Strangers from the Sky
Page 3
in out of the sky."
"By the time Amity found that Vulcan ship adrift
off 25
Neptune all that was over," Kirk said,
resetting a particularly recalcitrant grandfather
clock, half listening. "We'd already been
to Alpha
Centauri his
"You haven't been listening to a damn word I've
said, have you?" McCoy said disgustedly. "This happened
a full twenty years before that."
Kirk restarted the grandfather's pendulum, closed
the glass fronting, and frowned.
"tilde What7"
"This Vulcan ship fell to Earth while the
Centauri mission was still three years from its
destination. We're talking sublight, remember?
The crew heading for Centauri had no idea they'd
find an advanced civilization, had no idea what
they'd find. This was the Dark Ages of interstellar
travel, and here's an interesting point: mankind had
been sending and listening for radio messages from other
worlds since the 1970's. We were actively seeking
contact, but only on our terms. We had to be the
aggressors. It was okay for us to go outside our
system and find 'them" whoever "they" were tilde
ut there, but God forbid "they" presume to set
foot on our soil without knocking first. Worse, not
only did they look funny and talk funny, but
they had all these spooky habits like reading minds and
suppressing their emotions and living
practically forever from our standpoint, and being stronger and
smarter and having warp drive . . .
Kirk sat slowly, fiddled with the fireplace
poker, watched the flames.
"Zefram Cochrane is credited with the
breakthrough in warp drive," he said adamantly,
as if it were set in stone somewhere.
"As far as human technology was concerned,"
McCoy corrected him. "The Vulcans already had
it."
"That's impossible."
"Is it? They were out in space centuries before we
were. You've heard Spock's lecture on
ethnocentricity,
on how just because we haven't discovered something
doesn't mean it doesn't exist? How many
superior species have we discovered since? That's the
whole crux of the problem, Jim, the whole thrust of the
book. It was the timing that was wrong. The Amity
story makes good copy. Brave Earthmen rescuing
injured aliens from their damaged ship and all that. But
you of all people should know that human history is seldom
that neat. By the time of the Amity incident we were
receptive to alien contact. Twenty years earlier
Vulcans or anybody else were just as likely
to be burned as witches or blasted out of the
cornfield with a 12-gauge as they would've been in
any prior century. Neither Vulcan nor Earth
wants to admit to that, but there it is. That's why it's
been hushed up until now."
"Earth and Vulcan, joined in
some conspiracy to keep this secret all these
years?" Kirk mused, shook his head, rejected
it. "Sorry, Bones, you've lost me there."
"The Vulcan Archives were sealed until the death
of the last survivor," McCoy explained
patiently. "Nosh ing conspiratorial about it.
By reason of her credentials, Dr. Jen-Saunor
was the first person and the only human, by the way to have
access to them. On the human side, on the other
hand, all contemporary Earth accounts were mysteriously
"misplaced." Government files chewed up
by computers, witnesses gone to ground, the usual
nonsense."
"That much I can accept," Kirk said. "But not the
sealing of the Vulcan Archives. It seems
uncharacteristic. Isn't the truth supposed to be
accessible to all?"
"Not when it causes embarrassment to both
sides," McCoy reiterated. "With the exception
of the few who tried to help, most humans came out
of this looking like hysterics or spoiled children. And the
Vulcans could hardly be pleased with having to be
less than com27
pletely truthful about certain pertinent details
of the event. his
"Convenient for the author, though," Kirk remarked
dryly. "She's the only one with access to the
files, no one on Earth knows enough to refute her.
No wonder the book's so controversial. I'll
refrain from calling it an outright scam, but let's
say it's an "artful fabrication." Fiction
passing itself off as history. Like those Ancient
Astronaut books a few centuries back."
"Now wait a minute was McCoy growled.
"Another thing was Kirk interrupted. "This
novelistic style of hers. Reproducing
dialogue as if she were actually in the room when it
havened his
"What's wrong with making history accessible?"
McCoy wanted to know. "Anyone from a ten-year
old to a Starfleet admiral can read this and
understand it. And the dialogue, by the bye, was taken from the
journals of one of the Vulcan survivors. As
I'm certain you know from personal experience, once
a Vulcan says something, he never forgets it."
"Sort of like studying Hannibal's campaigns
from the perspective of the elephants," Kirk
suggested. McCoy was not amused.
