Preface

Paris, in some unknown region of space
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/43678740.

Rating:
General Audiences
Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
M/M
Fandom:
Petit-Cénacle RPF, Star Trek - Various Authors
Relationship:
Théophile Gautier/James T. Kirk, The Petit Cénacule
Character:
Théophile Gautier, James T. Kirk, Other canon characters
Additional Tags:
Crossover, Time Travel, Paris - Freeform, Shakespeare, romantics, IN SPACE!, canon-typical orientalism (both canons), apologies to Théo for stealing the plot of Arria Marcella, or was Arria Marcella autobiographical???, we'll never know for sure
Language:
English
Collections:
Yuletide 2022
Stats:
Published: 2022-12-18 Words: 6,375 Chapters: 1/1

Paris, in some unknown region of space

Summary

Théo travels in time (mostly by accident), meets a new friend, has a one-night stand, goes to see a play. A fairly ordinary day in the life of a young Romantic poet, really.

Notes

Thank you to Pilferingapples for spag beta and general handholding!

Paris, in some unknown region of space

Elle est belle pourtant: regarde l’horizon
Qui s’ouvre devant nous, éclatant de lumières...
Va, nous saurons franchir ces débiles barrières
Qui nous tiennent comme en prison.

---un grand artiste dont s’honore la France

Among the group of young Romanticists were many an artist, writer, composer and architect, but there were also those who made no particular mark on the history of the Arts, beyond enjoying them, and they also deserve a place in our histories. One of the most singular was a man who entered our company mysteriously and absent any introduction, and left us even more mysteriously.

A certain eccentricity in dress was nearly obligatory among that set. And if nothing else, his costume would have endeared him to us, for he appeared among us dressed as if he had raided the clothes-closets of, on one side, a grandfather who was a marveilleuse, and on the other side, a grandfather who was a general of Napoleon. Among a coterie of poets who dressed in medieval doublets and Oriental drapery, his twined golden braid and voluminous frock-coats of blue velvet still stood out, but far less so than in any other company!

Otherwise, he had the look of any other man of Paris: brown hair, of which the most memorable aspect was the sideburns; two eyes; a nose; a mouth. Where some of my comrades appeared older than they looked - a youthful face and figure belied by a wise and weathered mien - he gave the opposite impression. Still and quiet you might have taken him for a man of middle years, but in his speech, his movement, his passions and opinions, he seemed far younger.

He was if anything too eager to drink wine from a skull, though certain of our more wild orgies he held himself apart from with an incongruous delicacy. He spoke several languages, though generally poorly. He was a tolerably good musician on the harpsichord or pianoforte, and would happily perform for hours in return for the slightest appreciation; this granted him entry to some gatherings that might otherwise have drawn their cordon before him, although he protested to possess no reliable taste when it came to music, and would only play songs as requested.

All art would put him into raptures, and he valued above all being in its very presence; an engraving of great painting or architecture he loudly rated no better than a tale told to a child, but he would stop in the street to marvel at the framing of a plain window in the most humble of buildings. He would not play from printed music but would attend the most experimental of concerts, whether the performers knew their instruments or not. As for literature, he appreciated it, in all of its forms. Hugo he worshiped; Dumas he worshiped; Nodier he worshiped; Lamartine he worshiped. Even so minor and unknown a poet or playwright as Mac-Keat or O'Neddy or Gautier he approached with an awkward reverence that I cannot disparage without the most rank hypocrisy, but several of us took it among ourselves to break him of the tendency of too great and too volubly unalloyed an admiration of ourselves. In that age we had largely become familiar enough with even the great Hugo to admit to the man's faults and had no desire to be forcibly dispossessed of our own.

We were, in large part, successful in this mission. There were only two among us who he seemed to still approach only with near-fearful worship, those being the good Gerard and Pétrus Borel. Why anyone would gasp away from the merest hint of censure from the gentle Gérard was difficult to conceive. Borel, perhaps, one could understand, for even among his closest intimates he could make the world seem to whirl around his spinning center; and then, our newcomer had sufficient cause for caution in that man's sanguine company, for there was one great flaw in his tastes: he liked everything.

