, to be able to say his friend's name so easily.

"Vance was the only one who could keep his partner from going off the deep end. He had a sort of inner stillness and calm that--"

"They were the ones who designed computer games on the side? A couple of the cadets were talking about them."

"... that affected us all."

"David and our Lieutenant Saavik seem to be hitting it off pretty well," Jim said. David and Saavik stood together on the other side of the recreation hall, talking quietly.

"I suppose so," Carol said without expression.

"She has a lot of promise -- Spock had great confidence in her."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry I had to meet David -- and you and I had to meet again -- in such unhappy circumstances," he said.

The look in her eyes was cold and bitter and full of pain.

"That's one way to put it," she said.

"Carol--"

"I'm going to bed," she said abruptly. She stood up and strode out of the recreation room.

Jim followed her. "I'll walk you to your cabin," he said. He took her silence for acquiescence.

With some curiosity, Saavik watched Admiral Kirk and Dr. Marcus leave together. Of course she knew that they had been intimate many years before. She wondered if they intended to resume their relationship. She had observed the customs of younger humans, students, while she was in the Academy, however, and she now noted the absence of any indication of strong attraction between Marcus and Kirk. Perhaps older humans observed different customs, or perhaps these two individuals were simply shy. Mr. Spock had told her that she must learn to understand human beings. As a project for her continuing education in their comprehension, she resolved to study the admiral and the doctor closely and see what transpired.

After Dr. Marcus and the admiral left the recreation hall, Saavik returned her attention to the gathering as a whole. She wondered if there were something in particular she was supposed to do. Keeping her own customs after the deaths of Mr. Spock and Peter Preston, she had watched over their bodies the night before Mr. Spock's funeral. Only yesterday morning she stood with the rest of the ship's company and sent his coffin accelerating toward the Genesis planet. She wished she could have sent young Peter's body into space, too. He had loved the stars, and Saavik believed it would have pleased him to become star-stuff. But his body was the responsibility of Chief Engineer Scott, who had decreed he must be taken back to Earth and buried in the family plot.

Everyone assumed Captain Spock's casket would burn up in the outer atmosphere of the Genesis world. So Admiral Kirk had intended. But Saavik had disobeyed his order. Instead, she programmed a course that intersected the last fading resonance of the Genesis effect. When the coffin encountered the edge of the wave, matter had exploded into energy. Within the wave, the energy that had been Spock's body coalesced into sub-quarkian particles, thence, in almost unmeasurable fractions of a second, to normal atomic matter. He was now a part of that distant world. He was gone. She would never see him again.

She wondered how long she would be affected by the persistent, illogical certainty that he remained nearby.

"David," she said suddenly, "what is the purpose of this gathering?"

David hesitated, wondering if he understood it well enough to explain it to anyone else. "It's a tradition," he said. "It's like Dr. McCoy said a while ago, it's to celebrate the lives of people who have died."

"Would it not make more sense to celebrate while a person is still living?"

"How would you know when to have the celebration?"

"You would have it whenever you liked. Then no death would be necessary. The person being celebrated could attend the party, and no one would have to feel sad."

David wondered if she were pulling his leg. He decided that was an unworthy suspicion. Besides, he could see her point.

"The thing is," he said, "the funeral yesterday, and the wake today... they aren't really for the people who died."

"I do not understand."

"They're for the people who are left behind. People -- humans, I mean -- need to express their feelings. Otherwise we bottle them up inside and they make us sick."

This sounded like the purest hocus-pocus to Saavik, who had spent half her life learning to control her emotions.

"You mean," she said, "this procedure is meant to make people feel better?"

"That's right."

"Then why does everyone look so unhappy?"

David could not help it. He laughed.

The door to Carol's cabin sensed her and slid open. She stopped. Jim stopped. Carol said nothing. Jim tried to decide on exactly the right words.

"Carol--"

"Good night, Jim."

"But--"

"Leave me alone!" she said. The evenness of her voice dissolved in anger.

"I thought..."

"What? That you could come along after twenty years and pick up again right where you left off?"

"I was thinking more in terms of 'we.' "

"Oh, that's cute -- there never was any 'we!' "

"There's David."

"Do you think you're so great in bed that no woman would ever want another man after you? Do you think I've spent all these years just waiting for you to come back?"

"No, of course not. But--" He stopped. That she might be involved with someone else simply had not occurred to him, and he was embarrassed to admit it. "Of course I didn't mean that," he said. "But we were good together, once, and we're both alone--"

"Alone!" Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

"Carol, I don't understand."

"Vance Madison and I were lovers!"

"I didn't realize," he said lamely.

"You would have, if you'd listened. I've been trying to talk about him. I just wanted to talk about him to somebody. Even to you. I want people to remember what he was like. He deserves to be remembered. I dream about him -- I dream about the way he died--"

Jim took a step backward, retreating from the fury and accusation in her voice. His old enemy, Khan Singh, had murdered all the members of the Genesis team except Carol and David. The people he captured refused to give him the information he demanded, so he killed them. He opened a vein in Madison's throat and let him slowly bleed to death.

