STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  Stemple sighed. “I’m afraid so, Ish. I know what you’re saying and that’s why I think I’m doing—well, maybe not the right thing, but I’m not doing any evil in pushing Jason into marrying her. I like Biddy. She spent a lot of time up here while you were in San Francisco, and she’s a good girl, when she isn’t driving me crazy. I’m sorry I put her in the position of a laughingstock by making her the last girl to be chosen—the short straw—but I know Jason’s going to marry her and I think he’ll do right by her. She’ll make him a good wife, too.”

  Ishmael raised an eyebrow at him. “Could you stand that?”

  “Having Jason Bolt do me out of Bridal Veil Mountain?” Aaron shrugged. “I’ll get over it.” And he went up to bed.

  “Ishmael!”

  Ish turned, and squinted through the clammy drizzle to see Jason Bolt hurrying along the slush-foul mess of Madison Street after him.

  It had, to the great delight of the girls in the dormitory, obligingly snowed on the occasion of Christmas. Ishmael had been mystified by their pleasure in the meteorological conditions, since Seattle weather had subsequently returned to its normal pattern and the streets were now calf-deep in a freezing mixture of ice, half-rotted snow, and rainwater.

  He had just left the dormitory and the warm uproar there of preparations for Candy’s wedding on the morrow, a pleasant atmosphere of lamplight and pine boughs and last week’s Christmas tree still standing in the parlor, its slightly tattered finery reminding him for some reason of Emperor Norton I. Outside the evening was damp and depressing, and the cold made his leg ache.

  Jason fell into step with him, as they continued along the street. Jason looked harried these days, more so than the flurry entailed in marrying off his youngest brother would account for. Ish guessed the reason, and it engendered in him both anger and distaste, as well as an obscure feeling that he should not be as concerned as he was about the emotions of others. It was, after all, their affair. The wind smote them, bits of sleet snagging in the fleece collar of Jason’s jacket. It would be a miserably icy night.

  “Ish,” said Jason, “I have a proposition for you. A business deal, if you like.”

  “Your last business deal,” replied Ishmael, “resulted in your losing $40,000 at poker and borrowing $700 from me.”

  “Which I paid back,” Jason reminded him. “And I’m in a position to pay that again.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Ishmael,” said Jason, “you’re fond of Biddy Cloom, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “Are you planning to ask her to marry you?”

  Ishmael looked at him, startled by the question, startled by even the idea of marrying here on this world at all.

  Jason went on, “Because if your uncle has told you not to ask her until after Friday, let me tell you that you won’t suffer for it if you ask her tomorrow night.”

  Without thinking, Ish said, “No. I cannot marry Biddy Cloom or anyone else.”

  It was Jason’s turn to look both shocked and startled, more at the vehemence in Ishmael’s voice than at his words. “Why not? Oh, I know all the ladies in San Francisco said you were cold as a whale’s backside, but ...”

  “It is true that I am—cold,” said Ishmael quietly. “But it is impossible for me to marry. There is hereditary insanity in my family. My father, who married Aaron’s sister, showed no taint of it, but two of my uncles on that side are in asylums in the East, and their children seem to be likewise tainted. I have known for a long time that I cannot marry. I would not do such a thing to any woman, to have her bear my children.”

  Not the best of stories, he thought, but true, after its fashion: for it was true that he could not take a human woman to wife, being what he was. He could see by Jason’s shaken expression that the big man had at least believed him, and had realized that compared to some matters, the ultimate fate of Bridal Veil Mountain was of fairly small worth. “I—I’m sorry,” Jason said at last. “I didn’t ...”

  “It is not your doing,” said Ish. “I have become accustomed to the knowledge, and only recently have I had cause to regret it. Could I do so, I would marry Biddy, for I can think of few women who would make as good a wife. But for me it is out of the question.”

  It was the truth, and Jason accepted it as such, and quickly turned the conversation to other things. Walking alone back toward the mill later on, the sleety wind driving against his back and the cold twisting the malformed ligaments of his bad leg with the familiar ache, Ishmael thought about that. As he had said to Aaron once, he understood neither love nor desire for these soft, pretty alien girls. But as a companion in his exile he could do worse than Biddy Cloom.

