STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  Joshua Bolt slumped in the worn armchair beside the bed. Aaron had sat there, doing accounts, when he himself had first awakened to the sound of rain, the emptiness of being no longer in pain, remembering nothing. Existing, for one instant, in the absolute present, utterly without past or future. Josh’s face was white from loss of blood, his eyes shut and a little sunken-looking, his fair eyebrows looking almost brown by contrast with the bloodless skin. On the edge of the circle of lamplight Aaron lay, whiter than Josh, almost as white as the sheets of the bed. His face was changed, sunken and pinched-looking, half-hidden by bandages that covered the ruined mass of wounds that would not heal.

  Spock sighed. Fifty-one hours. Jason and Jeremy had given their blood already. Stemple was still hemorrhaging. How long would it take the internal damage, the lesions throughout the lungs, to heal? Would repeated transfusions carry him through until they did? His mind groped for a clinical train of thought, and found only emotional ones.

  Wearily, he left the room.

  The parlor of the little cabin on Eagle Head Point was dark. Spock leaned against the mantel beside the last embers of the fire, and numbly tried to piece together some kind of solution. He was aware that he was long past the point of even minimum efficiency, but there was no one else and he dared not let Stemple go unwatched.

  Medical biology had not been his specialty, though he knew enough about it to understand the specialists under his command. Given even minimal facilities, he knew himself capable of saving Stemple’s life. But without drugs, without life-support equipment, without electricity or even the means of obtaining it ... He leaned his elbows on the mantel and rested his face in his palms, stubbornly fighting to remain awake and clear-headed.

  Minor injuries from disrupters—grazes and flash-cuts—would begin to heal in eight to a hundred hours, untended. This was epidermal tissue only. There was no recent report on untended internal human injuries, except, of course, somewhere in the files of some mercilessly curious Klingon laboratory. If he could stabilize Aaron’s condition long enough to find nightshade and distill a crude heart stimulant of some kind—if he could maintain blood-transfusions to keep his heart going—if he could only get enough sleep to keep from making mistakes.

  He shook his head, and pushed his fingers through his hair, trying to pull back some of his slipping attention. It would take very little, he knew, for him to drop off to sleep, and that would be fatal for Aaron. Fatal for the world, with the Karsid drones arriving in a matter of months—fatal for the time-stream, and who knew what other time-streams it would touch.

  As he brushed back the untidy mane of hair that was his chief disguise among the humans his fingertips touched the small, faint squares of residual scar-tissue on his temples, and he shivered. After coming this far, he thought, and enduring this much, to fail in the end.

  Behind him, Sarah Gay’s voice said, “They’re like Joshua’s were, aren’t they?”

  He swung around, startled. He had been so tired he had not seen her, sitting in the dark corner beside the desk. Her hand was a white blur as it moved to turn up the lamp, and Spock knew that its light showed her more clearly what she had already seen: the stigmata of an alien that marked his face. The slant of the eyebrows, the long, strange shape of the ears half-revealed by the brushed-back hair. She said nothing, but regarded him for a moment in the stronger glow of the gold kerosene light.

  He knew Dr. Gay’s mind to be largely logical. She did not ask questions whose answers were obvious. After a long time she said, “How is he?”

  “Joshua will be fine.” It would, he realized, have been why she had come.

  She shook her head. “I don’t mean Josh.”

  Spock regarded her steadily for a moment, then shook his head. “I do not know,” he said wearily. “I can keep him alive—I do not know for how long.”

  Their eyes met in silence again. There was another question to be answered, but the answer to that was obvious, obvious in Spock’s mere presence. So Sarah asked instead, “How did you come to Aaron?”

  “We were chance met,” replied Spock quietly. “I did not bring this on him.”

  She got to her feet, and crossed the room to glance through the narrow door into the dark bedroom. Then she turned back to him, the lamplight flashing across her thick spectacle lenses. “What is it?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that. The wounds in his face and chest haven’t even begun to close, after all this time. The blood isn’t even clotting. Is this something ...”

