Veridian III, 2371
He had not thought about Idaho in years, and now he could not stop.
It was the smell of it, mostly. A house in the mountains in the morning in the fall: wood smoke, coffee, something frying. And outside, past the window, three horses standing in the mist doing absolutely nothing with tremendous dignity. And her voice, from the other room, saying something about the fence.
Antonia.
* *
James Kirk stood in a kitchen in Idaho with a coffee cup in his hand and understood, with the perfect lucidity that arrives in dreams and in exactly one other place, that this was not real.
And he did not care. That was the whole of the trap, and he could see the shape of it, and he did not care. Because he had spent his entire life going forward, and had never once been allowed to stop. And here it was: a kitchen, a woman, three horses, and nothing to do.
He had come here from a starship. There had been a ribbon of light. And this was where he had gone.
This is where I went, he thought. Out of everything. Out of eighty years and a thousand worlds and four hundred and thirty people whose names I knew. This is what was in me. A house. And her.
He looked at his hands around the cup. They were not old. There were no scars across the knuckles. No burn the size of a coin near the base of the thumb, no finger set slightly wrong from a break that nobody ever set properly.
They were a captain's hands.
"Jim?" she called. "Are you coming?"
"In a minute."
*
And then he stopped.
Because something had happened. And he did not know what it was, and it had happened somewhere at the very back of his skull, in a place he could not reach and had never been able to reach and had never in his life known was there.
He turned around.
There was nobody in the doorway. There was nobody in the hall, or on the stairs, or in the yard beyond the window with the horses in it. The house was warm and the coffee was hot and there was no one there and there had never been anyone there.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen with his cup in his hand.
Somebody said my name.
But nobody had.
*
The Nexus is a kind and thorough place. It builds a paradise out of what it finds in a person, and it does not stint, and it does not lie about the material. When it reached into James Kirk for the thing he wanted more than anything, it found a great deal. It found a ship. It found a brother, and a nephew, and a green hill in Iowa. It found a woman named Antonia, and horses, and the smell of a fall morning, and it built them, faithfully, and they were enough, and he loved them, and he would have stayed until the stars burned out.
And it found, at the very bottom, in the place the man himself could not reach, a shape it could not build. Not a face. Not a name. There was no face, and there was no name, because there was no memory. There was only the print of one, the socket where a life had been fitted and then lifted out clean, forty years wide.
There was a room in that house he never went into.
There was a place at the table the Nexus laid, and did not know why.
There was a woman-shaped expectation in every doorway, and a weight his right hand kept reaching for and not finding, and a feeling, once or twice a day, that somebody who ought to be standing beside him was not.
And he could not name it. And it did not hurt, exactly. It was not grief. It was the impression of grief with the grief lifted out of it, an ache with no wound under it, and he learned, over what passed for time in that place, to stop turning around when it came.
* *
There was a kitchen in Idaho. There was Antonia. And she was real to him in every way a thing can be real to a man, and he loved her, and it was enough.
James Kirk stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his hand on the frame and looked back, once, at the empty hall.
Then he went out to find her, in the yard, by the fence, in the cold bright morning.
And he never knew.
THE END