“Most agreeable news. . . . Yet your mind remains troubled.” It was only a guess on Spock’s part, but one he’d made with confidence. For all her affectations of serenity, he divined shades of melancholy in her fleeting microexpressions and the subtle intonations of her voice.

An ephemeral flush of shame deepened the green tint of her exquisite features. She was unable, or perhaps simply unwilling, to meet Spock’s gaze as she answered him. “My freedom came at a price, one that I did not expect but in retrospect seems inevitable.” She turned her palms upward and looked at them. “After I awoke, I gave no thought to my art. It wasn’t until I came back here and sat down at the piano that I realized I no longer knew how to play.”

The implications of her statement were intriguing. “All your learned ability was gone?”

“No. I remember the notes, but when I play, the melodies no longer flow. There is no beauty in them. No truth.” She paused. “For most of my life, music was my refuge. My salvation. Now I’m forced to find sanctuary in the silence that follows. It’s a poor substitute.”

Spock thought for a moment. “Have you spoken of this to anyone else?” T’Prynn shook her head. Might this be an opportunity to be of service? “I, too, am a musician. Perhaps, if we were to try playing music together, I might help you find that which you have lost.”

She studied him with a frank curiosity. “You would do this for me? Even though we’re little more than passing acquaintances?”

“You are in need, and I may be able to help you. It seems the logical course of action.”

For the briefest moment, her emotional control seemed to waver, as if a bittersweet smile desperately yearned to be seen on her face. Then her composure returned, and she restrained her reaction to a polite bow of her head. “Most generous of you, Spock. I would be honored to accept your help, and to share in your music.”

Though he would have been hard-pressed to explain why, Spock found T’Prynn’s quiet gratitude most agreeable, indeed.

Packing it in. Doctor Ezekiel Fisher, M.D.—Zeke, to his friends—figured he must have used that phrase hundreds of times over the years, but it had never seemed so apt a description as it did now, as he prepared to vacate his office at Vanguard Hospital. He resisted the urge to indulge in nostalgia over each knickknack and personal effect as he stuffed them all into boxes. Some items, such as his assorted family holographs, he had removed to his quarters a few at a time, in anticipation of filing his resignation. Others, such as the various gag gifts his friends or subordinates had given him over the years, he had waited until today to box up.

A familiar, squarish head topped with gray hair and fronted by an ashen mustache leaned in around the corner of the office’s open doorway. “Excuse me, Zeke,” said Doctor Robles, “I don’t mean to rush you, but—”

“Yes, you do,” Fisher said. He flashed a teasing grin he’d spent a lifetime perfecting. “Hold your horses, Gonzalo. I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

Robles scratched absently at his snowy temple. “That’s what you said three days ago.”

“I have a lot of things.” Sensing that the new CMO was about to reach the limits of his patience with the already unconscionable delay in claiming his new office, Fisher held up a hand to forestall any argument. “No more jokes. I’ll just be a few more minutes, I promise.”

Making a V of his index and middle fingers, Robles pointed first at his eyes, then at Fisher, miming the message, I’m keeping an eye on you. Then the fiftyish man slipped away, back to the frantic hustle and deadly drudgery of running Vanguard Hospital on an average day.

Fisher tucked a jawless, cast-resin skull that he had used for close to thirty years as a candy dish into his lightweight carbon-fiber box of bric-a-brac. For a moment he considered leaving “Yorick” as an office-warming gift for Robles, but then he decided that inheriting the prime piece of Vanguard Hospital real estate would be reward enough for the soft-spoken internist. Besides, without it, where would Fisher keep his mints?

As he excavated three years of detritus from the bottom drawer of his desk, he heard a knock at the open doorway. Laboring to push himself back up to a standing position, he grouched, “Dammit, Gonzalo, when I said ‘a few minutes,’ I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.” Then he turned and saw not his successor but his former protйgй, his professional prodigal son, looking back at him. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Doctor Jabilo M’Benga smiled, adding warmth to his kind face. “I hear I almost missed you.” He stepped inside the office, and Fisher met him halfway. They embraced like brothers, and then Fisher clasped the younger man’s broad shoulders. “Look at you. I hate to admit it, but starship duty agrees with you.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” M’Benga said as they parted. He strolled in slow steps around the nearly empty office. “Hard to imagine this place without you in it.”

Fisher shrugged. “Not that hard. I’ve been doing it for months, and it gets easier all the time.” He continued wedging the last of his private effects into the box. “Sometimes you see the storm coming and you just know it’s time to get out. Know what I mean?”

“I suppose.” M’Benga tucked his hands into the pockets of his blue lab coat. “Though I have to wonder: After more than fifty years in Starfleet, do you think you’re still fit for civilian life? I can’t help but picture you getting home and going stir crazy in about a week.”

That made Fisher chortle. “Oh, I don’t think so. Let me find a seat by a baseball diamond, or a soccer pitch, or a tennis court, and I’ll be right as rain. You’ll see.”

M’Benga mirrored Fisher’s smile. “So. No regrets?”

“Honestly? Only one.” Fisher closed the box. The lid locked with a soft magnetic click. “I’d always hoped you’d be the one to succeed me in this office.” He hefted the box with a grunt, set it atop two others that he’d already sealed for the quartermaster’s office to deliver to him later, then clapped his hands clean and stood beside M’Benga. “But I can see now that you’d never have been happy here. Not really. And I’m glad you found your calling on the Enterprise.”

“So am I. But I’m glad I got the chance to work here with you first.”

“Come with me,” Fisher said. “I want to tell you something.” Moving with the slow, steady gait of a man blessed with good health but burdened by old age, he led M’Benga out of the office and down a corridor through the administrative level of Vanguard Hospital. The younger man walked at his side, close enough for them to converse in the hushed tones considered appropriate in a medical setting. “Be glad for all the places you get to be, and everyone you meet along the way. It’s human nature to focus on beginnings or endings, and that’s why we often lose sight of where we are and what we’re doing, in the moment. But the present moment—the ever-present now—is all we ever really have. Our past is already lost, gone forever. Our future might never come. And as you get older and time feels like it’s speeding up, you even start to feel the now slipping away. And that’s when you realize just how quickly things can end—when you’re busy thinking about what was or what’ll never be.”

M’Benga aimed an amused but admiring sidelong look at Fisher. “All right, Doctor. Let’s put your philosophy to work. What’s your prescription for this moment of now?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Fisher draped his arm across M’Benga’s shoulders. “How would you like to watch a few dozen Tellarites try to reinvent the sport of rugby out on Fontana Meadow?”

“That depends. Will there be beer?”

“Of course,” Fisher said, as if M’Benga were a Philistine just for asking. “Just because we’re hundreds of light-years from civilization, that doesn’t mean we live like savages.”