Baltar eyed the Vulcan’s hand.
“You’re going to put your fingers on my face.”
“That is generally how the procedure is performed.”
“Yes, well. Where I come from, people usually buy me dinner first.”
Spock raised one eyebrow.
Across the lab, leaning against a console that was not holding her weight, Six smiled. I like him.
“Please shut up,” Baltar muttered.
The eyebrow stayed where it was. “I was not speaking.”
“No. Not you.”
“I am aware.”
Baltar went still. Six stopped smiling.
Spock stepped closer. “You have directed your attention toward an apparently empty region approximately two meters to my left on eleven occasions since we entered this room. Your pupil dilation and respiration indicate the behavior is not voluntary.”
“You noticed that.”
“It would be difficult not to.”
Six crossed the room, slowly, the way she did when she wanted him to watch her do it. Careful, Gaius.
“Oh, marvelous. Now she’s worried.”
“Who?”
Baltar looked at him for a long moment. Then, very quietly: “Her.”
Spock placed his fingertips against Baltar’s temple, cheek, and jaw. “My mind to your mind.”
Six was standing beside them now.
“My thoughts to your thoughts.”
The lab went away.
Caprica. Sunlight. A house over water, the good house, the one from before.
Baltar stood barefoot on the terrace. Spock stood beside him, fully uniformed, looking as though he had been assembled there by mistake.
“This is my house,” Baltar said.
“Was.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Spock had melded with many minds and each had its own architecture. Kirk’s was a bridge, all forward motion. McCoy’s was a cluttered kitchen where nothing was ever thrown out. Baltar’s was this: a beautiful house with every window open and the owner standing on the terrace rehearsing what he would say if anyone asked what he had done.
Everything here carried the texture of ownership. The light was Baltar’s light. The water remembered being looked at by Baltar. Even the guilt, which had a shape and a smell, was unmistakably his.
Then Six stepped out of the house in the red dress, her hair moving in a breeze that did not exist, and she was the only thing on the terrace that Baltar had not built.
She looked at Baltar. Then at Spock. Her expression changed.
Spock looked directly back at her.
For possibly the first time in Gaius Baltar’s life, he had nothing to say.
Six took one careful step toward the Vulcan. “You can see me.”
“I can.”
“You can what?” Baltar said.
“You are not a memory,” Spock told her.
“No.”
“Nor a conventional hallucination.”
“No.”
Baltar pushed between them. “Wait. Wait, wait. You can actually see her. You can hear her. You’re talking to her.”
“That would appear self-evident.”
Baltar laughed. It was not an entirely sane laugh. “Oh, thank God. Do you have any idea how long I have wondered whether I was completely insane?”
“Your sanity,” Spock said, “remains an independent question.”
Baltar stared at him.
Six burst out laughing. “Oh, wonderful. You two are getting along.”
Spock turned back to her. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am.”
“I know the form you have chosen. That does not answer the question.”
“He’s had years to answer it.” She circled him, close enough that a human would have stepped back, and Spock did not step back. “First I’m a chip in his head. Then I’m a psychotic break. Then I’m an angel. It depends how frightened he is that week.”
“Those are his hypotheses. I asked for yours.”
The air on the terrace changed pressure, the way it does before weather. “I’m the part of God’s plan that talks back.”
“I have encountered several entities that described themselves in comparable terms,” Spock said. “Trelane. The Organians. A being called Apollo. All of them possessed considerable power. None possessed the thing they claimed. In my experience the claim of divinity correlates inversely with its likelihood.”
“Spock,” Baltar hissed, “please don’t antagonize her, she can be, she gets…”
“I’m not offended, Gaius.” She had not taken her eyes off the Vulcan. “He’s not wrong. He’s just not right. You have a very small set of boxes, Commander, and I don’t go in any of them.” She nodded at Baltar. “Neither does he. Maybe that’s why he was chosen.”
“Chosen,” Spock said.
Six smiled and let the word sit there.
“Do you know what your captain would do with a woman like me in his head?”
