T'Ria lowers the force field that screens the archway into the studio and feels the blast of snow and wind. Stepping over the threshold, she calls out over the artificial gale, "I confess I remain unpersuaded of the necessity of this arrangement."
"Worried that your wife is going frigid?" D'Jane shouts back. She's halfway up a mound of ice, weilding a garrotte-like wire that glows red with heat. "Andorian nh!uvmari sculpture," she says, effortlessly clicking through the consonant that Vulcans find quite difficult, "requires forming an ice block at a carefully varied rate to produce variations in the opacity. And the carving traditionally must be done in winds of at least 68 kilometers per hour. Federation ideals, babe—respect for cultures!"
T'Ria has her arms tigtly wrapped around her chest. "You have a sentimental attachment to the least physically comfortable portions of our honeymoon," she observes over the wind. "Most would doubtless see that as illogical, but you are at least consistent."
"You really understand me! We should get married!" She grins while applying the hot wire to the ice. "You drop by for a reason?"
"We have received a video letter from Mariner and T'Lyn."
* * *
D'Jane opens her parka and the two layers of tunic underneath, revealing green skin from her neck to her waist. "Ugggghh, I swear the cold got inside my clothes." The midafternoon of ShiKahr, with air as dry as Vulcan wit, is a blessed relief. She finds T'Ria in their bedchamber and sheds her outermost two layers of fabric, kicking them into a convenient corner. T'Ria taps the cushion beside her in a silent invitation to join, which D'Jane quietly accepts. "Computer," D'Jane instructs in accented but nimble Golic, "play video letter from USS Cerritos."
Beckett Mariner and T'Lyn appear on the wall screen, recorded kneeling side-by-side on the floor of their shared quarters, the left hand of T'Lyn pressuring the right hand of Mariner in the most stationary and placid version of the Vulcan kiss.
"What up, couple-friends?" Mariner greets. "Hey D'Jane, women who love Vulcan women, rep-re-sent!"
"Greetings," says T'Lyn.
"Were we ever that adorable?" D'Jane asks.
"I may be disqualified to judge," T'Ria remarks.
"In a missive such as this," T'Lyn begins, "I believe it is traditional to recount recent events likely to be of interest to the receiving party. Therefore, I attach the reports I prepared for the Vulcan Science Academy about observing a class-2 comet impacting an ice giant, and about experiencing through a mating bond one's partner being partially exsanguinated by a dikironium cloud creature. In the latter case, we were fortunate that those lifeforms do not find Vulcan blood—" She makes an air-quote with her free hand. "Tasty."
"Yeah, do not recommend that one," Mariner adds. "Oh, and there was the time Boimler got duplicated by a coalescent organism, only it didn't copy his past few years of personality development, so he got to phaser his slightly-more-immature self. Ahhh. It was symbolic and great. What else... Dr. Migleemo has been hosting social tastings of cheeses from around the Federation. Real meeting of cultures—my rind to your rind, am I right?"
D'Jane asks, "Do I need to feel offended on behalf of your society?"
T'Ria replies, "Let us not respect Vulcan society more than it respects us."
D'Jane closes her eyes and nuzzles down into her wife's shoulder, then opens her eyes wide again when T'Lyn says, "Also, we have received our first invitation to acquire a polyamorous third." She pauses. "For additional context, see the logs of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701, stardates 5943.7 and following, concerning the planet Sarpeidon."
"Well, leaving it there—" Mariner says.
"T'hy'la," interposes her wife.
"OK, OK." Mariner puts on a show of reluctance. "Back in Those Old Scientists days, Sarpeidon was destroyed by a supernova. The inhabitants escaped, or, like, procrastinated on doomsday by traveling into their past. We showed up to scan the supernova remnant—"
T'Lyn inserts, "An optical pulsar with a 36.84-millisecond rotation rate."
