Strangers From the Sky (13 page)

“Let me put it to you this way, Leonard. If I sent you 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 hospitalized. Under 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 still—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—”

“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 anomalies. “Radical dysfunction in deep-level mnemonic patterns, and localized distortion of short-term focal memory.”

“I see it,” McCoy acknowledged grudgingly.

Krista shut off the viewer.

“Left untreated,” she said, toying with the fringe on one of the pillows she’d stitched herself but looking McCoy straight in the eye, “it can result in severe stress, increasing disorientation, instances of selective amnesia. It can indicate possible latent schizophrenia.” She leaned toward McCoy, put one hand on his arm. “I couldn’t be more reasonable than in suggesting that this man get immediate and concentrated help. In an enclosed environment.”

McCoy let it all sink in. How could a thing like this happen?

“Leonard?” Krista Sivertsen dropped her professional voice, exchanged it for a personal, caring one. Her hand was still on McCoy’s arm. “I know he’s a close friend of yours. I want to help.”

“I know you do, Krista.” McCoy patted her hand absently, baffled. “I just don’t understand it. What could cause something like this to happen to a man like Jim Kirk?”

“We’re not really sure,” Krista said, back in her professional mode. “It’s only recently been identified as a separate phenomenon. In the old days it was clumped in with all the other schizophrenias and treated with varying degrees of success. The only place I’ve ever encountered it these days is in certain kinds of drug addicts.”

She chose her next words carefully.

“Sometimes a man like Jim Kirk, a man of great personal dynamism, finds it hard to adjust to a ground assignment. Is there any chance he might be experimenting with some of the new synthetic soporiffs the renegade labs have been peddling under the counter?”

“Of course not!” McCoy said. “I know the kind of dependence those alterants create as well as you do! Jim Kirk’s not that kind of man!”

“I’m sorry,” Krista said sincerely. “But I wanted to eliminate that as a factor right off. There are so many variables to consider. I ran his medical history before I sent you the results of the scan. It’s incredible how many times the man’s mind has been tampered with in his deep-space years. It’s quite possible that any one of those old traumas…”

McCoy thought about it. From Sargon’s initially benevolent “borrowing” to Parmen’s literal mental cruelty to Janice Lester’s outright theft, Jim Kirk had had more people poking around in his mind than any other ordinary mortal in history.

“Even a Vulcan mind-meld can trigger erratics in certain unstable individuals,” Krista Sivertsen was saying. She had never met Kirk until he’d turned up in her office that morning, but the story of this human and a certain Vulcan was legend. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Leonard?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. But I can’t believe—Krista, let me ask you: is it possible a Vulcan mind-meld could
un
do something this severe?”

“Oh, no you don’t!” She knew what it cost McCoy to ask this; the story of
this
human and a certain Vulcan was legend also. “If you’d thought that, you should have gone to a Vulcan healer first. You dropped this in my lap, and it’s my responsibility. No band-aid therapy and no pointed-eared witch doctors allowed.” She was trying to make him laugh, but McCoy was preoccupied, beyond humor. “Leonard, trust me. With today’s techniques it’ll be a matter of a week or two. He can take some vacation time, and I promise you we’ll keep it off his record. But only if you do it my way.”

“How—how soon?” McCoy asked vaguely.

“As soon as possible. Tonight. I can free up a bed within the hour. Where is Admiral Kirk now?”

“That’s the problem,” McCoy frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Estimated arrival time Sol III?” Spock asked his navigator.

“Seven solar days, Captain,” Lieutenant Mathee reported. “Stardate 8097.4, as per your original log entry, sir.”

“Very well,” Spock replied evenly, giving no evidence of how heavily that time would pass with him. “Helm, maintain warp two. We are going home.”

And none too soon, he thought.

Rapa Nui. Easter Island. The World’s Navel. It had many names. Kirk had of course heard of it, recognized the rows of solemn gargantuan statues facing out to sea, knew something of their history.

He was not prepared to find that the entire island had been transformed into a museum, the Museum of the South Pacific, centered in the ultramodern glass-and-rhodinium structure rising beside Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater lake near the island’s eastern tip. Nor was he prepared for the museum’s curator.

Dr. Galarrwuy Nayingul was an Australian of the ancient races—dark-skinned, deep-eyed, shorter than Kirk but solid, immutable, as if rooted in the Earth his people had inhabited perhaps longer than any others still living, his thick white hair and beard framing a face that was ageless. On this tiny island 9,000 kilometers from his birthplace near Darrinbandi, he was farther from home than Jim Kirk.

“A pleasure, Admiral,” he said warmly when Koro had introduced them, gripping Kirk’s pale hand in both his dark ones as if he’d known him all his life. “What brings you to this part of our, you’ll pardon the expression, mundane little world?”

Kirk shared in his laughter, which was rich and deep and resonant with a more ancient, cosmic laughter.

“Curiosity, Dr Nayingul.”

“Galarrwuy, please. Or if that’s too much of a mouthful, Galar will do.”

“Galarrwuy,” Kirk said carefully. “I came looking for something Koro tells me is rarer than the American bison. An early kelp station.”

“Ah!” Galarrwuy said, leading Kirk and the suddenly diffident Koro down the aisles of the closed-for-the-evening museum, its display cases filled with Micronesian artifacts and Maori bird masks lighting automatically as they passed. “You too have read The Book.”

“I don’t mean to sound like a tourist,” Kirk began. “I imagine you’re swamped with them.”

“Only those I choose to see. And you would be one of them,” Galarrwuy said, opening the door to his private office, offering his guests the comfort of low couches and freshly fermented pineapple juice. “Though not overmuch for you, boyo,” he scolded Koro avuncularly. “You’re going home soon.”

