STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  She had certainly needed it, he thought, as engineering officer on a starship crewed primarily by Orions, Kzinti and Trisk.

  The Drelb astrophysicist was working alone in her lab amid a wild litter of computer printouts. She was standing at a tall corner desk, but when the doors opened she turned her enormous blue eyes with their long, realistic, but purely ornamental lashes toward Kirk and Kellogg. She did not speak, but the gelatinous cone of her body mass turned a soft rose color with pleasure, and a faint, pervasive odor akin to that of vanilla or baking bread drifted momentarily on the sterile air of the lab.

  Taking the welcome as she would have a verbal one, Kellogg said warmly, “I’m glad to be with you, too, Aurelia. This is Jim Kirk, captain of the Enterprise. We have a problem, and I thought you might be able to help us if you have time.”

  The Drelb’s glutinous bulk faded from rose to yellow, and developed bright kelly green stripes. The long eyelashes blinked, and somewhere in the protoplasm there was a shifting and a round, knobbly-tongued mouth formed. A soft voice inquired, “Is the problem theoretical?”

  “In a sense.” Kellogg drew up a stool to perch on.

  The blue eyes turned toward Kirk again, studying him. Then suddenly a deep blue suffused the entire tall cone, and that soft voice said, “Deep sorrow with you in your grief, Jim Kirk.”

  She said nothing further for a moment, but Kirk knew that her empathy was deep and genuine—the shift in color and smell were not polite fakes. Drelbs are among the politest species in the galaxy, but also among the most honest, a point not always in their favor. The few Drelbs that trouble to leave their home world know how revolting their appearance is to creatures of less free-form identity, and, since they are photosynthetic and practically indestructible, their first concern is generally to make those around them as comfortable as possible. Kirk was aware that the Drelb had produced those large, human blue eyes simply because she knew that humans are more comfortable if eye contact is made—even so, the gesture touched him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It is in connection with that incident that we need your help.”

  The Drelb shifted a little, settling into a comfortable blob of gelid protoplasm and retracting her white, delicate-fingered hands back into her body mass. The eyes remained, and he could see every variation of thought and feeling in them as he spoke of the ore transport, the events of the Tau Eridani Cloud, the Klingons and his interview with Trae.

  Aurelia did not speak, but the colors that moved through the viscous mass mirrored her feelings. When he quoted Spock’s first transmission from the Klingon vessel she turned a bright red-violet, and her eyes grew more intent and far less human. If she had been a Vulcan, reflected Kirk wryly, she would have remarked, “Fascinating.” As it was, she merely exuded an odor of cinnamon.

  “Trae of Vulcanis tells us that no alteration of a single event in history—either Earth’s or Klinzhai’s would have a predictable result. What I want to know is: Could the Klingons have gotten back in time to make that alteration?”

  “Ninety-eight percent affirmative, Jim Kirk,” she replied, after a moment’s mental calculation. “Temporary ignorance of precise method, but whiplash effect between gravitational fields of cloud and of white dwarf relating to Tillman’s constant offers high degree of probability.”

  A tentacle emerged from the body, snaked across the room, and plucked a slab of soft plastic calculating material from the far end of the table. Another tentacle snagged a calculator, and other limbs extruded to manipulate both items—the equivalent of a human operating a calculator with one hand and taking manual notes with the other. The Drelb’s body mass was vivid yellow now, with occasional throbs of red or violet as equations momentarily stumped her. After a time the calculating activity ceased. The Drelb seemed to settle a little, and her color went to a deep, contemplative violet and stayed there.

  “What about it?” asked Kellogg, speaking for the first time. “Can we do it?”

  The eyes, which had almost disappeared in the effort of Aurelia’s concentration, returned, and opened wide. “Temporary ignorance,” replied the Drelb again. “Presently calculating program to discover ways and means. Starship readouts at point of transport vanishment would help.”