Being one who has at times been accused of this same fault, perhaps with cause, I dare not criticize too strongly. But his admiration for Hugo was as much as for Racine; Dumas the same as Voltaire, who was the same as Moliére. Auber was as transcendent as Berlioz, David as phosphorescent as Delacroix, the Arc de Triomphe as annihilating as Notre Dame.

As for his politics, they were more or less the same. His opinions of Phalansterians and Ultra-Royalists were equal to his opinions of National Guardsmen and Jacobins; one could not provoke him to reduce his high opinion of Napoleon Bonaparte, and one could not provoke him to produce any opinion whatsoever of political lycanthropy. These paradoxes rather endeared than enraged the greater part of our group; he carried the sublime and the grotesque and the banal all together in one hand, in the image of a mascot of the ridiculous.

He went by the name of Trelane de Gothos; most certainly, being the sort of name it was, it was a Romanticist's pseudonym, but if he had another I never knew it. He did not offer any other, and we would not have asked.

I, having at that time abandoned the practice of politics, blush to admit that on occasion, in search of entertainment we would attempt to provoke him into admitting the least Romanticist opinions we could unearth in him, with the aid of a bottle of wine or absinthe. Some times it was arts, sometimes it was politics, and most particularly the untarnishable glory and manliness of Napoleon Buonaparte and his great imperial victories, upon which M. de Gothos could declaim for an hour at a time, with enough wine to loosen his tongue.

On one evening we sat together in the corner of the tavern and he had been whipped into a froth of enthusiasm for his favorite Emperor, when the room was struck with one of those general silences that can occur in even the rowdiest of companies. I don't recall what it was he said, but I recall that the whole room heard him, and I recall perfectly Borel replying, from across the room where he sat next to Gérard:

"Eight million murdered men."

The silence was tumbled away under a rill of anxious laughter, as those silences always go, but M. de Gothos flushed red and then white and then stood unsteadily from the table. "I'm leaving now," he said, and made good as his word.

The night was young but it was near midwinter, cold and dark, and as the area of the tavern in those days still held more trees than houses, and as he had seemed nearly frightened in his departure, I was struck with a sudden attack of conscience, gave my leave to the company and sought him out in the street. He stood still under a tall old oak and whipped around when he heard my approach. "Théophile," he said, with a sigh of something like relief.

"I hope you have not been offended," I began, and he interrupted with a laugh.

"Offended!" he declared. "As if I could be offended by that! But how is it that you can been such artists - visionaries - geniuses - the avante of the avante-gard - the openers of vistas undreamed of until now by your whole human race - and yet so very provincial!"

"Provincial!" I said. "Perhaps I should be offended! And perhaps don't say that to Pétrus."

"Pétrus!" he replied, and I would swear he shuddered. "No. But yes, provincial. Napoleon was a great man. Lafayette is a great man, and Talleyrand, and Robespierre, and Saint-Just, and Danton, and Louis the Sixteenth, and the Fourteenth, and Pompadour, and Richelieu; and there will be more great ones in centuries to come, and there are more reaching back to the medieval ages of which you are so fond, and before; and all the little political arguments you make now will be as uninteresting in four hundred years as the gossip of Charlotte of Savoy's ladies-in-waiting is to you now. But the people! The people will still be great."

"You greatly underestimate my interest in the gossip of Queen Charlotte's ladies, and greatly overestimate my interest in the minutiae of political philosophy."

"Hah!" he said. "You would. Would you like to hear some medieval gossip, from the very source? I happen to be in possession of vast cosmic powers; we could go on a visit to the Paris of her day, as easily as snapping my fingers."

I did recall that he had made substantially more progress on the wine than I had, but I assumed that this had resulted in the imagination of vast cosmic powers; that it had simply given him the impetus to reveal them, I swear, did not once occur to me, and so I agreed.

"Yes, why not," he said. "Let's go. Who'll stop me? And then perhaps you'll see."

At the snap of his fingers a great shiver passed through me. The Paris streets in a dark evening are their own fantasy; scents and whispers flow past one on business of which one knows nothing and needs to know nothing; but they seemed in that instant instead to flow through me.

In a paroxysm of sudden belief I half-expected to see the history of Paris spool past me like a clock unwinding, but instead, the night went out - as sudden as a snuffed candle - and when it re-formed around us, we were on no street of Paris I had ever imagined, medieval or otherwise.