"And while looking for science, we found a chroniton signal, OK? Apparently, like, the Sarpeidon library with the time portal had an emergency protection mode where it tried to send itself into the future? Time portals, you know, what are you gonna do? So Boimler and Rutherford and Tendi beam over to the airless rock to tricorder the chronitons, and the next thing they know, Boimler is zapped into an ice age while Tendi and Rutherford have to escape a bunch of murder-happy religious zealots."
T'Lyn says, "I admit that I did not expect the Sarpeidon inquisition."
Mariner continues, "So, in the ice age, there was a political prisoner named Zarabeth, and, um, babe, do you want to explain this part?"
"During the course of developing the means for Zarabeth to escape exile in that time period, she formed an attachment to me. However, this dissipated when she discovered I was not being telepathically influenced by the population of Vulcan in its barbarous period five thousand years ago."
"Starfleet life," D'Jane says.
"Fascinating," T'Ria concurs.
Mariner grows almost solemn. "Won't lie, that all felt a bit weird at times. I realized I'd kind of expected that if anything like that happened it would be because of me, which is, like, 30% more vain than I'd like to be?"
T'Lyn says, "Whereas I believe that would have been the natural prediction given our past histories."
D'Jane comments, "Women who love Vulcan women who habitually sell themselves short."
T'Ria replies, "Statistically, I am short, my beloved."
"A human expression, ashayam."
"So, yeah," says Mariner, "Zarabeth rescued, personal reflection undergone, monogamy maintained."
"Of course," T'Lyn amends, "in the interests of cultural and personal understanding, we will apprise you if that situation changes."
"What else, what else..." Mariner reflects. "Oh! The Romulan thing. If you see these two claiming to be refugees from the Rateg province—" She punches a sequence into her LCARS keyboard and calls up an image. "They're not, don't believe them, it's a Sela scheme. Yeah, Sela re-established herself in the Tal Shiar by cleaning up after Shinzon, apparently. It's strange, she always seemed like an Enterprise-level villain, but maybe she's come down in the galaxy if the Cerritos had to deal with her, but on the other hand it feels like we've been getting bigger and bigger problems since, like, the Pakleds maybe?"
T'Lyn states, "That concludes the list of events we had considered for recounting."
"I can't think of anything else, either, babe." Mariner looks as though she's going to say something further but then halts herself. After a moment, she says, "Thanks, you guys. For everything." She raises her free hand in the Vulcan salute. "Live long and prosper."
T'Lyn salutes likewise. "Peace, and long life."
The screen chimes to blackness and the Starfleet logo appears above the caption TRANSMISSION CONCLUDED.
"Hmmm," D'Jane hums. "Ashayam, what would you do if you were telepathically influenced by the barbarous Vulcans of five thousand years ago? Would you treat me like the Orion slave girls of interstellar legend?"
"Potentially," says T'Ria.
"Good," declares D'Jane. Her wife raises an eyebrow, and D'Jane cuddles up close. "As long as we'd be together."
* * *
At the time of the evening meal, T'Ria retrieves their pizza slices from the replicator and carries them to the dining table, where one place is set with knife and fork and the other without. "Your mind is unquiet, my wife," she says.
"Atypically?" D'Jane asks as they sit.
"Far less riotously than upon many other occasions. I believe this sensation is termed poignancy."
"It's Mariner and T'Lyn. They did... something so nice for me, you know?"
"Providing the opportunity for a human to experience Orion pheromones without untoward consequences?"
"Providing me the opportunity to... be Orion without seducing anyone other than my wife or otherwise girlcocking anything up." She takes a bite of pizza and uses the opportunity to think. "I just get so damn tired of the irony sometimes. Vulcan isn't the best planet for either of us, either by ourselves or certainly together, but we're stuck here because we're together and our bond which is the best thing in my life has the side effect of me creating 'mone drones if we're not careful."
T'Ria places a forkful of pizza in her mouth, chews and swallows. "Would you like to move?"
"Where to?" There's more resignation in D'Jane's voice than she would like.
