Did you ever know that you were just born to drive people crazy?  That
your whole mission in life was to cause people to stare at you with
completely exasperated looks that say "I want to strangle you, but
unfortunately, it's illegal"?  As you might guess, that describes me
perfectly.  Alara, our lovely and talented archivist, is being driven
nuts by the influx of stories with the title "Aftermath" and would
naturally prefer that there be some more variety of titles.  So of
course, I had to write a story with this title.

NOTE TO THE ARCHIVIST:  Please don't kill me.  Archive this as
Aftermath.Mercutio or Forged, whichever you prefer.



Aftermath (Forged), by Mercutio (mercutio@europa.com)


never tasted the water springs
from the deep places inside [the] soul
refreshment denied and control
found only in embracing thirst


In denying my needs, I have lost the source of my own soul
but after a while, you get used to it.


-- Two translations of a brief, three line stanza from Between the
Hammer and the Forge.  The first is a formal one, approved by the
poet; the second, from "Wit and Wisdom of the Forge", is a loose
reinterpretation into Standard for the popular audience and is the
more frequently quoted of the two.

****

T'Sif could see the desert from her window, that vast stretch of sand,
too hot for any living creature to tolerate during the violent assault
of the sun without protection that off-worlders frequently mistook as
being all that there was to know of Vulcan.

She felt the intrusion on her solitude before hearing or seeing her
visitor.

"May I enter?" a voice asked.

It was Senek.  She knew that without turning from the vista that
another would see merely as a red blur.  To her, it was a hundred, a
thousand different shades of color.  "I cannot stop you."

He advanced no further into the room.  "I would not intrude on your
privacy."  She said nothing, a silent figure, her back turned to him.
"Will you not look at me?  I am your betrothed."

Her betrothed.  Her husband-to-be.  Her killer. They were one and the
same.

Slowly, she turned to face him.  Vulcan courtesy demanded that she
meet his eyes, that she give him the full attention that he was due,
that any person should be due.  T'Sif forced herself to raise her eyes
with all the painful discipline she had learned at Gol.  Discipline
was all that she had learned; she could control her outward behavior
for a time, but she could not control her mind.  Only years of
isolation in the desert, far beyond any Vulcan habitation, had lent
any semblance of peace.

"I am listening, Senek," she said, her dark eyes on him, feeling the
wash of his emotions, the frustration and the confusion as he
struggled to understand her and failed.  Vulcans had emotion; that was
the guilty secret of many.  The secret they preferred to keep hidden;
only one of many secrets she had written about in her diaries, the
diaries now known to their readers as "Between the Hammer and the
Forge".

He studied her for a long moment.  "The Enterprise arrives in four
point six days.  It would be practical to discuss in advance what
items we will be taking."

Senek's tone was eminently logical.  His mental voice was not.  T'Sif
suppressed a hysterical laugh, her control beginning to shred at this
too close contact with another person.  "Of course."

He had not heard enough compliance in her tone.  "I have estimated
that the journey to Dretyth will take a minimum of seven point three
Standard weeks.  You are aware, are you not, that the planet is
sparsely populated and not equipped with replicators or other such
equipment?  We must be prepared to take everything with us that we
will need."

She knew.  She knew everything there was to know about Dretyth, as
useless as it was to know when the trip itself would kill her.  Her
family was shipping its embarrassment off into exile, where the
civilized world might forget about her, and all of them shamefully
aware that if bonding with another person did not kill her, as
unshielded and oversensitized as she was to every stray thought, then
the journey there, on a starship full of non-telepaths certainly
would.

"I know..." she looked at him.  Did he know too?  She couldn't tell,
had never been able to tell with Senek if his obvious feelings of
repressed anger and jealousy at her remoteness covered that same
half-ashamed, half-relieved overtone that her family all shared at the
thought of her death.  "Do you know?"

"Do I know what?" Senek asked, voice calm as the desert air in the
morning, just before dawn.

His exasperation at her pointless question was plain to her, could not
be hidden from her shieldless, unprotected, unprotectable mind.  It
grated like the grains of hot sand, thrown by the wind at midday that
she knew so well.

"Do you know?" she asked, advancing on him, eyes wild, unable to hold
onto her control any longer.  "Do you know they want to kill me?  Do
you also?  Do you relish the idea of my going insane at the moment of
our bonding, the touch of my mad mind in yours?  Have they convinced
you to do this?  Or do you wish merely to silence a poet who could not
be silenced any other way?"

Senek raised his hands, a gesture of innocence, but did not step away.
"T'Sif...  you are..." -- flashes of color, mad, insane,
out-of-control, all of the emotions of his mind, the half-formed
thoughts coming to her, buffetting her without mercy -- 

And then he stopped, a wall dropping between them, one which would
have been impenetrable to anyone else, but was no more than a veil to
her.  A veil that gave her a moment of blessed peace to absorb his
words without being forced to feel every nuance of his mind along with
them.

"I... I must go now," Senek said, brows knitting together.  "You
require privacy.  I apologize for my intrusion."

And then he was gone.   Without the pressure of resisting his
thoughts, there was nothing left to hold her up.  With a moan, T'Sif
collapsed to the ground.  But in that time when she had been unable to
protect herself from his thoughts, she had discovered something, a
truth she would rather not have known.

Senek didn't know.  He hadn't known.

And now he was aware that they both had been condemned to die.


-the end-