Strangers From the Sky (7 page)

“Is that a confirm, Admiral?”

“What? Yes, continue.”

“Ten hundred to 1200: Visiting Firemen.”

“Say again?”

“Only notation you gave me, Admiral,” the computer responded primly. “I took the liberty of tracing the etymology through Linguistics and can report that the term originated on Earth in the then-United States of America
circa
—”

“Never mind!” Kirk snapped. Had Spock been tinkering with this thing behind his back? Some sort of Vulcan practical joke?

Of course, Vulcans did not engage in the employment of jokes, practical or otherwise, Kirk reminded himself. He could almost hear Spock saying it. There didn’t seem to be a profound statement on any subject that Spock hadn’t already uttered. Or was it just his manner that lent whatever he said an aura of profundity?

“Jim?” the computer intruded gently into his wool-gathering. “Was it something I said?”

“What? Yes—no! I remember now. Visiting firemen. Means the command staff from Starbase 16 is in town and I have to give them the Cooks’ tour.”

“Cooks’ tour? Shall I check Linguistics for that also?”

“On your own time!” Kirk said testily. It
was
ragging him, Spock’s influence or no. “Continue schedule.”

“Very well; 1200 to 1400: lunch with Admiral Nogura, his office.”

Ulcer territory, Kirk thought. Heihachiro only schedules lunch with me when he wants something done yesterday.

“Next?”

“Fourteen hundred to 1600: tactics seminar, Blue and Gold groups.”

Boredom, Kirk thought. How to keep myself awake so I don’t put the cadets to sleep.

“Confirm.”

“Sixteen hundred:
Kobayashi Maru
, Green group—”

“—and debriefing at 1700? Assuming they haven’t incinerated themselves?”

“Would you care to do this for me?” the computer demanded, touchy about interruptions.

“No, continue.” Kirk knocked back half his drink without tasting it, rubbed his eyes. “Sorry if I disrupted your train of thought.”

“Not possible,” the computer responded, literal-minded. “Seventeen hundred: Kobayashi Maru debriefing, Green group. 1800: Cocktail reception for—”

“Stop!” Kirk had clearly had enough. There was a cumulative uniformity to his days that was terrifying in its implications. He turned his thoughts toward the one thing he really cared about. “Computer, present position and status of
Enterprise?
”

“One moment.” Pretty kaleidoscopic patterns played across the small screen. Kirk swirled the ice cubes in the bottom of his glass, waited. The rest of him might be parked behind a desk, but his heart was always with his ship. “Ready.”

“Go ahead.”

“Position and status
USS Enterprise
, NCC-1701: Stardate 8083.6. Crew complement comprising engineering officer and thirty-seven trainees: bridge crew comprising seven cadets, Captain Spock in command. Presently engaged in training patrol two parsecs off Llingri Star Cluster, to continue approximately three solar days. Employing Regulation 14-B standard maneuvers with accepted Vulcan variant. As of last report, all is well.”

“I see,” Kirk mused. Accepted Vulcan variant, indeed. That meant Spock was working their little human tails off under Vulcan regimen. Good for him! “Estimated return date?”

“Captain Spock had logged return date of 8097.4. Precisely.”

Precisely. He would do it, too. Bring her into spacedock trim and unscathed and down to the minute by his calculations—ion storms, intervening interplanetary conflicts, and Scotty’s lamentations about his engines notwithstanding. Good old Spock.
Enterprise
couldn’t be in better hands.

Dammit.

Kirk ran himself through the sonic shower in record time, and slipped into an old sweatsuit. He padded into the kitchen and punched up a salad—McCoy had been on him about his weight again—then settled back by the fire, and lovingly turned the crisp new pages of his anachronistic book.

In the dying light of a stormy afternoon, Yoshi sat in the other room of the agrostation staring at the comm screen, neither hearing nor seeing it.