"I could become an outpost scientist. We could live together as the only sapient inhabitants of a planet that is barely class-M. You are the only company that I require. However, I suspect that you would eventually find the lack of society discouraging."
"Not without appeal, though. Some satellite of a gas giant, maybe... Painting a sky like that..."
"On a past occasion, you mentioned the possibility of Risa. It does seem plausible that the effects of a pheromone spike would go less remarked-upon there."
"Ugh, so tacky, though."
"It may be that the planet is not as tacky in all locations as it is in some of them. Certain conferences of the more freewheeling academic societies are held at resorts there. I recall the program for one such event suggested rock-climbing and cliff-diving as potential recreations between sessions."
"A cabin, up somewhere that's nowhere in the mountains..." D'Jane contemplates.
"We might even," T'Ria speculates, "find a suitable community on Earth. The human species is not without its freewheeling components." She takes another bite of pizza. "As indicated, your satisfaction and comfort will be the determining factors, as I only require proximity to you."
"There is one other factor." D'Jane greets T'Ria's inquisitive eyebrow with a slight smile. "We did promise T'Lyn and Mariner a place to stay in ShiKahr."
"Depriving them of a household where they will be accepted, should they visit again, would be a demerit of relocating."
"Women who love Vulcan women gotta stick together."
"An interesting sentiment. I had not known the opportunity to contemplate such solidarity prior to their joining." She takes a contemplative bite from her fork. "I speculate that they would find comparable, though not identical, satisfaction in a reunion, wherever that might occur."
"Will we cross the stars again, ashayam?"
"Interstellar distance is inconsequential if your happiness is at stake, my wife. Let us go home, wherever that may be."
T'Lyn, eldest daughter of Suvatri and T'Kel, is about to order her room-temperature water from the mess-hall replicator when her padd chirps. A vertical notation in Golic appears at her touch, running over the right edge of the horizontal Terran Standard.
"Computer, one root-beer slushie," she orders instead.
Mariner enters from the corridor. Special occasion? she thinks over the background noise.
We have received a letter from T'Ria and D'Jane.
"Computer," Mariner says to the replicator, "One strawberry milkshake." A reading letter or a watching letter?
A handwritten letter, in Golic, done by two people in cooperation. It appears to be the story of how they met.
* * *
The Xeno-Anthropology Annex of the Vulcan Science Academy has the best collection of offworlder art and artifacts on the planet. Only half again as large as the Louvre, it is a medium-sized museum for ShiKahr. The Vulcans use its collection to study the history and cultural evolution of other species, but they find nothing illogical in opening it to those who seek appreciation of a more aesthetic kind. It is an exemplar of cultivating interplanetary amity by bringing divergent purposes into consilience.
And once, it played host to love being born when Orion avarice met Vulcan candor.
Academician T'Ria was just able to hear the human musicians playing in the courtyard, singing a song that her universal translator rendered as "hang the bastards upside-down" in a language identified as Italian, when she saw the Orion woman. Acting more like a human than a Vulcan, the green-skinned figure stood before the thermal chamber that housed the museum's Tholian metamorphic glyphs, and reproduced the contours of the glyphs in a sketchbook with pigment sticks in the orange-red region of the spectrum. Vulcans contemplated, humans made reproductions, and T'Ria had no frame of reference for what was typical for an Orion.
"Pardon the intrusion," T'Ria said, not knowing if an Orion would consider that courteous or not. "Do you find a particular significance in these artifacts?"
The Orion woman's features were angular. Her knee-length skirt and the top that left her toned arms bare were made of overlapping segments, shaped of some lightweight metal or perhaps a metal coating over polymer, glossy black and reds that were almost black. The segments flowed as she turned to face T'Ria standing beside her.
"They had a long and hard journey to get here. More than many other exhibits." Her eyes scanned T'Ria, head to toe and back again. "D'Jane Lienne, born of Orion," she introduced herself.