We were in a curving corridor, only a few step away from where it met four other corridors to form a sort of broad atrium. The first impression one was given was of bright airiness; but at the same time there was a sense of being enclosed, deep underground. The walls, which met the ceiling at a mathematically oblique angle, were a pale, delicate, smooth gray, the same as the floor; but the effect, which might otherwise have been monotonous, was painted with great swathes of colored light, each surface a different color, as if we were under the largest cathedral windows imaginable, but with no visible source for the light.

In the atrium a door and a serving window marked what must have been a cafe of sorts, for several circular tables were set around it, made of a similarly unfamiliar material to the floors and the walls. The chairs set around them, still that pale gray, were graceful in the same sort of pristine mathematical way as all of the architecture in this place, and seemed supremely comfortable from the way their inhabitants sprawled over them with beakers of drink in their hands.

One table was occupied by a group of three. Two of them were pleasant-looking young men who would not have been out of place at any Parisian restaurant, barring their fashion. They both wore black trousers that flared out at the calves, and short fitted tunics with a fine drape that caught the light almost like velvet, in gloriously vibrant yellow and red trimmed in gold.

Their companion, while dressed in costume similar to theirs, though more subdued in color, resembled nothing so much as someone costumed as the King of Cats for a masquerade, though as someone with a fair amount of experience with that sort of costume, I could tell it was not a mere false head or wig. His pointed ears flicked back and forth as expressively as my own pet's, and his eyes showed slitted pupils against solid gold. A coat of auburn fur closely covered his face, flowing into luxurious sideburns all the way down his neck, framing a leonine nose and mouth.

It was this more than the rest that inspired me to turn to my companion and say, "Monsieur de Gothos, I do not believe this is the Paris you promised me."

He too was watching the men, but with the same half-panicked stare he set sometimes on Petrus or Gerard. "I think I've made a mistake," he said, and grabbed my arm. "Run."

He pulled me the other way down the corridor, and I followed at a rapid pace. After a sharp turn he ran straight toward what appeared to be an unbroken wall, but as we approached it, it slid open like the scarab wings of an alabaster Egyptian amulet-box, and then closed behind as we passed through.

The room we entered was filled with furniture in low, solid shapes, and a profusion of plants in pots. It gave the general impression of an orangery, if it had windows, and if any of the plants had been familiar to me in the least.

"I must have made a time error again," M. de Gothos said, and then swore in a rather pedestrian fashion as he dropped his grip on my arm.

"So my friends and I have not been tragically wrong about the Paris of Charles VII after all?"

"I was supposed to bring us 400 years into the past! I miscalculated the polarity somewhere because we are most definitely 400 years in the future. And to find ourselves on the same sphere as them!" He draped himself theatrically over one of the boxy pieces of furniture and declaimed, in a way that would have done any star of the comedie-francaise proud, "Monsieur Gautier, I do believe I am cursed." And then, with a birdlike grace, he sat up again, alert with anxiety. "Curses, and curses! They've found us. Monsieur, quickly, hide. They won't know I've brought you along, and they won't think to check."

Caught up in his sudden terror, I found myself a niche in a corner of the wall, shielded by the heavy foliage of several potted trees and a latticework screen that recalled the patternwork of Moorish architecture in Spain, and not before time, because I soon heard another voice.

I had not noticed anyone enter the room, so I peered curiously through a gap in the leaves. M. de Gothos was still alone - or rather, he was conversing with an angelic ball of light which glowed before him. I wondered if I ought to prostrate myself, but it did not seem to be casting out proclamations from God - or, at least, no more so than any worried mother!

"You promised you would stay safe on Earth, sweetie," it said, in a warm feminine voice. "That was the deal! We let you go play your favorite game because you swore to us that you were adult enough to be responsible now."

"I am!" he said, and pounded one fist against the surface where he sat. "I was going to stay on Earth, I don't know what happened! I think I made a temporal error. A small one."

"You also swore you would stay in the nineteenth century," the angel replied, with a disappointment familiar to me from my own mother's voice a decade or so ago. "And you also forgot to factor in orbital drift! You're lucky we still have the training bands on, or you might have ended up in deep space and it would have taken much longer to find you."

"Orbital drift! Obviously!" M. de Gothos said.

"Yes," the luminous orb replied. "Now come along: playtime's over, and we'll see the next time we let you have an unsupervised outing."

