Alta had never used a transporter.
It surprised Kirk more than it should have, and when he thought about it afterward he understood why. The Bellerophon's transporter had gone down with the ship. Nothing in the Krell installation had ever been adapted to move a human being. For nineteen years she had crossed the same few kilometers of plateau on foot or in the ground vehicle Robby kept running, and the rest of the galaxy had come to her as books, recordings, and whatever her father chose to say about it.
Now she stood on the terrace in the morning light inside a circle Kirk had marked out with four stones, because his chief engineer had told him plainly over the channel that if the beam had to fight the interference he wanted the pad clear of anything metallic, and she looked at him with the composure of a young woman who had decided that nobody was going to see her hands shake.
Her father stood outside the stones.
"This is unnecessary."
"You've mentioned that," Kirk said.
"Repeatedly."
"I noticed."
Alta glanced between them. "Father."
Morbius stopped.
She had changed her clothes. The dress was plain, nearly severe, and Kirk suspected that the thing which mattered about it was that it had been chosen rather than simply worn. Her hair was tied back. She carried nothing at all.
"I am going to look at a ship," she said.
"You have seen ships in the archive."
"Yes."
"There is nothing aboard that vessel that you need."
She considered it a second, seriously, the way she considered everything.
"I would like to find that out myself."
Kirk kept his face where it was.
Morbius turned to him rather than to her, and Kirk filed that away. "Captain, I hold you personally responsible for my daughter's safety."
"So do I."
That appeared to offend the man less than anything else Kirk had said in two days.
Robby stood at the edge of the terrace with the morning behind him.
"Have you ever transported?" Alta asked him.
"No."
"Does it hurt?"
"I do not know."
"That is very helpful."
"I could invent an answer," said Robby.
She laughed. Her father did not.
Kirk opened the communicator. "Enterprise. Energize."
* *
The room went away.
She had read about it. She had heard it described by two dozen recorded voices, all of them calm. None of them had mentioned that the going away happened to you rather than around you.
Then the transporter room was there, and she was standing in exactly the place she had been standing, and every other fact in the universe had been replaced.
She did not move for several seconds. The transporter chief found something on his console that required his full attention, which Alta understood later to have been a kindness.
Kirk stepped down first. "Welcome aboard."
She looked at the walls, and the ceiling, and the closed doors, and the consoles with their small patient lights, and found that her breathing had gone shallow and that she could not entirely fix it.
McCoy came around from beside the console. "Easy."
"I am quite all right."
"That's my line," said McCoy.
She looked at him, and something in her shoulders let go.
Then the doors opened, and Alta stopped again, because there were people in the corridor.
Two technicians went past carrying a diagnostic unit between them, arguing quietly about who had signed for it. A crewman came the other way with a food container. A woman in sciences blue walked by reading a slate and did not look up from it.
None of them had come to see her. None of them knew that a young woman who had spent her whole life in the company of two other people was standing in a doorway watching them the way a countrywoman watches a city.
One crewman glanced in, saw Kirk, and straightened. "Captain."
Kirk nodded, and the man went on about his business.
"He did not ask who I was," Alta said.
"No."
"Does he know?"
"Probably. News moves quickly on a starship."
"But he did not ask."
It was McCoy who understood it first. "He was busy."
Alta looked down the corridor after him for a long moment.
"People can be near you," she said, "and still be busy with something else."
"Constantly," said McCoy. "It is one of our great social achievements."
*
Kirk had planned the route with some care, and he had not told anyone that he had planned it. No bridge yet. No engineering. No laboratory full of people finding excuses to look at her.
He took her to the observation lounge, which was quiet at that hour and had a viewport four meters across.
Alta came through the door and stopped.
Altair IV filled half the glass. Green at the edges, red-brown across the middle, turning slowly, with the terminator lying over the eastern ridges.
All her life the sky had been above her. Here it was beneath her feet.
She crossed to the window and put one hand flat against it.
"That is my home."
"Yes," said Kirk.
"I have never seen all of it at once."
He watched her face in the glass. "Most people never see their first home from outside. Not that way."
"You have."
"From orbit. That isn't the same as knowing it."
She half turned. "How many worlds have you seen?"
Kirk thought about it longer than he expected to. "A good many."
"How many is a good many?"
"Don't ask him," McCoy said. "He'll start counting."
Kirk gave him a look. Alta smiled.
"Do they all look different?"
"Yes."
"Are they all different?"
"More than they look," said Kirk.
She turned back to the planet and did not say anything for a while, and neither did either of the men, which was the most useful thing Kirk did all morning.
*
The doors opened behind them, and Uhura came in.
Alta turned at once. They had spoken only by communicator, three times, but recognition managed without a face.
"Lieutenant."
"Alta."
Uhura had come without a slate, without a receiver, without anything at all in her hands, which Kirk understood to be deliberate. There was nothing about her arrival that could have turned into an interview.
"I thought you might want to see where the voices come from."
Alta looked at Kirk. "May I?"
"That's why you're here."
*
Kirk saw very little of her for the next two hours, which was also deliberate.
She sat at the communications station while the Enterprise spoke to a supply tender three systems over. She listened to a weather report from a colony she had never heard of, in a dialect of English she could barely follow, about a storm that was going to inconvenience eleven hundred people she would never meet. She heard a Vulcan navigational beacon identify itself in three languages, one after another, with what she described afterward as enormous patience. She heard a merchant captain complain about docking priority with such feeling that she asked, seriously, whether he was in danger.
