Flake after flake drifted down outside the clear aluminium window. Jim had said they looked like stars. They did not look like stars. Stars moved with predictable regularity, more precise than clockwork. If Spock looked at a star and closed his eyes, he would know exactly where it would be when he opened them. Admittedly, with the distances involved, it was unlikely the star would have seemed to have moved at all to the naked eye, but magnify the time to an improbable length even for the lifespan of a Vulcan, and he would still know exactly where that star would be.

If he looked at a snowflake and closed his eyes, there would be no telling where the snowflake would be when he opened them, or even which snowflake it was. The vagaries of air movement, temperature, pollution in the atmosphere—they would all have their effect on where that snowflake would be a few seconds later.

But all of these snowflakes were falling to the ground and together they were making a soft, chill blanket over the earth. For this was Earth. This was the North American continent—Canada, to be more precise, and in the room behind him McCoy was reaching up to hang baubles on a freshly cut green conifer, and Jim was in the kitchen making mulled wine. The scent was rather attractive to him, although he had not admitted that out loud. He had always been fond of Earth spices, not only because they were different from Vulcan spices, of which there were many, but also because they reminded him of his mother. He remembered her baking cinnamon cookies and gingerbread. He remembered her using cloves and nutmeg and paprika and allspice. The scents coming from the kitchen now brought him back vividly to a time when he had been eight years old, past the Kahs-wan already, bonded to T’Pring, a full member of Vulcan society, and yet still a child.

He remembered standing there in the kitchen in the big cool house outside of Shi-Kahr, his head about the height of his mother’s elbow, watching her as she stirred ingredients in a bowl carved from soft stone. Outside, the desert heat shimmered against the windows, but inside a cooling breeze fluttered, directed through the thick-walled house by many artful vents and fans that were worked by the heating and cooling air. And his mother was making cookies, and reminiscing as humans seem to love to do.

‘I remember when I first came to Vulcan, Spock. This was before your father and I were married, and I was staying in a small place in the city. It had such thin walls. It was one of those turn of the century apartments, and it was so hot inside. I didn’t cook anything, couldn’t face a hot drink let alone a hot meal. The very air was hot in my lungs. I yearned for a proper old-fashioned air-conditioning unit, and the landlord only told me that on Vulcan one must become accustomed to heat. That it was illogical to install air-conditioning when the temperature outside was so high. I would become ill going from one to the other. I could have slapped her, standing there without a bead of sweat on her face – but of course I didn’t. I didn’t realise then that Vulcans were just as capable of scamming as anyone else. She didn’t want to pay for air-conditioning units. So I put up with the heat. I drank a lot of water. I survived on salad and fruit. And here I am now, making cookies. Do you want to taste the dough, Spock? Tell me if I’ve put in enough cinnamon?’

Of course he wanted to taste the dough. Had one of his colleagues from school walked in, he would have been mortified at being caught licking the spoon his mother handed him, but of course he wanted to taste the dough. Raw cookie dough was one of the great pleasures in life. That, and calculus.

Every snowflake that fell outside the window was made from smaller flakes, each of those smaller flakes unique. Despite the depth of his understanding, it still seemed amazing to Spock that he could live a lifetime and never see two identical snowflakes. But then he thought of his mother, and it made sense. He had occasionally seen people who looked like his mother, some a little like her and some so much like her that he had given a second glance. The galaxy was filled with humanoid individuals. But never would he meet one who replicated her entirely. Never would one have the precise pattern of her irides, the precise tone of her voice, all of her memories and thoughts and potential, all packaged together in the same person.

Even though Spock had lived and died and lived again, he didn’t think he would ever get used to the loss of his mother. He remembered her more strongly at times like this, at such human times, surrounded by human traditions here on Earth, the precipitation coming from the sky made of Earth water and falling on Earth ground. There was such a melange of traditions here. McCoy was decorating the Christmas tree, although he did not believe in God. Jim had placed a menorah on the windowsill and lit the candles, although Judaism was slightly overshadowed by a history of Christianity in his mixed family history. Humans seemed so capable of drawing all these things together, bending to change, encompassing other beliefs. They barely even remembered the pagan rituals that demanded the tree, the log, the fire.

Some humans, he reminded himself. There were still those humans who clamoured for the status quo, who argued that the Mars Colonies should only be open to settlers from Earth, that Starfleet was a human organisation. But the majority of humans bent and flexed and survived. Here were pagan traditions wrapped in Abrahamic traditions wrapped in atheism, all in the same house. He didn’t have any Vulcan traditions to add, not for this time of year. There was not a cold season, as such, where he came from on Vulcan. There were no short days and long nights. There were no reasons to light flames and shoot off fireworks and to feast to stave off the cold and dark. There were rituals for other times, for the driest times and the hottest times, mostly; rituals that no Vulcan would ever admit were illogical. But there was no Christmas, Diwali, or Hanukkah.

He remembered how his mother had been after his rebirth. Thin, elegant. She had reminded him of a crane, or perhaps a heron. She always seemed to wear greys and blues as if she were reminding herself of the Earth sky and the Earth seas. Her hands had been so thin and delicately boned. He remembered the sinews of her neck and the pouching of her skin that led down to a chest that had lost its fullness. That mother who had baked cookies had had full lips and breasts, smooth skin. She had been the picture of health and happiness. And after his rebirth she had been happy, too, but there was very little that modern medicine could do in the end about aging. In the end the body could go on no longer. Bones and skin thinned, became paper-like, brittle, tired. Hair lost its colour. Even the eyes seemed dull.

Flake after flake drifted down, and Spock pressed his hand against the cold pane, thinking of his mother and how much she loved snow. They had spent a couple of vacations on America’s east coast and Spock had experienced Earth winters, but mostly he remembered the sparkle in his mother’s eyes and the red of her cheeks when she went outside muffled in scarf and gloves and hat, towing him behind her on a sled and promising him that snow really was fun. He remembered sitting on that sled in the biting cold, clenched between her thighs and with her arms on either side of him, shooting down a hill over the glistening snow, and hearing his mother whoop. She had never made a noise like that on Vulcan, never. She made him think of the flowers that come up in the desert after the rain. The snow had brought her to a peak of vitality.

His memory was odd and tattered after his rebirth, but some things he remembered so clearly that it was like watching a hologram in his mind. Snowflakes were not like stars, he thought. They were like his mother. Unique and beautiful, and so painfully short-lived.