They had always called this the “other room.” There was the sleeping room and there was this room—living room, kitchen, den, workroom, office, storage area, library, gym, entertainment center. The comm screen dominating one wall was combination computer, holovision, ship-to-shore, mail service—their only contact, except for
Delphinus
’s monthly supply runs, with the rest of the world.

What Yoshi really wanted to do was to cut himself—themselves—off entirely from that world, pretend nothing had happened, retreat, hide out, wish it all away. But he kept the screen on, kept staring at its melange of images though most of them made no sense in his present state of high agitation. He seemed to think he ought to be watching for something specific, but whether or not he would recognize it when he saw it…

Did he actually expect MediaComm to announce that an alien spacecraft was being hunted in the South Pacific?

He’d thought of tapping into the AeroNav band. He was a good enough hacker to make it work, but figured their equipment was sophisticated enough to detect a tap and abandoned the idea. Instead he sat flipping from one news channel to another, mesmerized.

“…following his attempted assassination by pseudo-religious factions calling themselves the Alliance for the Twelfth of November…”

Flip.

“…threatening their mutual nonaggression pact with a renewal of hostilities unless…” Flip.

“…when a riot, believed to have been instigated by spectators for the Southern Hemisphere team, resulted in twenty-three deaths…”

Good old Earth, Yoshi thought. Half a century since the last world war and we still can’t keep from cutting each other up for anything from the rights of the persecuted to a disputed soccer score. Any aliens in their right minds would have taken a quick look around and kept right on going. Those poor souls we fished out of the water this morning must have been lost but good.

Flip.

“…trading was active, the price of mixed SeaSources shares plummeting in the wake of reports that fungus infestations first noted in the mid-Pacific region continue to spread unchecked…”

Uh-oh, Yoshi thought, coming back from wherever he’d been with a bump. This one piece of local news was the only thing that could make him sit up and pay attention.

Word of a new and particularly resistant strain of kelpwilt had been rampant up north for months. None of the usual treatments worked, and the disease had been spreading inexorably in Agro III’s direction. Stations to their north and east had already reported losses of up to a quarter of their acreage.

Yoshi shook his head, incredulous. Until this morning his most pressing task had been scooting up and down the access lanes in the hydrofoil examining random samples of the weed for possible infestation. Now he could sit content in the middle of his acreage and happily let it rot out from under them, as long as no one came near him and demanded he hand over the aliens.

He asked himself the same question Tatya had asked herself. What was he afraid of?

Nothing terrible would happen to him and Tatya. At most they might need some outside “help” to forget what they’d discovered. Their lives would resume their normal course, and it would be as if they had never discovered the aliens, or as if there had been no aliens at all. Wasn’t that what he wanted?

But if he let them do what they wanted, what would AeroNav and the intelligence networks and the PentaKrem and the powers-that-were do to the aliens? And why did he care?

Yoshi told himself he wouldn’t care, if it weren’t for Tatya. He had a violent allergy to controversy; it was one of the reasons he’d sought the seemingly lonely life of the agrostations. Was he so caught up in Tatya’s romanticism about other planets that he was suddenly willing to risk his life to prevent what could only be the misunderstanding, the hysteria, the detention and interrogation and possible exploitation—or worse—of two total strangers who just happened to look vaguely human, who just incidentally spoke a human language, and about whom he knew absolutely nothing else?

What if they had incredible super powers which, once awakened, could crush two isolated humans like bugs on a wall? What if they were criminals escaping from their own world, bent on murder and mayhem? What if they were the vanguard of an invasion force, whose mission was to infiltrate, win over poor unsuspecting humans, and conquer Earth?

And what if they were just two innocent star travelers who had lost their way and almost died and were now totally dependent upon the kindness of strangers? Well, what if?

There were very few things Yoshi would risk his life for; he’d be the first to admit it. Unlike his adventurous partner, he’d never aspired to anything more grandiose than what he had here. The twenty-first century with its crowds, its noise, its technology, its potential for getting a person too deep into things too big and too complicated, intimidated him. All he’d ever wanted was to spend the rest of a long and uneventful life contemplating the sea, counting the stars, worrying about nothing more threatening than kelpwilt, and staying out of harm’s way.