“He would attempt to reason with you, fail, and then improvise.”
“And you?”
“I am doing it now.” Spock raised his hand. “May I?”
Six looked at the hand. Then at Baltar. “What is he asking?”
Baltar almost giggled. “He wants to mind-meld with the hallucination inside my mind-meld.”
“An imprecise description,” Spock said.
“It is an excellent description.”
Six considered the Vulcan for several seconds. Then she smiled. “All right.”
Spock touched her face.
Nothing happened.
Then his breath caught.
The house was gone. For an instant there was no Caprica, no Baltar, no Six. There was only distance, and stars, more stars than any single sky could hold, and Spock standing alone beneath them, his uniform unchanged in every detail except that it was white. Entirely white.
Beneath the stars, or behind them, or threaded through them, was something he could not resolve into thought.
Not a mind. Not in any sense he understood. But there was structure. There was intention. A pattern so immense that his consciousness could perceive only the smallest intersection of it, the way a plane passing through a sphere sees a circle and mistakes it for the whole.
And then something worse.
Recognition.
Not his recognition of it. Its recognition of him.
The contact vanished.
Caprica came back. The water, the light, the terrace.
Spock lowered his hand. He did not stagger. He simply stood a fraction of a second longer than a Vulcan needed to stand, and Baltar, who had spent his whole life around people pretending not to be terrified, saw it.
“What happened?” Baltar said. “What did you see?”
“Nothing that I can adequately describe.”
Six’s smile was small and not unkind. “That must be difficult for you.”
Spock looked at her. “You are not the source.”
The smile faded. “No.”
“The source of what?” Baltar said.
Neither of them answered him.
“You are an intermediary.”
“Perhaps.”
“Between Doctor Baltar and whom?”
Six glanced up at the sky. “Why must it be a whom?”
Spock followed her gaze. “That is a reasonable objection.”
Baltar threw up his hands. “Oh, excellent. The imaginary woman and the Vulcan are discussing metaphysics while I stand here inside my own subconscious in bare feet.”
“The phenomenon possesses awareness,” Spock said. “It became aware of my presence.”
Six looked back at him. “Maybe it always was.”
Spock said nothing for several seconds. “That hypothesis cannot be tested.”
“You’re learning.”
“If either of you,” Baltar said, “would like to explain to the man whose head this is what is going on, I’ll be over here. In my house. Which I apparently no longer own.”
Spock turned to him. “Doctor. I am going to end the meld now.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not believe it is wise to remain.”
The lab returned: the humming console, the smell of ozone, Baltar sweating through his collar.
Spock withdrew his hand. Neither man spoke.
Six stood behind Baltar. Only Baltar could see her again.
“Well?” Baltar said finally.
“She is not a projection generated by your subconscious.”
Baltar’s face went blank. “You’re certain.”
“Within the limits of the technique, yes. During the meld I could distinguish your memories, your suppressed impulses, your sensory fabrications. She belonged to none of them.”
Baltar turned slowly toward Six. She gave him a tiny, satisfied smile.
“Then what is she?”
“Either an independent consciousness operating through your own,” Spock said, “or something for which I have no adequate classification.”
“You said either. You stopped at two. There’s a third, isn’t there.”
Spock did not answer.
“You felt something else. I saw your face.”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
Spock took longer with the question than he should have. “It knew I was there.”
Silence. Six watched him.
“And what does that mean?” Baltar whispered.
Spock glanced at the empty corner of the room where nothing stood. “It means, Doctor, that I would prefer not to speculate.”
Six smiled. “Very Vulcan.”
Spock’s eyes shifted. Directly to hers.
The meld had been broken for nearly thirty seconds.
Six’s smile vanished.
Spock held her gaze for exactly as long as it took to make the point. Then he turned and left, and the door closed behind him.
Baltar did not move for a while. When he did, it was only to look at her.
“You’ve never looked frightened before.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“Neither is he.”
Six stared at the closed door.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “He is.”