STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  Then, to Jason’s lifelong astonishment, he saw Biddy start, gazing up into Aaron’s face. With a squeal and a gasp you could have heard all over the room if there hadn’t still been such a row around Joshua and Sarah, Biddy threw herself into Stemple’s arms. Jason stared, mouth open, as the two embraced, Aaron’s face buried in the girl’s dark curls; then they disengaged briefly, and their mouths met in a long, satisfied kiss.

  They came back through the press of loggers and girls as the fiddlers were tuning up for another square dance. Aaron looked poker-stiff as usual, his arm possessively around Biddy’s waist.

  “Jason,” said Aaron quietly, “I concede that you have won your bet. I—have asked Miss Cloom to marry me.”

  Jason felt like he’d been hit between the eyes with an ax handle. “You what?”

  “I’m going to marry Biddy.” The black eyes met his, defiant, daring him to say something, anything, and by God I’ll break you and your mountain and your damn neck if you do.

  With an effort, Jason got his breath back. “I—I wish you every happiness,” he managed to say. “I—Aaron, that’s wonderful.” Astonishment was giving way to pure joy, and the magnanimous happiness with the world that comes from being let off the hook. “Congratulations—may I kiss the bride?”

  Biddy presented a chaste cheek. Then she asked, “What was it you wanted to see me about, Jason?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. And, sincerely, “Biddy—I’m happy for you. Not for any other reason, just happy for you.”

  “Thank you, Jason,” she said softly, and Aaron led her toward the dance floor.

  One of the millhands came up quietly, and tapped Aaron’s shoulder. “There’s a feller asking to see you, up by the mill offices.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Says it’s important. Says he’s down from Vancouver, with information for you about the disposal of the British timberland north of here. Needs to see someone about financing.”

  Aaron nodded impatiently. Ishmael had appeared out of nowhere. He said, “Would you mind if Ish deputized for me, Biddy? I’ll be back.”

  She smiled, suddenly shy. “All right.”

  His eyes met his nephew’s over her head. Ishmael tilted an eyebrow at him, and led Biddy onto the dance floor.

  The fiddles struck up “Red River Valley.” Aaron, wrapped in his mackinaw, paused in the doorway, watching the room, like an island of light in the wilderness. Saw them weaving back and forth in the dance: Ishmael and Biddy, like brother and sister, Ish’s face solemn, though his eyes smiled. Joshua and Dr. Gay. Jeremy and Candy. Clancey swinging Lottie through the bright measures. Jason on the sidelines, a huge cup of punch in his hand and the relieved smile of a reprieved life prisoner on his face. Long skirts swished on the pine floor, their colors mixing and swaying in rhythm. Ish swung Candy in the center of the ring, and the formation dissolved into the grand right-and-left, men’s hands and women’s touching, swinging through the circle, the smiling faces flushed red with exertion.

  His eyes followed one form around the circle, and he shook his head at his own folly.

  At first he had only thought that his feelings had been because he would miss having her about the place—because he had gotten used to her. He had grudged to admit even to himself, let alone to anyone else, that it might be more than that. Maybe it was Ish’s insistence that he treat her feelings with justice that had made him look at her differently than he had. He didn’t know. He hadn’t even been really sure what she’d say when he asked her—because there was seldom any telling what that maddening woman would say.

  I must be out of my head, he thought, watching the couples work round the ring to one another again, and smiled. Homely, tactless, a girl no man in his right mind would consider marrying—except that, entering the room to see her on Jason Bolt’s arm, he had known that he could not abide seeing her married to someone else.

  The couples fetched up together again, after their circuit; he could see Ishmael swing Biddy in a circle on his arm, and laugh at something she said to him.

  Ishmael would never be human, thought Aaron, but tonight, swinging through the figures of the dance, he was as near to it as he’d ever come.

  Smiling to himself, Aaron hugged his mackinaw close about him, and stepped out into the night.

  The music of the fiddles faded behind him. His breath steamed like a rag of silk on the still, frosty air. It had ceased snowing, and a thin slush lay underfoot. The clouds were breaking from the black sky, and stars were beginning to show, snagged in the dark tangle of the tree branches overhead, diamonds trapped in a lattice of black.