He might have turned the aliens in himself as soon as they’d gotten back to the station—to at least get them medical help, he’d reasoned—if it hadn’t required more assertiveness than he possessed. And if he hadn’t been certain Tatya would break every bone in his body.

And if the female alien hadn’t spoken to him, in his own language.

Yoshi sighed, and flipped the channel.

“…reportedly a defective recon satellite believed to have splashed down somewhere to the west-northwest of Easter Island…”

Yoshi stood up abruptly, capsizing his beanbag chair and making his sore ankle throb violently. He dialed the volume up.

“…AeroNav vessel dispatched in an attempt to recover any portion of the satellite which may have survived. In other news…”

“Well, there it is,” Yoshi said aloud.

“I’ll bet it’s the Whale,” Tatya said from the doorway of the sleeping room. Yoshi hadn’t realized she was there; they seemed not to have seen each other for hours. “She’s due tomorrow anyway.”

They had always called
Delphinus
the Whale, as a play on her name, because of the size and shape of the ship itself, and as an affectionate joke at the expense of her captain, though never to his face. Jason Nyere was sensitive about his size. Suddenly the joke wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was.

“How are they?” Yoshi nodded toward the room behind Tatya; no need to specify who “they” were.

“Stabilized, I think.” Tatya looked drawn, exhausted. “The male seems to be coming around a little. I don’t dare medicate either of them, not even painkillers. As nearly as I can tell their entire physiology is different from ours. Organs in the wrong places, vital signs all screwy. I can’t get accurate readings on anything, not even a blood pressure…”

Her voice trailed off. Yoshi had never seen her too exhausted to talk.

“Yoshi, what are we going to do?”

Yoshi shrugged. He didn’t want to
do
anything. He wanted to fall into the Mayabi Fault and disappear.

“Pass them off as a couple of my relatives?” he suggested, groping for humor.

Tatya was not amused.

“I’d like to see you try telling that to Jason,” she said grimly.

“I don’t hear any brilliant ideas from your corner of the room,” Yoshi snapped back.

Alone out here, they were accustomed to arguing as loudly and as often as they chose, but the presence of their unwanted guests had changed all that. Argue they did, but softly, counting on the rising wind stirring up whitecaps and howling around the corners of the station to keep them from being overheard should one of the aliens waken.

It did not occur to them that pointed ears had evolved on other worlds for a reason, that the wind had already wakened one of their guests, and that one such pair of ears was absorbing every word.

“They seem so primitive,” Sorahl had said to his mother the first time she observed the frown with which he studied his private viewer and inquired as to what might be puzzling him. “I mean no disrespect, but I cannot help wondering why you and my grandfather find them so fascinating.”

They had been two days from the Sol system, the scoutcraft traversing the Oort Cloud where so many of the comets visible from Earth originated. T’Lera and Sorahl were in the living quarters, she at the beginning of her offshift, he nearing the end of his. Shortly he would take over from Selik, who, with seemingly effortless proficiency, navigated with one hand while recording new comets with the other.

“‘Primitive’?” T’Lera had inquired, making no effort to disguise her dryness of voice; of all beings, surely her son was most accustomed to it. “Specify.”

Sorahl’s gesture encompassed a number of record tapes strewn about his workspace, particularly those gleaned from Earth’s holovision broadcasts by previous expeditions.

“Their forms of entertainment,” he began, with the wariness of youth expecting to be criticized for its naiveté. “Their obsession with violence, with maudlin emotions, with humor at the expense of others. If these are the things they value…”

“Is this what your study indicates, my son?” T’Lera allowed herself to address him informally when they were alone and off duty. Were her father in attendance she would have refrained; where Savar had commanded, formal mode had been all.

“Mother, I am aware that I lack the experience of those who have made this their life work, but my observations indicate that this is a species perpetually on the verge of self-destruction.”

