For a long moment there was total silence, Kirk's eyes locked with Sarek's as his mind undoubtedly raced to find a believable yet not quite true explanation that did not include the fact that they were here to erase this entire timeline.

Scotty, on the other hand, was suddenly almost limp with relief. The engineer had an instinctive distrust of politicians and diplomats and had always been uneasy whenever Kirk himself took on that role, even though this time, Scotty himself had initially encouraged him to do it.

"You always were too clever by half when you put on your diplomat's hat," he muttered to Kirk under his breath, then added aloud, "I believe 'tis time for a wee bit of the truth, Captain, now that Sarek's figured it out for himself anyway."

Without waiting for a reply, Scotty raised his eyes to meet Sarek's.

"Captain Kirk's not the b.l.o.o.d.y time traveler this time," he said. "I am."

The chronometric radiation was back to what Picard had come to think of as the normal background level for this apparently unstable timeline by the time the two Guinans emerged from his ready room, unsmiling, even somber.

"I will return to the D'Zidran," one of them said. Picard a.s.sumed it was the one from this timeline, but even he couldn't be sure. As far as physical appearance went, they could have switched clothes, differing primarily in color, and no one would have been the wiser. "I will ask Tal to get word to Alliance Prime asking to have every ship in the fleet be on the lookout for Captain Scott."

"And it would be helpful, Captain," the other Guinan said, "if you or Commander La Forge could give Tal the technical information the Alliance will need in order to adapt their sensors to detect Captain Scott's ship, should he be using the cloaking device. Somehow, neither the Romulans nor the Klingons developed that form of cloaking here, only the interphase variety you already encountered."

Picard nodded, not really surprised at the turn things had taken once Guinan-his Guinan-had stopped hiding and decided to talk to her counterpart. "Have Tal contact us as soon as one of you has had a chance to... explain the situation to him." He turned toward the engineering station. "Commander La Forge, I a.s.sume you can have the necessary information ready to transmit."

"From what I've seen of their sensor capabilities, the conversion shouldn't be a problem, sir," he said, no indication of approval or disapproval in his purposely neutral tone. "I can have the data a.s.sembled in a few minutes."

Picard silently accompanied the two Guinans to the transporter room, where he watched the one who remained behind as she watched her almost-twin shimmer out of existence. In the turbolift on the way back to the bridge, he finally spoke.

"Did you learn what we need to know?"

"I learned what she knew. And she learned what I knew."

"I rather suspected that's how it would be, from what she said about the search for Captain Scott. But does she know the whole truth? That we're from the future, not an alternate universe?"

She shrugged, a slight movement of her hands, as the turbolift doors opened on the bridge. "If you can't trust yourself, who can you trust?"

"And how does she feel about 'correcting' the timeline?"

"It disturbs her as greatly as it does me, but she knows it has to be done. If it can be done. She's had the same feelings of 'wrongness' that I have, but she's had them for so long that she hardly notices them anymore."

"And the destruction of her-of your world?"

"It's not as if we have a choice, Captain. You of all people should know that she will do what we both know must be done."

Picard was silent a moment. They were before the viewscreen now, everyone's eyes on them both.

"Of course, Guinan. I'm sorry."

"It's all right, Captain," she said after a moment. "Despite all appearances, to you she is still a stranger."

He shook his head. "Not entirely. A number of us do seem to have met both of you four hundred years ago, when you were still one."

"Before the timelines diverged," Guinan said, smiling faintly. "As best we could determine, the split was sometime in Earth's twenty-first century."

"Was that when she first detected the 'wrongness'?"

"That was one indicator, yes, but she can't remember precisely when it started. She-we were involved in other things, nowhere near Earth, for several decades. The last time we visited Earth was early in the twenty-first century. It was another fifty years before she attempted to return, and by then it had been a.s.similated. We a.s.sumed it happened before your ancestors developed warp drive, because no one outside your solar system officially knew you existed and certainly not that the Borg had arrived."

Picard nodded. "And they would have known if the Borg had come after we developed warp drive. The Vulcans made contact with Earth within hours of Cochrane's first test flight. But why would the Borg bypa.s.s every other world between Earth and the Delta Quadrant in order to take over Earth? And then begin spreading out-very slowly-from there?"