  And amid that dark network of branches, Aaron thought that one red star seemed to be moving.

  In the hall the dance finished, the men and girls laughing, holding onto each other to catch their breath. Ish had seen Aaron leave, but knew, without being told, what had passed between Aaron and Biddy and Jason. There was a logic to it that pleased him. Biddy, holding onto his arm, was saying something to Sarah beside them, about coming to Seattle in the most awful time of year.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Sarah replied, worriedly pushing hairpins back into place. “Once we passed the Golden Gate we were able to make good time.”

  “Did you have to walk up from the harbor alone?” asked Biddy. “I remember when I first came to Seattle a year ago, it was like this, only there was mud. ...”

  “No.” Sarah smiled. “Captain Clancey wanted to go ahead up to the wedding, but I came up with the other passengers. I don’t see them—oh. There. By the door.”

  Ish looked over at them, two swarthy men edging their way out the door as he watched. He frowned, shocked and startled.

  They were Klingons.

  At first his only thought was, What are Klingons doing at Candy’s wedding dance?

  Then, as they vanished into the darkness outside, like a lead sledge it hit him: cold that stopped his breath, and the screaming echo of remembered pain.

  Klingons.

  The transport.

  Aaron.

  “Ish?” Spock looked down. The woman he held on his arm was gazing worriedly up at him. “Are you all right? You look absolutely green.”

  Without a word he broke free of her, limping swiftly across the room, maneuvering among the thick press of humans to the door. The Klingons were nowhere in sight as he stepped out into the freezing night.

  It was deathly cold and still outside. Spock’s breath blew like a cloud on the icy air. Black and silver in the starlight the wide yard of the dormitory lay, patched with pools of golden window light. There was no movement visible up and down the muddy shadows of First Street, where it jogged down toward the harbor in the direction of the mill, and despite the cold enough people had been in and out of the dance to churn the new-fallen snow in the yard to a dirty and unreadable slush.

  But Spock knew in what direction he must go. The logical place to ambush him would be the screen of the woods that separated the mill from the town. For a moment he debated about flanking wide enough to take the ambushers from behind, but discarded the idea. With his lame leg he could never move fast enough over the rough ground of the woods. So he started off along the road, hugging the shadows of the last few buildings of the town where he could, listening ahead for any sound, his mind a chaos of whirling memories.

  They must have been hunting him for months, he thought. They had no record of where he was in 1867, and they had the entire Pacific Coast to search. But they had finally come to San Francisco, and everyone, as Jason Bolt had pointed out, passed through that city sometime.

  They had missed him the first time. But small and clear he saw again in his mind Joshua Bolt standing, lamp raised, in the doorway of Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s the night of the first attack. Aaron had not returned to San Francisco, but Joshua had.

  He left the last buildings of the town behind, moving stealthily through the freezing darkness. Wind cut through his wool shirt and the sweater underneath it as though they had been
gauze. Aaron’s tracks were clear here, in the slush and thin snow; none followed.

  Joshua must have broken very quickly, he thought, when they put the Mind-Sifter on him. It surprised him a little that they had not killed him afterwards.

  Non-interference? A ripple effect? Statistically the risk of ripple effect would increase exponentially, particularly with that much time involved. The Klingons would never have risked it. The historian Khlaru, whose name had been in the reports in the transport’s data banks, might not have been able to dissuade the imperial representative from the plan, but he had at least accomplished that much.

  He moved through the black shadows of the first trees of the woods, listening, as he had listened that night in San Francisco in the fog. That brought back other memories, of himself in San Francisco, the warm brightness of the gambling halls and the sting of champagne on his tongue. He had been a human among humans, betrayed into a maudlin concern for their stupid and illogical affairs. At the dance—memory of that understanding filled him with disgust and shame.

  There is no time for this, he told himself, pushing the thoughts away. He paused in the inky shadows of a pine, his bare fingertips almost numb where they touched the wet roughness of the bark, each breath a spiked lance of crystal ice in his lungs. They’ll be waiting for him just this side of the mill yard.

