Strange New Worlds IV

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “I do not know. I cannot go alone in time. I fear it without my people. Yet I must. I am of time, and I must go.”

  McCoy cocked his head, frustrated and intrigued. In time. Of time. Was it talking about variant types of time? As if time itself had flavors, beyond past and present and future. He walked closer, studying the chair Irum sat in. Smooth, shiny blue metal, streamlined and all of one piece. There were no other devices or technologies in the cavern he could see, except for the glowing globe of light floating above their heads. The chair could be a spacecraft of some kind. Or a temporal device? Something like the sentient time portal they’d once encountered, the Guardian of Forever?

  “Are you from the future, Irum?”

  That produced two complete head swivels. A nod? A shake? “I am of time, McCoy. I am a time walker. I remember we. I know we. We were of time. We walked together. That was our way, always to walk time together.”

  “Your people, Irum. They died, when you crashed here?”

  “They are out of time, McCoy. I am alone.”

  McCoy sighed. “I’m sorry, Irum. I know how that feels, when people die. I know it all too well.” Mears’s face suddenly rose up before him—a misty shaded outline of her flowing hair and wide grin and keen glance—swirling airily past the doctor’s inner eye. Let the haunting begin. He shrugged it away. Extreme fatigue was taking its toll on his nerves.

  Irum saw nothing of this vision, of course. “Then we are friends,” it said, lifting the thin corners of its mouth into a tiny smile. “I can help you, McCoy, if you will touch me.”

  “What do you mean?” The doctor felt a twinge of suspicion.

  Irum said nothing, only stared, eyes glittering.

  It wanted to hear its name spoken. “Irum, I don’t understand. Help me?”

  “Take you out of time, McCoy. Take you everywhere. Anywhere. Anywhere in time. Do you see?”

  “No,” McCoy said. “Not really, Irum. You’re talking about time travel?”

  A full head revolution. “Yes, McCoy. Time travel. I am of all time. You are in this time. I felt you approaching me, and from your times I chose this weather time, for you. I made it. Do you like it?”

  McCoy glanced around the swampy cavern. Irum had somehow poked into his brain and pulled out a Southern bayou to greet him, calling the trick weather time. So it was a master of both time and space, manipulating reality to suit its needs. “I like it a lot, Irum,” he replied. “Thank you. But I still don’t quite get what you mean by putting me anywhere in time …”

  “I will insert you, McCoy, in the time you choose. You yourself.”

  “Why, Irum?”

  A hesitation, its head tilting just slightly to one side. “Because we are friends. I will walk you there.”

  “You’ll come with me?”

  “I will walk you, then … walk by myself.” It sounded terrified at the prospect.

  “And all just by touch—touching you?” McCoy felt scared too. Silence.

  “By touching you, Irum?”

  Rotation. “Touch my forehead, McCoy.”

  An idea tickled the doctor’s brain. He was no quantum physicist, but … “Say, Irum. Why don’t you just go back and save your own people? Go back before the crash. Can’t you do that?”

  Irum swung its head back and forth. “I cannot walk with those who are not of time. They are gone. Are you lonely, McCoy?”

  McCoy blinked. “Sometimes. Are you, Irum?”

  “Yes.” It looked sad. “Time is everywhere. People are not.” A melancholy sigh. “It is good to hear my name, McCoy. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Irum.” A funny notion struck him, one of his famous intuitions. Irum was very direct, almost like a simpleton but not stupid. It was so eager to please. What had he thought when they first met? Like speaking to a precocious—“Are you a child, Irum?”

  “McCoy, in your years, I am almost adolescent. I am young among my people, if I had any people.”

  “You don’t have a home planet somewhere, or some time?”

  “No, McCoy. I am the last. I cannot return unless I walk with those who are.”

  What a tragedy. Living here in this cave with nothing but—the doctor surmised—only recently intercepted broadcasts between Martian colonists and terraformers to keep it company. Teaching itself English this past century—a drop in the bucket for Irum—just to give itself something to do. Content to live a solitary life until the noisy humans came along to disturb its bereavement. And now it knew it had to go: you can’t mourn the dead forever. Irum could probably spin its fantastic snowman head and become a mighty ruler of infinite time and space, travel almost anywhere it wished, bend the warp and weave of the very fabric of existence, but it was alone and young and afraid. It didn’t want to leave, unless it had company. Just like any bashful youngster.