"I have no idea, Captain, but that appears to be precisely what happened. El-Auria was one of the worlds they bypa.s.sed, together with hundreds, perhaps thousands of others."

Each of which, Picard thought but refrained from saying, will either be destroyed or turned back into Borg Collectives if we manage to "correct" this timeline out of existence.

Eighteen MUCH OF Scotty's explanation to a stone-faced Sarek was taken up with an attempt to convince Sarek-and perhaps himself-that Picard and the crew of that future version of the Enterprise were the ones responsible for the premature arrival of the Borg, not Kirk and himself. When he finished and fell silent, the Vulcan continued to watch him expressionlessly, saying nothing, until the engineer began to squirm uncomfortably, wondering if he'd made a ma.s.sive mistake admitting the truth this way. Maybe Kirk could have found a way around it. Maybe the captain was right in keeping the truth to himself-the truth that they were here to find a way to, essentially, eliminate this Sarek's entire universe. Could even someone as logical and as principled as Sarek accept that kind of truth and not see them as enemies? Enemies who, despite having saved his life and his ship, had to be kept from carrying out their purpose, even if it meant jailing or killing them?

Scotty shook his head dismally. He was used to working with engines, not people. With engines you knew where you stood. If you did something wrong, they let you know in no uncertain terms: They stopped working. Or blew up.

People, on the other hand, even the logic-driven Vulcans- "If you'd like to confirm what I told you," he said abruptly, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his courage up another notch, "I'd not object if you wanted to look inside my head."

One of Sarek's eyebrows arched in a subdued version of an expression he'd seen on Spock's face a hundred times. "A meld would not be advisable," the Vulcan said. "When other species are involved, the procedure is difficult at best, debilitating at worst. And if you are lying, I would be playing directly into your hands."

"I beg your pardon?" Kirk looked at Sarek quizzically.

"If you are agents of the Borg, there would be no better way for you to learn every Alliance secret than by taking it directly from my mind."

"I see. Would you feel any safer melding with me?"

"Because you once melded with your Sarek?"

"You know about that, too? That was my thought, yes."

"Since I am not 'your Sarek,' it is irrelevant."

Kirk sighed, seemingly unworried. "That reminds me. You did promise to tell us how you know these things. We've kept our part of the bargain and answered everything you've asked."

Sarek nodded a brief acknowledgment, looking more toward Scotty than Kirk. "Of course."

Quickly, the Vulcan told them of his false memories and his brief suspicion that they were a result of some kind of cross-time link between himself and the Sarek in their universe. "However," he concluded, "since it now appears that this universe replaced that universe rather than co-existed with it, it would seem that my twin and I did not co-exist either and therefore could never have been linked in any way."

"That's an easy one," Kirk said with a slight grin. "You just have to think of it in a slightly different but equally logical way. I obviously don't know all the rules about time travel paradoxes, but our universe probably wasn't replaced by yours when the Enterprise did whatever it did. More likely it was transformed into yours. Which means that you are 'our Sarek.' It's just that you-and all your memories-were transformed, right along with however much of the rest of the universe was affected. But, for whatever reason, not all of the memories of that other life were completely eliminated. Some of the strongest of them must still be there, hidden behind the new ones. You're getting glimpses of your original memories, that's all. Ghost memories, so to speak."

"Very facile, Kirk," Sarek acknowledged, then paused as his eyes narrowed infinitesimally. "However, I must admit there is an appealing logic to your theory. And a certain comfort in the implication that if you were to be successful in your quest to repair the damage you say the Enterprise caused, our universe would be restored to its original form rather than destroyed."

"I hoped you'd see it that way."

"However," Sarek continued, "I find your argument for blaming the Enterprise for the change less than convincing. The fact that, seen from your perspective, your rescue from the Vortex immediately preceded the change is prima facie evidence that the one was the cause of the other."

Kirk grimaced. "Don't think I haven't thought of that. And if I were certain it was true, I'd let the Vortex take me in a second. But how could saving my life now have brought the Borg here over two hundred years ago?"