"Only of waiting ten minutes," said Uhura.
Alta laughed out loud, and two people at the far end of the compartment looked up and smiled and went back to work.
She met Sulu, who showed her how the planet moved under the ship without the ship ever feeling as though it moved at all. She met Chekov, who informed her in complete sincerity that the first practical orbital mechanics had been worked out by a Russian, was corrected by Sulu before he reached the end of the sentence, and defended his position at some length while Alta watched the two of them the way another person watches weather.
And McCoy took her through sickbay, which had not been on Kirk's route and which Kirk decided, watching it happen, was the best thing anybody did that day.
Ensign Rivera was sitting up with his shoulder strapped, three ribs knitting and a headache he was not admitting to. He was nineteen, which Alta did not know, and he had been thrown six meters by something no instrument aboard could find.
"You're the girl from the house," he said.
"Yes."
"Did you see it?"
"No. My tiger did."
Rivera considered that with the gravity of a man who intended to repeat it in the mess hall for the next year. "Then your tiger did better than me."
McCoy said, "Nobody saw it, Ensign. That's the whole trouble."
Alta looked at the strapping, and at the young man's face, and then, for some time, at nothing in particular.
"Does this happen often?" she asked.
"Getting thrown across a garden by an invisible whatever it was?" Rivera shook his head and winced. "First time."
"But something like it."
"Ma'am," said Rivera, "I've been aboard fourteen months. Something like it happens about every third week."
"And you stay."
He looked as though the question had honestly not occurred to him before. "Yes, ma'am."
"Why?"
Rivera thought about it, and what he came out with, McCoy told Kirk afterward, was worth more than the whole tour.
"Because somebody has to go and look," he said. "And because I like the people."
*
She ate in the mess.
That was where Kirk, watching from three tables away, saw the change arrive.
There were twelve people in the room and not one of them had been assigned to entertain her. Two conversations crossed each other. Somebody at the next table was arguing about music with the passion of a man who had lost the argument before and intended to win it now. Two nurses were talking about a patient in terms Alta could not follow. An engineer was complaining about Mr. Scott's maintenance schedule, and stopped when Mr. Scott came through the door, which made Alta laugh before she understood why everyone else had.
She did not say a great deal. She listened.
And Kirk understood that what was overwhelming her was not information. It was multiplicity. Every person in that room contained an entire life that had nothing whatever to do with her father.
Uhura sat down opposite her with a cup of coffee. "Too much?"
Alta shook her head. "No."
Then she changed her mind, which Kirk was beginning to recognize as the most honest thing about her.
"Yes. But I do not want it to stop."
"That's about right," said Uhura.
*
Later the two of them walked the outer corridor on deck six, where a row of ports looked out into open space instead of down at the planet.
Alta slowed, and then stopped.
There were more stars than she had ever seen. No atmosphere to soften them. No horizon to cut them off. They went on in every direction and kept going, and there was no edge anywhere.
She stood in front of the glass for a long time.
"My father says the galaxy is dangerous."
Uhura leaned against the bulkhead beside her. "He's right."
Alta looked over, surprised. "I thought you would disagree."
"Why?"
"Because you live in it."
"That's how I know," said Uhura.
Alta turned back to the ports. "Then why do you go?"
Uhura considered several answers, and chose the shortest.
"Because dangerous isn't the same as empty."
Alta said nothing.
"Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is terrible. Most of it is neither one until you're standing in it."
"Do you ever wish you had stayed home?"
"Sometimes."
"Do you go back?"
"When I can."
"And if you could not?"
Uhura looked at her then, and took her time about it. "Then I would still want to know that I had chosen to leave."
Alta said nothing to that for a while. When she did, she had turned back to the glass, and she said it to the stars rather than to the woman beside her.
"Lieutenant. Do you know how your ship came to see our house?"
"Mr. Spock says the screen your father describes wasn't operating."
"Yes," said Alta.
Uhura waited. She was very good at waiting. It was, she would have said if anybody had asked her, most of the job.
But whatever had come up did not come the rest of the way, and after a moment Alta put her fingertips against the transparent aluminum, the way she had in the lounge, and said, "It is a great many stars."
"It is."
"Thank you for not asking me what I was going to say."
"You'll say it when you want to say it," said Uhura.
* *
They came down to the transporter room the long way, because Uhura took a wrong turning on deck five and admitted it, which Alta found more interesting than the ship.
At the pad she put something into Alta's hand.
It was a communicator, smaller than the one her father kept on the hall shelf and a good deal lighter.
"I can't," said Alta.
"It's ship's issue. There are four hundred of them aboard and I sign for all of them, and I have decided that this one is signed for."
Alta turned it over twice. "My father has one in the house."
"Your father has one in the house," Uhura agreed.
Alta looked up at her.
"The grille is the receiver. Flip the cover and it opens the channel. You'll get me, or whoever has the board, and if it's nobody at all it will keep trying until it gets somebody." Uhura closed Alta's fingers around it. "It works from the surface. We've established that three times this week."
"When should I use it?"
"That isn't the kind of question it has an answer to."
Alta considered that, and then put the communicator into the pocket of a dress that had not been made with pockets in mind, which was the first alteration she had asked Robby for in two years.
"Lieutenant."
"Mm."
"Does it matter what time it is?"
"No," said Uhura.
