Those hooves clacked sharply on the deck as the goat-man stepped back. Now he put an arm around Spock, brought him over to McCoy and embraced both of them like long-lost brothers.
"I don't want to be impolite," Kirk began, "especially after what you've done for us ... but who are you?"
"Who am I? Oh, you want a name! Call me Baal." He paused thoughtfully. "Or Lucien. Yes, Lucien. But above all, call me friend." One finger fluttered skyward as he declaimed, "Never could I abandon those who have come so far to frolic with me ... for such purpose you must have been sent."
He surveyed the bridge again, speaking before Kirk could tell him that their motive for being here was somewhat different and not exactly voluntary.
"But not here, no, no. This is not a proper place. Let us leave this vessel and repair to where more daring delights lie." His hands moved over his head, a complicated swirling movement that left behind a trial of fading amber light, like moving lights in a time-lapse picture.
There was an explosion of dull red light, and then the swirling trails had vanished.
So had Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy - and the creature that called itself Lucien.
Sulu stared at the blank places on the bridge. He walked to the spot where the ship's doctor had stood seconds before, moved his hands through the air over the place like a blind man searching for unknown things.
Uhura watched him, her face showing fear and bewilderment, while Arex sat motionless by the operative but still useless navigation console.
In a sense, they were still drifting in darkness...
Only a last word or two lingered in Sulu's mind, the last thing the goat-man had said before disappearing. Or were they words - or only meaningless nonsense syllables of an alien argot which his brain automatically arranged into human-sounding groups?
"Megas-tu..." the goat-man had said.
Kirk felt himself floating, floating. A globe turned slowly, patiently beneath him, came nearer. He saw that its red-and-white candy stripes were vast cloud formations. They were in constant motion crashing and rolling against one another, sometimes blending into various shades of pink, sometimes forming sharp lines between. Red battled white here as the sea battled the land on more familiar worlds.
They drifted further, closer - for he could see other shapes floating with him - and suddenly were within the banded atmosphere. The crimson and cream bands kept their color as he descended, and for the first time he saw what caused the redness. Miles-high storms of brilliant red dust and sand colored the clouds.
Then the surface became visible, an unstable, swirling chaos of constantly changing shape and form. Only occasional isolated hints of something solid beneath him indicated that this planet possessed a real surface. Even so, he felt there was nothing to prevent them from drifting right through that flowing "ground" until they came out the other side of the world.
As soon as he thought he had finally fixed a stable point on the surface, it would break apart and dissolve into nothingness, or explode in a pinwheel of color.
Nothing was finite here; nothing was constant; nothing was real. Even the air had color, the wind producing harsh cries and strange slithering sounds as of creatures and cloth brushing against one another.
The soul-filled breeze blew red-and-white particles into miniature dust-storms that twisted and writhed into insane alien shapes.
In the midst of this anarchy, four people appeared.
Kirk was one of them, Spock and McCoy two others, Lucien the fourth. The three officers immediately covered their eyes. Until they had actually touched down the three officers had seemed to be at once a part of and apart from the elements. Now the wind had a chillness to it, and the flying sand abraded unprotected flesh.
They shielded their faces as best they could and tried to see around them. There was no discernable horizon. Lucien stood nearby, impassive, waiting, watching.
"Spock, Bones - you all right?" Kirk managed to shout. The sound of his own voice in this place was reassuring.
"Nothing more serious than a faceful of sand, Jim," McCoy responded. "But I wish I had a medical tricorder, just to check in case we -" He broke off. Kirk turned, saw through separated fingers that the doctor was staring at him. That wasn't surprising; he found himself staring in fascination back at McCoy.
"Jim, look at yourself!"
Kirk felt no change - and yet there was something. He looked at himself, as instructed, and saw fingers parting from hands, hands from wrists, wrists from arms, and arms from shoulders. All of his limbs were drifting away from the central torso, drifting away and changing shape. He saw his trunk splitting up into neat, irregular blobs, still fully clothed. There was no pain, merely the quiet astonishing sight of bits of himself coming apart, like a jigsaw puzzle in water.
