Strangers From the Sky (9 page)

The young cadet stood stiffly at attention as Captain Spock signed the end-of-shift status report. Spock allowed him a moment more of this posture, as good for the soul as it was for the spine, before favoring him with a mild glance.

“Stand at ease, Lieutenant. Is there anything else?”

The young human relaxed his stocky frame, though his spirit was still beset with the trials of serving under a Vulcan commander. Spock saw this in his eyes and addressed it.

“No sir, only—”

“Only what?”

“It’s end of shift, sir. Owing to the drills this morning you’ve been on the bridge since alpha shift. I was wondering if you planned to give over to anyone else for gamma, sir.”

“As I read the duty roster,” Spock said without having to look at it, “all who have requested gamma shift are currently at their posts. To have someone relieve me would necessitate awakening or otherwise intruding upon the offshift time of someone on alpha or beta. I see no logic in this.”

“Only the logic that a commander shouldn’t have to take a triple shift, sir,” the young lieutenant suggested softly; he was met with a raised eyebrow. “Begging the captain’s pardon, but it seems to me even Vulcans must get tired sometimes.”

A quiet bemusement tugged at the corners of Spock’s mouth.

“Mr. Mathee, are you offering to relieve me?”

“I would, sir,” the young human said sincerely. “If I didn’t think you’d think it was presumptuous.”

“Thoughtfulness is never presumptuous, Lieutenant,” Spock said, compounding the young man’s confusion. “Nevertheless, I might point out that you would have to pull a double shift were I to take you up on your offer.”

“Due respect, sir,” the human said, finding ground at last to anchor on. “Logic suggests that if you can handle a triple, I can handle a double. Sir.”

Spock nodded, pleased, and rose from the center seat.

“Very well, Mr. Mathee. The ship is yours for the next 7.94 hours. I shall be in my quarters.”

Though far from sleep, the Vulcan thought as the turbolift brought him down the levels. There is something I must do.

He entered the dark cabin, deactivating the body scanner to keep the lights from coming on. His night vision and the precise placement of every item in the room carried his body around petty concrete obstacles like furniture to where his mind had begun its journey while he was still in the lift.

In the briefest of moments he had discarded the Starfleet uniform (did it arrange itself so precisely in its place in the cabinet or were his hands so deft they conducted the busyness of mere
things
in such a way that they only seemed to move by themselves?) for the black meditation robe with its
Kohlinahr
glyphs, as easily as he exchanged the day’s cares, concerns and calculations for the level of tranquility he desired.

As he knelt in the
loshiraq
, the “open posture,” his hands formed in the double
ta’al
of Focus, his mind had already passed the purifying ritual, his heart rate slowed almost to human languor, his breathing almost to nil. His mind floated down, down, down, searching.

What he searched for was the answer to a most illogical question: how was it possible to remember that which had not taken place?

There is no true forgetting. Locked within the convolutions of every sentient mind is the exact recollection of every event that has transpired in the presence of that mind. Yet few humans would desire such total recall, and the human animal is notorious for its ability to forget, its memory lapses willed or unwilled. Not so the Vulcan.

The Vulcan memory is actively eidetic, unforgetting. Within the reaches of certain levels of meditation any past moment can be recollected in its entirety. It was this Spock sought to do.

His was not the realm of daydream, of preoccupation with things past. Yet something from that past had of late intruded upon his consciousness. Ever since he had read
Strangers from the Sky
. Tracing it back, he found no background, no event to surround it. Yet the memory remained, an indication to the logical mind that such memory was faulty. Ever intolerant of flaw in his own logic, Spock sought to correct the error.

All he remembered was a voice, female in timbre and, to judge from its inflection and coloration, probably human. It spoke a single phrase:

“You cannot do it alone.”

There was nothing to which to attach that phrase, yet it persisted, floating in his subconscious, tantalizing. Spock must find the answer.

Down he reached, searching.

Indeed?
the mind voice demanded in its language which owned no words.
And what precisely is the meaning of this?