  Silently, he resumed his course. He knew these woods, and the Klingons did not—he had walked through them all autumn, with Biddy Cloom, or Joshua Bolt, or Aaron Stemple, indulging in the murky sentiments of the humans among whom he had lived. He would not, he thought, allow that to happen again. And yet, whether he was able to stop the Klingons or not, he knew that he was destined to continue to live in this place among these humans. If in four months the Enterprise had not made its appearance, it was not likely that it would.

  He turned a corner of the path. Like something viewed through a gate, he could see the churned and sodden ground of the mill yard, under a thin sugaring of snow that was already melting; beyond the hill bulked bare and ugly in the starlight, a wasted stubble-field shorn by the reapers of trees. The roar of the tailrace drowned all sounds from the woods ahead.

  Dark against the starlight of that gate Aaron Stemple stood alone in the middle of the road. Something must have alerted his suspicions, for he stood tense, ready. But even as Spock started to hurry up the path toward him, slowed by the cold that sliced into the wrecked muscles of his leg, he turned, shrugged and seemed to relax, and resumed his course toward the mill.

  “Aaron!”

  Stemple whirled, startled. At the same instant a glaring flash of greenish light erupted from the trees to his right. He dropped in the road as if he had been clubbed.

  Spock took the only logical course. If the Klingons had not dared kill Joshua in San Francisco, they would not kill him—provided they assumed him to be human, and not a temporal anomaly like themselves. All this went through his mind in instants as he broke cover and ran to where Stemple lay in the slush of the path. The ligaments of his knee gave out and he stumbled as he reached Stemple’s side, keeping the Klingons from firing again. Gently he turned him over in the mud and starlight, sickened by what he saw.

  Klingon disrupters are messy weapons, designed to hurt, and to cow by fear, as well as to kill. Spock could see Aaron hadn’t taken the main bolt, for he’d been turning back already at Spock’s warning cry. But he’d been caught in the blast nimbus, and the right side of his face was a spreading ruin of ruptured tissue. Spock knew that his whole body must be torn that way, inside and out. Stemple’s slow dragging breath brought the blood trickling from mouth and nose, black in the starlight against the marble whiteness of his face.

  Ice rustled on branches. There was a thin, glassy crunch as a twig broke beneath a booted foot. Spock turned, the nerves of his injured knee screaming as they ground into the frozen muck. Like ghosts, the two Klingons materialized from the dark woods.

  “Get away from him,” said the shorter one in a thin, cold voice. Even with the disguise, the long straggly hair of the frontiersman and some minimal plastic surgery on the ears and brow, he could have been nothing but a Klingon. Spock wondered if his own disguise were that flimsy. The taller man he recognized vaguely, the shorter one not at all. Neither had been among those who had questioned him aboard the transport. He wondered whether they had listened to the tapes which he knew they’d made of the proceedings, and if they had, whether they would recognize his voice.

  He lifted his hand from Stemple’s face, his fingers a black smear of blood. “What have you done to him?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “That does not concern you.” Starlight slithered along the muzzle of the disrupter. At that range the blast would shred them both. This was not San Francisco, where the proximity of crowds had held them to the uncertain limitations of contemporary weapons.

  Spock made no move to rise. “It concerns me that you have killed my uncle and my benefactor,” he said, looking down the gaping black eye of the muzzle. “It concerns me that you have killed my friend.”

  The roaring of the tailrace was loud in his ears, and the far-off sighing of the wind. Behind them he could distinguish other sounds, the distant scrunch of boots in icy gravel, a woman’s voice. The inky murk of shadows closed them in: the hunters and their prey in that long chase, and Spock kneeling between.

  “Get away from him!” the Klingon leveled the weapon at him, knuckles moving as his hand tightened.

  Spock said, “No.”

  In the harsh dialect of Klinzhai, the second hunter said, “You can’t, you fool ...”

  “Shut up,” snapped the taller one in the same tongue. “I know what they told us. No humans ... but he doesn’t know it.”

