The Entropy Effect

“It won’t make things any easier for you, but I wish you would.”

“I’ve been falling in love with you ever since you came on board,” Hikaru said. “But I’m leaving —”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “If you do change your mind it won’t make things easier for me, either. I love you, too, Hikaru, as much as I’ve fought it, and I don’t know if we’re going to be sorrier if we do make love—or if we don’t.”

Mandala stroked his cheek, the corner of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. He leaned toward her and she responded, kissing him gently, her hands spread against his back.

“You can’t imagine how often I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered. She unfastened his shirt and drew it up over his head, caressing his sides with her fingers. She watched him pull off his boots and his pants; again, she admired his compact athlete’s body. She lifted the bedclothes for him to get in beside her, and as he lay down and turned toward her she drew her hand up his thigh, to his hip, to his waist. Her fingers made slow swirling patterns on his skin, and he shivered. Hikaru kissed her face, all over, small warm kisses; he caressed her and stroked her hair and kissed the scar on her shoulder as if he wanted to take away all the pain it represented. Mandala bent over him and let her hair curl down to touch his shoulders. Cautiously at first, then playfully, then joyfully, they loved each other.

Jim Kirk sat in the officers’ lounge, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. He felt depressed. The door slid open and Dr. McCoy beetled in.

“Mornin’, Jim,” he said cheerfully, his southern accent strongly in evidence, as it always was when he was under the influence of several drinks, or of a hangover. Kirk could not tell which it was, and he was in no mood to put up with either.

“What a night,” McCoy said. He got himself a mug and sat down across from Kirk. “What a night. The same for you, too? You look like I feel.”

“Yes,” Kirk said, though he was not really listening. “It was quite a night.” He had spent most of it on the subspace communicator, trying to clear away the red tape for Sulu’s transfer, and now he was beginning to think he had made a serious mistake. Perhaps if he had not been so efficient, Mr. Sulu would have

changed his mind.

“I thought so,” McCoy said. “I sure hope you had as good a time as I did.”

“As good a time—?” Kirk went back in his memory over what McCoy had been saying, and realized that since the doctor had only just come back from Aleph, he had no way of knowing about Sulu. In fact, Kirk had seen neither hide nor hair of McCoy since meeting him and his veterinarian friend in the park the day before.

“Bones, what are you talking about?”

“Well—I admit I’d had a few when I ran into you yesterday, but you weren’t that subtle.”

Kirk just stared at him.

“Jim, boy, you really looked happy. I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so good. Now, you know I think more constancy in some matters wouldn’t hurt you one bit—”

Kirk could not stand it when McCoy got avuncular, especially this early in the morning.

“—so it’s a real pleasure to see you with an old friend.”

Kirk realized what McCoy had inferred. For some reason it irritated him, though, to be fair, McCoy had no particular reason to think anything else. Besides, why should Kirk care what McCoy thought about his and Hunter’s friendship? The truth was no one’s business but their own.

“You’ve got the wrong idea, Bones,” Kirk said.

McCoy slid into the bantering tone by which, all too often, the two men avoided discussing anything that was really important.

“What, Don Juan T. Kirk, Casanova of the space-ways—”

“Shut up!”

McCoy looked at him, startled out of joking, realizing that everything he had said so far this morning was as close to perfectly wrong as an imperfect human could devise.

“Jim,” he said quietly, all traces of the good old boy abandoned, “I’m sorry. I knew you and she used to see a lot of each other, and I just assumed ... I didn’t mean to bring up anything painful.”

Kirk shook his head. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even an unfair assumption, given my usual behavior.”

“Do you want to talk about it? Or would you rather I slunk away, as best I can with my foot in my mouth?”

“Hunter and I are friends. She’s one of the best friends I have. We used to be lovers. We aren’t anymore. She’s a member of a partnership family—”

“Oh. Well. That explains it.” “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even begin to explain it.”

“Jim, now I am beginning to get confused.”