  “Not of this earth,” replied Spock. “I am sorry, Dr. Gay. It has nothing to do with you, and little to do with me. I was drawn into it against my will. I would have saved him, had it been possible, and I still will if I can.”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment, then asked, “Where are you—from?”

  He shook his head wearily. “The name of the planet would mean nothing to you. Your astronomers have not even discovered the star yet.”

  “I see.” She looked down at her folded hands where they rested on the handle of the door. Then she looked up at him again. “I knew at the dance, you see.”

  Spock’s eyebrow lifted, startled. Sarah smiled a little.

  She reached out and took his hand in her long slim fingers; cold, as Spock had always found the hands of humans icy to the touch. Then she released it, and her fingers brushed lightly against his cheek. “That’s fever-hot,” she said clinically. “A hundred and three, a hundred and four. A—one of us—would be raving. You were clearly having the time of your life.” She took his hand again, and with her other hand pushed up his sleeve a little, to expose the scars on his wrist. “Those are recent, aren’t they? An Earthman’s scars will turn pink if he’s flushed, when he’s been dancing, for instance. When you took my hand for the grand right-and-left, I noticed that. The scars on your wrist had turned a sort of apple-green.”

  And yet, thought Spock, she had stood talking with him and Biddy afterwards. ... He rubbed absentmindedly at the slick uneven blotch on the flesh. The Klingons had strapped his hands down, of course, when they’d questioned him. The straps had been high-density flexiplast, and had cut like metal when he’d struggled.

  “In the future,” he found himself saying tiredly, “I must remember to avoid dancing.”

  “Only with medical doctors,” she replied calmly. “Will you be returning to your own world, now?”

  Spock shook his head, exhausted and bitterly ironic. “For a long time,” he said, “I did not even remember my—own world.” For the Enterprise was his own world, and more than that would be far too difficult to explain to this woman. “I was injured. I had lost my memory, in much the same way that Joshua lost an hour or two of his. In some ways I wish that I had not recovered it, for I think that the memory of what I lost is worse than ignorance. But for me there is no way home.”

  It was easier, he thought, than explaining that his home did not yet exist and if Stemple died, it never would.

  “I am sorry.”

  As he had to Jason, Spock said, “It is none of your doing.”

  She rested a hand lightly on his wrist. “It is precious little comfort to you, I know, for me to say so,” she went on, “but your home is with us—all of us. Whether Mr. Stemple lives or dies, whether this—whatever happened to him—is over, or is only the beginning of other things, you are one of us now. Whatever you are or people think you are.

  “We are all exiles here,” she went on. “Lottie, Clancey, Mr. Stemple, the girls, myself. Whyever we left the places we left to come here, there is no way back to the past for any of us. This is our home, and we are all that we have. It is only that you are from farther away.”

  Uncertain footsteps came from the other room, and then Joshua stood framed in the dark doorway, rubbing his eyes. Sarah rose quickly and went to him. Spock stood in the shadows by the fireplace, watching them, listening to the voices; hers soft and querying, his tired as he nodded, the firelight catching a sudden gleam on that ivory-colored h
air. She turned back to Spock, and pushed up her specs. “I’ll be back in the morning,” she said. “Will you be all right until then?”

  Spock nodded, though his body hurt for sleep. He moved mechanically to fetch their coats, leaden with fatigue. As he watched them depart along the trampled track in last night’s snow back toward town, the lantern-light bobbing around their mingled shadows, it was in his mind that Aaron would not live through the night. In the morning it would not matter whether Sarah returned or not.

  He went back to the table where she had been sitting, and took her chair, and turned down the lamp again to rest his aching eyes. Leaning his head on his hands, he began patiently, wearily reviewing his options.

  He was still reviewing them when he drifted into exhausted sleep.

  Chapter 18

  EARTH.

  In the darkness it looked like a sleeper, helpless in innocence.

  A very vulnerable Earth, thought Captain Kirk, standing before the main viewscreen on the Enterprise bridge. No gleam of lights from the swollen megalopoli of West Coast and East Coast. No strings of orbiting satellites, ship stations, docking bays. No silver bubble of defensive armament gleaming like a baleful eye on the moon, no ring of battle stations. No haze of the interstellar trash that any planet picks up in the first few decades of experimentation with spaceflight.

