The Entropy Effect Read online

  Sulu could not tell from the far-away, introspective look on Kirk’s face how the captain would react now. Perhaps he was only trying to keep anger in check.

  “Mr. Sulu,” he said, “what happens if she doesn’t accept your application, or if Starfleet has already assigned new people?”

  “Captain Kirk . .. this is something I’ve got to try to do, whether it’s Captain Hunter’s squadron or some other.”

  For the first time since Sulu had come in, Kirk smiled. Sulu had never been quite so grateful to see that expression on anyone in his life.

  “I don’t know how Hunter will respond to your application, either, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said. “But if she refuses it she’ll be a long time looking for anyone half as good.”

  The process went faster than Sulu ever imagined possible. He was granted an immediate temporary transfer to Aerfen . At first he wondered if perhaps he had been accepted out of desperation, because the fighter was so short-handed. It was possible that Hunter did not really want him on her ship. But Kirk assured him, and Captain Hunter reassured him by her manner, than he was accepted on his merits both past and potential, and that the transfer would be permanent as soon as the red tape threaded its convoluted way through the bureaucratic machinery. So at six hundred hours, barely five hours after he had spoken to Kirk, he stood in the middle of his emptied room, a full duffel bag and a small box of miscellaneous stuff at his feet, and his antique sabre in his hands.

  Carrying it, he left his cabin, walked quietly down the corridor, and knocked softly on Mandala’s door. The answer was almost instantaneous.

  “Come in!”

  The lock clicked free; he went into the darkened cabin.

  “What’s the matter?” Mandala had her uniform shirt half over her head already, assuming an emergency for which she would be needed.

  “It’s all right,” Hikaru said. “It’s just me.”

  She looked out at him from the tangle of her shirt. It covered the lower half of her face like a mask, and

  pulled loose strands of her hair across her forehead.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “You don’t look like you’ve come to get me to help repel an invasion.” She pulled her shirt off again, tossed it on a chair with her pants, and waved the light to the next brightest setting. The gold highlights in her red hair gleamed. When she was on duty she never wore her hair down like this, in a mass that curled around her face and shoulders and all the way to the small of her back. In fact Hikaru supposed he was one of the few people on board who had ever seen it down.

  Mandala’s smile faded. “On the other hand you look like something’s wrong. What is it, Hikaru? Sit down.”

  He sat on the edge of her bunk. She drew up her knees, still under the blanket, and wrapped her arms around them.

  “Come on,” she said gently. “What’s the matter?”

  “I did it,” he said. “I applied for a transfer to Hunter’s squadron.”

  “She accepted you!” Mandala said with delight.

  He nodded.

  “You ought to be turning cartwheels,” she said. “It’s just perfect for you.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I made a mistake. I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Hikaru, the Enterprise is a great assignment, but you haven’t been wrong in thinking you need wider experience.”

  “I wasn’t thinking professionally. I was thinking personally.”

  She glanced away, then back, looked straight into his eyes, and took his hand.

  “You see what I meant,” she said. “About getting too attached to anybody.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how you feel. I didn’t even mean to talk about that. I just came to say goodbye, and to give you my sabre. It takes me over the mass allowance.”

  Mandala accepted the sabre with the dignity due to it: it was an old sword, and a finely-made one.

  “Thank you,” she said. She bent her head down, resting her face against her knees, and he thought she was crying.

  “Mandala, hey, I’m sorry—”

  Shaking her head violently without looking up, she grabbed his wrist to stop the apology. When she did raise her head, he saw that she was laughing so hard she was in tears.

  “No,” she said. “ I’m sorry. It’s beautiful, I’m not laughing at the sabre, only I am, sort of, if I were quick enough on my feet I’d give you—” She glanced around. “Ha, there!” She pulled the heavy ring off the middle finger of her right hand. It was a naturally-formed circle of a stone like ruby, very much the color

  of her hair, even to the same golden highlights, at the facets. Except when she was practicing judo, she always wore it. She slipped it on his little finger.

  In shooting for her promotion to lieutenant commander, one of the subjects Mandala studied was psychology, including its history. Smiling, she told Hikaru about another century’s theory of sex and symbols: swords and sheaths, locks and keys. When she was finished, he laughed with her at the quaint ideas of a different age.

  They looked at each other soberly.

  “Did you mean it, what you said before ...”

  “I very seldom say anything I don’t mean,” Mandala said. “ Haveyou changed your mind?”

  “I... I don’t know.”

  “It won’t make things any easier for you, but I wish you would.”

  “I’ve been falling in love with you ever since you came on board,” Hikaru said. “But I’m leaving —”

  She put her hands on his shoulders. “If you do change your mind it won’t make things easier for me, either. I love you, too, Hikaru, as much as I’ve fought it, and I don’t know if we’re going to be sorrier if we do make love—or if we don’t.”

  Mandala stroked his cheek, the corner of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. He leaned toward her and she responded, kissing him gently, her hands spread against his back.