“Ah, Galar, serious!” the boy protested, looking from one to the other to see where best to plead his case. “
Morla el do!
Tomorrow’s good enough! I’ve come for to have a listen. As part of my education,” he added winningly.

“Seriously,” Galarrwuy corrected him, unimpressed. “Doubtless your kin know you’re harboring with me yet again, but it does get wearisome having them ring me up every time you take a tail wind. Sit you down and finish your juice, then home for dinner. You can use my spare boat.”

“Ar!”

The boy settled into silence in one corner, hoping they’d forget he was there.

“You seek information about the old kelp stations,” Galarrwuy told Kirk rather than asking him. “In order to relive the experience of the young couple Tatya and Yoshi, all innocently tending their seaweed crop when, on a crystalline night two hundred years ago, the Strangers from the Sky, our cosmic siblings the Vulcans, fell into their laps, so to speak.”

“It’s curious you should use the term ‘relive,’” Kirk said sincerely. “Because in a peculiar way I feel I
have
lived the experience before.”

Galarrwuy’s deep-set eyes grew intense.

“Truly? Are you a reincarnationist, James Kirk?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. Didn’t think so.” Kirk held out his hands helplessly. “I’m not sure anymore.”

Then he told Galarrwuy about his dreams.

There was an almost interminable silence.

“Koro,” Galarrwuy said at last. “It is time for you to go.”

“I’m troubling n’one here,” the boy grumbled from his corner. He’d been listening, wide-eyed. “Please, Galar, let me stay?”

Galarrwuy waited, as if he knew what the boy would say next.

“You’ll Dream-time with him, won’t you? You said you would teach me, when I’m old enough. I’m old enough now. Why can’t I stay?”

“Koro,” Galarrwuy said at last—emphatically, unequivocally. “You will go.
Now
.”

Kirk felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He’d thought only Vulcans could do that with their voices.

Whatever authority Galarrwuy had called upon, Koro obeyed. Within moments the sound of an aero-boat punctuated the island’s uncanny silence. When it had faded to nothingness, Galarrwuy rose from his couch and went to the window, facing west, contemplating the darkness beyond. Kirk had not spoken since he’d told about his dreams.

“He is young,” Galarrwuy said of Koro, as if by way of apology. “And, as they say in the islands,
eeyulla
. Impressed with his own importance.”

“He’s a boy,” Kirk offered, excusing him. He’d grown awfully fond of the young sea urchin in a scant few hours.

“In my ancestors’ reckoning he’d be three years a man,” Galarrwuy said sternly, his back still to Kirk. “If he survived the desert ordeals. The young today are spoiled. Undisciplined.”

“I believe that’s endemic, Galarrwuy.” Kirk smiled, thinking how Vulcan this human sounded. Here was one he could trust, whatever happened. “Didn’t Socrates make the same complaint in his day?”

Galarrwuy chuckled, relinquished the view at the window.

“So he did.” He grew suddenly, deadly serious. “Do you know of Dream-time, James Kirk?”

“I know it once comprised the whole of your people’s oral history,” Kirk ventured. “That there were songs that accurately predicted the future. Cave paintings that depicted airplanes a thousand years before they existed. I assumed there were rituals not accessible to outsiders.”

“You are partly correct,” Galarrwuy said, showing no surprise at the extent of Kirk’s knowledge. He would expect such a man to know as much.

The room seemed darker than Kirk remembered, as if something were absorbing all the light and only Galarrwuy’s eyes were clearly visible to him. Some of the artifacts displayed around the room seemed less than inanimate.

“By the end of the twentieth century,” Galarrwuy began, sitting across from Kirk again, “my people were almost extinct. They had lost their ways to the ways of the newcomers and no longer knew who they were. Only a few managed to preserve the old ways, and in time learned to use them in compatibility with the new.

“Today my people flourish, and Dream-time is recognized as being as ‘legitimate’ as any of the other ways humans attempt to touch the face of Creation. Nevertheless, to the uninformed the Singing still carries an aura of mumbo-jumbo.”

Kirk felt as if he were being offered a lifeline in this storm of recent origin. Could it work? Could a Dream-time that could foretell the future also explain the past? He would try anything to exorcise the voices in his head.

“Galarrwuy, I’ve been to many worlds,” he said. “If I’ve learned nothing else, I have learned that one man’s ‘mumbo-jumbo’ is another’s science and a third’s religion. I have since tried to keep an open mind.”

Galarrwuy chuckled again, partaking of the cosmic laughter.

“There is also an old saying from your part of Earth. ‘Don’t keep your mind so open your brains fall out.’ I have never been to any world other than this,” he said, serious again. “At least, not in body. Yet my experience is much as yours, James Kirk. There is more to what troubles you than dream.”

“Galarrwuy, you sound like a Vulcan.” Kirk smiled, trying to lighten things.

“No, I do not. I sound like a human who has lived within the influence of Vulcans, as well as other admirable species. Do you see how interdependent we have become? Do you understand why, in whatever reality your experience took place, you must return to that reality, and be certain it conforms to history, and not to your dream?”

Kirk struggled to comprehend exactly what Galarrwuy was suggesting.

“You mean you don’t think I’m crazy? That there is some alternate reality present in these dreams?”

“I believe that you believe that,” Galarrwuy said intently. “And you have far more experience with alternate realities than I. The logs you kept aboard the
Enterprise
are available in the archives at Memory Alpha. I have read them. Now, you tell me: what is reality?”

Kirk shook his head, as if that would clear it of the confusion. He held out his hands in submission.

“I don’t know anymore. Will you help me?”