Sarek eyed Kirk expressionlessly. "I would think it would be obvious. You have already admitted to traveling back in time once, and my so-called 'ghost memories' contain a number of other similar occasions."

Kirk grimaced. "Therefore I may do so again, now that I've been saved? Is that what you're suggesting?"

"It is only logical. Perhaps you will be the one to bring the Borg to this quadrant two hundred years prematurely."

"Impossible!" Kirk snapped, although the knot that suddenly tightened around his stomach belied his show of certainty. "I would never do anything so insane."

"But your successor, this Picard would?" Sarek asked.

"I would not dismiss either possibility too lightly, Captain," Scotty said uneasily. "You never know what you might be capable of under the right circ.u.mstances. Remember Edith Keeler."

The knot grew achingly tight. As if he could ever forget! Even after all these years, the memory of that terrible moment on the bleak and grimy streets of Depression-era New York had the power to take his breath away. He had watched her die-caused her to die only meters in front of him because he had seen the horrors that would come if he allowed McCoy to save her. The Guardian had shown him: For decades, perhaps centuries, Earth would be ruled by Hitler and his bloodthirsty n.a.z.i disciples. There would be no Enterprise, no Starfleet, no Federation.

"All that you knew is gone," the Guardian had said moments after McCoy, sick and delusional, plunged into the past.

And then...

Then the Guardian had allowed-even encouraged-Kirk to follow McCoy and set things right, to cause time to "resume its shape."

And the ancient ent.i.ty had, from its first words, seemed almost eager. For billions of years, it told Kirk and Spock when they first arrived, it had "awaited a question."

And when they returned from the past: "Many such journeys are possible," it said. "Let me be your gateway."

That seeming eagerness, more than anything else, almost kept Kirk from reporting the Guardian's existence to Starfleet.

Almost.

The danger it posed was incalculable, as McCoy's adventure had proven, and he was just one man, a man with the best of intentions. If someone-or thousands of someones-with evil intentions found the world and were given similarly unrestricted access to the past, nothing and no one would be safe. They could snuff out civilizations in the blink of an eye and, by sealing off the Guardian's world from the rest of the galaxy, make certain that whatever they changed in the past was not undone.

In the end, he had reported its existence and its threat to Starfleet. If it was going to be found and controlled, inevitably, by someone, better it was Starfleet than the Klingons.

The Guardian's existence was clsssified immediately, at the highest levels.

But that was in a different universe. "Sarek, has your Alliance discovered the Guardian's world?" he asked, focussing on Sarek's face, his eyes, for even the slightest hint of recognition.

Not surprisingly, there was none. "I know of no world so designated, but perhaps we know it under another name. What are its coordinates?"

Kirk shook his head. "I don't have the coordinates. I doubt if anyone outside the very top level of Starfleet would. If Starfleet existed in this timeline." He turned to Scotty. "I'm a.s.suming its existence wasn't decla.s.sified in the time you came from?"

Scotty shook his head. "I cannot imagine it was," the engineer said, taking the remote from his utility belt. "But it's easy enough to find out. Computer, give me the coordinates of the Guardian's world."

The expected reply from the G.o.ddard's computer came instantly. "No data available."

Kirk took the remote. "Computer, summarize all existing data on the artifact known in the seventh decade of the twenty-third century as the Guardian of Forever."

"No data available," the computer repeated.

Sarek, who had been observing, silent and motionless except for his eyes, asked: "What is this 'Guardian' of which you speak?"

Kirk swallowed away the returning knot in his throat and gathered his thoughts for a moment. Then, in terms as accurate and impersonal as he could manage, he explained what little he knew about the Guardian and its world.

"I see," the Vulcan said when Kirk finished. "You believe that if you can find this artifact, it will show you what caused this timeline to come into existence? And then send you back in time to prevent it from happening?"

"I believe there's at least a chance. If we can find the Guardian. If it's in the mood to answer questions and give us a hand. If a hundred other things. But for any of this to happen, you'd have to be willing to help us find it. Are you?"