  I will be in this place, this alien world, until I die, he thought. How long shall that be? How long do my kind live? Am I doomed to live all that time alone? Yet what is my alternative? For me to live here as an alien, an exile, is one thing. At least I know what I am and what I am not. But to father a son who will be half-alien, half-human—to be at home nowhere, and never knowing quite why ... it would be a monstrous thing to do, not only to Biddy, but to the child.

  He knew that he could not afford to become involved in the griefs of humans, and their emotions were strange to him. Yet for some reason his heart hurt for that unborn child, half-human and half-alien, as he walked on down the slushy path in silence toward the dark house.

  Chapter 15

  “WILL THAT DO IT?” Kirk taped the bundle of slick, semitransparent sheets of flimsiplast into a plastic sack, and turned back to watch Kellogg extracting the long, accordion-folded scroll which was extruding itself like some fantastic tongue from the fax machine.

  “It better,” remarked the base commander, as the last of the foot-wide ribbon collapsed at her feet. “Is this Library of Congress the same Congress Aaron Stemple was in?”

  “It was back then,” Kirk replied. “Like all bureaucracies it took on a life of its own and is still going strong.”

  She picked up the fax and began shuffling it into order. “Hell, Jamie, look at this.” She held up the top end of the flimsy. “This stuff was just photo-duped into the record banks straight from the printed records. I don’t think anybody’s even looked at the stuff since 1867.”

  Kirk crossed the small transmission-fax cubicle to look over her shoulder at it. He had to admit she was probably right. Instead of the usual readout of computer-printed lines the fax contained what was clearly a page-by-page photoprint of the original volume of government transactions for Washington Territory 1860-1870. From where he sat at the table loading the plastic-wrapped bundles into quarter-meter cubical carrying boxes, McCoy growled, “I can understand why.” After being photographed, reduced to microfilm, the microfilm screened and reduced to a graphic-image pattern which was stored for several centuries in a computer bank and then hyperspace-transmitted through four relay stations to be blown up again and xelo-faxed, the printing—like the printing of virtually everything they had received over the hyperspace beam from the Library of Congress banks—was virtually unreadable.

  But Kirk only said, “Good. It means the Klingons didn’t have access to this information. They could trace Stemple as far back as 1872, but no earlier. In 1867 they’ll have to hunt for him, and the way people moved around on the frontier, that could take them a long time.”

  McCoy took the folded stack of fax from Kellogg, slipped it into another plastic bag and taped it shut. “Is this the last?”

  “Should be.” Kirk slipped over to the doorway of the cubicle and eased it open slightly. The corridor outside was clear. Removing the tricorder that was slung around his shoulder, he checked the readings. No one was closer to the transmission-fax cubicles than Corridor 16, the main artery of the base. It registered as a confused stream of life-forms, rather like an ant trail. The Enterprise’s big life-scan systems were so sophisticated that they could tell a cat from a fox in five square miles of territory, but the equipment filled several rooms. The most a hand tricorder could be set to
tell you was that there were life-forms in the vicinity—it couldn’t have distinguished a Klingon from a mollusk.

  He leaned back into the room. “Coast seems to be clear.”

  “Good,” grumbled McCoy. “About time something went right.”

  Kellogg was signing pink export-manifest slips. She handed them to Kirk to countersign, then stuck them to the lids of the boxes. On the sides the carrying-cases bore labels: LIVE TRIBBLES—DO NOT FEED.

  As McCoy hefted the boxes, he grumbled, “I signed on as a physician, not a combination historical researcher and secret agent.”

  “How do you think I feel, turning fax-clerk at my time of life?” retorted Kellogg with a grin. As McCoy departed, she added, “Don’t step on any Klingons on your way out.”