"But mother!" he began, and then neither of them were there.

I stood where I was for a fair amount of time, half-certain that surely something else must happen, but nothing did: some of the leaves of the plants began to rustle in a soft breeze from a grating in the corner of the ceiling, and that was it. Finally I stepped out of my niche.

M. de Gothos, it seemed, had been even younger than he had presented himself to be, and still, in theory, in need of parental care, but what he might be, I might not even hazard a guess. He had been dragged back home by the scruff of his neck; but he had been correct. She had not known I was there, or thought to check.

But where, after all, was I? It was certainly the sort of opportunity no experienced traveler would squander. I took a turn about the room, and was finally able to identify a single pineapple plant among the varied foliage. I also discovered a single small, round window, draped only by a vining shrub that seemed determined to obscure it entirely.

The view through the window was not like anything I had ever seen, and I do not know that I can give a fair account of it now. The nearest comparison I can make is the horizonless starry dark of a moonless night at sea, but it was not dark, and there was a horizon. The window overlooked a jagged, rocky prospect that shone a deep, deep red where light struck it, like red blood so rich that the color devoured itself; in shadow it was a flat and featureless and bottomless black, like the sky above. The stars disconcerted me, and I gazed at them for some time before I realized that they were moving wrong: first that they spun around a star that was not Polaris, and too quickly; then that many of them must not be stars at all, for they moved independently of the others, as if they the lightning-bugs of America or the candle-lanterns of the Orient.

"It's beautiful, isn't," someone said behind me, and I turned, expecting almost another ball of featureless light, but it was a man, standing in the same door through which we'd come. It was the yellow-clad man we'd seen at the table, and he smiled at me. "I'll never get tired of looking at that view, no matter how many angles I see it from. You'll pardon me for following you here," he added, walking toward me with a hand outstretched to clasp, "But you looked a little bit out of place, from your clothes. Commander James T. Kirk, of the USS Lydia Sutherland. But call me Jim," he added, as we shook.

"Theophile Gautier," I replied. I am not particularly fond of the military, but a naval officer on leave is always a good time. American, he must be, though his French was uncommonly good if so. "Of Paris. And I'm afraid the clothes look out of place everywhere, that's rather the intent when one dresses like this."

He raised his eyebrows. "A man after my own heart. Yes, I heard you say that this wasn't Paris. It is, you know. This is the transfer station on 3317 Paris, one of the Trojan asteroids out by Jupiter."

The word 'asteroid' was new to me, but the rest seemed clear enough. I was somewhere far beyond the moon, and this man seemed perfectly at home there. "Having established where I am, could you inform me of when? My comrade promised me the fifteenth century, but he seemed to think we had come that far into the future instead of the past."

"It's the middle of the 23rd century, so if you're from the nineteenth, he'd be right," the Commander told me. "But pardon me if you seem somewhat... unperturbed, for a man of the nineteenth century finding himself near Jupiter."

"Time is but a phantasm," I said, "And we all swim in the same universal ocean of being. I'm a poet, and a Romantic," I clarified, as it seemed necessary. "I have been waiting for something like this all my life." Voyages not unlike this happened to Gerard on an irregular basis, after all, and while I was still not convinced this was more real than any other dream or vision, I meant not to waste it on hysterics.

"A poet!" he said. "Look, would you like to come back and help me finish a couple of bottles? My companions have abandoned me, and a shore leave is always better for an interesting new friend." And so I followed him back to the meeting of corridors where this adventure had commenced, in a bright hope that it would continue in an even grander spirit than it had begun.

"Your companions?" I asked.

He waved a hand expressively. "Gary's pulled. He won't be back until tomorrow morning, probably. I think he was trying to set me up with M'ssiew, which was very kind of him, but it was obvious from the start what was going to happen. So I'm at loose ends for the last day of shore leave, until ol' Lydia is finished with her emergency repair up in the Trojan-3 spacedock. And what's become of your companion?"

"I'm not entirely certain," I said. "I think his mother hauled him back, to wherever he had come from. I am afraid I am not terribly familiar with the ways of beings who traverse time and space at their will."

"Are any of us? Does that mean you don't have a way back?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead," I admitted frankly.

