Strangers from the Sky
Page 12
Thasians, Organians, Medusans spend their
entire lives in a realm of ever-flowing dream.
Among the Vulcan Masters, there are mind
techniques that make logical use of
dreams, channeling them to the solving of specific
intellectual problems, suppressing them entirely
to transform the time of sleep into the vast empty
blankness where logic is All. It is said that the
High Masters scarcely sleep at all.
For the average Vulcan, the realm of dreams may
perhaps provide release for those emotions kept in
check while waking. This is a matter for Vulcan
privacy, and not for the curiosity of outworlders. Those
who have observed the Vulcan in sleep may doubt that
dreams transpire beneath the stillness of that repose.
What the Vulcan dreams, what use he makes of
such
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dreams are his concern, but that the Vulcan dreams
is fact.
Sometimes it is necessary to dream.
Abandoning his nightly meditations at last for
sleep, Spock dreamed.
"You cannot do it alone," the female insisted. "You
cannot do it . . . You cannot do it . . . You cannot . . .
You cannot alone. . . You alone. . . alone. . .
alone . . . his
"Mother?" Spock asked the darkness,
sensing rather than seeing her.
She was standing beside him, her hand on his arm in a
gesture he tolerated from no other.
"Mother, if I fail . . . your people and my father's
will never meet his
"And you will never be, was Amanda finished for him.
"Is that what motivates you, my son?"
Spock shook his head.
"Personal concerns are of little consequence in a
situation of this magnitude. It is the thought of Earth
without the benefit of Federation his
"And the benefit of Vulcan wisdom?" Amanda
asked. "Poor little Earth! How ever will we
manage?"
Spock stood on his dignity even in dream.
"Mother, it is a fact that without Vulcan
intervention the entire food supply of Earth would have
been endangered by the year his
"And as even your father will admit, it is a fact that
without the mitigating influence of humans, there was a
67.6 percent probability that Vulcans would have
logicked themselves to death within a millenniant,"
Amanda countered. "Assuming they survived the
Tellarite Insurgency in a Federation that did not
contain humans. And where was Vulcan,
I'd like to know, during the Romulan Wars? Which of
your worlds do you argue for, Spock? And why not both?"
Spock had no answer.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Neither Vulcan nor Earth could have achieved what
they have without the other. Neither could do it alone. Nor can
you. You cannot do it alone . . ."
It was not Amanda who stood beside him in darkness, but
T'Lera who stood before him in the light. Vulcan
and commander, dweller in the void of space for more years
than Spock had lived, she awaited his argument with the
equanimity of her station and her years.
"Commander, was Spock began, wondering for the first time
in his life which of his worlds he spoke for. "What can
I say to persuade you?"
T'Lera now studied him, making no effort
to mitigate her gaze. This one, whatever he was,
would not fear her. She must know why.
"Who are you?" she asked, slowly approaching
him. "Who are you . . . ?"
"I'm taking the afternoon off," Kirk told his
Coridani aide. He had a sudden desperate
need to be alone. "Get Kinski to cover my
1400 briefing, hold all my calls,
and you can have the
water-ballet tickets for tonight. If you don't
mind sitting next to Commodore Hrokk."
"Thanks, but I'll pass."" The girl
lowered her bifurcate eyebrows at him.
Commodore Hrokk had two hands more than the
average humanoid. "Where will you be, Admiral?"
"Anywhere but here," Kirk said shortly, putting
the time lock on his desk, jingling the activator for the
aircar he'd left in the flag officers' hangar.
Before the results of this morning's psychoscan came
back he would be long gone. "And don't have me
paged unless the world's coming to an end. Clear?"
"I thought you and Enterprise solved that the last
time, sir," his aide quipped. Kirk stopped in his
tracks. "I only meant it's a running gag
around here, sir. V'ger and all that."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Yes, I know," Kirk said. was "Admiral
Quirk" is what they call me behind my back,
isn't it?"
When Coridani blushed, they went from grey
to mauve.
"It's not that we don't appreciate
what you did, Admiral, only his
"Only what, Ensign?"
"Only it's a little awesome working for a living
legend, sir. Particularly one who's so down
to Earth? Is that the expression I want?"
"It'll do," Kirk said grimly.
Living legend! he thought, navigating the
corridors in quick time before someone waylaid him with
some new idiocy. They'll cast me in bronze if
I don't keep moving. Living legend! That
hurts almost as much as the one about being "down to Earth."
As Spock would say: precisely!