Carol flung herself into her cabin. The door slid shut behind her, cutting Jim Kirk off, all alone, in the passageway outside.

David finally stopped laughing. He wiped his eyes. Saavik hoped he would explain to her what he found so funny.

She watched him intently. He looked up. Their gazes met.

He glanced quickly away, then back again.

David's eyes were a clear, intense blue.

She reached toward him, realized what she was doing, and froze. David touched her before she could draw away.

"What is it?" he said. He wrapped his fingers around her hand in an easy grip.

He could not hold her hand without her acquiescence, for she could crush his bones with a single clenching of her fist. This she had no intention of doing.

"For many years," Saavik said, "I have tried to be Vulcan."

"I know."

David was one of the few people with whom she had ever discussed her background. Though she had learned to control her strongest emotions most of the time, she never pretended to herself that they were nonexistent.

"But I am not all Vulcan, and I will never be," she said, "any more than Mr. Spock. He said to me..." She paused, uncertain how David would react. "He said I was unique, and that I must find my own path."

"Good advice for anybody," David said.

Saavik drew her hand from David's grasp and picked up his drink. She barely tasted it. The raw, unaged alcohol slid fiery across her tongue, and the potent fumes seemed to go straight to her brain. She put down the glass. David watched her curiously.

"David," she said hesitantly, "I am under the impression that you have positive feelings toward me. Is that true?"

"It's very true," he said.

"Will you help me find my path?"

"If I can."

"Will you come to my cabin with me?"

"Yes," he said. "I will."

"Now?"

In reply, he put his hand in hers again, and they walked together from the recreation hall.

Jim Kirk strode down the corridor, upset, angry, embarrassed.

He nearly ran into his son and Lieutenant Saavik.

"Oh -- Hi, kids." He collected himself quickly. Long years of experience had made him an expert at hiding distress from subordinates.

"Uh... hi," David said. Saavik said nothing; she simply gazed at him with her cool imperturbability.

"Got to be too much for you in there?" Kirk said, nodding toward the rec hall behind them. "I never should have let McCoy and Scott have their way about it."

They looked at him without replying. After a long hesitation, Saavik finally spoke. "Indeed," she said, "it is not a ceremony Captain Spock would have approved. It is neither logical nor rational."

Kirk flinched at the echoes of Spock's voice in Saavik's words. He had known Spock longer than she had, but she had spent more time working with the Vulcan in the past few years, when Kirk was tied to a desk by an unbreakable chain of paperwork.

"Perhaps you're right," he said. "But funerals and wakes aren't for the person who is dead, they're for the people left behind."

"It is interesting," Saavik said, "that David said precisely the same thing. I fail, however, to grasp this explanation."

"It isn't easily explained," Kirk said. "And I can understand why you wouldn't think of Spock in relation to a gathering where everybody was doing their best to get drunk. I was going to go to the observation deck, instead. Have either of you been up there? David, surely you haven't had a chance to see it. Would you like to come along?"

"I am familiar with the observation deck," Saavik said.

"I'd sure like to see it," David said, "any other time. But Lieutenant Saavik wanted to check some readings on the bridge."

Kirk glanced from David, to Saavik, and back. Saavik started to say something, but stopped. A blush colored David's transparently fair complexion. Kirk realized that he had put his foot in his mouth for the second time in ten minutes. He, too, began to blush.

"I see," he said. "Important work. Carry on, then." He turned and strode quickly away.

Saavik watched him until he had passed out of sight around a corner. "Nothing needs to be checked on the bridge. David," she said.

"I had to say something," David said. "I didn't want to discuss our personal affairs with him. It isn't any of his business"

"But why did he not remind you that the computer would announce any change in the ship's status?"

"I don't know," David said, though he knew perfectly well.

"He has not commanded a starship in a long time," she said. "Perhaps he forgot."

"That must be it."

They continued down the corridor to Saavik's cabin. Inside, David blinked, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the low light. The room held no decorations, only the severe furnishings standard issue in Starfleet, but the warm and very dry air carried a hot, resiny scent, like the sunbaked pitch of pine trees at high noon in summer.

Saavik stopped with her back to David.

"Saavik," David said, "I just want you to know -- maybe we don't need to worry, but where I was raised it's good manners to tell you -- I passed all my exams in biocontrol."

"I, too," she said softly. "I always regarded learning to regulate the reproductive ability merely as an interesting exercise. Until now." Her voice trailed off.

David realized that she was trembling. He put his hands gently on her shoulders.

"I have traveled far, and I have seen much," Saavik said. "I have studied.... But study and action are very different."

"I know," David said. "It's all right, it will be all right."

Saavik reached up, and her hair fell free around her shoulders. It was thick and soft and dark, and it smelled of evergreens.