The same thing was happening to Spock and McCoy. Their bodies were coming apart in toy-like bits and pieces, floating away from one another, sections of loose Spock mixing with fragments of McCoy.
Little bits of the Enterprise's first officer tumbled lazily past Kirk. The painless amputations were changing themselves, now stretching out like rubber, now growing thick and fat, as they wobbled along.
Spock stared in fascination as his left arm elongated and turned into a flowing rivulet of colored sand.
"Lucien, do something!" Kirk yelled.
"But why, Captain?" The goat-man shook his head pityingly, suddenly remembering. "Oh, very well. I'd forgotten how much bodily integrity means to you poor humans." Kirk noticed that the goat-man had also come apart, though it didn't appear to bother him.
A swirling cloud of dust formed one of Lucien's hands, fully equipped with a proper complement of fingers. It moved, and something like a neon pentagram appeared in the air, floating, glowing radiantly. There was a flash of brilliant crimson again - Lucien seemed fond of red, or perhaps that was simply the common color of manipulated energy here - from each point of the five-cornered shape. It was repeated once, twice, and twice again.
Five drifting globes of flame touched the free particles, squeezing them together, reshaping and rejoining the mixed forms and making them whole again.
Kirk saw his arms, legs, lower torso reform, move, and join together again neatly and painlessly. Abruptly, the drifting flame winked out. The pentagram itself followed shortly, vanishing into the all-consuming wind.
Kirk reached down and cautiously felt himself. He pulled experimentally at his right wrist with his left - not altogether sure how he would react if the hand came off. Around him, the rest of the impossible world still remained shapeless, all rolling mists and roarings and whines arising out of nothingness.
Lucien sighed. Probably in deference to his guests, he had reformed his own corpus. "This isn't easy, you know, holding us all together like this. It's not even natural."
"If you know as much about us as you claim to," said a much relieved McCoy, "you'll know that being in one piece is very natural where we come from."
"Really, Doctor?" Spock commented. "Personally, I find all this quite absorbing."
"Yes, but that's probably because you're not natural to begin with, Spock."
Suddenly, a pair of long green tentacles, like the arms of an octopus, appeared out of the coiling mists and brushed against the face of a startled Kirk. Instinctively, he jerked away, and they vanished.
"Look, Lucien," he began, as much to take his mind off the disturbing apparition as to obtain information, "or whatever you want to call yourself - I want to know why you brought us here." Even as he said the words he was fully aware that if the goat-man chose to ignore the question they could do nothing to compel him to answer.
It made no difference whether he was inclined to or not. Before their savior/captor could reply, a tremendous roaring sprang up like the wildest of hurricanes. A frenzied wind whipped up around them. It lifted Kirk and dashed him to the ground, which conveniently became soft sand beneath him just in time to cushion the impact
Lucien frowned and made another of his cryptic
gestures. Red and rose energy flashed from his fingertips. The hurricane wind died as abruptly as it had arisen. Lucien finished his complicated hand-weaving in the air.
Even as they watched, the landscape shimmered, altered, and began to take on form and substance. Then they were standing on a grassy knoll, complete with weeds, trees, and a running stream. The knoll was cloaked in heather and milkweed. Kirk became aware of a new figure standing next to him. He looked down.
A small goat-boy stared back at him. A dancing miniature whirlwind spun in his open palm - the hurricane which had just thrown Kirk so callously around. The toy tornado slowed, slowed, and became a child's top. It stopped and fell over in the boy's hand.
Lucien bestowed a mildly disapproving smile on the youngster. "Kids will play." The boy grinned back, clutched tightly at his top, and hurried off to the top of the knoll.
