Strangers From the Sky (41 page)

“Mr. Kelso?”

“Just saying good-bye!” Kelso took a last look around, gave Parneb’s colossal walls a final loving pat. “I may never find this place again,” he pointed out, rejoining the others.

He did not see the look of sorrow on Parneb’s face.

“We’re ready,” Kirk said.

He remembered nothing else.

Parneb’s calm had been a sham; he was no more sure of the range of his powers now than when he’d first brought these people here. But he was their only hope for return to their century; how could he possibly tell them that? Clasping the small crystal in both hands, vowing never to tamper with time again if only this worked, he concentrated all of his strength to make wishing make it so….

And overshot the mark. He felt the five of them surge away from him, to a time beyond time. The images in the great crystal sprang out at him, splayed themselves on the walls in images of bloody horror, in montage of betrayal and violence and death, of voices he knew, but voices distorted by urgency, tragedy and fear.

“
Above all else a god needs compassion
…”

“
Well, it didn’t make any sense that he’d know
…”

“
Spock is right and you’re a fool if you can’t see it
…”

“Oh,
dear!
” Parneb lamented, shaking his head as if it could drive the images away, clasping the crystal as if to crush it into submission and pull them back.

“
Kill me while you can
…”

“
A god needs compassion
…”

“
Kill Mitchell while you still can
…”

“
I’m sorry…You can’t know what it’s like to be almost a god
…”

“
Pray to me, Captain…pray that you die easily
…”

“
Compassion
…”

“
I’m sorry
…”

“
Kill Mitchell
…”

“
Kill me
…”

“
Above all else a god needs compassion, MITCHELL!
”

Parneb seized the great crystal, wrestled it into submission, his fingers burning into it as if clutching dry ice. The images whirled, assaulted him, fused themselves into him as he pulled them back, back…

To a place of swirling blue dust and clouded judgment, where two figures, one standing watch, the other fallen in undignified sprawl in the sand—

“Captain?”

A strong and gentle hand helped Jim Kirk to his feet.

“What happened?” Kirk dusted his trousers, mentally checked for bruises, tried to remember where they were and why. The first was easier than the second.

“Apparently the thinness of the atmosphere is inimical to human lungs, Captain. You lost consciousness. I took the liberty of having the others beamed aboard.”

“You did the right thing,” Kirk said vaguely. The others. The rest of the landing party, obviously, but who?

“Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Kelso reported some upper respiratory distress,” Spock was saying, and Kirk fixed the two names in his memory. Bits of their mission were coming back to him, but why was he so disoriented? “They are reporting to Sickbay.”

“Good,” Kirk said, beginning to cough from the dust.

“Captain?” The Vulcan appeared concerned. “May I suggest we beam up also? There is nothing further to be learned here.”

The details came back to Kirk at last: a landing party, to examine a planet that seemed to disappear. The planet on which they were now standing, and which at any moment—

“You—did not lose consciousness, Mr. Spock?”

The Vulcan shook his head. “I am not aware of having done so, Captain. However, my time sense accounts for a loss of point-five minutes, and somehow I seem to have damaged my uniform.” He showed Kirk where the hem of his tunic was torn, his insignia gone.

“And my communicator’s missing,” Kirk realized, feeling for it, searching the sand at his feet. “If we had more time—you say we lost only half a minute?”

“Affirmative, Captain, however—”

“However, it’s not a good idea to stick around and wait for this dustball to take us into oblivion again,” Kirk finished for him. “We can continue our research aboard the
Enterprise
. Which, as I seem to recall, is what you recommended in the first place. Remind me, Mr. Spock, to place more confidence in your judgment in future.”

The words were said in all seriousness, but a Vulcan somehow better versed in irony accepted them as they were intended.

“I shall give it first priority, Captain.”

Spock terminated the meld, emerging into the realm of light.

And noise. Specifically, McCoy’s snoring. The doctor lay sprawled in his chair near the dormant hearth—head thrown back, mouth gaping, hands limp over the chair arms, one booted foot propped like a dead thing on the footrest, the other twisted improbably beneath the chair. He might have been dead, shot through the heart, except for the noise.

He had thundered off to sleep somewhere in the 28.6 hours that the other two had labored down the intricate paths of memory and history. No matter. The tricorder, tumbled out of his insensate hands and upended on the carpet, was still running. Its attentiveness to what had transpired was more important, finally, than McCoy’s. No matter what it ultimately recorded, James Kirk’s sanity was no longer an issue.