The fire crackled primevally—warm, comforting, mesmerizing. It had been a long day. Jim Kirk fought to keep the words from dancing off the page.

One more chapter, he thought, yawning, adjusting the comfort level of the chair, rubbing his bleary eyes. Bones was right. This book is fascinating; I can’t put it down! One more chapter and I’ll…

He nodded, drowsing. The book tumbled from his insensate fingers, over the arm of the chair onto the floor, its impact softened by the thick carpeting so that it made no sound. It landed spine upward, several fragile pages creasing under its weight.

Jim Kirk slept and, perchance, he dreamed.

“
Commander,” he began, feeling his throat tighten around each word. A single wrong one would end everything. “What can I say to persuade you?
”

T’Lera studied him, the intensity of her eyes damped down so as not to intimidate him. How vulnerable these humans were! Was it logical, was it ethical, to leave them isolated in a galaxy fraught with unknowns? For the briefest moment she might have relented for this reason alone. But that decision was not for her to make
.

“
Do not think to persuade me with words, Mr. Kirk,” she said slowly. “But if you offer a perspective which outweighs mine
…”

A log snapped in the fireplace. Kirk jolted awake.

Huh? he thought, sitting upright and groping for the book, finding it on the floor, annoyed with himself for damaging it.

That was a strange one! he thought. When I was a kid I used to act out whatever I’d watched on vid the night before, tearing through the cornstalks, taking all the parts at once, Good Guys vs. Bad Guys back when I still believed there were such things, running myself ragged until Sam and his friends jumped me from behind the hayrick, laughing at me for a gullible, wool-gathering fool and we’d end up pushing each other into the creek.

And I’d dream about those silly 3-D melodramas, too, reliving them all night until I’d get tangled in the bedclothes or fall out of bed, and Mom would threaten to deactivate my viewer if I didn’t calm down.

And God knows I’ve had nightmares aplenty about the real horrors in my life, Kirk thought with a shudder, now completely, coldly awake. The
Farragut
incident, Kodos the Executioner…

But this is the first time I’ve found myself playing a character in a history book.

He banked the fire, dumped his unfinished salad in the disposal, smoothed the pages of
Strangers from the Sky
before setting it on his nightstand, vibed his teeth clean, and went to bed.

And dreamed.

He staggered out of the room, slumped to the floor in the anteroom, numb and in shock from what he’d just witnessed. He’d thought he could stomach anything, but this—the horror!

Behind him, through the walls, a tumult of voices all shouting at once poured into the room where it had happened, the noise of it drawing them like vultures, furniture slamming against walls as bodies shoved past each other in their haste to see. Reporters, security guards, diplomats, and their aides and hangers-on, pushed and jostled into a mindless mob, enacting the very Babel T’Lera had foreseen, a Babel of his, Jim Kirk’s creation
.

Kirk clutched his head, clamped his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to block out the roaring chaos. He had done this thing, he! A world was unraveling under him and billions yet unborn, and it was all his fault!

“
What is it? What happened?” voices demanded in all the languages of Earth. “Where are they? Where’s Kirk? That stuff on the walls—Good Lord, it’s everywhere! What is it?
”

“
It’s blood, you idiots!” a woman’s voice shrieked above the others
.

Kirk’s scalp prickled; his skin crawled in horror. Tatya, no! he wanted to cry. Tatya, don’t! Don’t look, don’t see what I’ve done to your hopes, your dreams! It’s my fault, mine! I tried, but it wasn’t good enough! I’m sorry, Tatya, so sorry!

“
Their blood is different from ours!” she was shrieking, hysterical. “It’s their blood, don’t you understand? You’ve killed them; we’ve all killed them. It’s on all of our hands, all of us!
”

Kirk clutched his head and moaned. No, my fault! Mine alone!

Behind him he heard the tattoo of bootheels, the blond woman’s voice: “I told you! You cannot do it alone
…”

“…
Alone!
”

The bosun’s whistle brought Spock back to the here and now abruptly enough to let him hear that he had spoken the word aloud and in Standard.