  Spock willed himself not to show any comprehension of what they were saying, though it must become obvious to them, logically, that he would not remain guarding a man already dead. Nor would it take them long to deduce that if he knew they could not shoot him, he must logically be a time-and-space traveler like themselves, and fair game.

  “Get away,” said the Klingon softly. “Or I shall send you with him.”

  Still Spock did not move. He could hear Lottie’s voice clearly over the roaring of the millrace, saying, “I know he’s in trouble, Jason. Those two men at the dance were the ones who came through back in September. ...”

  Jason’s voice, indistinct with distance but sharp with alarm, said, “But they were in San Francisco. ...”

  “For the last time,” said the Klingon assassin, “our business is with him. I think you would not put your life at risk for a corpse, my friend, but you waste your time. For he will die.”

  “Then let him die in peace,” Spock rasped. “I do not know what the range of that thing is, or why you want him dead, but I shall kill you if you come near.” Spock had always been too logical to be much of an actor. He could never, he had always known, fake people out as Captain Kirk did. But the anger that shook in his voice was genuine. The Vulcan half of his mind reflected detachedly that they would never associate such emotion with the Vulcan prisoner who had escaped them; the human half knew that the words were not a threat, but a promise.

  Clancey’s voice was clearly audible now. “Steady, lass! Is it Aaron you’re in such a taking over or Ishmael? You say ...”

  “I don’t know—don’t ask—for God’s sake hurry.”

  The Klingons glanced at one another in the near-dark. The taller Klingon, the one who held the disruptor, said, “Kill him and let’s go.”

  The shorter one turned back, and regarded Spock in the starlight for a moment, a dark shape in a plaid shirt, kneeling by the body in a black glitter of ice and blood. “We have killed him,” he said softly. “He will not recover from the blast.”

  “And the other? He has seen us.”

  “What has he seen?” said that soft, thin voice. “Assassins are as common as lice on the frontier. As for him, he is fool enough with his own loyalties and life that his own place in th
is world cannot be a long one. Come.”

  “Aaron!” called Lottie’s voice, harsh and piercing in the hard cold of the night. “Ishmael!” And he heard her running, her voice puffing and breaking. “Ishmael!”

  The taller Klingon paused indecisively, disrupter still held steady upon them; toying, Spock’s Vulcan mind was shocked to note, with the thought of momentarily disregarding the stricture against tampering with more than one element of the time-stream and making sure of Aaron and Spock as well.

  He thought in disgust, How typically Klingon.

  The shorter assassin caught his partner’s arm, and said, “Come on, you fool! They’re coming!”

  “Ishmael!”

  Spock swung his head around to shout a warning, and saw them at the top of the path, Lottie’s stout silhouette between the bulky shape of Clancey and the tall shadow of Jason Bolt. Starlight flashed on the woman’s dyed blond hair and the bunched taffeta of her skirts, and on the long muzzle of Jason’s rifle. He heard the Klingons move, swiftly, and turned back to face them, ready to kill them or die trying.

  But they were gone. There was only the blackness of the woods, and the faint suggestion of rustling in the trees. After a moment he heard the silvery whine of a transporter beam.

  Lottie was running toward him, stumbling in the slippery muck of the road and gasping for breath, with Jason and Clancey outdistancing her up the long hill. Spock found that he was still kneeling, shivering, suddenly cold to the marrow of his bones with exhaustion. As the humans surrounded him he looked down at the body sprawled in the mud beside him, the gory ruin of the man he had crossed half the galaxy and centuries of time to save.

  The Klingons had accomplished their mission, and departed. His own last link with his own time, his own world, was severed. He was alone, and he had failed.

  Chapter 17

  METHODICALLY, SPOCK PUT ASIDE the hollow needles and the length of rubber tubing, and folded the silk scarf he’d used as a tourniquet. His concentration had narrowed with exhaustion to include only the crude equipment Dr. Gay had lent him, and his own hands. Automatically he registered this tunnel vision as a symptom of fatigue and made a mental note to compensate. He turned back to look at the tiny room behind him.