Spock retrieved the tricorder, turned it off, pondered some way to effect a similar result on McCoy. How one could purport to derive any benefit from a state of rest accompanied by such a prodigy of sound…

Spock looked at Kirk, who sat slumped forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands.

“Are you all right, Jim?”

Kirk’s shoulders sagged momentarily before that voice restored him. He ran his hands through his hair and looked at his friend.

“Are you?”

Reassured, he too contemplated McCoy, who if anything waxed louder.

“It’s a shame he’s got no volume control.”

“That can be remedied,” Spock said solemnly.

Effortlessly he lifted the limp figure from the chair, intent upon carrying the doctor into the bedroom where he could snore to his heart’s content. McCoy responded to the change in position by wrapping his arms around Spock’s neck, snuggling into his shoulder, and mumbling something that caused him to smile in his sleep.

“‘Rosebud’?” Spock repeated quizzically.

“A girl in the bar he frequents,” Kirk said vaguely. “She glows in the dark.”

“Indeed.”

Wearing an expression of great long-suffering, Spock transported the doctor into the next room. He returned to find Kirk at the window wall, contemplating the twilight. His face, part shadow in the fading light, was set in the human equivalent of a mask, firm of mouth, hard of jaw, but the eyes (windows of the soul, Spock thought; a human metaphor, appropriate to one most human) looked wounded.

Kirk started slightly at the Vulcan’s reflection in the glass.

“Spock…” The human shuddered, steadied himself against the window frame, passed one hand over his eyes, tried to smile, grew serious. “Parneb must have short-circuited our memories to cover his tampering.”

“Precisely.” Spock stood close, protective. “So that our memory of the past was forgotten or distorted.”

“I’m cold!” Kirk said suddenly, surprised at himself. He set about laying a fire in the barren hearth. Spock remained at his side, to warm his soul.

Kirk stirred the fire, poured himself another brandy, could not speak.

They had had dinner. Kirk had actually slept some, dreamlessly for a change, had awakened in chagrin to find Spock keeping the watch and the dinner dishes cleared away. Spock had permitted himself a single restorative brandy.

Vulcans were for the most part impervious to the effects of ethanol; if they imbibed at all it was largely out of curiosity or for the sake of abiding by human customs when among humans. Spock, more abstemious than most, rarely drank even on such social occasions.

But the long mindjourney had taken its toll on him as well, and if his spirit was beset with thoughts of T’Lera and of Jeremy Grayson, what better way to restore it than to seek a place of warmth and quiet, the companionship of a friend, and the esthetic contemplation of what was essentially a potable work of art?

Nothing that is is unimportant. Spock studied the play of firelight in the amber depths of the vintage Armagnac. There were some things that transcended even the self-imposed discipline of the Vulcan.

“We were wrong!” Kirk said suddenly, poking at the fire. “We spirited T’Lera and Sorahl away from Earth on a totally false premise. Suppose the United Earth Council had decided to welcome them, initiate diplomatic relations? We may have done more harm than good. Spock, did we save the Federation, or set it back twenty years?”

Spock picked up Kirk’s bound copy of
Strangers from the Sky
.

“If, as he intended, Captain Nyere had allowed the journalists onto his ship, the stage would have been set for the kind of ‘media circus’ which, in our shared nightmare, was prelude to the metaphorical blood-on-the-walls scenario,” he said carefully. “If, as she intended, T’Lera had by then relieved all human agents of the responsibility for her death by taking Sorahl’s life and then her own, our nightmare would have been realized. The means she would have chosen would not have been as violent—the blood-on-the-walls metaphor is yours, Jim—but the end would have been the same.”

“Human journalists would have burst in on the bodies of two dead aliens and drawn all the wrong conclusions.”

“Precisely.”

“Whereas you believe that we, by simply being there, prevented that?”

“So it would seem.”

“And our subconscious minds, triggered by my metaphor and unable to keep the secret forever, finished the worst-case scenario we’d journeyed to Antarctica to prevent,” Kirk said slowly, piecing it together. “The signposts were there throughout the dreams—my tennis game with Melody, your dream about your mother. Because your memory of Jeremy Grayson was blocked, you dreamed instead about his great-granddaughter.”

“Indeed.”