  “You can’t imagine how often I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered. She unfastened his shirt and drew it up over his head, caressing his sides with her fingers. She watched him pull off his boots and his pants; again, she admired his compact athlete’s body. She lifted the bedclothes for him to get in beside her, and as he lay down and turned toward her she drew her hand up his thigh, to his hip, to his waist. Her fingers made slow swirling patterns on his skin, and he shivered. Hikaru kissed her face, all over, small warm kisses; he caressed her and stroked her hair and kissed the scar on her shoulder as if he wanted to take away all the pain it represented. Mandala bent over him and let her hair curl down to touch his shoulders. Cautiously at first, then playfully, then joyfully, they loved each other.

  Jim Kirk sat in the officers’ lounge, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. He felt depressed. The door slid open and Dr. McCoy beetled in.

  “Mornin’, Jim,” he said cheerfully, his southern accent strongly in evidence, as it always was when he was under the influence of several drinks, or of a hangover. Kirk could not tell which it was, and he was in no mood to put up with either.

  “What a night,” McCoy said. He got himself a mug and sat down across from Kirk. “What a night. The same for you, too? You look like I feel.”

  “Yes,” Kirk said, though he was not really listening. “It was quite a night.” He had spent most of it on the subspace communicator, trying to clear away the red tape for Sulu’s transfer, and now he was beginning to think he had made a serious mistake. Perhaps if he had not been so efficient, Mr. Sulu would have

  changed his mind.

  “I thought so,” McCoy said. “I sure hope you had as good a time as I did.”

  “As good a time—?” Kirk went back in his memory over what McCoy had been saying, and realized that since the doctor had only just come back from Aleph, he had no way of knowing about Sulu. In fact, Kirk had seen neither hide nor hair of McCoy since meeting him and his veterinarian friend in the park the day before.

  “Bones, what are you talking about?”

  “Well—I admit I’d had a few when
I ran into you yesterday, but you weren’t that subtle.”

  Kirk just stared at him.

  “Jim, boy, you really looked happy. I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so good. Now, you know I think more constancy in some matters wouldn’t hurt you one bit—”

  Kirk could not stand it when McCoy got avuncular, especially this early in the morning.

  “—so it’s a real pleasure to see you with an old friend.”

  Kirk realized what McCoy had inferred. For some reason it irritated him, though, to be fair, McCoy had no particular reason to think anything else. Besides, why should Kirk care what McCoy thought about his and Hunter’s friendship? The truth was no one’s business but their own.

  “You’ve got the wrong idea, Bones,” Kirk said.

  McCoy slid into the bantering tone by which, all too often, the two men avoided discussing anything that was really important.

  “What, Don Juan T. Kirk, Casanova of the space-ways—”

  “Shut up!”

  McCoy looked at him, startled out of joking, realizing that everything he had said so far this morning was as close to perfectly wrong as an imperfect human could devise.

  “Jim,” he said quietly, all traces of the good old boy abandoned, “I’m sorry. I knew you and she used to see a lot of each other, and I just assumed ... I didn’t mean to bring up anything painful.”

  Kirk shook his head. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even an unfair assumption, given my usual behavior.”

  “Do you want to talk about it? Or would you rather I slunk away, as best I can with my foot in my mouth?”

  “Hunter and I are friends. She’s one of the best friends I have. We used to be lovers. We aren’t anymore. She’s a member of a partnership family—”

  “Oh. Well. That explains it.” “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even begin to explain it.”

  “Jim, now I am beginning to get confused.”

  “Partnerships aren’t usually exclusive relationships. Hers certainly isn’t. There are nine people in it now, I think—nine adults, I mean. Four or five of them have careers like Hunter’s, that keep them away most of the time. But with the larger group, the kids have some stability. I met Hunter’s daughter a few years back...” At first they had not got along too well; he was not used to being around children. At least he had realized in time that his patronizing manner insulted her, and that she despised him for it. Once he started treating her as a reasoning human being, they began to work out a watchful friendship.

  “Her daughter!” McCoy said, surprised. He had not considered Hunter in any but her Starfleet officer incarnation, and he was nearly as startled as he would have been if Jim Kirk himself had started telling stories of his kiddies back home.

  “It isn’t that often that you meet someone whose father you almost had a chance to be,” Kirk said.

  McCoy took a long swallow from his coffee mug and rather wished it had something stronger in it.

  “I nearly joined Hunter’s group, Bones. After I met them the first few times, they invited me—they invited me three different times, over four years. I felt comfortable with them. I liked them all. I think ...

  I think I could have loved them all.” He stopped and did not continue for several seconds. When he did, his voice grew very quiet. “I thought I wasn’t ready for such a big step. I kept turning them down. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I wouldn’t be ready even now. Maybe I made the right decision. But most of the time I think that saying no was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

  “It’s never too late to correct a mistake.”

  “I don’t think I agree with you about that,” Kirk said. “But anyway they never asked me again after I started to wonder if I should have accepted.”

