The light let her go, and she was standing on the plain.
She was on her feet. She was in uniform, clean, unhurt. She looked down at her hands, and the palms were whole, unmarked, and for one impossible second she did not understand, because she could still feel them opening on the hot casing of a relay, could still feel the skin go. She turned them over. There was nothing there.
And there were seven of them on the plain in the daylight, in front of a ring of stone, and it was not a stolen ship's landing party and it was not a mutiny. It was a survey. Tricorders. A routine. Scott was reading the base of the ring aloud in a bored voice. McCoy was complaining about the heat. Galloway stood at the perimeter, alive, watching a horizon that had not changed in ten thousand years, and a little way off stood Ensign Brandt, the other man who had come off that plain remembering, watching the back of the captain's head with the same still face as Galloway, and keeping, like Galloway, the same silence.
And Christopher Pike was not among them. In this history he had never been the captain of this ship, and he was a long way off, being restored, gently and without his knowledge, to the whole of his own life.
And a man in a gold command tunic stood in front of the Guardian with his hands on his hips and his head tilted, the way a man stands when he has been shown something he intends to enjoy being puzzled by.
"MANY JOURNEYS TO YOUR PAST ARE POSSIBLE," said the Guardian of Forever. "LET ME BE YOUR GATEWAY."
"A time portal," said James Kirk.
He was thirty-four years old. He had brown hair and unmarked hands. He was not tired at all. He looked at the ring with open, undisguised delight, and he had never in his life heard the name Edith Keeler, and he never would.
"More precisely, Captain," said Spock, and his voice was steady, and only Uhura, eleven meters away, heard the half-second it cost him to make it so. "A mechanism through which any period of history may be observed. And, it would appear, entered."
McCoy folded his arms. "Then let's make very sure nobody does."
Kirk almost smiled. "For once, Doctor, we agree." He raised his communicator. "We'll leave this one for a full science team. Uhura, mark it with a buoy and have them beam us up. I want a report to Starfleet before we break orbit."
Nyota Uhura stood on the plain of a dead world with two whole hands, and a wooden bird on a shelf four hundred years away, and a man's voice in her ears that she had spent two years trying to keep and had lost and had just, in a corridor she was the only person alive who remembered, heard again.
"Aye, sir," she said.
Her voice did not shake. She had promised herself, in an observation lounge, that it would not, and it did not.
* *
And James Kirk lived.
That is the whole of it, and it needs to be said plainly, because everything the five of them had spent comes down to this one flat fact: he lived, and he did not know, and he never would.
He did not know that he had knelt in a road in 1930 with a woman in his arms. He did not know that he had peeled two thousand pounds of potatoes, or carried a coffin that weighed nothing, or burned a letter at four in the morning, or read four hundred names a week for four years because somebody should. He did not know he had held a woman back from the whole purpose of her life for forty years and been loved for it. He did not know there had ever been a woman named Edith Keeler, or a boy named Sam, who was born in a thunderstorm and buried at seventeen and left no one behind him.
None of it was in him. It had gone where the layer went.
He stood on the plain in the sunlight and grinned at a rock that was older than the Earth, and thought about the next thing, and was, by every measure any instrument could take, a happy man.
And behind him, four officers and two men of security looked at the back of his head, and remembered everything, and said nothing at all.
* *
The transporter room took them, and set them down, and it smelled the way it had always smelled, of ozone and floor polish. Kirk stepped off the pad already talking, something about the survey log, something about a course for Sulu, easy and unhurried, and went out toward the bridge without looking back.
The rest of the landing party moved off the pads so the remaining security team could be materialized; it was not usual to move seven people in a single transport. And as Lieutenant Galloway, the last of the team, took shape on the pad, McCoy turned to watch the door close behind the captain.
Then he turned to Spock.
"Where do we go from here?"
Spock did not answer at once.
"Nowhere, Doctor," he said. "He should never know."
And that was the whole of the arrangement, and they kept it, all six of them, for the rest of their lives.