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swollen lips, was looking directly at her. Tatya would have jumped up and fled (fled where, though, in a hydrofoil in the middle of the Pacific?) anywhere to escape those eyes, if just then the foil hadn’t nosed against the dock, its motor dying to silence as Yoshi called down unnecessarily:
    “We’re here!”
     
    “By virtue of his service, T’Kahr Savar could have requested and been granted a place on your expedition without your intervention,” Prefect T’Saaf said to Commander T’Lera with particular emphasis. Let the proud one know that the exception was made because of who and what her father was, not she. “But the choice of Sorahl as your navigator is insupportable.”
    “On what grounds, Prefect?” T’Lera’s voice once again held that dry, almost ironic tone. “Because he is without rank, or because he is my son?”
    “There are six others of full rank as qualified as he,” T’Saaf replied, and to address both issues: “Nepotism is not only illogical, it may in this instance prove dangerous!”
    The charge of nepotism was grave, freighted as it was with implications of favoritism and a lack of judgment, equally serious violations of both a commander’s code of ethics and a Vulcan’s honor. T’Lera did not permit it to perturb her; she knew T’Saaf’s methodology and had been prepared for this.
    “If the Prefect will refer to the addendum to my preflight report.” She struggled mightily to control her voice, which had slipped beyond the bounds of dryness into outright irony, if not sarcasm. “She will note that of the six of rank whose skillscans equal or surpass Sorahl’s, four are already assigned to other ships, one is on leave of absence, and the sixth is Selik, who is already aboard my vessel as astrophysicist and cartographer. It was in fact he who recommended Sorahl, as the most promising of the senior cadets, to accompany us.”
    Prefect T’Saaf did not condescend to look at the addendum; she knew it would read as T’Lera said it did.
    “As to the matter of rank…” T’Lera continued. Salt in the wound, a human might have called it; the Vulcan had no equivalent metaphor. “I respectfully remind the prefect that this is a technicality. The commencement ceremony for senior cadets transpires six days after our optimum departure date. Am I to delay my ship’s departure by what may prove a dangerous margin? Or am I to deprive my crew of the best available navigator because he lacks the formality of rank designation on his uniform?”
    She would not burden T’Saaf with the tale of how she herself had accompanied her father on his second voyage to the Sol III system when she was a child. T’Saaf would point out, and rightfully so, that regulations had been less stringent then and that as prefect Savar had been free to take certain liberties no longer permitted. That T’Lera had departed Vulcan a half-formed child of eleven years, to return two full decades later—in the days before warp speed the journey took that long—as a mature adult and unique among her kind for having spent those years in the void, was self-evident. Never again could a planet entirely contain her, and that was both her gift and her burden.
    Did she presume to visit the same fate on her son?
    But Sorahl was older, in his nineteenth year, and with the breaking of the light barrier a scoutcraft could now reach Earth within ten days, not ten years. The entire journey, including mapping and research, would be completed in a matter of months. It was not the same.
    But these were deeply personal things, and none of the desk-bound, planet-bound, convention-bound T’Saaf’s concern. The unarguable fact was that Sorahl was qualified and available, and his commander wished him to go. That his commander also wished to show her son what her father had first shown her—that there was that to be found in the misnamed void between the stars which knew no words in its exquisiteness, that there was that on other