  Kirk held out to her the plastic carrier with all the spools of data, recordings taken of all readout screens throughout that hellish journey from Starbase Twelve to Alpha Eridani III. A tentacle extruded to take them, hesitated, then turned into a dainty little white hand complete with pink-painted fingernails to remove the box from his palm. An area around the squashy top of the cone of the Drelb’s body turned warm gold with thanks, but she remained largely violet, preoccupied with the greater problems of astrophysics.

  After a moment the violet melted to a more businesslike red, and Aurelia turned away, oozing toward the computer terminal in a thick trail of silver snail-track. Kellogg hopped down from her stool, and walked to where Kirk stood.

  “End of interview,” she said in a low voice. “Drelbs aren’t much at long good-byes.” She raised her voice slightly, “ Do you need us for anything else, Aurelia?”

  The mouth materialized on the opposite side of the cone from the eyes this time, the side facing Kirk and the base commander. “Negative,” it replied. “I will expedite all solutions and reports. I am deeply glad for the challenge of this problem, and for the opportunity to meet you, Jim Kirk.”

  “And I for the chance to meet you, Aurelia,” replied Kirk. Like the Drelb, he spoke the truth. She flushed momentarily rose again with the pleasure at his sincerity, but was back in her violet study by the time Kirk and Kellogg were out the door. For all their empathy, Drelbs are businesslike creatures at what passes in them for heart.

  Kirk and Kellogg met McCoy in the base’s main cafeteria. Like messes the galaxy over, it was a vast room filled with half-occupied trestle tables of metal and plastic, the walls a neutral shade not violent enough to be actively displeasing to anyone or anything, with a close-woven floor-covering in orange and green patterns vaguely reminiscent of spilled food. At this point in the shift the huge room was largely untenanted. A couple of Gwirinthans were clumped together at a corner table, nibbling daintily on porridge made of peas and cheese. As Kirk and Kellogg entered, one of them extended its neck over the head-level of the others and gave the BC a warm smile. Elsewhere, a tight-knit group of Klingons huddled standoffishly over megacaffeinated coffee, looking like they were discussing studied trivialities and each privately wondering who in the group would report their words back to the imperial representative.

  “That’s him,” said Kellogg quietly, as she and Kirk crossed back to McCoy’s table with their coffee. Kirk followed her glance, to observe the tall Klingon who had just joined that group. He was a man in his middle sixties, his thickly curling black hair and beard shot with white. His face had a closed, uncompromising look to it; a craggy face, like something put together from odd slabs of cement and mortar. A faded tattoo, like a caste-mark, was visible on his forehead, and the cut of his clothing was noticeably less military than those of the scientists at the table.

  “Khlaru?” Kirk asked softly, and the base commander nodded.

  “You don’t see many Klingon scholastics around,” she said informationally, sliding into the chair beside McCoy. “They’re a sub-caste of Klingon society and they’re not allowed off the home world much. But I guess Khlaru’s some kind of big noise in Klingon historical circles.”

  “Such as those are,” remarked Kirk with distaste. “Klingons subscribing to the loose-leaf textbook school of history.”

  “Give them a break,” said Kellogg cheerfully. “How many people in the Federation know the truth about the Ellison trials?”

  Kirk sighed, and had to admit that she had a point—the Federation’s hands had been far from clean in that case, and the cover-up had had to be very thorough indeed. His eyes returned to rest on the Klingons.

  McCoy mused, “That’s the trouble with Klingons, you know.
Even when they’re on R and R, they never look like they’re having any real fun.”

  “Would you, if you knew everything you said was likely to end up on file somewhere?” replied Kirk.

  “Maybe,” agreed McCoy. “So what’s the verdict? Can it be done?”

  “Steiner seems to think that it can.” He sipped his coffee, which, like cafeteria coffee on any planet in the bounds of Federated Space, tasted like it had been dredged from the bottom of a particularly badly polluted swamp. It was said to be much worse in the Klingon Empire.

  “If,” Kirk went on, “that was what Spock meant in the first place.”

  “If?” McCoy’s thick brows quirked upwards. “Spock mentioned the Guardian. ...”