"Academician T'Ria."
"That is a style of dress I have not seen before, Academician T'Ria."
"It is a Vulcan bridal dress." Silver, covering her from the neck down while following her contours closely, hemline higher in front than on the sides, revealing a little more of her legs, clad as they were in silver-white form-fitting hose that extended all the way down to her lustrous, anomalously high-heeled shoes. Under the large lenses of the UV-blocking spectacles she employed to compensate for her defective inner eyelids, she wore the equally traditional blue-silver eyeshadow. All of it, historically, meant to carry traces of a woman's having left the home.
"I like it on you. Of course, I'd like it even more off you."
"Intriguing. How is that statement meant to be interpreted?"
"In any and every way that you like. I am, after all, an artist."
"You draw nude models... and also engage in other activities with them?" T'Ria inclined her head. "I am honor-bound to inform you that this style of dress is only worn by Vulcan women in the interval prior to the solemnization of their marriage to their betrothed. It is a custom understood but not often discussed, by which a woman publicly signals her willingness to become the property of her husband."
"Become the property? That sounds like something your people would say about mine."
"Unlike humans, Vulcans do not propagate stories about Orions without empirical evidence. Property is an inevitably imprecise translation of the archaic Golic. The state to which it refers has little bearing on most aspects of a woman's life—all aspects, indeed, not necessarily governed by rituals that long predate Surak."
"Mm-hmm." The Orion artist crossed her arms and stood contrapposto, her sketchbook to one side and her drawing tools in her other hand. "And if Academician soon-to-be-property T'Ria decides not to become her husband's property after all?"
"The full name of the solemnization rite translates as 'marriage or challenge'. I may choose the challenge, the kal-if-fee, and select a champion. If my chosen champion defeats my betrothed in armed combat, and then elects to free me from my obligations, I remain as I am."
"I bet I could take him."
T'Ria lifted an eyebrow. "The combat in kal-if-fee is to the death."
"What good combat isn't?"
"I have no inclination to see anyone die on my account. Nor do I have a quarrel with the logic of how my betrothed and I were matched by our respective families."
"Hmpf. Arranged marriages? Is all of Vulcan like the richest families of the Syndicate? Do you go through bridal kidnappings as rites of passage?"
"You seem unduly perturbed by my unavailability. However, I doubt that situation will endure overlong. Your artistic talent, your evident physical fitness, the exotic allure your species carries on every Federation world... all factors indicate that you will be able to find a more suitable partner with no undue delay. Indeed, to paraphrase an ancient Earth writer famed for understanding the subject, if all those you seduce were laid end to end, I should not be the least bit surprised."
"You are very odd, Academician T'Ria. Well. If you won't let me take him, how about I take you?"
"One of those bridal kidnappings to which you referred?"
"One fight. Bladed weapons. Combat until first blood. So I have a happy memory to carry with me when I leave Vulcan for... wherever life takes me next."
T'Ria contemplated the offer. "I find myself disinclined to leave you unhappy, D'Jane Lienne. I accept your unorthodox challenge."
"Right, then." D'Jane handed her sketchbook and pigment sticks to T'Ria, and then she reached behind her back and unsheathed a crossed pair of blades. Made of something like tritanium over active nanofiber composite, they telescoped out from forearm-length to over a meter.
"Fascinating," T'Ria said. "You desire immediate combat?"
"Why put off making happy memories?"
"The shadow courtyard," T'Ria decided. "It is informally dedicated to amateur cultural displays by visiting offworlders."
"Oh, I was a professional."
"Your clothing serves as armor?"
"You want to even the odds?"
"Since it is logical that both of us will aim for peripheral damage, I will accept the 'odds' as given."
Walking in shoes designed to slow her stride and curtail her movement, T'Ria led the way out of the gallery and around the corner to the archway that opened into the courtyard. It was a popular place among visitors who wanted open air along with a break from the full Vulcan sun. The human musicians from earlier, four Starfleet noncoms, were lounging on the far side of the open space, upon the concentric steps that encompassed the pavement, eating citrus-flavored ice shavings.