  “You could ask them.”

  Kirk shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It would be such bad manners that they’d almost have to say no.”

  “But if the partnership isn’t exclusive, and you and she are still friends—”

  “That’s what I thought, for a long while. After the first time they asked me, I thought nothing had changed. Hunter and I were so close for so long .. . But she was growing up and I was still treating everything as nothing more than play. Play is fine up to a point. Play is why the partnership isn’t exclusive. But for me and Hunter—especially after the second invitation into the partnership—it was like I was teasing her, all the time, as if I were willing to go just so far but no farther in trusting her, but expected her to trust me completely. She even told me her dream-name. Do you know what that means?”

  “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “Either did I, at the time. It’s hard to explain, but it’s something even deeper than trusting another person with your life.”

  Kirk paused again, and McCoy waited for him to continue, knowing how hard it was for Jim to speak of such personal matters.

  “We had a lot of serious misunderstandings,” Jim said. “So much so that when they offered me the invitation for the third time, I was surprised. And when I said no the third time, she was surprised. And hurt. I think she very nearly stopped trusting me at all, then. It’s probably a good thing that she got sent one direction and I got sent the other and we didn’t see each other again for a couple of years.”

  McCoy listened to a side of his friend that he seldom saw, realizing that all too often he let the clear and hearty surface obscure the depths. Kirk almost never let anyone detect even a hint of private pain; and he had learned a few things from Spock about concealing it, even as he teased the Vulcan about really being human underneath. Truth to tell, Kirk himself was more deeply human underneath than he cared to admit. McCoy wished he could think of something to say that would help.

  Kirk took a deep breath and let it out fast and hard. “Jim,” McCoy said carefully, hoping, as he did so, that he was not pushing even their friendship too far, “couldn’t you say to Hunter what you just said to me—about thinking you made a mistake? That wouldn’t be the same as asking to join the partnership, would it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. But I don’t know anymore if she wants to hear that. Why should she? And even if she does, it would put her in an uncomfortable position. What if the rest of the group said no? Bones, what if they said yes and I got cold feet at the last minute? That would be nothing less than a deliberate insult. It’s the only strain I don’t think our friendship could survive. Not again.”

  “You don’t ordinarily change your mind once you’ve made it up.”

  “This is different.”

  “Why?”

  Kirk shrugged. “It just is.”

  Ten hundred hours. Sulu set his duffel bag and his box of irregularly shaped oddments on one of the transporter platforms, then turned back to all his friends. Word of his transfer had spread almost instantaneously, it appeared, and for once he was glad of the highly efficient ship’s grapevine. He would never have had time to find all his friends, much less his acquaintances. But here they were, crowded into the transporter room to wish him well: the members of his beginning fencing class; Pavel Chekov and Janice Rand and Christine Chapel; the elderly yogi of the Enterprise , Beatrice Smith; Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy and Uhura. Even Mr. Spock was there. As Sulu bid them all goodbye, he had a sudden, frightening feeling of apprehension, the conviction that there was something very wrong with what was happening, even though he wanted it, and that the pendulum would swing back very soon, with force and speed enough to crush him. He shrugged off the experience as understandable anxiety; besides, he had never had a prophetic flash before, and his ESP rating was no better than average.

  He did not shake hands with Mr. Spock, as he did with Captain Kirk, certainly did not embrace him, as he hugged Uhura, and, then, Dr. McCoy. Instead, Sulu bowed solemnly to the science officer. Spock raised his hand in the Vulcan equivalent.

  “Live long and prosper, Mr. Sulu,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spock.”

  Sulu turned. “M
andala...”

  She put her arms around him. “We were right, Hikaru,” she said, too softly for anyone else to hear. “But even that doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “No,” he said. His vision blurred; he was embarrassed by the tears.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said.

  “You, too.”

  He turned abruptly and bounded up onto the transporter platform. He could not stand to remain in Mandala’s arms in a place so public. They had said their goodbyes in private.

  She raised her hand in a gesture of farewell. Sulu returned it, then glanced at Spock, behind the console, and nodded. The flickering coldness of the beam engulfed him, and he disappeared.

  After Sulu had left, the transporter room slowly cleared out. The mood was one of general depression, to which Mandala Flynn was far more than ordinarily susceptible. She gave herself a good mental shake and forcibly turned her attention to her job. In a few minutes their prisoner would arrive. She felt uneasy about the whole assignment, and she knew something unusual was going on. The captain and the science officer knew what it was, but neither had taken her into his confidence.

  ‘Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die’: Flynn thought the line in the same cynical tone in which Tennyson had written it, not with the nonsensical approval or unquestioning attention to obedience that had encrusted it more and more thickly as the centuries passed.

  The more she knew about an assignment, the better she could carry it out: she had never encountered an exception to that proposition. But the senior officers of the Enterprise did not know her well enough to know how far they could trust her; she wondered if Captain Kirk would ever trust her. He had shown no sign of being willing to do so yet.