The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

  Hikaru slept peacefully beside her. The faint light gleamed on his shoulders. He lay face-down with his head pillowed on his arms, turned toward her. Yesterday, they had both realized they wanted, and needed, to spend as much time together as they could, even if he were soon to leave the Enterprise .

  He was so gentle ... Mandala did not like to think of him hardened by the violence he would encounter in his next assignment. But she could not say so to him. Her reasons were too selfish; and she would, in effect, be telling him to give up his ambitions.

  He might be strong enough to come through the experience unchanged. It was possible. But it was about as likely as his chances of advancing farther without making the transfer at all.

  She pushed away the depressing thoughts, for she still felt exhilarated by her dream. Her heart beat quickly; she was excited. She leaned down and kissed the point of Hikaru’s shoulder. She kissed the corner of his jaw, his ear, his temple. His eyes opened, closed, opened.

  He drew in a long breath. “I’m glad you woke me up.”

  “I’m glad you woke up.” She brushed her fingertips languorously up and down his back. He shivered. “You got me out of some nightmare,” he said.

  Bad?

  “It seems like it... but I can’t remember anything about it, now.”

  She moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulders, cuddling him. He hugged her tight, burying his face in her long loose hair, until he had shaken off the unease, and began to respond to her.

  She leaned over him, letting her hair fall down in a curtain around them. When it tickled his neck and shoulders, he smiled. She caressed him, drawing warm patterns with her fingers and cool ones with her ruby ring.

  “You are so beautiful,” Mandala said, and bent down to kiss him again before he could think of anything to say.

  Jenniver Aristeides and Snnanagfashtalli sat across from each other in the duty room, playing chess.

  They both preferred the classical two-dimensional board to the 3-D versions; it was somehow cleaner and less fussy, but it retained its infinite complexity.

  “At least if I ask Mandala Flynn for a transfer she won’t spit in my face,” Jenniver said.

  “No,” said Fashtall. “She is not like the other one, she is not the spitting type.”

  “It’s just that I have such a hard time getting anybody to believe I don’t like to pound people into the ground every chance I get.” Jenniver shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame them.”

  Fashtall raised her sleek head and gazed across the table at her, the pupils in her maroon eyes widening.

  “ Ibelieve,” she said. ‘They will not say they do not believe you, when I am around. And no one will spit in your face.”

  “He never actually did, you know,” Jenniver said mildly. “He couldn’t reach that far anyway.”

  “Mandala Flynn’s predecessor is gone,” Fashtall said. “And Mandala Flynn is our officer. If she does not give you a transfer to Botany, she will tell you a reason, at least. I do not think she will hold you in place longer than she must, if she knows you are unhappy.”

  “I’m scared to talk to her,” Jenniver said.

  “She will not hurt you. And you will not hurt her. Have you watched her, at judo? No ordinary human on the ship could defeat her, not even the captain.”

  “Could you?” Jenniver asked.

  Fashtall blinked at her. “I do not play fair, by those rules.”

  The Changeling laughed. Reflecting that Fashtall had far more sense of humor than anyone else gave her credit for, Jenniver moved her queen’s pawn.

  After a moment, Fashtall growled.

  Jenniver smiled. “You’re not even in check.”

  “I will soon be. Driven by a pawn!” She made another irritated noise. “You think a move farther ahead than I, friend Jenniver, and I envy you.”

  She suddenly turned, the spotted fur at the back of her neck rising, bristling.

  “What is it?”

  “Something fell. Someone. In the observatory.”

  Fashtall bounded out of the duty room on all fours, and Jenniver followed, running easily in the absurdly light gravity. She passed Fashtall and reached the observatory first.

  Mr. Spock stood swaying in the middle of the dimly-lit room, his eyes rolled back so far they showed nothing but white crescents, his hair disarrayed, blood running down the side of his face from a gash in his left temple, and, most strangely of all—once Jenniver noticed it—out of uniform, wearing a flowing, dark-brown tunic rather than his uniform shirt. She hurried toward him: her boot crunched on a shard that cracked like plastic. She hesitated, afraid as she often was that she had inadvertently damaged some fragile possession of the frail people around her. But the floor was littered with the amber fragments: whatever the damage was, it was not something she had caused.

  Spock’s knees buckled and Jenniver forgot the broken bits around her: she leaped forward and caught the science officer before he fell. She held him up. Fashtall rose on her hind legs and touched his forehead.

  “Fever,” she said. “High—much too high even for a Vulcan.”

  Spock raised his head. “My observations ...” he said. “Entropy ...” There was a wild, confused look in his eyes. “Captain Kirk—”

  “Fashtall, you go wake up Dr. McCoy. I’ll help Mr. Spock to sick bay.”

  Snnanagfashtalli’s white whiskers bristled out: a gesture of agreement. She sprang over the broken instrument and disappeared into the corridor.

  “I am all right,” Spock said.

  “You’re bleeding, Mr. Spock.”

