U.S.S. Enterprise, 2285
Leonard McCoy was standing four feet behind the command chair, with another man's mind folded up inside his skull like a letter in a coat pocket, when James Kirk found out that his son was dead.
He had been carrying Spock for eleven days by then. He was not well. Part of those two weeks had been spent in a locked room on Earth being observed by people who believed, on the available evidence, that he had lost his reason, and he had not been able to explain to any of them that the trouble was not that there was nobody in his head. It was that there were two.
So he was not at his best, and he heard it anyway, and he understood it before Kirk did. The transmission was thin, and Kirk was three seconds behind, and McCoy had spent forty years reading bad news off other people's faces.
The girl's voice came up out of the console. It said the boy's name. Then it said the other word.
* *
Kirk said something to the man on the screen that he never afterward apologized for.
Then he stepped back to sit down, and the chair was not where he had left it, and he missed it entirely, and went down on the step with one arm out.
Nobody moved. Then Sulu did, and Kirk waved him off without looking, and stayed where he was, on the deck, on the step, in front of his own bridge.
And Leonard McCoy stood four feet away with his hands at his sides, and did not go to him.
That was not medicine and it was not kindness. It was the only thing available, because Doctor McCoy was the sole living creature in the universe who knew that this was the second time.
*
The first time was on the twenty-first of July, 1953, ten days after the fact, in a hallway in Brooklyn, and there had been a Western Union boy on the landing and a woman on the bottom step with her hands over her face, and James Kirk had not wept.
Samuel George Kirk. Born in a thunderstorm in April of 1935. Killed on a hill with a number on it, sixteen days before it stopped, aged eighteen. He had drawn rocket ships with far too much fire coming out of the back of them and signed them in capitals, and his father had kept every one of them on the wall of a front room until the year he died.
None of that had happened. It had been read out of the world by six people and a machine, deliberately, with instruments they built themselves, and among the things that had not happened was a boy.
They had taken a son off this man.
And then they had put him back where he belonged, and he had gone on and lived his enormous corrected life. Somewhere in the middle of it a woman he had known for a year had a boy, and told him so, and asked him to stay away. He did. The boy grew up and became a scientist, and hated him for a while, and then did not, and got about four months of knowing him.
And now that one was gone too.
*
McCoy did the sum standing up, because he was a man who could not stop doing sums, and it came out the same way every time he ran it and he ran it for eight more years.
James Kirk had lost two sons. Two.
He knew about one.
He was on the deck of his own bridge in front of six people, taking the full weight of it, and he was taking it once, and it had been paid twice, and the second bill had been settled in advance in a hallway in Brooklyn by a man nobody in that room had ever heard of, including him.
There was no version of this in which telling him helped. McCoy had understood that in 2267, in a science laboratory, and he understood it better now with his hands at his sides.
There was one other man who could have done this particular sum, and he was not available.
Spock had been handed the second half of it on a bench in Brooklyn in the April of 1968, unprompted, by Kirk himself, in a sentence about a boy in a photograph he had no business having. He had filed it without comment, and never raised it with anybody, and he had had no more notion than Kirk did of what it was ever going to be worth, because neither of them knew one thing about the future of that child and neither of them ever would.
He had been dead for eleven days.
So he stood there and he kept it, the way he had kept a file for eighteen years and would keep it for eight more, and he watched his friend absorb one half of a thing, and had no method of any kind for putting the other half down.
*
The thing in his head did not speak.
It never spoke. That was not what it was and McCoy had stopped expecting it to somewhere around the fourth day. It was not a passenger and it was not a voice, it was a shape, a set of arrangements, the way a room is arranged by somebody who is not in it.
But at 1140 hours on that day, standing on a bridge with a man on the deck in front of him, Leonard McCoy felt something in the arrangement move.
It was not a word. It was closer to the sensation of a hand tightening.
He never reported it. It went in no log. He mentioned it to exactly one person, in a corridor on Vulcan two weeks later, after the ceremony, and the person he mentioned it to had been dead at the time and did not remember, and looked at him for a long moment and said, "That is not possible, Doctor."
"I know it isn't."
"I have no recollection of it."
"I know you don't."
And Spock, who had been alive again for four days and was still assembling himself out of parts, said, "Nevertheless."
Which was not agreement, and was not denial, and was the closest either of them ever came to it.
*
Kirk got up off the step eventually, the way he always got up off everything, and gave an order, and the order was correct.
McCoy went back to sickbay, and sat down, and did not treat anybody for eleven minutes.
Then he opened his personal file, the one with the medical history of a man who had never existed in it, written in his own hand over two and a half years by a doctor who would not let a patient go unrecorded, and he went to the last page, and under the final entry he added one line.
It was not medicine either. He knew that while he was writing it.
Second son. 2285. He does not know it is the second. I am not going to tell him. There is nobody left to tell.*