"You don't like your preconceived notions chal-
lenged, do you, you old dinosaur?" he badgered
Kirk. "Don't like your safe little textbook
version of history threatened. You're getting
conservative in your old age, Admiral. Very bad
business!"
"You want some coffee?" Kirk asked
innocently, stifling a yawn.
"Not the kind you serve!" McCoy grumbled.
"Closest it ever came to a coffee bean was in a
dictionary. Right under "bilge water.""
"Well, don't mind if I do." Kirk
meandered out to the kitchen, punched a single preset
button on the synthesiser.
"Curious," McCoy heard him say.
"What is?" the doctor asked,
contemplating the barber lights.
"Assuming I believed any of it," Kirk said,
returning from the kitchen sipping something that at least was
hot, "and I'm not saying I do here you have two
Vulcans stranded on Earth twenty years too
soon. Their ship is beyond repair, and they're
totally at the mercy of humans and their primitive
technology. How'd they get back home?"
"I'm not saying they did," McCoy replied.
"You're not going to tell me they spent the rest of
their lives on Earth!"
"No, I'm not going to tell you that, either. I'm not
going to tell you a damn thing."
"I can just see them putting in a request for a
sublight ship," Kirk mused. "Or having to bob
their ears and assimilate. I can't imagine a
worse fate for a firstgeneration Vulcan. Or
doesn't your highly acclaimed historian tell
you?"
McCoy didn't answer.
"Time I was moving on," he said pointedly.
"Got a SiIt A.m. consult and a morning full
of office hours staring me in the face."
Kirk tried to block his way to the door, only
half
"Come on, Bones, tell me. What happened
to the Vulcans?"
McCoy slipped his disk copy of Strangers
from the Sky out of a pocket and held it out to Kirk,
tantalising. "Why don't you read it and find out?"
Kirk looked at the garish little plastic disk and
almost took it. Something about that era of first contacts had
always made him uneasy, perhaps the very thing McCoy
had been on about all night: the innate Murphy's
Law capacity of humans to botch whatever they put
their hands to. He thought about an isolationist Earth,
alone against a universe rife with unknowns. No
Federation, no Starfleet. No half-Vulcan
first officer, who was also his friend . . .
Kirk handed the disk back to McCoy.
"Thanks, no, Bones. Maybe some other time.
his
"Your loss!" McCoy growled, stalking past
him to the door. "I'm going home to find out what
does happen!"
TWO
"Destruction before detection."
It was the axiom etched on every
scoutcraftcommander's soul. Nevertheless, no
commander could depart for what until recently had
amounted to a several decades' journey without the
formality of having the words reiterated by the commanding
prefect. It might be illogical to hear repeated
that which one knew as first principle of one's
profession, yet it was required.
"Destruction before detection."
It was the definitive distillation of the precepts of
TeaKahr Savar, first to hold the office of
prefect for offworld exploration upon its creation some
170.15 years ago. It could also, of course, be
inferred from the philosophy of IDIC as found in the
writings of Surak long before such
exploration was feasible.
"It is not given to us," Prefect Savar had
written in his declaration of intent before assuming
office those many years ago, "to influence or affect
in any way the normal course of events upon any
world we may observe in our joumeys. The
sociopolitical implications of any such
intervention are too grave."
Subsequent study of those near worlds with advanced
civilisations confirmed the wisdom of Savar's
precept. It was found, for example, that the
blueskinned and antennaed inhabitants of one such
world had grounded their cosmology in a complex
polytheism that rendered their solar system the whole of the
universe. To confront them with living proof of the
existence of an alien species pointed-eared,
green- blooded, different in all respects was
to throw them into possibly irreconcilable
theological turmoil.
In another instance, the suidaen inhabitants of the
61 Cygnus system, despite their own recent
history of space exploration, were a
conspicuously xenophobia species, prone
to violence when their beliefs, however erroneous, were
challenged. To communicate with such a species would
only provoke the violence Surak had sought
to eradicate among his people.
And while the inhabitants of the Sol system were
highly advanced, heterogeneous, open to the new and
strange, and had in fact been actively seeking
communication with other intelligent life for over
seventy of their years, they had only recently found
peace among
themselves after a series of global wars. Any
threat to that tenuous peace from without was anathema.