“So many of its great thinkers would concur,” T’Lera said dryly. “But what you have observed is not the sum total of what they choose as diversion for their leisure, much less what they consider of value.”

Sorahl lowered his eyes. His observation had been naive, and presumptuous. Before he could ask his mother’s forgiveness she interrupted him.

“And what would you suggest, my son? That we abandon our efforts to learn of them?”

Sorahl’s eyes came up to meet hers, barely masking the fire behind them in time.

“Not at all, Mother. Rather that we take the first step to which all our research has been leading. That we make first contact.”

T’Lera hid her bemusement at his eagerness behind a careful sternness.

“Forgive my inability to follow your logic, Sorahl-
kam
, but if this is as you suggest a violent, unready, or—to use your word—primitive species, of what benefit would revealing our presence be to them? Would they not resort to precisely the violence you suggest in order to protect themselves from that for which they are unready?”

“I do not think so,” Sorahl said quickly.

Curious, his mother dropped her pretense of sternness.

“Please explain.”

“A recent paper by the political scientist Sotir…” Sorahl began carefully, watching his mother’s face. Between them they always referred to his father and her former consort as an impersonal entity. There was a certain irony in this, Sorahl thought, in that much of his childhood had been spent under his father’s care while T’Lera was off on yet another space voyage, but to refer to another’s divorce, even within the family, was a serious breach of the proprieties. “…promulgates the theory that benevolent intervention in the evolution of a less advanced culture may actually spare another species the aggressions and loss of life which we as a species endured before finding the Way. In short—”

“Logic suggests that there are as many theories as there are theorists,” T’Lera said abruptly. “And Sotir has never been offworld.”

This fact among others, she did not need to say, had been one of the reasons for their estrangement.

“Does this necessarily mean his theory is without validity?” Sorahl asked with a familiar stubbornness his mother always found curiously satisfying. It was not Sotir’s stubbornness, which could be both pedantic and strident, but her own and Savar’s, a stubbornness that was nonaggressive, invisible until challenged, but then immovable.

“Any theory logically arrived at possesses its own validity,” T’Lera admitted, masking her pride in her willful offspring. “Nevertheless, one is not free to test it on unsuspecting outworlders.”

“Then why are we here?” Sorahl demanded with the impatience of youth, which even a Vulcan could fall prey to. “Why study these Earthmen for most of my grandfather’s life and all of yours yet refrain from the logical next step?”

“It is not yet time,” T’Lera said, in a tone that indicated the topic was not open for debate.

“In whose opinion?” Sorahl dared to ask, where one who knew his mother not quite as well might hesitate. “Yours, or Prefect Savar’s?”

Destruction before detection. It was not Sorahl’s question that gave his mother pause but the manner in which it had been asked. She had had cause herself to question whether after a lifetime under the aegis of that principle she could separate her own motivation from her father’s.

“Savar and I are as one in our ‘opinion,’” T’Lera said quietly, believing it. Her far-seeking eyes had gone hard. “But you, it would seem, prefer
T’Kahr
Sotir’s ‘interventionist’ theory?”

Sorahl’s jaw tightened imperceptibly beneath the full brunt of his mother’s irony.

“I believe,” he began, as if he had rehearsed it, expecting challenge, “that if Earthmen, or any intelligent species, were offered incontrovertible proof that it is possible to abandon violence and live by logic, millions might be spared the need to destroy each other. They could not help but see the advantage of our way.”

“Despite their ‘primitivism,’” T’Lera added.

“Mother, I am not suggesting that we are superior to them.” Sorahl’s voice had risen despite his best efforts and he lowered it forcibly. “Merely that we are different. That is consistent with IDIC.”

“Precisely,” T’Lera said, as if he had led himself to her side of the argument, which in fact he had. “And IDIC leads to Savar’s Prime Directive, not to Sotir’s interventionism. We are too different to judge what is ‘best’ for another species. And it is not yet time.”