"Well. I can't promise you a ride home," he said, "But stranded travellers in time are the work of a Starfleet officer, if anything is, and after the repair we're scheduled for Earth. If anyone knows a way to get you home, it will be clever boys in the research department at Command. If you stick with me I can promise you our best try. And until then, I can do my best to show you the best the 23rd century has to offer. Although on this particular rock, it's not much."

We had returned to the crossing of corridors where I had originally arrived. He retrieved a small package from under the table and then frowned. "It does have better than this, though. Let's try something more exciting. I know a place-- well, you'll see."

We traveled down more gently curving corridors, mostly unpeopled, still scattered with that sourceless colored light, until we reached an area where some of the ceiling and floors showed unfinished red stone, as if to promise us that now we were truly under ground-- whatever strange ground this was.

"Here we are. The Argelian Lounge. Home-away-from-home for all spacemen who wish they'd landed on a better rock for shore leave."

"Algerian?" I said, mishearing.

"No, Argelian. Although the confusion is understandable," he added, and pressed a panel to open another sliding door, onto a room out of a Romantic's dream.

Music like none I had heard before, but filled with a haunting longing, drifted from no source I could see through a room full of richly-embroidered cloth in deep jewel colors; all the room was ornamented in gold. We sat on cushions under a low table in a corner and watched a beautiful women clad only in veils of gauze writhe languorously to the music. It was impossible to look away, for every motion seemed to imply that her already-precarious clothing would fail her, and also her skin was blue, and she had antennae like a snail's, neither of which detracted from her beauty at all.

"She's not Argelian," Kirk leaned across the table to assure me. "Or even Orion; but she's not bad, is she?"

No, she wasn't!

A nightmare-dream of writhing violet tentacles approached our table, and Kirk said we'd have a bottle for the tablle.

"A bottle of what, sir?" the tentacled person asked with evident patience.

Kirk grinned at me, and said, "Bring us the oldest bottle you have, in honor of my friend here."

The bottle was dusty, and green.

"What is it?" Kirk asked the person curiously. A tentacle held it up to the nearest light, and we were given the answer: "It's green."

"It's absinthe," I knew immediately on smelling it. "But sweeter than I am used to."

"It's almost definitely not poison, then."

It was absinthe, but not like any of my Paris; it had the complexity of the best I'd had before, but the bitterness was rich and almost honeyed, and one felt one could drink it forever without noticing. It was as if someone had recreated absinthe from a rapturous description in a poem, without having ever tasted it himself. We finished a bottle, and then something bright blue and abrasively harsh enough for two bottles in, which I did not recognize at all, and I lay back on my hands and regretted the lack of even a single pipe among the rest of the decadent decor of the place.

"Smoking," Kirk said thoughtfully. "That was a favorite 19th century vice, of course! I'm afraid we stick with other vices, out in the black. The air is too precious to use anything recreationally that might pollute it."

I realized then that I had seen not a single flame since I arrived. There were no hearths; the light shone like moonlight, or prism-light, from no visible source, and I had seen not a single cigar or pipe, and it suddenly struck me like a bolt of lightning that I was not on Earth. "You have made me so welcome that I have forgotten we are on Jupiter!" I exclaimed. "So if I cannot try a cigar, what other vices do you practice here?"

"I think the most common haven't changed much in millennia," he said. "I've been up for sixteen hours, and I think you've had a long day - would you care to come back to my room here?"

The room had only one bed, and as different from the sybaritic luxury of the Argelian Lounge as could be imagined. A simple rectangular couch, upholstered in the shade of vibrant orange that seemed to be favored here, when the colored lights were not enough. There was a single heavy-looking cushion for the neck, and no sheets or blankets. A ledge built into the wall served as a shelf for the package he still carried, and the most perfectly simple desk and chair completed the entire furnishing.

"I know it doesn't look comfortable," he admitted, "but in a sealed habitat, the temperature is always exactly as you want it, and blankets only get in the way. Depending on what you're using it for."

"It's hardly large enough for two, unless they're willing to get to know each other very, very well," I replied.

Luckily, we were both amenable to that idea.

Later, he sat up and laughed. "I've just realized. Your first introduction to the 23rd century was a human flirting with a Caitian. That must have been a shock."