  He put his hand to his temple; his fingers came away wet with blood. Then he looked at his sleeve, brown silk, not blue velour.

  “Let me take you to sick bay,” she said. “Please.”

  “I am not in need of assistance!”

  She thought she was being cruel but she could not think of anything else to do but obey him. She was supporting most of his weight: she let him go, as slowly as she dared so he would have as much chance as she could give him to keep his feet. But as she had feared, his legs would not support him. He collapsed again, and again she kept him from falling.

  She looked at the wall across the room, not meeting his eyes: if she pretended she had not noticed, perhaps he could pretend she had not seen.

  “I am going to sick bay,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

  “Ensign Aristeides,” he said softly, “my pride does not require quite so much protection. I would be grateful for your help.”

  Leonard McCoy paced back and forth in his office, wondering what he had done to deserve such insomnia. The inexplicable period of unconsciousness in the transporter room, whatever that was all about, had done nothing to alleviate his tiredness; it only made it worse. And it made him worry about it more. He felt as if he had gone on a binge such as he had not indulged in since he was a peach-fuzzed undergraduate, despite his reputation—and his pose—as a hard drinker of the old southern school. But he had not had anything stronger than coffee—and precious little of that since he had begun having trouble sleeping—since coffee and brandy at the officers’ reception for Mandala Flynn: hardly an indulgence to come back and haunt him two months later.

  “Dr. McCoy!” Snnanagfashtalli rose up gracefully on her hind legs from the running position. “Mr. Spock is ill. Fever, at least three degrees Centigrade—”

  “He always has a fever of at least three degrees Centigrade.”

  “As do I,” Snarl said, flattening her ears. “In human terms.”

  Snarl was not a being to trade witticisms with; McCoy grew very serious very quickly.

  “Where is he?”

  “He remained conscious, so Ensign Aristeides is helping him to sick bay.”

  “Good. Thank you.” McCoy felt relieved when Snarl pricked up her tufted ears again.

  Jenniver Aristeides strode in, carrying Spock. The Vulcan lay unconscious in her arms, his long hands limp, his head thrown back. Every few seco
nds a drop of blood spattered on the floor.

  “He passed out just a minute ago.” Though the ensign loomed head and shoulders over McCoy, she spoke hesitantly. “I thought it was better to bring him than wait for a stretcher.”

  “You showed good judgment.” McCoy sighed. “I was afraid of this, he’s worked himself right into a fit of the vapors.”

  The quotation on page 47 is reprinted from The Iliad ofHomer , translated by Richmond Lattimore, by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Copyright 1951 by the University of Chicago.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  To Gene Roddenberry, for letting me into

  his universe for a while,

  and

  To David Hartwell, a singular friend.

  Epilogue

  Jim Kirk sat by Spock’s bedside, turning the strangely shaped bit of broken equipment over and over in his hands. He had never seen anything remotely like it before and he could not figure out what it was—or what it had been. This was the only piece large enough to inspect; the other shattered fragments lay jumbled together in a box nearby.

  McCoy came in and sat down, rubbing his eyes tiredly.

  “Bones,” Jim said, “I’ll call you when he starts to wake up. Why don’t you go get some sleep?”

  “That’s just the trouble, I’ve been trying,” McCoy said. “Whatever Spock did to himself so he wouldn’t need sleep, I think he gave it to me, too.”

  Jim rubbed his fingertip along the smooth curved amber surface, stopping at a broken edge.

  “I’ve felt uneasy for the last couple of days,” McCoy said. “As if something awful is about to happen, and I can’t do anything about it. Or it’s already happened, and I don’t even know about it.”

  Kirk grinned. “You’ve only felt it for a couple of days? I’ve been like that since we got within grabbing distance of that damned singularity.” He glanced at Spock, who had not moved at all since Kirk had come into the room. “Is he going to be all right, Bones?”

  “I think so.”

  “Aren’t you certain?” Kirk asked, startled, for he had only asked the question to get a reassuring answer.

  “I’m reasonably certain,” McCoy said, “but I don’t see how he got himself into this state to begin with. I’ve been expecting somebody to have to cart him in here with exhaustion for days—”

  “You knew he was going without sleep—”

  “Yeah.”

  “—and you didn’t tell me?”

  “What would you have done? Forbade it?” McCoy grinned. “I didn’t tell you because of medical ethics. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Not wanting to get my head bitten off by my captain.”

  “All right, all right. But what’s wrong with him, if it isn’t exhaustion?”

  “Itis exhaustion, but it’s the sort I’d expect if he’d been through tremendous physical exertion. A couple of Vulcan marathons, say—a hundred kilometres through the desert. The scalp wound is completely inexplicable. He didn’t get it when he fell—he reopened a graze that was already partly healed. And it was patched with hybrid skin synthetic. Spock knew I made some to match his genotype. He could have used it himself. Only he didn’t; the packet was still in storage, unopened.” He stopped, and shrugged. “Shall I go on?”

  “No. I can do that myself. He was out of uniform—I’ve never seen him out of uniform on the ship.