  “Most of the imp rep’s agents are amateurs,” she told Kirk a few minutes later, as they ambled along the corridors in the general direction of the transport chamber, far enough behind McCoy not to be obviously shadowing him but close enough to tell if anyone else was. It was early in the first shift. The corridors were alive with scientists, techs, clerical and security personnel, maintenance crew. “There aren’t a lot of Klingon civilians outside the empire—ordinary civilians, I mean, not defectors—but there are some. The files on all of them are impeccable, naturally.”

  Kirk grinned. “And you checked them, naturally.”

  She shrugged, “What’s the good of being BC if you can’t get at classified files in the computer?” She hooked her hands in her belt, pacing along at Kirk’s side with a preoccupied frown. “Jamie,” she said after a moment. “Is what we’re doing going to do any good? In the long run, I mean?”

  He glanced over at her as they shouldered their way through the usual crowd outside the canteen. A couple of Kzinti growled a greeting at her which she returned in their own language with a snarl and bared teeth. “We won’t know that till it’s over,” he replied.

  “What I mean is—hasn’t it been over for centuries? It’s all in the past, isn’t it? If the Klingons have succeeded we won’t know it, because we’ll have grown up with it the other way, whatever the other way is going to be or was. Hell,” she added in frustration, “we can’t even talk about it without inventing a new verb tense.”

  “Well,” said Kirk quietly, “that’s the problem with time travel. Fortunately it’s mostly a theoretical one, because we haven’t got the capability to do it—yet. But what’s so frightening about what the Klingons are doing is that there really isn’t any way of controlling results, once you begin to tamper. There are legends of a civilization out in the galaxy of Kasteroborous that mastered time travel, and promptly stagnated because they never dared do anything again. If the Klingons succeed we may simply never have existed—or we may become worse than the Klingons themselves. The 1870s ...”

  “Commander Kellogg!”

  Kirk and Kellogg halted, turning to greet the slender, nervous-looking man in the black-and-gold uniform of Klingon Imperial Service who came striding at them from the junction of Corridor 109. His formal black beard was thin and showed signs of both implants and dye, as did his hair—Klingon males being worse even than human males on that subject. He wore the harried expression of a man for whom it has long ago become second nature to glance over his shoulder, common to Klingon civil servants even of the highest degree.

  “Colonel Nch’rth,” Kellogg greeted him, producing the correct glottal rasp and meeting his dark, haughty gaze with her own.

  “It was my intention to send you a memo, Commander,” said the imperial representative. “And I shall follow up this conversation with one, certainly.”

  “On what subject?”

  Nch’rth’s voice tightened, as if some internal tuning peg had been turned a fraction of a millimeter. “On the subject of the proper marking of containers in which dangerous fauna are transported.” His eyes had, Kirk noticed, shifted from Kellogg to Kirk himself. Like any Klingon, he unconsciously turned to speak to a man rather than a woman. “The boxes used to transport dangerous or abominable creatures are clearly required to be marked as containing them. Yet one of the maintenance crew—a man who owes allegiance to the empire, and is thus under my protection—was badly bitten by a pelz that was being transported aboard the Enterprise. The bite of a pelz is a truly savage thing—the man could have lost a finger. The boxes should have been more clearly marked or the animal sedated.”

  “Whatever the boxes contained, they were clamped shut and, I believe, locked,” said Kellogg, drawing the imperial representative’s eyes back to her as a reminder that she was the one to whom he must speak regarding base regulations, not the captain of a starship. “And they were labeled, were they not, Captain?”

  “Yes, they were,” said Kirk. “I saw them myself, up in Dr. McCoy’s laboratory later.”

  “The labels were not properly displayed,” said the imperial representative stubbornly, still speaking more or less to Kirk. When Kirk made no response he turned back to Kellogg, his voice contracting until it threatened to go right up into the next register. “Believe me, Commander, this casual fraternization and tolerance of negligence between a supposedly neutral base commander and a high-ranking Federation military officer has not gone unnoticed and will not be tolerated. If such negligence had been on the part of a member of the Klingon military your reaction would be different. One of the other boxes in that shipment was marked as containing a Ceti eel. What if that had escaped? They breed like flies in the ventilating system. One of them could have wiped out this base.”