  “Spock said the word guardian,” Kirk corrected him. “Is there anything else he could have meant? A guardian of what? Or who or where?” He glanced across at Kellogg, who was stirring cream into her coffee and unobtrusively keeping an eye on the room with the absentminded watchfulness of a Wild West sheriff. “Could guardian be a file-code in the central computer? Or 1867, for that matter?”

  “I thought of that,” said the commander. She leaned forward on her bony elbows, and the harsh overhead lighting twinkled on her gold sleeve braid. “Nothing in Base Central, and all the computers on the base tap through that, even the Klingon ones. Log entry 0001867 is about twelve years old and has to do with air-recycling regulations. I also checked dome-numbers and room numbers on the base, and no combination of them comes up to 1867. Peoples’ serial numbers—invoice numbers—I keep being reminded of my Uncle Franklin who became convinced he was the reincarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt because the numerological permutation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up to a number that was the square root of my uncle’s numerological computation. I suppose that kind of thing is easier to do if you’ve got a computer. I think the cafeteria staff mixes their coffee grounds with shredded political prisoners.” She set the cup down. “I think your first guess was right, Jamie. I think 1867 is a date.”

  “So do I,” said Kirk quietly. “And my instinct tells me it’s an Earthdate. But that instinct isn’t enough to justify the dangers of trying to take the Enterprise through a time slip in the TE Cloud.”

  “Would it be that dangerous?” asked McCoy.

  “Hell, yes.” Kellogg and Kirk spoke in approximate unison—it was Kellogg who continued solo. “Christ, Bones, I’m astounded the imp rep didn’t report that ore freighter torn to pieces in the cloud. Even if they knew what they were trying to do with that white dwarf and Tillman’s Factor or whatever the hell it was, there are high odds that all that came out the other end of the time warp was a bucketful of components. The stresses involved in that kind of messing around are incredible, even if the energy drain didn’t blow the engines or kill the life-support systems on the way through.”

  “Well, if that’s the case,” said McCoy, “it’s more than likely that the Klingon mission—whatever it might have been—was ended right then and there, and we don’t have to worry about it.”

  Kirk glanced sideways at him, and grinned at the note of doubt that had crept into the surgeon’s voice even as he spoke. “And what are you willing to bet on that?”

  “Not a rubber nickel.”

  Chapter 8

  FOG HAD LIFTED like a great gray wing from San Francisco when Aaron, Joshua and Ishmael left the offices of Struan and Sons, and made their way along the precarious board sidewalks of East Street through the primordial mud and chaos of the San Francisco yards. Above them, the city was emerging from pewter mist; the freshening wind carried to them the bite of sawdust and salt, the banging of hammers and men’s curses and laughter in every language of Earth, the din of the sea and the endless mewing of gulls.

  Sea wind tangled in Joshua’s straight fair hair as he walked on ahead up the steep slope of Union Street. Ish and Aaron followed, talking of lumber and money as they climbed the board sidewalks between the narrow, iron-shuttered fronts of the modern brick warehouses and the hulls of old ships hauled aground and converted into buildings when the press of the city’s trade left no time for construction; past the saloons and crimping-houses that infested the waterfront along with the offices of shipping and trade. They were jostled by British seamen in striped jerseys and pea-coats, dour Scots shipmasters and Yankee captains in tall hats and jawline beards, Chinese coolies in black pajamas, gesticulating Italian fishermen, whores painted to within an inch of their lives.

  Seeing Ishmael’s fascinated gaze, Aaron laughed and said, “I’ll bet you never believed this much variety was possible.”

  Ish shook his head. “They are all human.”

  They climbed the hill of Union Street, rising above the din and squalor of the docks, and the city spread out below them like a carpet of trash to the east and south. Solidly palatial brick buildings that housed the banks, stock exchanges, gambling palaces and whorehouses clustered near the scrollwork mansions of the rich away south of Market Street; clapboard boarding-houses and stores huddled in the shadows of the hills and a dense, rickety congestion of color and dirt marked where Chinatown lay off to the south. The streets here on Telegraph Hill were paved with boards, broken and so smeared with mud as to be nearly invisible—the sidewalks, board also, transmuted themselves into stairways through which the long, thin, brown California grass waved in the salt breeze.