"Oh, that's not what's disconcerted me most, I assure you," I said. "I have a very nice lion costume at home and it's done me great service, only the head is hard to breathe through and makes it difficult to engage in certain maneuvers. The idea that someday one wouldn't have to pretend is delightful. I don't suppose you could introduce me to our server from the lounge?"

"If you're here long enough, I'll make it a promise. But Sulamids don't have nearly as much in common with humans as Caitians do, it takes some unusual knowledge to know what to do. Luckily, I have considerable experience, if you'd like some advice."

In what was not truly morning, for in the time we slept the sun had set and risen on 3317 Paris twice, he went to another alcove in the wall which was able to produce whatever food we might desire, and as we ate he asked, "So what do you find most disconcerting here?"

"That everybody speaks perfect Parisian French indistinguishable from my own," I admitted. "That France should dominate the worlds of the future is at least flattering; but surely in four centuries, the language would have changed as much as in the four centuries before my time."

"In that case, how did you expect to navigate the middle ages?"

"Oh, that language I can speak."

"A poet. Well, I'm afraid to disappoint you: I'm not speaking French, I'm speaking Federation English. There's a device built into this base, just like in our ships, which translates any language known to Starfleet into any other. It's probably the first time it's had to handle 19th Century French, but it seems to be up to the job."

"You're speaking English," I said doubtfully.

"Let me prove it to you." He pulled down the package he had carried all of yesterday and opened it up. "It's books. Old paper books. I'm something of a collector. It's not fashionable these days; Gary caught me book hunting again and dragged me out of the place, he calls me 'a walking pile of books'. But there's something about printed out words on paper." He skimmed through them and then handed them to me "These should be safe enough, I think."

There were three volumes, bound not in leather or paper but something of an unfamiliar texture, but the titles were mostly familiar: The Count of Monte Cristo; Faust; The Tempest. But the first two were clearly in English translation, and the latter in the original. But glancing over the pages gave me an uneasy sensation, like I was looking at both English and French at once. I close the first two quickly but I could not resist the temptation to linger over the Shakespeare, strange and uneasy as it was.

"Are you fond of Shakespeare, then?" he asked.

"Of course!"

"A man of taste. Well, that solves one problem. I'm not due back on the ship until the end of beta shift, and there's not much left to do on this rock, but anywhere with more than the critical mass of people will have Shakespeare being performed somewhere. Let's go find out."

The theater he led me to was nothing more than a square room; a few dozen chairs were set around the walls, and we entered and sat down without any sign of a ticket-taker or even an usher. I asked Jim about this as we waited for the play to begin and he told me that there were no tickets. That in fact there was no currency in this future world, and he explained to me an economy that we have not the space to reproduce here. It would require I think an entire treatise by someone far better schooled in the subject than myself, though in Jim's voice it seemed as clear and limpid as any schoolboy arithmetic. I will say only that the Fourierists have much to look forward to, if they have the time to wait.

The play itself, A Winter's Tale, was marvelous, though staged like nothing I have seen outside of informal readings done of an evening among friends. The actors wore the clothing that would be ordinary for their characters in this time - the men in boots, trousers, and tunics decorated in blocks of color; the women in dresses that one may strongly hope will come into fashion in fewer centuries, for the skirts reached barely the length of their fingertips and all of their long legs were revealed down to knee-high boots; the creatures with more or less limbs than a human each dressed after their own kind, or perhaps not at all.

But the poetry! To hear Shakespeare spoken in the pure language of the original English, as it was written centuries ago, but to understand it as if it was my mother tongue - it was an experience that I cannot replicate and wish only that I could share it with some of my friends. Never will I be able to read Shakespeare again without remembering that day, the creature like a small two-legged pig in trousers speaking Leontes' lines with the greatest of passion, Perdita with her hair piled high above her head and her skirt high above her knees, the bear, who was also cast as Florizel, wearing his own fur, and the poetry of the lines ringing out in a beauty undimmed by any centuries.

Jim beside me was as rapt as I, and we sat in silence for a few moments after the performers left the stage, until we were interrupted by a chime. Jim pulled a small metal box from a pocket and it spoke in a man's voice, "Commander, we have a visitor on board. Can you cut short your leave?"

"Of course," he replied. "I'll be bringing a guest on board as well. Two to beam up in five minutes?"