Sarek studied the two a moment, then nodded almost imperceptibly. "If you are telling the truth and if my own 'false memories' of a Borg-free Alliance-your 'Federation'- are indeed fragmentary memories of that other universe, then it is only logical that I help you. All Alliance worlds will benefit if we are successful. On the other hand, if you are lying..."

The Vulcan fell silent for a moment, his face revealing nothing. Again he offered a minuscule nod. "If we find that the so-called Guardian does exist in this timeline and can be located, I will go there myself and attempt to communicate with it. If all is as you say, you will be allowed to pose your own questions. Is that agreeable?"

Kirk breathed a sigh of relief. "Perfectly. Now, how complete and how extensive are your computer's charts of s.p.a.ce in and around Alliance territory?"

"All stellar systems within a hundred light-years of Alliance Prime- "

Sarek broke off abruptly as the viewscreen in the far wall flared into life. The Narisian communication officer's cat-like face appeared briefly before being replaced by that of Commander Varkan.

"What is it, Commander?"

"A fleet-wide alert has just been issued by Alliance Prime. All Alliance vessels are requested to report any sightings of the being I believe to be one of the two you insisted we bring on board the Wisdom."

Sarek glanced at the two humans. "Who initiated this request, Commander? Who knows of their existence?"

"The initial request to Alliance Prime was from Commander Tal of the D'Zidran . Tal had a peculiar story about tracking down an unknown vessel that had triggered one of the Klingon mines in the Arhennius system. He said- "

"A vessel called Enterprise?" Sarek asked sharply.

The Romulan's eyes widened in surprise. "How did you know that ?"

"Patch me through to Commander Tal," the Vulcan ordered, ignoring the commander's question. "Immediately."

"As you wish, Arbiter," Varkan said, obviously as displeased at this turn of events.

For a moment, the Narisian's face reappeared as the Romulan relayed Sarek's order. Sarek's screen momentarily lapsed into visual static as his personal comm unit was linked directly into the Alliance subs.p.a.ce network. As Sarek waited for Tal to appear, he said over his shoulder: "Apparently your Enterprise did not make a second jump after all, gentlemen."

After several minutes of discussion, Picard and the bridge crew-including Guinan this time-were no closer than before to having a workable plan. Something that Captain Scott had done at some indeterminate time in the past had brought the Borg to Earth centuries ahead of schedule. Only the Borg knew what and when that something was. And no one, not even Guinan, had yet come up with a possible, let alone practical, way of obtaining that knowledge. Picard, despite the revulsion the idea inspired, had suggested somehow exploiting the nightmarish link that still existed between himself and the Borg, but he had no idea how to proceed. It was not as if he could tap into the collective at will. And even if he could make a connection, he would more likely be taken over long before he had a chance to systematically search through the Borg memories-even if he knew how to make such a search.

But then they were hailed by the D'Zidran.

"On screen, Mr. Worf," Picard snapped.

Commander Tal, the other Guinan in her customary position a meter behind his left shoulder, appeared on the viewscreen a moment later. The rest of the D'Zidran's bridge crew, however, were conspicuous by their absence, giving the bridge the deserted look of a derelict. Tal's lips parted to speak but he froze in silence for a moment as his narrowing eyes fell on the Enterprise's Guinan, who this time had not scuttled out of range of the viewscreen.

Tal glanced over his shoulder at his Guinan, then looked back to the screen. "I see that she was not exaggerating." He was silent another moment before continuing, once again leaning forward, as if the motion could provide even more confidentiality than the empty bridge. "Tell me, Captain Picard, just as a matter of idle curiosity, do I have a duplicate in your universe?"

"There is a Tal," Picard said cautiously, "who has had quite an interesting career. Whether he is your duplicate, however- "

"Never mind," Tal said abruptly, waving a hand in dismissal. "It is not important."

"As you wish, Commander," Picard said. "I a.s.sume you would like us to transmit the information required to adapt your sensors to detect a cloaked ship."

Tal smiled. "I would, I imagine, if you would also be willing to give me the design for the cloaking device itself. From what Guinan tells me, it is considerably safer and certainly less spectacular than our own methods. But no, that is not why I contacted you. It is to let you know that the Alliance has already located your Captain Scott. And that the... individual who found him would like to speak with you."