D'Jane approached them. "Hi," she said, keeping both her swords low. "What do you play?"
"Accordion."
"Violin."
"Oboe."
"Singer and, ah, second violin if we need one."
D'Jane asked, "Do you know any love songs that go with blades?"
Hesitantly, the first violinist suggested, "A... tango?"
"I trust your judgment," D'Jane said.
T'Ria added, "And I do not know why I am trusting hers." More loudly, she projected her voice to the musicians and the half-dozen other visitors enjoying the courtyard. "Please stand on the uppermost step, behind the colonnade, for your safety."
"And," D'Jane did a good job of projecting herself. "If you come from a society that uses currency, place your bets."
T'Ria set D'Jane's art supplies on the steps by the courtyard entrance.
D'Jane tossed a sword into the air.
T'Ria caught its hilt and judged its weight in her hand.
D'Jane requested, "Your Earth tango, please."
She let the musicians settle into their rhythm, kept time for a measure with her sword, and then rushed at T'Ria.
Their blades met.
T'Ria quickly understood the parameters of the fight. It was Vulcan strength and speed, conscious motion as fast as many species' reflexes, against an Orion at the top of her form with years of experience making her blades an extension of her taut, muscled, flawless body.
T'Ria lost ground and regained it. D'Jane cut high and T'Ria swung low and D'Jane struck back with a spin and a flourish, a performer who wasn't even having to try yet, and T'Ria parried and her hair came tumbling down.
"Not bad for fighting backwards and in heels," D'Jane commented.
"Backwards?"
"Oh, yes." And D'Jane thrust again, forced T'Ria to cede ground again, controlled the fight in every detail.
And then T'Ria knew how D'Jane would move next, and she twisted herself sideways just in time to save her skin and her wedding dress by centimeters.
D'Jane paused, actually paused, showing puzzlement for the first time, while T'Ria stood on the lowest of the boundary steps, meeting D'Jane's eyes at her level for the first time. "Until blood," T'Ria purred. Puzzlement became intrigue and D'Jane leapt forward again, driving T'Ria to the side.
In their next exchange, T'Ria led D'Jane toward the center of the courtyard, where they each built up force with a skirt-lifting twirl. Their blades met once more. Each felt her motion arrested, felt the impact channeled through flexed and straining knees into the unyielding stone. Choking back her own breath, T'Ria rasped out, "I burn." D'Jane's hand caught T'Ria's shoulder while T'Ria swept her leg and they both went down, rolling across the stones sprinkled with sand. T'Ria was the first to rise. Hissing "Do you burn?!" she brought her blade down towards D'Jane, who blocked it and drove her back with a kick to her midsection.
The ferocity in D'Jane's scowl stopped the music as she rose and lunged, and with their next impact T'Ria was swordless and flat on her back.
"Kroika!" screamed the Vulcan girl.
D'Jane stopped.
T'Ria pressed her palm against the Orion artist's blade and slid it down, bleeding vivid green, until their hands met for the first time. "I am prepared," T'Ria whispered, "to become the property of the victor."
"I've never been prepared for anything," D'Jane whispered back.
Fascinating, T'Ria said in both their minds.
They sat up together. "Please, resume playing," T'Ria requested. "Something you find celebratory."
Your hand is hurting, D'Jane thought. I can tell without looking. I feel it like I would feel my own pain, except not.
The injury is of no consequence. My betrothal bond snapping like a twig in a sandfire, however...
The accordion player called over to them, "Would you like a waltz?"
D'Jane asked, "Is that worse for fighting?"
They stood together, leaning on each other more than physical exhaustion or injury demanded.
"Um, yeah, I guess."
"Let's do that, then," said D'Jane. T'Ria, what are we?
Seemingly, and in opposition to virtually every tradition of my planet, perfect for each other.