“And because we were both needed to tell T’Lera the truth, neither of us could complete the dream alone—any more than we could have completed the job alone. And Elizabeth Dehner became the key, because she alone could galvanize us into forgetting our differences…”

“Therefore, Jim, despite our occasionally being cast as buffoons, we were necessary to the outcome.”

He handed Kirk the book.

Having been assured that their planet was safe for the moment from talking petunias and little green men, the majority of humans shrugged and returned to the realm of the mundane. Unbeknownst to the majority, however, the continuum had been subtly changed. Life on Earth would never be quite the same.

Yoshi returned to the agrostation to find his entire acreage suffering from advanced kelpwilt. He immediately contacted AgroInternational, submitting “his” formula for an organic cure, and volunteering his station as the test site for Sorahl’s synthetic enzyme. Within three days of treatment, the fungus was completely consumed. Patented at Yoshi’s insistence under the name “Sorahlaze,” the enzyme was made available to all agrostations at cost and eradicated the kelpwilt fungus from the entire planet within a solar year. Sorahlaze is still the specific for kelpwilt on any number of planets Federation-wide.

Did this contribution to Earth’s science by an alien who officially did not exist in fact save Earth from famine? The true magnitude of Sorahl’s contribution can never be measured. And this was only the beginning.

While terrorism had been virtually eliminated from Earth’s political makeup even before the deaths of Racher and Easter, these deaths were in a sense the final blow. The rank and file lacked direction, and soon disappeared into cracks in the society that had spawned them. The arms dealer who had equipped both task forces was exposed and virtually bankrupted. Aghan and the others who were captured were “reeducated” well before the Mind Control Laws would have made this impossible. And while any human society will perforce always have its lunatic fringe, Melody Sawyer’s laser rifle ensured that the remainder of Earth’s twenty-first century was remarkably free of terrorism.

At the same time other, more positive movements were absorbing human attention and energies. Notable among these was Welcome, a society devoted to preparing humans to accept other intelligent life forms. Begun when
Icarus
left Earth for Alpha Centauri, Welcome did not become a recognized global entity until it included in its membership one Tatiana Bilash.

Tatya returned to the agrostation with Yoshi for a time, but while the two remained deeply affectionate and eventually had a child whom Yoshi raised, their paths had already begun to diverge. Deciding for reasons she could not define that her life required new direction, Tatya threw all her energies into Welcome, becoming its chief spokesperson. She was part of the delegation that welcomed the first Centaurians to Earth, and was one of the elder statespersons to sit at the first Babel interplanetary Conference in 2087.

How much did Tatya remember of the events that sparked this new career? We will never know. What is known is that for all her travels, the one world she never visited was Vulcan.

Yoshi, however, did journey to Vulcan, as part of an exchange of scientists and agricultural experts in the year 2073. He never returned to Earth, but sought Vulcan citizenship and was granted a teaching fellowship at ShiKahr, where all trace of him eventually vanishes into the privacy that is uniquely Vulcan. Perhaps he simply retired to the desert, perhaps he became
dVel’nahr
, a Vulcan-by-choice, an honor that has been granted to few humans. One can only assume that he at last found the peace he could never have found on Earth. Whether he and Sorahl ever met again, whether either retained any memory of the other, is also lost to their respective privacies.

Back on Earth, all was not order and tranquillity. In the mop-up operation following the incident, the real Dr. Bellero was recalled from Marsbase and interrogated about her supposed presence in Antarctica. The true identity of the woman who took her place was never determined, nor were the identities of the two strangers—one charismatic, one somber—who succeeded in changing a Vulcan’s mind.

Perhaps the key to the entire mystery is Parneb, but our knowledge of Parneb begins and ends with Sorahl’s journals. The young Vulcan made astute observations of the flamboyant human who drove the rescue party through the Western Desert, chattering all the way, then sat drinking tea with Dr. Bellero while the others refitted the sleeper ship. But once that ship leaves Earth, Sorahl can offer us no further insights on Parneb or the unnamed strangers. Whoever they were, their trail conjoins with Parneb’s somewhere in the timelessness of the desert, then vanishes.

Attempts to identify a Mahmoud Gamal al-Parneb Nezaj result in the discovery of several persons of that name, including one who married into the vast, extended al Faisal family some years after the Vulcan incident, though there is evidence that this Parneb was a much younger man. Whoever he was, he is quickly lost in the byzantine intricacies of a clan whose roots extend both to the ruling family of what was once Saudi Arabia and to the Bedouin tribes extant in the Suez from ancient times, and whose present descendants include former High Commissioner of United Earth Jasmine al Faisal. The marriage produced no offspring, and that seems to be the end of Parneb.

