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By Root 710 0

point, was among the highest elevations on Vulcan. Located near the summit of Mount Seleya, on ground that Surak had walked nearly two millennia ago during the Vulcan people’s painful transition from the chaos of barbarism to the discipline of logic, the peak was one of the most historic and revered places on the entire planet. It was used as a site for study and meditation, its ancient, rock-steady strength an anchoring force for the adepts who used the self-regulation of Kolinahr training to seize their passions and cast them out onto the desert’s cleansing sands.

This morning, however, T’Pol and Kuvak appeared to have the peak to themselves.

T’Pol looked to the east across the ocean of desolation that was Vulcan’s Forge. The venerable stone structures that comprised the aboveground portion of the T’Karath Sanctuary rose in the foreground, nearly thirty kilometers distant. Much farther off lay the skyline of ShiKahr, the desert heat already rippling and distorting the ancient city’s only faintly visible image despite the rarefied atmosphere. Apart from the many occasions when she had flown over this hemisphere of Vulcan in suborbital and orbital spacecraft, the last time T’Pol could recall having seen ShiKahr appear so remote had been some six decades ago. On the day before undertaking her kahs-wan—desert survival ritual—she had stood in almost this very spot, surrounded by her parents and the family pet, a large, slow-moving sehlat. Not long after she and her family had returned home to ShiKahr, her father had died from a sudden illness.

It occurred to T’Pol that her youthful memories of her father were far less clear than were her recollections of the kahs-wan.

Pushing aside her unbidden memories as unworthy of this sacred place, T’Pol turned away from the vista to face the gray-haired bureaucrat who had brought her here.

“With respect, Minister Kuvak, what is the relevance of this place to the questions I have asked you?”

“As I have said, T’Pol,” Kuvak said, cinching his simple, unadorned travel robe tightly about his lean frame. “I have already given you all the answers I am authorized to give.”

T’Pol found that unsatisfying. So far, Kuvak’s answers had amounted to little more than the vague assurance that he had never sent any arms or technology to the Romulans.

Realizing she had little choice other than to engage in what Tucker would describe as “playing along,” she said, “You indicated a desire to show me something.”

He nodded. “Indeed I did.”

She watched him carefully, alert for any sign that he might be about to pull a weapon from his robe. Although her own robe appeared deceptively baggy, she felt confident it would not impede her ability to disarm the minister should he attempt anything violent.

But instead of pulling out a tricheq blade or a phase pistol, he merely raised his arms so that his sleeves billowed in the thin breeze. The large sleeves bunched up as he made another expansive gesture at the desert, as though intending to encompass the entire dry expanse of Vulcan’s Forge.

“Daughter of T’Les, what do you see when you look out across the desert?”

T’Pol frowned, not at all certain what he expected her to see. She studied his stony features carefully, though they gave nothing away.

“I see,” she said at length, “the land where Surak conceived the principle of IDIC.”

Kuvak appeared somehow disappointed in her answer, if not outwardly displeased. “Interesting. I see the land where Surak died from radiation poisoning. Look again.” He pointed back out across the sea of sand. “Do you not see the scars?”

Understanding dawned as T’Pol looked out across the russet sands again, more closely this time. A curved, broken ridge, no doubt the eroded remnant of a nuclear-spawned crater, suddenly resolved itself in her vision, as though someone had just drawn a city-sized, slightly foreshortened circle across the desert’s face.

“I believe I see one of them,” she said. Why, in all the times she had visited the desert, which had been many, had she never observed this before?