Kirk picked himself up off the grass, pulling up a small tuft of it as he rose, and examined the newly materialized growth. It looked and smelled like good old earth-type field clover. But he wouldn't have batted an eye if it had suddenly turned into a twelve-legged Denebian spider.
Lucien was still busy. He dropped his hands to his sides and brought them up slowly, trembling, toward the sky. The forest rose close around them in rhythm with his rising hands, everything from bushes and seedlings to mature trees.
There was a gap in the woods, and Lucien gestured toward it, pointing to a vast structure that one moment was kilometers away, the next, close enough to reach out and touch.
"Is this better, my friends? You must remember it has been a long, long time since I've associated with anything human. I hope memory serves well enough. I have tried to translate my world into symbols your minds can comprehend. I could have altered your minds to perceive mine, instead, but I seem to recall that you frown on such things."
No one claimed otherwise.
By then they were all gazing toward the gap in the trees, toward the now-near, now-distant city.
It was a fairyland of crystal and ceramic mosaic, of glass and free-sculpted metals - a fairyland into which the forest, by all laws of perspective, should have extended, yet did not.
On open streets, men and women and children walked through neatly paved ways, each person differently dressed, all elaborately caped and gowned.
"Welcome, my friends, to Megas-tu," Lucien declaimed happily. "Welcome to you, and you, and you." He said it proudly, like an old man showing off his favorite grandson.
Kirk turned from the incredible metropolis back to the goat-man. "And what is Megas-tu? I would have said a world, but I've seen too much in the past few hours, or weeks, or whatever the time-referent is here, to accept anything merely on what I see."
"It is merely that, Captain James Kirk. A world. A world that operates on rules different from those of your universe." He snapped the fingers of one hand, and they found themselves seated on the grass in front of a flowing brook.
Brocaded cloths were spread all around. Quantities of sweet-smelling food and drink showed from under the lids of bulging wicker baskets. It was all very beautiful and nice and horrifying.
Lucien noticed the ambivalent expressions of his guests, looked thoughtful. "Let me see ... it takes a moment for me to remember some of your terms, you know. What is the word?" He paused a moment, then brightened.
"Ah yes, magic. Our universe operates according to the precepts of what you superstitiously call magic. Our laws are not unrealistic - merely different." He plucked an apple from empty air, took a bite out of it, and caught another. He tossed it to McCoy.
The doctor caught it automatically. "I know this is just a figment of my imagination, but -" He took a sample nibble, smiled in approval.
"It is, as you see, quite real, Dr. McCoy," Lucien continued. "Everything here is real, if you only try to see. For example..." He seemed to search the deserted knoll for a moment, then gestured.
An intricately decorated tent decorated with cabalistic symbols appeared on the grass a short distance away. An attractive girl, as delicate as Chinese porcelain, moved to enter the tent. She paused at the entrance, which was opened by an old, wrinkled woman.
They were still too far away for the watchers from the Enterprise to overhear their conversation, but some kind of business transaction seemed to be taking place. After a few minutes of this, the old woman nodded and disappeared inside. She came out shortly thereafter holding a small stoppered bottle.
Lucien spoke while the two women - if such they really were - resumed their conversation. "Beautiful, isn't she? But all our women are as young and appealing as they want to be. When anyone can be as lovely as her aesthetics demand, character soon takes over from vanity. Hence the potion-seller prefers a more traditional configuration. It makes for better business.
"To insure the man of her dreams, the young one seeks a slight edge."
"Not a love potion?" said the skeptical Kirk. "There's nothing magical about that. It's just a question of chemistry."
Lucien gave him an odd look. "You must have made some progress in certain areas since I last visited your people, Captain." He gestured, and the tent scene vanished.
Another exchange was taking place off to their right, now, on what should have been the empty top of the knoll. Two human shapes were conversing there. One was a tall, thin gentleman clad in flowing robes and a conical hat inscribed with mystic devices. He stood stroking his long white beard, deep in discussion with a manlike creature that sported a pair of wings and a traditionally gargoylish face.