  They rounded the shoulder of the hill as the last mists faded. North across the bay, the tall brown hills of the Golden Gate emerged, tawny in the morning’s golden light.

  Aaron heard the quick take of Ishmael’s breath. Turning, he saw his nephew had stopped short, staring out across the bay with surprise and shock and something very close to pain in his eyes.

  Ishmael’s hand groped for and found the splintery wood of the rail of the sidewalk stair; he did not take his eyes from the hills. He whispered, “Aaron ...”

  “I’m here, Ish. What is it, what’s wrong?”

  His gesture took in the hills, the lay of that tumbled land. His voice was bewildered. “Aaron, I have been here.”

  “What?”

  “All this ...” His hand seemed to touch the bay, the great headland of the Gates and the blue-black Pacific beyond. “I have been here, but it was not like this. The city is different. There is something—missing—from the hills, but I know those hills. I have seen them in the wintertime, all green with new grass. I know their shape.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Aaron, stunned. “You only think that because ...”

  “No,” whispered Ishmael desperately. “No.” He looked down across the shipyards, then shut his eyes, his face tense with effort and beaded with sweat. “Aaron, I see—things—remember things—but they make no sense. I see ships that they built here—metal ships, huge ones—so big they have to build them in sections and—and—” His hand moved again, but what was done with the sections was lost, as if in a drift of the mists that blew across the bay. “I can see rooms, I know how they look inside, I can remember—see inside the walls, even, know the tiniest wire and microcircuit. I know what they’re for, what they do, how to put them together. But it all means nothing.”

  His eyes opened again, staring bleakly out over the yards. “I remember, but I do not understand.”

  “It could be that you’re remembering two different things,” said Stemple quietly, coming to stand close beside him. A couple of dark lascar sailors and cat-footed Chinese crowded past them on the narrow stair, headed down toward the docks, and took no more notice of them than if they’d been standing admiring the view. “Juxtaposing them, as you do in dreams.”

  “Maybe.” Ish turned his gaze back to him, and his eyes were terrifyingly distant, wholly unhuman. “But where would I have seen the hills?”

  “You coming, Ish?”

  Ishmael looked up from his newspaper, which was spread out across the big table in the dim vastness of the dining room of Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s boardinghouse. Most of the other tenants, regulars and transients l
ike himself, Aaron and Joshua, had gone out for the evening. It was Saturday, which he knew held some sort of significance that he did not grasp. Aaron was decked out in his best gray broadcloth and a ruffled shirt, an impeccable homburg in his hand and a cane tucked beneath his arm.

  “I see no logic,” Ish stated mildly, “in ‘relaxing’ by staying out late, in the rain, drinking alcohol and losing money at games of chance. To relax is—to relax. To rest. To do nothing.”

  Aaron laughed, and vanished into the shadows. Other footsteps thumped in the big parlor, doors opened and shut, but gradually the tall house on Filbert Street grew quiet, save for the soft patter of the rain. Ish settled himself in the dim circle of the kerosene lamp’s glow, letting the silence pervade his soul.

  Humans, he had found, habitually talked too much, and seldom had a great deal of importance to say. He wondered briefly how he would be able to endure living among them, and dismissed the thought as redundant and unprofitable. He searched in his mind for the fleeting memories of what he had thought he had seen on the hills that afternoon, but even that was fading. It had been blindingly vivid at the time, but was pale and unreal as watercolor to him now.

  What had happened to him? he wondered. Something—some sense of something left undone nagged at him, and he shivered as the fresh scars on his temples and wrists ached anew, like the faint echo of a pain that had seared through his entire body.

  He put the thoughts aside as Joshua Bolt came into the dining room, nodded a greeting to him and silently borrowed part of the newspaper and settled down on the other side of the table. They read in companionable silence, Ishmael picking his way cautiously through the overwritten fastnesses of pulp journalism and town politics and wondering why the humorous account of two Irishmen caught roasting a Chinese in the boiler of his own laundry should shock him so. It evidently hadn’t shocked the reporter who had written the article.