  And—” He hefted the weird piece of equipment—“this is nothing I’ve ever seen before. Scotty doesn’t know what it does. It’s mostly bioelectronics, which are so new they’re hard to come by. I’ve never signed a requisition for them, and there’s no record that we ever brought any on board the ship.”

  Mr. Spock, his awareness rising slowly through the depths of sleep, gradually became aware of the voices around him. They were discussing him, but as yet he could make no sense of the individual words. He tried to concentrate.

  “Something very strange is going on,” Jim Kirk said. “Something I don’t understand. And I don’t like that at all.”

  “Jim!” Spock sat up so quickly that every muscle and joint and sinew shrieked: he was aware of the sensation but impervious to it, as he should be, but for all the wrong reasons. He grabbed Jim Kirk’s arm. It was solid and real. Relief, and, yes, joy, overwhelmed the Vulcan. He slid his hand up Jim’s arm; he started to reach up to him, to lay his hand along the side of his face to feel the unsettling energy of Jim’s undamaged mind.

  He pulled back abruptly, shocked by his own impulses; he turned away, toward the wall, struggling to control himself.

  “Spock, what’s wrong? Bones—”

  “Well, you wanted him to wake up,” McCoy said drily.

  “Nothing is wrong, Captain,” Spock said. He eased himself back down onto the bunk. His voice was steady enough not to reveal that he was on the brink of laughter, of tears. “I am merely ... very glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too.” Kirk’s expression was quizzical. “You’ve been out quite a while.”

  “How long, Captain?” Spock asked urgently.

  “A couple of hours. Why?”

  Spock relaxed. “Because, sir, the singularity is in the process of converting itself into a very small black hole, what you would call, in Earth tradition, a Hawking black hole. When the conversion is complete, the system will explode.”

  Kirk leaped to his feet and started out the door.

  “Captain—” Spock said.

  Kirk glanced back.

  “TheEnterprise is in no danger,” the Vulcan said. “The process will continue for another six days at least.”

  “Oh,” Kirk said. He returned to Spock’s side. “All right, Mr. Spock. What happened?”

  Spock reached up and touched the bullet wound in his temple. It was barely perceptible, for McCoy had put more skin synthetic on the gash, and sealed it with transparent spray. His brown and gold silk shirt lay crumpled on a table across the room ... and Jim held the remains of the time-changer in his hands.

  “You were in the observatory,” Jim said. “Snarl heard you fall. Jenniver Aristeides brought you to sick bay. Do you remember?”

  What Spock remembered, he recalled all too well. He glanced from Jim to Dr. McCoy. As they were now, neitheir had existed in the alternate time-stream. And Spock had quite clear memories of a time-stream in which his observations proceeded smoothly: the singularity indeed did appear, and though he could not deduce its cause, it was clear from the beginning that it would soon self-destruct and cease to be a danger. The Enterprise had never been called to Aleph Prime. Dr. Mordreaux had never come on board, and Spock had detected no acceleration in the increase of entropy.

  And then he had reappeared in his observatory, dragged back to the Enterprise through space and time, to the place he belonged, and, simultaneously, it seemed, the miscalculation of his stamina caught up with him. Journey, or exhaustion, or both, caused him to lose consciousness.
<
br />   “Spock?” Jim asked gently. “Do you remember?”

  “No, Captain,” Spock said quite truthfully. “I cannot understand what happened.” He had not expected to remember the events in the time-loop he had turned back on itself and wiped out of existence. But he did.

  He had learned how fragile the continuum was. He had not restored it to its original form. He had only managed to-stitch it back together where it had torn most seriously; he had put patches over the worst of the rents, and hoped they would hold: perhaps he should not be so startled that the seams were not quite straight and the grain not quite smooth. If the inconsistencies were no worse than an inexplicable astronomical phenomenon that would have to remain a mystery, and conflicting sets of memories in his own mind, then perhaps he should accept them gracefully, and gratefully.

  “I apologize, Captain. I cannot explain what happened.”

  “You’ve got a bit of a concussion,” McCoy said. “Your memory may return when you’ve recovered from that.”

  Spock sincerely hoped it would not, but he did not say so.

  Kirk hefted the broken section of the time-changer. “Maybe you can at least explain what this is.”

  “Of course, Captain. It is an instrument which helped me to complete my assignment.” Though that was technically accurate, it was close enough to a lie for Spock to feel ashamed of himself for it.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I made it, Captain.”

  “There aren’t any bioelectronic components on this ship!”

  “Hey, Jim,” McCoy said, “lay off, will you?”

  “Sure, Bones, as soon as Mr. Spock answers my question.”

  “That was not a question, Captain,” Spock said. “It was a statement. However, it is quite true that the Enterprise carries no bioelectronics. If I may point it out, though, one of the most interesting properties of bioelectronic crystals is that they can be grown.” He reached for the time-changer.

  Kirk glared at him, then, quite suddenly, grinned. “Well, Mr. Spock,” he said. “I never thought of you as having a green thumb.”