He stepped into its sudden strike and grasped its throat, then drew it from the slithering group and raised it up to inspect it. It twisted in his hands. Several others coiled around his boots. He ignored them, as he ignored his two companions, though he was aware of everything, most particularly including the impression the scene must be making. Like the hero Ngarakkani, he would wrestle with the demons and defeat them.
The creature whipped its long lashing tail around his neck and began to squeeze. Kruge thought to unwind it from him, but its strength exceeded his. The harsh scales of its belly cut into his throat, squeezing the breath out of him. Darkness slipped slowly down around him.
The creature had tricked him into going on the defensive. He let its body tighten around him; he turned to the attack. He grabbed its throat with both his hands and squeezed. He began to twist.
He heard its bones begin to crunch. As he began to lose consciousness, its strength suddenly dissipated and it sagged away from him.
He cast the limply writhing body to the ground.
His subordinates gazed upon him with awe. He intensified their reaction by ignoring it. He tsked to Warrigul, who leapt up and sprang to his side, snarling at the twitching body of the creature.
Kruge pulled out his communicator.
“Torg,” he said easily, “I have found nothing of consequence. I am continuing the search.”
David sat forlornly on a stone outcropping. His world spread out around his vantage point. It was beautiful. It was strange, and growing stranger. It was destroying itself. The vines back on Regulus I had been a warning that he should have heeded, as he should have heeded the rogue equation in the primary Genesis description. Evolution was running wild. Each species was growing and changing and aiming for its own extinction, without creating any diversity, any new forms, to take over when the old died out. Not that it much mattered. If his estimates were right, the evolutionary process would be only about half done when the more violent geological processes tore the whole planet apart. Soon after that, the subatomic attractions would break down, and the entire mass of what had been the Mutara Nebula, what had been Genesis and its new star system, would degenerate into a homogeneous, gaseous blob, a fiery, structureless plasma: protomatter.
His shadow stretched far down the hillside as the sun set behind him. Night approached, a dark border overwhelming day. It reached the edge of Spock’s glade. The group of delicate fern-trees had grown and coarsened, turning from a patch of feathery emerald green to a smudge of bulbous gray, just in the few hours since he had left it.
He and Saavik had found a vantage point, but so far David had detected no sign of other intelligent life. His tricorder showed nothing, but it was of limited range. He had heard nothing over his communicator; if anyone else had fled Grissom before it was shot down, they were as reluctant to broadcast their presence to their attackers as was David. Perhaps they were listening to each other’s static.
More likely, no one else had survived. But until he was sure, he was keeping his communicator set to the Federation emergency channel.
Night fell quickly on Genesis. The land below the promontory had grown too dark for David to see anyone, friendly or malevolent. Darkness obscured everything, even the field of silver ice now covering the desert, nearly surrounding the glade, and grinding away at the base of the mountain itself. David rose and trudged back up the hill. Gnarled black trees with twisting exposed roots loomed over him, and great broken slabs of stone projected from the ground. Soon he reached the narrow, hidden cave they had stumbled upon.
He stepped inside, expecting the pale steady illumination of the camp light from Saavik’s kit. Instead he encountered darkness.
“Saavik—?” he whispered, but before her name had passed his lips she had uncovered the light again. She held her phaser aimed straight at him. She let her hand fall.
“Your footsteps…sounded different,” she said, in explanation and apology. She put the phaser away again. “This place is most discomforting.”
The Vulcan child whimpered. He lay huddled on a bed of tree branches, his face to the stone wall. Saavik had laid her coat over him. She turned to him, touched his shoulder, and said a word or two of comfort. David did not speak the language she was using, but he recognized it when he heard it.
“Why are you talking to him in Vulcan?” he said.
Saavik shrugged. “I know it is not logical. I know he cannot understand, but he would not understand any other language, either, and Vulcan is…the first language Spock taught me.”
David glanced at the child. “It’s hard to think of him as Spock,” he said.
“He is only a part of Spock. He is the physical part. The mind exists only in potential. He might perhaps become a reasoning being, with time and teaching. He is not so different from what I was when…when he found me—a scavenger, illiterate certainly, almost completely inarticulate…”
She shivered. He sat down next to her and put his arm across her shoulders. “You’re cold.”
“I choose not to perceive cold,” she said. She did not respond to his embrace.
The child suddenly cried out. David glanced up apprehensively, for they were beneath tons of stone. The gentle quake that followed the cry left the cave undisturbed, but the child moaned in pain. Saavik slid from beneath David’s arm and went to the boy’s side to tuck the black cloth and her maroon jacket more closely in around him.
“Sleep,” she said softly, in Vulcan.
David pulled out his tricorder and made a quick geological scan. The results gave him no comfort.
“This planet is aging in surges,” he said.
“And Spock with it,” Saavik said quietly.
David glanced at her, then at the boy, who had flung himself over.
“My gods—” David said.
An hour before, the child had had the appearance of a boy of eight or ten. Now he looked more like a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old.
“The child and the world are joined together,” Saavik said. She looked at David steadily, as if wishing—or daring—him to interpret events in a different way.