After some minutes of this, the tall man in the robes turned and gestured with his hands. There was a by-now familiar crackling in the air, and sparks of loose energy grew from nothingness. They lengthened, joined together, forming beams and walls and ceilings.
The clashing colors coalesced into four solid uprights. Gesturing and prancing all the while, the oldster danced around them, solidifying the small building. It rose lithe, delicate, with high ornamental spires and turrets and smooth polished domes.
Eventually the robed dancer came to a halt. Hands on hips, he studied the finished project, then nodded in satisfaction at his completed handiwork. A last gesture, and a sign appeared over the entrance to the compact castle, the inscription in an unknown calligraphy.
"Do you need a home?" asked Lucien. "A stable, a town? Stop in and visit your friendly sorcerer-contractor. Let him do the hard work."
"Sorcerer," Spock muttered. "Of course. Federation scientists were more correct than they suspected. In order to function, any supranormal spatial phenomenon must extend through known space and time to another dimensional plane.
"The interaction of interdimensional forces supplies the energy to produce new galactic matter. It explains not only our expanding universe, but also why the physical laws here differ so completely from our own."
"I'm not sure I follow all that, Spock, but are you saying you believe in magic?"
Spock looked back at him unwaveringly. "I believe in what is logical and what follows from observable facts, Doctor. The basic laws here appear to be what we sometimes call 'magic.' The Enterprise does not operate according to these principles, therefore it ceased to function. And so, almost, did we."
"So you used magic," guessed Kirk, turning to face Lucien, "to get our ship working again."
"It was the natural thing to do, Captain. You could have done it yourself, with a little instruction. But then, few of you humans ever bothered to become proficient at magic." He frowned slightly. "Those among you who did were not looked upon with favor. Some of you even managed to reach all the way through to Megas-tu through small interdimensional vortices."
"All the way from Earth to here?" exclaimed a cynical McCoy. "Impossible."
"Distances in our universe do not operate according to your laws, either, Doctor," Lucien told him. "By our methods of reckoning, certain parts of Earth are right next door."
"Lucien," interrupted Kirk, suddenly serious, "you persist in calling us friends, imply
ing that you know us. Even more, that we should know you. But how?"
"Ah, Captain, Captain!" The goat-man leaned back on the grass and rested his head in his hands, staring at the blue sky. "To feign such ignorance with me. Still, it way always one of my problems." He stopped, and Kirk got the impression he had somehow hurt the goat-man's feelings.
Lucien crawled forward then and swept his hand through the clear surface of the brook. His fingers broke the water once and withdrew.
"Listen, look, I'll try to explain further."
The ripples stilled. Colors began to appear, staining the clearness. Shapes started to form, and soon it was like looking into a viewscreen. Gone completely was the sandy bottom of the stream. In its place they saw a broad panorama of men and women - Megans - exotic and familiar, chiseled handsome and intentionally plain, all sitting lost in contemplation amid the howling chaos that was the real surface of Megas-tu.
"This may seem to you humans to be a world of insanity and instability," declared Lucien. "But it has the quality of change we all demand. My people are calm and contented, each one existing in the world of his or her imagination."
The image in the screen blurred, changed, and Kirk and his companions had again a view of the Megan universe as they first encountered it, a riot of blending colors and splinters of stellar shape.
"There are no rivals in our little universe at all, Captain Kirk. No other life-forms save ourselves." The picture jumped again, and they were back on Megas-tu. As they watched, the people in the stream-picture stood together, and some of them began to rise upward, free of the planet.
"Millennia ago," Lucien continued, "in our search for companionship, we Megans passed through the various gates between dimensions, including the great vortex you entered by.
"Eventually, on one such expedition, we discovered," and the scene shifted again as if anticipating his words, "your world - Earth." They now saw a view of the blue-white globe of Terra, seen from space. Kirk felt an unexpected quickening. He had been away from home for too long.
Star Trek Log Three Page 17