Fascinating! he thought, affixing this datum to the rest of the mystery he pondered even as he rose from his meditative posture to attend to the matter at hand.

“Scott to Captain…Scott to Captain…” resounded with unnecessary loudness in the utter darkness of his cabin. Interesting how Scotty never addressed him by name on the intership. For both of them there was only one true captain of
Enterprise
. Spock pressed the intercom toggle.

“Spock here.”

“I dinna wake ye, did I?” Scott’s voice was edged with its usual breathless anxiety. “I
am
sorry, but ye asked to be informed—”

“I was not sleeping, Mr. Scott. And, as I requested, you are personally reminding me of the Red Alert drill scheduled for 0601, so as not to breach security by letting the cadets know.”

“Aye. And I wouldna have bothered ye this early, only there’s a glitch in the readout on the intermix feed chamber, and before ye go taking her into evasives I’d like to take down to sublight for a wee bit and see can I get the bugs out.”

“A reasonable request, Mr. Scott. How much of a ‘wee bit’ will you require?”

“No more than half an hour, Mr. Spock.”

“Very well. Reschedule drill for 0631, and inform me when your exterminating operation is complete.”

“When my—
what?
” It took Scott a moment to get the joke. “Oh, aye, I’ll do that. Scott out.”

Alone, Spock pondered.

Alone
. Why had he spoken the word aloud? From the meditative depth he had engaged, the need to speak aloud signified a matter of grave seriousness. And why, out of all the languages he knew, had he spoken it in Standard?

There existed in Modern Vulcan alone some seven different words to describe varying states of solitude, excluding telepathic words unspoken, from “alone-not-alone” to “alone by circumstance” through “alone by need,” each of which incorporated some seven further concepts from Ancient Vulcan including “alone by temperament” through “alone by outcastness,” which in turn incorporated the “nonperson” modes. An etymological study of the concept through a single one of his languages…

But there was such a thing as being too thorough, and in the wrong direction. Spock cleared his thoughts and began again.

Solitude possesses many dimensions, the High Master T’sai had thought to him. Consider
.

She had been preparing him for first
Kohl
, where solitude and the listening to one’s own soul were All. In the end, it had been Spock who instructed her. Perhaps few knew firsthand as many variations on aloneness as he. Now, alone by his own choosing, he considered.

He began from the beginning as was logical, with the solitariness of the halfbreed child, alone by social outcastness, alone in the universe as the first of his kind. From such a beginning had he studied the alien solitudes he had encountered in his travels. From the loneliness of machine bereft of purpose and man bereft of memory to the loneliness of woman exiled in a world of ice, none knew as Spock did the degrees and dimensions of what it was like to be alone.

It was the one whose greatest fear it was to be alone that Spock considered last, for he knew this one so well. All he’d asked for was a tall ship and a star to steer her by, and the company of kindred souls in the adventure that was his life. Having surrendered both ship and adventure, Jim Kirk was nothing if not alone.

“
Jim!
”

This, too, Spock spoke aloud. Whatever it was that beset his meditations had its origins with Jim Kirk. But what was it? And who was the female whose voice insisted “You cannot do it alone”? What strange siren-metaphor out of Earth’s mythology threatened his captain and his friend, and what could be done?

Were he human and by nature impulsive, Spock might almost have attempted to contact Earth. From this distance—

He considered. It would require nearly a full solar day. Illogical. If there were real danger, there was nothing he could do. Except…

Spock reached within, took up the silver thread that linked his mind with Jim’s. Those whose minds had touched and been touched were given this.

Spock searched, found no immediate external danger to the human he so valued. He might have probed deeper to the unconscious levels, but to do so without permission was a grave breach of Vulcan privacy. Were he needed, he would know. Jim Kirk’s voice had called to him from across a galaxy once before, drawing him from the reaches of
Kohlinahr
, and he had answered. He would do so again.

But not now. Within moments Mr. Scott would report that his readjustments were complete. The drill would proceed apace; duty would occupy the Vulcan’s conscious mind for the present, perhaps sufficiently to block the insistence of disembodied female voices.