"It is our purpose to study these worlds, with a
view toward a time when first contact is deemed
practicable, without giving any
evidence that we ourselves exist," Savar had
concluded in his declaration. "For that reason, any
craft disabled within an inhabited system must
self-destruct before its presence is discovered.
Destruction before detection."
Destruction before detection. In the ensuing years it
had never yet come to that, yet every scoutcraft was
equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, and every
commander was
prepared at all times to activate it.
Destruction before detection. It was the first
application of the Vulcan Prime Directive.
Commander T'Lera, offspring of the same Prefect
Savar who had composed those words, stood before the
current prefect, awaiting her final departure
orders.
"The commander's choice of crew
complement is of course at her own
discretion was Prefect T'Saaf began,
contemplating the roster before her.
was nevertheless the prefect is justified in questioning at
least two of my choices," T'Lera finished for
her, her voice perhaps a shade drier than the occasion
warranted. "I am open to discussion."
T'Saaf moved her eyes away from the roster to the
imperturbable face before her. It was said that T'Lera
had qualified for the prefecture before her and refused
it, preferring instead the reaches of space where she had
spent most of her life. T'Saaf studied that
face, handsome even in middle years, the eyes never
quite fixed on any planet-bound thing but always elsewhere
and afar, and could well believe it. So to her had
fallen that which her abilities merited, but only because
this one had refused it. T'Saaf would indeed
welcome a discussion of the
liberties T'Lera sometimes chose to take.
"The choice of PK-AHR Savar as your
historiographer was the prefect began;
was was at his own behest, Prefect," T'Lera
said. For once her eyes came close to focusing
on the near-athand. "My father is old. He has not
many years left to him. If he wishes to spend them
in service, it is my judgment he is within
his right."
"He has served," Prefect T'Saaf
pointed out. "In the reaches of space, and in this
office, for many years and admirably. No further
service is required of him."
She got no answer to this. T'Lera's true
reasons, and Savar's, were other than those stated.
"Does his healer deem him fit for such a
journey?" T'Saaf demanded.
"He has made the journey thrice before the
breaking of the light barrier," T'Lera reminded her,
not precisely answering the question. "Six decades of
his life have been spent in the void between the stars. It
is logical to assume that this mode is more congenial
to him than the confines of any planet."
"Nevertheless, if he is unable adequately
to perform his duties . . ."
T'Saaf did not finish. The suggestion that her
predecessor might be in less than optimum
health or strength might be cruel, but its logic was
unarguable.a scoutship's personnel space was at
a premium, its food supply limbed. Every<
br />
crewmember would be employed to the fullest,
and no one, not even a former prefect, had the right
to voyage as a mere spectator.
"None can know the future," T'Lera replied,
though she did not offer it as an excuse. "Saver
is well aware of his responsibility to the rest of the
crew. He will accept the consequences."
In another the tone might be pleading; in T'Lera
it was only reasonable.
"If my father desires to make the journey one
final time his
""One final time,"" Prefect T'Saaf
repeated. "And if he does not return?"
"That, too, at his own behest," T'Lera
replied. She unstiffened her rigid posture for the
briefest moment, came as close as she could to making
a personal request. "He has not long, and there
is nothing that holds him to this world. One who has
lived in space is entitled to die in space."
T'Saaf gave no answer, but locked her
eyes with T'Lera's, forcing the latter to focus
down, to remain with the planet-bound, the temporal, the
personal.
"I accept the responsibility," T'Lera
said, undaunted, her far-searching eyes all the more
penetrating for their narrowed focus. "For my
father's sake."
"Kaiidth!" T'Saaf acknowledged, and
FL-ERA had her will, at least in this.
Yoshi and Tatya brought the hydrofoil back
to the agrostation without speaking. There didn't seem
to be any words for this particular
situation.
Yoshi steered the foil one-handed around the perimeter
and down one of the access lanes that radiated like wheel
spokes from the hub of the station, his eyes never leaving the
horizon. The hand that gripped the wheel was
white-knuckled; the other lay clenched in his lap.
Tatya stayed below with her patients, sitting on
her heels on the deck between the bunk where the male
lay and the stretcher that held the female. Now that she
knew, or thought she knew, what they were, the idea
of touching either of them made her quail.
You're going to have to touch them sooner or later, she
told herself. You're a paramedic; it's your pb.
When you get them back to the
station, what then?
She'd plunged her bloodstained hands into seawater
up to the elbows, trailing them over the side