  “My attitude, Colonel, is hardly casual,” said Kellogg, her voice suddenly hard. “And yours, if I may venture to say so, is scarcely professional. You have made your complaint and I will take action to see that such an incident does not recur. However, since your man had no right to be tampering with locked boxes no matter what they contained or how they were labeled, I suggest that you take steps to do the same. Good day to you, sir.”

  She turned, and strode briskly away, Kirk in her wake. Behind them, Colonel Nch’rth called furiously, “You shall receive a memo!”

  She snapped back over her shoulder, “I shall read it!” and continued walking. “And as for you, Captain, regarding those boxes ...” They turned a corner and passed out of earshot, and Kellogg grinned. “Where in the hell did you come up with a live pelz? I didn’t know there were any on the base.”

  “We had one in zoological—Mr. Sulu smuggled it down as papers.”

  “Good God,” said Kellogg, paling. “Don’t tell me that was a real Ceti eel. .. .”

  Kirk shook his head and grinned. “Just dirt, covering the fax-sheets. But I think after that, none of the imperial representative’s amateur agents are going to be terribly anxious to snoop in any boxes we might be carrying on board the Enterprise.”

  “Would that it were live tribbles,” Mr. Sulu sighed, as the door to the Officers’ Conference Room on board the Enterprise zipped soundlessly open twenty minutes later to admit Kirk. “Better to perish smothered in fur than in flimsiplast. ...”

  “Hear, hear,” muttered McCoy, from the pile of property transactions and licenses that he had been sorting through all morning.

  “Where, where?” inquired Lieutenant Gilden, a thin, depressed-looking young man who had been drafted from his beloved Historical Section to catalog and help keep things in something resembling order.

  “There, there,” said Uhura in a comforting tone, following Kirk into the conference room with four velfoam cups of coffee balanced in her hands.

  “Now, now,” Kirk chided. Trae, who had been bent over the terminal that had been installed in the far corner when the conference room had been taken over by the inner circle of the Guardian Project, raised his head and regarded Kirk with the expression of a man who has, against his every inclination, expected better. He had obviously spent a great deal of time listening to Sulu, Gilden, Uhura and McCoy. The memory of Spock’s voice drifted through Kirk’s mind. I feel as though I had been shanghaied by a shipful
of Hokas. ...

  It had been largely out of consideration for threats to persons and property that the headquarters for the paper-trailing of Aaron Stemple had been established aboard the Enterprise instead of in Trae’s quarters on the starbase itself. Once quantities of duplicated records had started coming in from the Library of Congress, it would have been impossible to conceal from the imperial representative’s agents on base that something was going on, and, after the attempt on Trae, Kirk put little trust in the predictability of the colonel’s reactions. Likewise, for this reason, the research circle itself was kept as small as possible, including only those who had prior knowledge of events—Kirk himself, McCoy, Trae, Sulu, Uhura and Kellogg as their other duties would permit. Lieutenant Gilden was the only outsider to have been drafted in, to make sense of the random information gleaned by the others from their reading, to discard what was meaningless and catalog the rest.

  Of this “rest” there was a vast deal. It had taken less than twenty-four hours for the Officers’ Conference Room to take on the aspect of a combination lunchroom and library, with piles of faxed translations of the old Karsid intelligence reports, Library of Congress records on their long flimiplast scrolls, faxed and photostated books interspersed with cups of dead coffee, candy wrappers, glasses of moxie that had long gone flat, and crumb-littered velfoam plates that Uhura had brought up from the mess hall as she came and went.

  Uhura had taken over the post as outside contact for the Guardian Project. As communications officer she had less time to devote to it than Sulu or McCoy; her duties, unlike theirs, increased rather than decreased when the Enterprise was in port. It had been Kellogg’s priority clearance on the hyperspace transmission channels that had gotten the Library of Congress information faxed through to the base, and Kirk’s idea to establish a zoological research project that would both account for the Enterprise’s continued presence in orbit and permit them to carry boxes from the base to the ship largely uninvestigated by agents of the Klingon imperial representative.