David had nothing to say that would give her, or himself, any comfort. He nodded.
“The Genesis wave is like a clock ticking…or a bomb,” he said. “For him and for the planet. And at the rate things are going…”
“How long?” Saavik asked. She thought that if they must die, sooner would be less painful than later. But though she accepted the logic of that conclusion, she was not yet ready to stop fighting for every instant of life left to her.
“Days…maybe hours,” David said. “It’s a chaotic system, Saavik. Which variable will pass the energy threshold and cause everything to disintegrate into protomatter…” He shook his head. “It’s completely unpredictable.” He looked away, and then, in such a low tone that Saavik almost did not hear him, he said, “I’m sorry.”
She nodded, accepting both his verdict and his grief.
“It will be hardest on Spock,” she said. “Soon…he will feel the burning of his Vulcan blood.”
“I don’t understand,” David said.
I should not have spoken of pon farr, she thought. It is not logical to burden David with one more thing about which he can do nothing. No one has ever found a way to free Vulcan men of the loss of emotional and physical control they endure every seventh year of their adult lives.
She was saved from having to choose between an explanation and a lie by the abrupt querulous bleating of David’s tricorder.
He pulled the instrument out and frowned over the life signs.
“Whoever they are,” he said, “they’re getting closer.”
Saavik estimated one chance in a thousand that other refugees from Grissom caused the signs, and five to ten chances in a thousand that whoever was tracking them had other than malicious intent. In all the other possibilities, the beings who had destroyed Grissom sought Saavik and David in order to inflict the same fate upon them. Still…a chance, eve
n if it was the chance to become a prisoner, was better odds than the certain death they faced by remaining on Genesis.
Saavik stood up. “I will go—”
“No!” David said sharply. “I’ll do it. Give me your phaser.”
Saavik did not want David, untrained as he was, to go out alone on a spy mission. She glanced at the Vulcan boy. She did not want to leave him alone, either, and she particularly did not want to leave David alone with him. She realized it would be marginally less dangerous, for David, if he were to go spying on the unknown entity.
And she could see that his guilt impelled him to undertake the mission. She offered him her phaser.
He touched her hand, took the weapon, and hurried out into the darkness.
A moment later the Vulcan child cried out in agony, just before the ground began to tremble.
Ten
The Enterprise sped free through space.
Excelsior lay far behind, still waiting for a tow. The communications channels were just beginning to come clear again. Kirk wondered if Uhura was all right. She was levelheaded. When Security came to the transporter station she should simply have thrown up her hands and surrendered. But accidents could happen, and Kirk could not help but worry. Nevertheless he was grateful to her, for without her help he might have the whole fleet converging on him. The one thing he knew he could not do, even to save McCoy’s sanity and Spock’s soul, was fire on another Starfleet ship.
“Estimating Genesis 2.9 hours, present speed,” Sulu said.
“Can we hold speed, Scotty?” Kirk asked.
“Aye, sir, the Enterprise has its second wind now.”
“Scan for vessels in pursuit,” Kirk said.
“Scanning…” The voice was an eerie facsimile of Spock’s. “Indications negative at this time.”
Kirk turned toward the science station. McCoy, at Spock’s old place, looked up and blinked.
“Did I…get it right…?” he asked.
“You did great, Bones,” Kirk said. “Just great.”
“Sir, Starfleet is calling Grissom again,” Chekov said. “Warning about us.”
“Response?”
Chekov glanced worriedly at his console. “Nothing. As before.”
“What’s Grissom up to?” Kirk said. “Will they join us, or fire on us?” he said, half to himself. “Mister Chekov, break radio silence. Send my compliments to Captain Esteban.”
“Aye, sir.”
Kirk rose and went to McCoy’s side.
“How we doing?” he said.
McCoy gave him a thoughtful and slightly sardonic glance, the look of a doctor who recognizes a bedside manner when it is being inflicted upon him.
“How are we doing?” he said. “Funny you should put it quite that way, Jim.” He paused, as if listening to a second conversation. “We are doing fine. But I’d feel safer giving him one of my kidneys than getting what’s scrambled up in my brain.”
“Admiral,” Chekov said, “there is no response from Grissom on any channel.”
“Keep trying, Mister Chekov. At regular intervals.”
Carol Marcus hurried up the steps of the tall Victorian house and knocked on the door. She waited apprehensively, looking back over the small town of Port Orchard. Beyond it, water sparkled slate-gray and silver in the autumn sun. The chilly salt air fluttered against the rhododendrons that grew all around the porch. They were heavily laden with the buds of next year’s flowers. She had hoped to see them in bloom, in the spring. But if that had still been possible, she would not have had to come here now, all alone.
The door opened. Carol turned, still dazzled by sunlight on the sea.
“I’m terribly sorry not to arrive when I said I would—I got lost,” she said. “I have something to give to Del March’s family, but I couldn’t find the address, I ended up in a park—” She stopped suddenly. She was practically babbling. “I’m sorry,” she said more calmly. “I’m Carol Marcus.”