Kirk let the aircar down on its pontoons and
waited for it to stabilise. The sea was calm, but
he'd come in rather fast and kicked up a local wake;
he'd have to wait for it to dissipate. Meanwhile he
opened the overhead iris to 360 degrees and had a
look around. He'd never been to this part of the
Pacific before, had no idea it was so built up.
The picture of it he had in his head was two
centuries old.
That clump of submersibles riding at anchor on
a massive free-floating dock he'd passed to the
west he recognised as belonging to
DownUndersea, an entire underwater city
built out from the coral reefs off Brisbane almost
to the Solomons. But this far out, well east of
Norfolk Island and south of Pitcairn, he'd
expected open sea.
Instead he'd landed in the middle of a number of little
pontoon villages built entirely on the
surface of a reasonably quiet South
Pacific. No doubt they had
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some kind of shielding against major storms; all the
same he'd hate to be bobbing around like a cork on
that ocean in a typhoon, Kirk thought. But the
inhabitants of these villages were seafolk
Maoris and Samoans and the hard-as-nails
descendants of descendants of HMS Bounty's
Pitcairners; they could probably weather anything.
Kirk opened the hatch on the aircar and breathed
deeply of the salt air. It was beautiful here. He
would have to come back sometime when he could stay a few
days, get to andnow the people and their world. There was still so
much
of his own planet he knew nothing about, and he could
find much to like in this part of it.
But what he'd come looking for wasn't here.
McCoy popped the results of Jim
Kirk's
psychoscan out of his viewer and scowled. This was more
serious than he'd thought.
"Get me Admiral Kirk's office," he
barked into the comm.
Within seconds he was talking to the Coridani
en- sign, who was extremely sorry, doctor,
but
"What do you mean he's gone for the day?" McCoy
blustered. "Where the hell is he?"
He rang up Kirk's apartment and left a
message with the computer. He called the museum at
Alexandria on the odd chance he might be poking
around in the library. He called all of Kirk's
usual haunts. No one had seen Jim Kirk in
over a week.
- Ever since he got hold of that damn book,
McCoy
fumed.
Ordinarily he'd let it go. Jim was a big
boy and could take care of himself. But in view of what
had turned up on his scan there was something ominous about
his choosing to disappear right now.
McCoy had one last resort, and that was to use his
clout to have Kirk found via the
intracranial senceiver flag officers were required
to have implanted whenever
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
they were planetside. McCoy had always hated the
device, balked at it as a major invasion of
privacy, and he wouldn't use it unless he was sure
the man was in real danger.
And he wasn't at all sure of that. Yet.
Taking the scan tape with him, McCoy headed
for the Psych Division. There were some people he had to talk
to.
Kirk aimed the aircar toward the nearest of the
float villages, adjusted its engines for
oversee, felt it kick in like an outboard and churn
up a great frothing wake. He lowered the overhead
dome, keeping only the windscreen in place,
enjoying the wind m his hair and the spray on his
face. As he neared the piers extending out from the
village like the spokes of a wheel and the variety of
sea- and air-going craft moored to them, he slowed
to a leisurely bobbing pace, cutting his wake
to almost nil.
A boy of about twelve, shiftless and barefoot,
sat dangling his legs over the end of one
of the piers. When he saw this exotic craft heading
in his direction, he jumped to his feet and waved it
toward him excitedly. Kirk killed the engine to an
idling purr and came alongside.
"Whattaway!" the boy called the local
greeting, just loudly enough to be heard above the aircar's
jets.
"Hello yourself," Kirk replied.
"Mine's Koro Quintal," the boy stated,
jerking a thumb toward his bare chest. "What's
yours?"
Squinting up at him in the afternoon sun, Kirk
marveled at the diversity his planet could produce.
Everything about the boy declared the variety of his
ancestry. His first name, the wiry build,
jet-black hair and tawny skin, even his abiding
by the custom of not raising his voice close to the sea,
revealed his Maori roots. His last name and the
startling blue eyes in that burnished face made him
offspring of one of Fletcher
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Christian's crewmates.an Aussie accent
the like of which Kirk hadn't heard since Kyle made
commander and shipped aboard Reliant
completed the picture. Here was a thousand years of
Earth history, looking down at him from a pier in the
middle of an ocean named Pacific, hands on his
hips, grinning.
"Mine's Jim Kirk."
"You're lost, my word," Koro observed,
cocking his head like a bird.
"May be, son," Kirk acknowledged, waiting
for the boy to make the next move, enjoying the
exchange.
"Could be I'd help y'find it," Koro said,
digging one diffident bare toe into a rift in the
prefab surfacing of the pier. "Can I have a
go-"round in that-'ere rumlooking rig of yours?"