  McCoy cleared a lump in his throat. “Will I remember you, Irum, after I go?”

  “I do not know, McCoy. I am not you.”

  “Well. I’ll try to remember you, Irum. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  Irum closed its eyes and thrust its head forward to receive McCoy’s touch.

  The doctor hesitated, though he knew exactly when he wanted to go. But would he remember this time line after he went back? Otherwise, he’d change nothing. And even if he could, should he? There were always side effects—no action is without consequences. If Jim were here, he’d scream at Bones not to do this. The last time he’d jumped into a temporal portal he was gonzo on an accidental overdose of cordrazine, but now McCoy was stone cold sober.

  It was only a tiny mend. Just tidying up a tragic accident that never should have happened. What possible ripples in the time line could such a small fix produce?

  McCoy shook his head, chastising himself for his bout of conscience, or more likely fear. These excuses meant nothing. It was simple: He could save Mears. He had to do it. He hadn’t been able to save her. The doctor couldn’t heal the patient. Yet another shade to add to the load he carried already. But now he had a second chance, and it was the only remedy.

  So if he was destined to be a time doctor, he might as well get on with it.

  “Irum,” he said one last time, a farewell. He reached out.

  “McCoy,” it said one last time.

  He touched a finger to its white forehead and felt a sharp tingle—a thrilling shock—

  Admiral McCoy sat in his lamp-lit study, reviewing a case. His joints ached, cramped and stiff from sitting in one position for too long. He kept dribbling coffee onto his bushy beard as he absently sipped the lukewarm liquid. The cat was mewing in the kitchen, greedy thing, probably hungry again. Hadn’t he just fed it an hour ago? He clicked up a page displayed in a ridiculously small font size, grunted, and reached for his spectacles. Beverly Crusher, who’d sent him the report, must have eyes like a rabbit! Once the thick glasses were uncomfortably perched on his nose, the blotchy ants crawling on the viewscreen turned into words again. Being 144 years old was a novel experience, but rarely fun.

  Outside, a wet winter storm howled and raged through the bayou.

  This was another of many recent case histories about a new degenerative disorder, affecting mainly elderly humans, though Crusher’s patient was not that old or actually expressing the disease yet. When activated, it caused a progressive disintegration of the synaptic pathways. Patients reported hallucinating that they became unstuck in time, at one moment reliving scenes from their past and in the next transported to the future. They moved back and forth randomly, sometimes falling into the present, their perceived temporal jump pace accelerating as their synaptic pathways degraded, until at last they became vegetables, settling into comas and, soon after, death. The syndrome was genetically inherited and, of course, idiopathic. No one knew how it had slipped so quickly into the human genome.

  Privately, McCoy had a pretty damn good idea about that.

  The black cat yowled. Tree branches tapped at the windowpane beside his desk, fluttering in the high wind
whipping around the house. Reminded him of a certain dust storm on Mars almost one hundred years before.

  Mears was alive, old but still hale. She hadn’t died in the crash on Mars because there never was a crash on Mars. After he touched Irum, McCoy instantly returned to several minutes before the crash. He suggested they move their shuttle for a better view of the Mons Lights, and the meteor—or whatever it was—never struck. Simple as that. They had a lovely shore leave.

  “I remembered,” the old doctor whispered.

  The storm outside shrieked like banshees. He recognized familiar voices whistling down the wind, a foolish notion, but McCoy had always been superstitious. He thought about his oldest friends.

  Spock was alive, still out on Romulus last he’d heard. Jim was long gone, lost in that terrible incident on the Enterprise-B. Scotty, the luckiest of them all thanks to an unexpected sojourn in a transporter buffer, had a new lease on life, tinkering around these days in the SCE. All of them scattered about the universe and time and space. McCoy had never told any of them about this, nor anyone else, not ever. He’d thought about putting it all down in his memoirs, but somehow the encounter with Irum, and how he changed time, never made it in there either. No data trail: all in his head. Maybe he should walk down to the muddy river flowing across his property and whisper his secret into the reeds. But as he recalled from ancient myth, that ploy hadn’t work out too well, either.