Controversy continued to plague the captain and first officer of the
Delphinus
. If there were innocent victims of the event other than the Vulcans, these two were among them.

Jason Nyere put in for early retirement from AeroNav not long after the incident he was not permitted to remember. Subsequent hospital records indicate his treatment for repeated bouts of depression in his later years. One can imagine him scanning the night sky from his home near Lagos, uncertain of what he sought, but seeking nevertheless. Jason Nyere died of an unspecified fever in 2064, the year before the Vulcans came to Earth again.

There is no evidence that Melody Sawyer suffered any recollection of the incident. Given her own command of the survey ship
Xeno
, she earned a reputation over the next twenty years as a hard but fair captain. She is recorded as rescuing all hands following an engine-room explosion before going down with her ship. Ironically, an engine design developed by Vulcans and eventually used in Earth vessels could have saved her life.

Sorahl of Vulcan kept a precise record of his ship’s voyage home, which in fact took far less time than his human rescuers had estimated. Well beyond the Sol system, he encountered, whether by serendipitous coincidence or simply excellent navigation, a Vulcan robot ship prospecting for antimatter in the interstellar void. He was able to piggyback the adapted Earth vessel onto the robot ship and bring both to his world in under a year. This soon a return, and the account of their rescue as given by Sorahl and his commander, were significant to the Offworld Service’s decision to continue its study of Earth.

A curious footnote to the event comes from the transcript of T’Lera’s debriefing by the Offworld Service and members of the Vulcan Council, in which she refused to reveal the identities of her two Earthbound saviors. Under questioning, Sorahl was able to state only that “I have no knowledge of them,” implying that his mother/commander had for her own reasons removed that knowledge from his mind. Thereafter it is recorded of Sorahl only that he resumed active duty in the Offworld Service, and served on or commanded a variety of exploration craft until his death at the age of 247. His meticulously kept journals were the basis of much of this author’s research, for which she is most grateful.

Of T’Lera there is no further record at all. Following her final statement to the Vulcan Council that “It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself, and some truths are best left unspoken,” she simply disappears—from her son’s journals, from history, perhaps from the realm of the living. T’Lera herself becomes the final unspoken truth.

Those of us born into a Federation five hundred planets strong may forget how tenuous were its beginnings. Those of us nurtured in a Federation that has kept the peace for a hundred years may forget that history is never simple, never linear, never predetermined, but is in fact the outcome of a tangle of subtext, chance, coincidence, and what-if? No individual reading this can deny that the presence of Vulcans has in some way affected all our lives….

Spock walked alone through the crowded streets of Thebes. Something drew him inexorably toward a place where he had walked before. He found the tel more by direction than recognition; the entire area surrounding it was now a warren of high-rises, and Parneb’s neo-Fathy house was long gone. Perhaps someday the tel itself would be leveled in the name of progress, unearthing all its buried secrets. For now, however, it endured.

Spock did not expect to find that which he had left in this place in a time before he was born. His coming here was motivated more by nostalgia than by logic. He had come to pay homage to his ancestor.

Jeremy Grayson’s body had long since gone to dust; his
Katra
lived on in the people of a world who had at last learned the lesson of his small amulet, and in the green blood of his unique offspring. If the amulet itself was lost in Earth, that was as it should be.

“Your pardon, sir Vulcan?” A small boy tugged at the sleeve of Spock’s uniform, smiled a Cheshire-cat smile at him. “I believe you have misplaced this?”

He had picked up a fine silver chain from the dust at their feet, offered it to Spock, who studied him carefully. Too tall for his weight or too thin for his height, he was somehow terribly familiar.

“Surely this is yours,” Spock answered, attempting to give the chain back to him.

The boy smiled. “But you see, I already have one,” he said, showing Spock the milky uncut crystal that hung about his spindly neck. “That one belongs to you!”

He scampered off and vanished in the crowd; Spock could not have found him again if he had tried. Instead he considered the dusty, glinting thing that had been given to him again.

“Fascinating!”

A Vulcan’s strong and gentle fingers, touched with the soil of his ancestral Earth, reverently cradled the symbol of peace.