  A pristine and beautiful Earth. Velvet continents, ebony seas. Somewhere down there his own ancestors were shooting Apaches in Arizona. McCoy’s ancestors would be dressing up in bedsheets and hoods to pay a call on some Carpetbagger—or, he realized uncomfortably, perhaps to pay a call on one of Uhura’s ancestors.

  An Earth without defenses against the black, snake-headed ships of the Karsid Empire, and the insidious temptations of their trade.

  Exactly the kind of world the Karsids liked, he thought. That ancient empire had known its economics well. A culture ripe for takeover, reaching out to the first potentials of science and industry; a developing machine-culture with a prosperous economy. Like Klinzhai had been, a long time ago.

  Reasonably prosperous, defenseless and innocent.

  “Well,” said McCoy’s cheerful voice behind him, “we made it.”

  Kirk glanced back over his shoulder. The doctor was standing, hands clasped behind his back, a few paces behind him, watching the screen with something of the same awe that underlay the feeling on the bridge as a whole. The trip had been a rocky and terrifying one. Over the intercom from the Engineering Section Mr. Scott’s voice could be heard saying, “I dinna know how we made it, lassie, but it looks like you were right.”

  At the science officer’s console, Aurelia Steiner extruded a mouth close enough to the comlink to say, “There was a 97.6 percent possibility of correct calculation.” Her little white hands were playing over the buttons as she spoke, a half-dozen blue eyes on the end of long eyestalks hovered before the numerous readout screens. When Drelbs are busy they tend to forget how they look. Beside her, Trae of Vulcanis was watching the readouts over the equivalent of her shoulder, silent and thoughtful. He was one of a score or so on the Enterprise who truly knew what they had done, and what it had involved.

  Slowly, the globe grew in the viewscreens. Mountains spread before them in the darkness, the shaggy pelt of forests on their flanks. Breaking sheets of black cloud promised cold and snow. Kirk returned to his command chair, keeping a weather-eye on the readings, but his gaze kept returning to that silent planet, that dark and sleeping world.

  “Parking orbit achieved, Captain,” said Mr. Sulu. “Transporter range of Seattle.”

  “Can you get a reading on the town, Lieutenant Uhura?”

  Slim fingers played across the communications console. Kirk tapped into the circuit; McCoy, Trae and Aurelia moved up behind him to see.

  Shapes faded slowly into being, faint images of the town, like things sunk in deep water. White patterns on the black of the glass formed and clarified themselves into recognizable trees, buildings, water. It surprised Kirk that the town was so tiny. He was used to thinking of Seattle as something that stretched from the Canadian border halfway to Portland. This composite image of infrared and ultrasound reflection and tricorder readings was nothing more than a shabby hamlet with mud streets, a clearing in the thick, surrounding trees at one end of the bay. They’d seen thousands of them on planets that the Prime Directive had forbidden them to touch because the cultural level was so woefully low.

  Trae was comparing the screen image with his charts, glancing sharply from one to the other. “You put us down very precisely,” he complimented Aurelia, who was dangling one of her eyestalks over his shoulder to look. “By the distribution of the buildings the date would appear to be late 1867 or early 1868. That rectangle there can only be Jason Bolt’s dormitory, which was built late in ’66. As you see, there is no sign of the addition that was made when it was converted to the town social hall in July of ’68.”

  “Why a dormitory?” asked McCoy. “Dormitory for whom? Loggers?”

  Trae by now knew the history of the town as well as any of its contemporary inhabitants. “In 1866/1867 a project was undertaken between Aaron Stemple and another landowner of the vicinity, a man named Jason Bolt, to wive the settlers. Thirty women were brought from New England, and the dormitory was built to house them until they married. The building later became the town social hall, and so remained until it was destroyed by fire in 1889. Evidently it was known as the dormitory to the end of its days.”

  McCoy chuckled. “So that’s where Stemple got his reputation as a humanitarian. No wonder they elected him to Congress.”

  Trae regarded him severely; Aurelia flared a bright yellow with peppermint-scented amusement.