  The cat strolled up and rubbed against his leg. McCoy picked up the creature and tickled its back, amused by the white sparks of static electricity hopping about its black fur. It purred and settled against his chest, warm and comforting. For some reason, he couldn’t remember its name at the moment. Senility at last? Now, that would be poetic justice.

  To paraphrase something Scotty once said about starships, the more complex the human body became, the easier it was to gum up the works. McCoy thought and went back to the moment he touched Irum’s forehead, that tingling sensation he felt, the shock of getting wrenched out of time and through time and all around time … and something else.

  McCoy’s theory was the sort of mad reasoning that could end his distinguished medical career in an assisted-care facility. But how else to explain the seemingly spontaneous appearance of an abnormal allele on the human genome? His current case study was as telling in its lack of clues as any other. The subject, one Jean-Luc Picard—ironically, the captain of the Enterprise—was predisposed to express the phenotype of the gene’s degenerative syndrome. He had inherited the genotype from his mother, and she had inherited it from no one in her ancestry at all. And so it went across Yvette Picard’s entire generation. A hitherto nonexistent gene had appeared with the suddenness of flicking a matchstick. Though the medical community had not yet identified exactly how the gene worked, through laborious cross-checking and testing they did know which gene was involved and exactly when the mutant allele appeared on the genome.

  It happened on the day Leonard McCoy touched Irum’s forehead and changed time.

  A strong draught of air rattled the windowframe at his elbow, as the tepid glow of the lamp on his desk flickered a few times. The hairs on the back of the doctor’s neck stood up. Not because he was startled. He was chilled to the bone by his own crazy thoughts.

  Coincidence? No such thing. The genetic disorder must have appeared as a result of intense subspatial and even subtemporal stress produced by the modified time line. Creation and expression all in one convenient quantum package. This triggered a reversible adaptive response in the human genome, releasing some as-yet undetectable enzyme that suppressed immunity in certain individuals to nonlinear temporal perception.

  A disease that virtually unstuck people in time. Madness!

  The cat licked his nose with its scratchy pink tongue, staring up at him with swamp black, effluvium eyes. Cats always seemed to be looking at you from the bottom of a dark well, mocking the silly humans, as they well deserved.

  McCoy now had the task of naming the syndrome. He had no idea how to cure it, though through early tests with peridaxon, a drug he’d created on a hunch using the dried-out sample of wall lichen he’d taken from Irum’s cave, he found he could slow the disease’s progress. So everyone was grateful and they gave this unenviable honor to the humble old country doctor. He planned to call it Irumodic syndrome, though he supposed Leonard’s Folly would be closer to the truth. A lifetime dedicated to helping the sick and this was his legacy, to name the syndrome he unwittingly created.

  He could barely stand it. He’d infected the human race with misery. Their ghosts were already here, riding a cloud of despair that curled around his dizzy head. They slid in with the storm, and they were settling in for a long stay. They’d haunt him until the day he died, swooping and taunting, making sure he never forgot what he did. The good of the one, the bad of the many, the spirits hissed. Your fault. But he had no choice! What else could he do? He was a doctor, not a quantum physicist!

  “She was dead!” he cried.

  “She was dead, McCoy,” said his black cat, eyes glittering. “You did the right thing.”

  McCoy squinted down at the animal in his lap. Either he was dreaming or going stark raving mad. Fine. Ship him off in a straitjacket and be done with it. “Right?” he said. “What I did was insane. I’m not God. I had no business playing with time, no matter what I told myself, no matter how good it was.”

  “You did not play with time, McCoy,” said the cat with the warp-core eyes. “You had nothing to do with it. It was not your fault.”

  “Then whose was it?”

  The cat swiveled its head about, a full rotation. “Mine,” it said. “I walked you then, McCoy. I did not mean to hurt your people. I was afraid. Now I am free, and I come and go, walking in shapes and times and dreams. I animal walk. I weather walk. But I walk alone. I am not like you. When you touched me, I made your people sick. I am sorry, McCoy. You helped me. You are my friend. But I am to blame.”

  McCoy blinked groggily, unable to make sense of the cat’s speech. But he could tell it was sorry. “What can we do?” he said miserably.

  “I do not know. I cannot take back your touch. A touch cannot be undone. If we try to walk back and fix it, you must touch me again. We made a loop! Loops are bad. Hard to break.” The cat bared its fangs and ruefully shook its pointed ears. “Maybe you can fix your people. Can you? I trust you, McCoy. They all do.”