“Come in.” Vance’s mother took Carol’s hand and led her inside. Her voice possessed the same low, quiet timbre as Vance’s. Her hand in Carol’s felt frail. “I’m Aquila Madison, and this is Terrence Laurier, Vance’s father.”
Both Vance’s parents were tall and slender, as he had been. Carol had expected them to be about her own age, for Vance had been only a few years older than David. But they were both considerably older than she, perhaps as much as twenty years. Aquila’s close-cropped curly hair was iron-gray. Terrence wore his longer, tied at the back of his neck, but it, too, had gone salt-and-pepper from its original black.
A leaded glass door opened from the foyer. Terrence and Aquila showed Carol into their living room. It was a high-ceilinged, airy place, carpeted with antique Oriental rugs. Aquila and Terrence sat side by side on a couch in front of the tall windows. Carol sat facing them and wondered what to say to them, how to start.
“Del never did outgrow that joke,” Aquila said.
“I thought I’d written the address down wrong,” Carol said. “Do you mean he meant people to go to a park?”
“No, my dear,” Aquila said, “he meant people to think they’d written the address down wrong.”
“I don’t understand. Where does his family live?”
“He has none,” Terrence said. “None he’ll admit to, anyway.”
“Then where did he live?”
“He lived here,” Aquila said.
“What you have to understand about Del,” Terrence said, “is that he made up nearly everything about himself—his name, his home, the relatives that only existed in a computer file, his background before he was twelve—everything.”
“But his records,” Carol said. “In this day and age—”
“He didn’t need too much,” Terrence said. “Not here—a false address, a few counterfeit relatives and school records. He had an uncanny rapport with computers, and the voice synthesizer he built stood in for an adult as long as nobody asked to meet it face to face. He was so young no one thought to be suspicious of him.”
“As it was, he and Vance had been friends for a year before Terrence and I realized just how odd some of the odd things about him were. Vance knew, but he couldn’t persuade Del to trust us.”
“How did you find out?”
“I tried to go to his house once,” Terrence said. “I went out all fired up with the intention of either jumping down somebody’s throat for never getting the kid any decent clothes, or offering to get him some myself.”
“When we finally found out where he was living—it was an abandoned house—we persuaded him to move in here. We have plenty of room.” Aquila made a quick gesture with one hand, indicating the house, the surroundings.
Carol found herself already under the spell of Terrence and Aquila’s home. It had the comfortable and comforting ambiance of a place lived in by people who loved each other, of a place lived in and cared for and cared about by the same people for a long time. Vance had told her that the Madisons, Aquila’s family, were some of the first black landholders in the area. Her ancestors had settled here three hundred years ago, long before the Federation, even before the region had been admitted to statehood in the previous political entity.
“Did you adopt him?”
“We wanted to. But he was terrified that if we found his people and asked them to give up legal custody, they’d make him go back. Arguing didn’t do any good—”
Carol nodded. She had been in a few arguments with Del March.
“—and besides, he might have been right.”
“We didn’t press him about it. We were afraid he might run away from us, too, and we were already very fond of him. Though he could be quite trying.”
“He did have a reputation for being…a little wild,” Carol said.
“In college, yes,” Aquila said. “Once he was of age and didn’t have to fear being shipped back to—whatever he was running from—he didn’t have to be careful never to attract any attention. He did get…‘a little wild.’ We were aw
fully worried about him for a few years. So was Vance…”
“I didn’t get to know him as well as I should have,” Carol admitted. “We just never got off on the right foot. He and my son David were very close, though.” Carol reached into her pack and drew out a roll of parchment. “I think you should have this. It was Del’s—he kept it on the wall of his office. And Vance made it.”
Aquila unrolled the parchment. In his strong, even calligraphy, Vance had copied seven stanzas of Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” Those were the stanzas from which Madison and March had taken the terminology for the sub-elementary particles they had described and discovered. Carol remembered the end of the poem: “For although common Snarks do no manner of harm,/Yet I feel it my duty to say/Some are Boojums—”
Aquila and Terrence read it over. Aquila smiled, brushed her fingertips across the parchment, and read it a second time. Terrence raised his head. He and Carol looked at each other. They could no longer avoid talking about Vance.
“I loved your son,” Carol said. “I don’t know if he told you, about us—”
“Of course he did,” Aquila said. “We were looking forward to your vacation next spring, we were hoping you would come with him when he visited.”
“I would have. He told me so much about you…Aquila, Terrence, he was such an extraordinary man. I’m so sorry—” She had to stop. If she said any more, she would start to cry again.
“Carol,” Terrence said, “what happened out there? We never thought Vance would work on a military project—”
“It wasn’t!” Carol said. “Oh, it wasn’t! It was supposed to be just the opposite.”
She told them about the project, and the least painful version of their son’s and their foster son’s deaths that she could without lying to them. But it still came down to the Spacelab team’s being caught in the middle of someone else’s quarrel.
When she finished, her voice shaking, Terrence and Aquila were desperately holding each other’s hands. Carol stood up. She did not want to inflict her own grief on them anymore, and she thought they might want to be alone.
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 40