"Sorry about that," he told me, as he returned the device to his pocket. "Could just be Gary; he gets possessive sometimes, comes up with excuses. But he called me Commander, so I probably do need to be there. Let's head out into the hall; it's impolite to beam up from a private space."

"Beam up?" I asked.

"It's how we're getting to the ship. It's a shame I can't take you up on a shuttle - show her to you from the outside - but we came down by transporter so we'll go up that way. Blink and you'll miss it. As easy as the way you got here."

We were greeted on board the ship by Lieutenant Mitchell, who informed his commander that a Starfleet Commodore was waiting in the briefing room. "Jim," he said. "I don't know what he wants, but he said to bring your guest along; I didn't even know you'd have a guest. Do you want me to make sure there's security?"

"My guest's a time traveler," he said. "That sort of thing seems to go with the job. We'll be alright. I can let you know if something comes up."

The briefing room was another curved gray space, down a series of curved gray corridors, but the man inside was someone I knew, and he knew me. "Théo!" he said, and pulled me into a comprehensive hug.

"Pétrus!" I replied when I had breath. "What are you doing here? Did you travel in time as well?"

"Oh, nothing so fancy, I just never got around to dying," he said. "But look at you! I had almost talked myself out of believing in it, and here you are!"

"Commodore Champavert," Jim said, leaning on the wall behind me. "Your reputation proceeds you. I was going to call this an unexpected honor, but it looks like I'd be wrong."

"Yes, Théo told me four hundred years ago to meet him here to get him home," Pétrus said. "And in particular to wait until after the Shakespeare was over."

"Good. I don't think even in four hundred years I'd have forgiven you if I'd missed that. And Commodore?" I shook my head. "I am not even surprised that you never got around to dying, but I didn't think I'd ever see you a military officer?"

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Théo, especially after four hundred years," he said. "And a man must make a living."

"Jim here has just finished explaining to me that he mustn't, not anymore."

Pétrus looked startled, and then laughed. "Oh, you mean working for money! I'd forgotten about that."

"You weren't always good at remembering even when you needed to."

"A man can't live on poetry alone, even if his other necessities are supplied. Besides, there's some debate as to whether Starfleet is an art movement that thinks it's a military or a military that thinks it's an art movement."

"We're primarily scientific explorers," Jim spoke up.

"Let him keep thinking that," Pétrus told me in a loud aside.

"Do you have a way to send him back in time?"

"I don't, actually. But after a few lifetimes out in the stars you tend to make some friends, and I happen to know a Traveler, who will have no difficulty. With your permission to invite him aboard your ship, Commander."

"Granted, of course."

Pétrus nodded, and pulled out a device like Jim's, but smaller, and said into it, "Would you mind dropping by? A mutual friend is in town, and I could use some help."

"You know I am always happy to help," a voice started from the device and then faded into reality, along with a man, who was also very familiar. "Théo!" he said. "It's been a long time. At least I feel like it's been a long time."

"He's not always great about keeping track of time, or quite remembering where he is," Pétrus told me, "But he always manages to get where he's going. Gérard, it's been only a day for him since he's seen you, but probably longer for you. He needs to go back to his proper place in the timestream. We've already left it too long, really, but I couldn't let him miss the Shakespeare."

"No, you're right," Gérard said. "He needs to get back. Do you want to say your farewells first?"

"If you're not going to see me again for four hundred years," I told Pétrus, "I want a proper farewell."

"What else?" he said, and then swept me off my feet into the most comprehensive kiss I'd ever experienced. "When you get home, tomorrow, tell me when I need to meet you. And then tell me I need to get good enough to live up to that."

"I will," I said, when I'd caught my breath, and then Jim said, "Well, if he gets a proper goodbye, I want one too," and did the same.

"And now we really do need to go," Gérard told me, "Or you'll never get around to it; I know you. Take my hand."

And then I was in a dark place that smelled of my Paris, the one on Earth, the one I knew so well. Gérard was still holding my hand, and smiled sweetly over at me. "Théo," he said, "Thank you for everything. And for being what you are, and were. Also, if they get a proper goodbye, so do I."

His kiss was gentle and slow and had a field of stars strewn in it, and when I opened my eyes again, he was gone, and I was standing at my own front door. It was not yet midnight of the day I had run after Trelane de Gothos; even the cat had not missed me yet.

Afterword

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