  The doctor slumped out of his chair and crashed to the floor. The kind words hurt him more keenly than the sharp pains shooting through his bruised body. The dead and dying were all around. The weight on his back was too much. They were right. He was accountable, and he would pay. “How can I?” he said, moaning. “I’m too old!” Bitter tears burnt his parchment skin. “I know nothing. I can’t even remember your name, cat.” He writhed and prayed for madness.

  The cat walked up and licked his nose. “McCoy,” it said solemnly, “I am Irum.” Its face melted, morphing into a round white blob. “I will help. You are afriad. I will do for you what you did for me. I will help you forget your pain.” A soothing swipe of the scratchy tongue. “Do not remember, McCoy. Forget.” The cat’s snowman head sank into a swamp of dust and darkness.

  “Forget.”

  The word whispered into silence.

  Leonard McCoy woke refreshed. He practically leapt out of bed—not bad for 144 days young!—stepped into his slippers and dashed into the study. A fine sunny morning. He tossed open the shutters and surveyed his back garden. The rosebushes looked a bit tossed from the storm last night, and there was some debris scattered around the grass, but he could clean that up later. First, coffee, then, to work.

  He had a notion about the behavior of this so-called Irumodic syndrome (where had they come up with that odd name?) that might be worth exploring. Just as the chemical composition of the temporary antidote peridaxon had come to McCoy in a dream, last night as he slept he’d floated over a complex map of neurotransmittergated ion channels, watching a pinball progress
ion of ions sparking through the maze of channels … and he could still see the course they took, leading to rapid changes in membrane potential … and, maybe, the syndrome itself?

  McCoy felt confident the cure was close at hand. He could fix it. No one knew where this weird temporal-perceptive disease came from, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t wait to call Scotty and hoot about how elderly doctors can work miracles too.

  The cat purred and sidled up against his leg as he strode into the kitchen to grind some beans. “Why, hello there.” He reached down and scratched its soft fur. “How are you this morning, Tempus?”

  If a cat could smile, it would have.

  Flight 19

  Alan James Garbers

  Orlean raised a hand to shield his eyes from the burning morning sun and scanned the mountainside before him. Normally he wouldn’t allow the herd to graze in this direction. While the mountain wasn’t taboo, enough stories were told to keep even the bravest man away. Orlean glanced back to the brown and dying plain spread out behind him, his eyes following the dry wash that led to his village in the distance. In other years the wash would be a cool stream, the plain green with grass, and his herd plump and ready for winter. He turned and cast a wary eye up the rocky slope. Succulent sprigs of grass grew in the cool shade of boulders like bait luring the starved animals higher and higher. In a frenzy they raced from spot to spot nibbling to stop the pain in their bellies.

  Orlean nervously glanced about as he followed the herd higher. Indecision tore at his soul. To go back to the plain would mean a slow death for his herd, to go higher meant—what? When was the last time someone climbed the mountain? he thought. Perhaps the danger is gone. Orlean chided himself. Surely I am not afraid of a story. What would Riter say? Orlean knew what Riter would say if he were here, and not at Starfleet Academy. He would say how foolish Orlean was for fearing a mountain.

  By noon Orlean had worked his way into a hanging gorge. Trees shaded the narrow cleft and cool green grass grew like patchwork along a whispering brook, telling of better things to come. Losing his fear in the beauty, he pushed ahead of the herd. As he worked his way through the gorge, Orlean found the canyon walls gave way to a vast crater of tall green grass undulating like waves on the sea. The herd stumbled out into the green Mecca and began feasting. Orlean sat on a large boulder and rested in the sweet mountain air. Slowly his eyes swept the distant crater walls as he wondered why no one wanted to come here. The cool breeze, the tall grass, and fresh water all belayed any evil. Surely no harm could—Orlean’s eyes stopped on a distant rock outcropping. He willed his mind to accept the feature as natural but his eyes refused to believe and continued to pick out other lines and corners that were too straight to be other than man-made. Fear crept up his spine as the stories came flooding back. He rose to slink back into the gorge when the sight of the herd stopped him. They were not afraid. Was he more timid than they? With fists clenched he started across the crater to the unknown.