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EIGHT

Vulcan Diplomatic Compound

Sausalito, Earth

FOREIGN MINISTER SOVAL MEDITATED while standing stock-still in the empty courtyard garden, watching the silver starlight as it spilled from an unusually cloudless, almost crystalline sky. His only complaint was that the season that residents of Earth’s San Francisco Bay area euphemistically called “summer” was so frigid, at least by Vulcan standards. That chill, as well as Earth’s excessive barometric pressure, had necessitated the subtle genetic modifications that the Vulcan Science Academy had introduced into the Vulcan plants that grew in the diplomatic compound’s sprawling garden. Cinching his diplomatic robes more tightly around his torso against the creeping chill, Soval put aside his discomfort and resumed concentrating on the boundless sky above the garden.

Despite the cold, Soval enjoyed being out in the courtyard on Sausalito’s rare fog-free nights, long after the human staff had gone home and the Vulcan diplomats and aides had retired to the warmth of their quarters. On many such past solitary occasions, which he had arranged to occur sometimes as early as sunset and on other occasions as late as midnight, he particularly enjoyed watching the large natural satellite the humans called Luna as it made its stately transit across the sky.

Unlike mighty T’Rukh, which dominated the sky of an entire Vulcan hemisphere—rather than a moon that circled a point near its primary world’s center, T’Rukh was a co-orbital world that was tidally locked, along with Vulcan itself, to a common center of gravity external to both bodies—Luna nevertheless presented an impressive face, both for its ancient natural scars and its artificial construction projects, particularly when it was at full phase and low over the horizon. The full moon seemed to grow fourfold on such occasions, an optical illusion that evoked memories of T’Rukh’s magenta-striated face covering nearly a third of the sky, shimmering over the ruddy, sun-baked plain of Vulcan’s Forge.

Tonight, however, the relentless waxing and waning of Luna’s phases had reduced the body to a faint silver crescent, which had passed below the horizon more than four hours earlier. Luna’s current absence left the serene starscape overhead with only San Francisco’s nocturnal skyline, visible from the Vulcan diplomatic compound as a faint golden glow in the south just beyond the mouth of San Francisco Bay, to compete with it for visibility.

Looking steeply upward, Soval focused on the confluence of northern summer constellations that the humans called the Summer Triangle, a figure made up of the bright stars that the humans had named Altair, Vega, and Deneb. He knew that Altair and Vega, the triangle’s southernmost points, were close enough to the core of Coalition space to be at serious risk from Romulan incursions sooner or later, and he wondered how much longer those two systems could afford to maintain their present state of blissful neutrality.

Soval tried to draw strength from the permanence and placidity of the twinkling alien patterns overhead, using it to focus his thoughts on the coming meeting—a meeting for which he had begun to prepare late this afternoon, immediately after Administrator T’Pau had delivered her fateful address to the Coalition Council.

He wondered momentarily whether his Andorian and Tellarite diplomatic counterparts, those with whom he was scheduled to meet tonight, were undertaking similar preparatory rituals of their own at this very moment. Or had Ambassador Gora bim Gral of Tellar already arrived at the nearby Andorian diplomatic compound, thereby rendering both himself and Andorian Foreign Minister Anlenthoris ch’Vhendreni too self-conscious to engage in such meditations?

The realization suddenly struck him that he still did not know whether Minister Thoris or Ambassador Gral engaged in such activities, despite the close working relationship the three of them had begun