"Sounds reasonable, Koro Quintal." Kirk
smiled, offering him a hand down. "Hop in."
They'd made the circuit of the entire village
twice and flown over it once for good measure,
Koro's eager hands on the controls, before Jim
Kirk explained what he was doing here.
"Lot of outlanders been poking around this-here since
that book come out," Koro observed as they idled and
bobbed, watching the gulls wheeling and coasting back
to the haunts of man with the sunset. "Weren't none of
them a bloody admiral, my word."
"Don't tell me you've read it," Kirk
asked, bemused. He'd worn his civvies, hadn't
meant to tell the boy who he was, but news about
living legends reached even here.
"Strangers from the Sky? Aye, sure thing.
Assign- ment for school. Only it's ancient,
don't you'see? Hasn't been a kelp farm
hereabouts in a hundred years."
"If only there were someone who knew about that time,"
Kirk mused. "A local historian maybe.
Koro, who's the wisest person you know?"
"That'd be Galarrwny," the boy said without
hesita
1 1 0
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
tion. "He's curator of the museum over
to Easter. An outlander like you,
Admiral-Jim-Kirk."
Time to use that rank to advantage, Kirk
decided.
"Would you introduce me to this Galarrwuy sometime?"
"Now's as good as any," the boy said, scrambling
back into the pilot's seat. "Can I steer her again?"
Kirk hesitated. It was early evening here,
three hours earlier than San
Francisco, and it would take him as many hours
to get back. If he wasn't at his desk
by 0800 tomorrow, they'd send out an alert for him, and he
wasn't about to call in and let them know where he was.
He decided to chance it. At least Easter Island was
a thousand miles in the right direction.
"She's yours." He nodded at Koro. "Only
take her up and over please."
"Why?" Koro gunned the engine. "You apt
to seasick?"
"No, but it's faster."
"Ar!" the boy marveled. "Caught on to me
already!"
"The minute that book hit the stands they started coming
out of the woodwork," Dr. Krista Sivertsen told
McCoy. "All the seekers and the searchers, every
wide-eyed neurotic and flawed personality on the
planet turned up claiming they were present in a
previous incarnation when the Vulcans arrived, that they
helped them escape or helped them pass for human
or whatever. Some even claimed they were direct
descendants of Sorahl by way of a variety of
human females. Whatever it may have done for
history, that book is playing bob with psychiatry.
When your admiral told me why yo
u'd sent
him for a scan, I thought, No, impossible. He's
not the type at all. He's strong, assertive, a
totally integrated personality. McCoy's doing
a number on me. Then I read the results of the
scan.
"Let me put it to you this way, Leonard. If
I sent you
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a patient whom you diagnosed as having a serious
communicable disease, would you let me
plea-bargain him out of quarantine to run around
infecting others?"
"He's not going to hurt anyone!" McCoy
protested. "I'll personally monitor him around
the clock for as long as you have him in therapy. But you
can't relieve a man like Jim Kirk of duty and
expect him to sit home and watch the wallpaper."
"On the contrary," the leggy blond psychiatrist
said. "I want him hospitalised. sedation and under
restraint if necessary, until we get to the bottom of
this."
McCoy had argued himself hoarse since he'd
stormed into Krista's cozy, informal office in
Psych Division. Krista's digs
looked more like a high-class ski lodge than a
shrink's office, right down to the needlepoint on the
sofa cushions and the choice of hot cider or
schnapps-spiked coffee Dr. Sivertsen offered
her patients as part of her unique brand of therapy.
McCoy had known her for years, had in fact had
her as a student back when he was teaching. Back when
he was stil tilde unhappily married, and the sight
of her crossing and uncrossing those long legs in the
front of his lecture hall had been enough to remind
him just how unhappy he really was. But nothing would
be served by bringing up that particular part of the past.
"Krista, be reasonable his
"Leonard, I am being reasonable." She too was
conscious of their shared history, remembered how his
dry humor and the laugh lines around those sky-blue
eyes hadn't disguised the pain behind them. To this day it
was all she could do to keep from calling him Dr.
McCoy all the time. "You saw his readout, and
you're skilled enough to know what it means. I'll run
it for you again if you need convincing."
She punched up Jim Kirk's psychoscan.
"Here, and here," she said, pointing out the anoma-
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lies. "Radical dysfunction in deep-level
mnemonic patterns, and localised distortion of
short-term focal memory."
"I see it," McCoy acknowledged grudgingly.