  Kirk said, “Any sign of the Klingon ship, Lieutenant?”

  “Negative, Captain,” said Uhura. “Although we’re picking up traces of antimatter exhaust that could have been a parking orbit similar to our own.”

  All Kirk’s instincts leapt to battle alert. “Recent?”

  “Within four days, sir.”

  “Origin?”

  “Undetermined, Captain.”

  “Four days,” whispered Kirk. There was momentary silence on the bridge, as those around him digested the implications of this.

  Finally McCoy said, “So that means we’re too late.”

  “No,” said Kirk stubbornly. “The Klingons hadn’t known where to look for Stemple. They could be anywhere on the West Coast, still searching. The ship could have gone off so as not to risk running into Karsid drones. And there’s no telling when in 1867 the Klingon ship arrived.”

  “They have a week’s lead on us,” said McCoy. “In that time ...”

  “To us it was a week,” said Kirk. “But with that time warp the Klingons could have reached Earth months ago—or only a few days.

  “Lieutenant Uhura, run a tricorder scan of the entire area, twenty miles around the town. Screen it for non-Earth life-forms.”

  Uhura’s hands passed rapidly over the board, the console bringing images to life, one after the other. A grid map of white shadows on black. Trees like little tufts of cotton, the faint squares of dead wood that marked isolated buildings, the small flickering lights that showed where foxes, deer or humans walked late in the night.

  Then Uhura froze one image on the screen, a single green light among the fainter shapes.

  “Alien life-form reading, Captain. Within a few miles of Seattle.”

  Kirk cursed, softly and fluently. This was going to be close. “Klingon?” he demanded.

  Long fingers played over the board again, clarifying the database. Lights glimmered up onto her intent face. Then she looked up at him, her dark eyes wide.

  “Vulcan, Captain.”

  The glare of gold light and the falling sensation of the transporter beams faded, and Kirk found himself surrounded by wild windy darkness and murmuring trees. Old snow blotched the ground; even under the thermal jacket he had donned in the transporter room he shivered. With the cold came
the heady earth smells of water and pines, and the wild cold scent of the ocean. A fox’s green eyes flashed briefly at them from the woods.

  McCoy, who knew Seattle, said from the gloom, “According to Trae’s maps we should be at about the northeast corner of the Grayson Plaza Building downtown.” Kirk laughed. In the black silence of the woods around them only a single light burned, in the small, heavily glazed window of the little cabin in whose dooryard they had materialized.

  McCoy checked his tricorder’s faintly glowing readouts. “Two people inside,” he said softly. “If Uhura’s scan was correct, one of them will be Spock.”

  Kirk was angling one of Trae’s charts to the reflected gleam of the window light. “The cabin is listed as belonging to Aaron Stemple,” he replied quietly. “He found him.”

  Kirk knocked twice at the cabin door, but received no answer. He and McCoy traded a glance, then Kirk tried the latch. It lifted easily, a wordless comment upon the community of Seattle. The two men stepped inside.

  The dying embers of a fire lay crumpled like a luminous scarf in the stone hearth at one side of the room. A kerosene lamp stood on the table at the other, its deep, sherry-colored light edging with ruddy gold the litter of what McCoy recognized as ancient, barbaric surgical and medical equipment that lay around it. At the table a man slumped, his head bowed on his folded arms, his breathing slow with sleep. From the dark mane of uncut hair and the plaid wool shirt McCoy assumed it to be Stemple, and started to turn toward the door to the other room. Kirk paused, recognizing something, even in sleep, in the attitude of the sloping shoulders.

  He came back, softly, to the sleeper’s side. “Mr. Spock,” he whispered. “Spock.”

  Spock raised his head. His dark eyes were clouded with a fatigue extreme even for a Vulcan; they regarded Kirk for a moment with a kind of blank incomprehension, then closed again, and for a instant Spock’s crushing grip locked around Kirk’s hands. He drew a long, shuddering breath, then opened his eyes again, and whatever had been in them—-joy, relief, hope out of absolute despair—had been carefully wiped away and replaced with an unbreakable Vulcan calm that in an absurd way gave Kirk just as much joy to see.