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Strangers from the Sky

Page 3

by Margaret Wander Bonanno


  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

 

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