Strangers From the Sky (8 page)

She stood abruptly, intent upon a sonic shower and sleep.

“Sotir may theorize at his leisure,” she concluded. “It is I, as commander of this vessel, who must confront the reality. And you, as a member of this crew, who must obey. Before we enter Sol III orbit, Navigator, you will complete a thorough study of all record tapes designated ‘Colonialism.’ I will expect a full report.”

Sorahl’s voice, borrowing generously from the irony that was his birthright, reached his mother over the sound of the shower.

“Understood,
Commander
,” he said.

Which of them had been correct? Sorahl wondered now in the strange and utterly alien place where he found himself upon awakening. Or, rather,
more
correct, since logic dictated that no single individual could possess the whole of any truth. And what did it matter, now that circumstance had given them both into the Earthmen’s hands?

He could hear them arguing in the room beyond.

“…hide them here for how long? Even if they somehow magically recover all by themselves—”

“I don’t know, Yoshi, I just don’t know! But you said it yourself: we’re committed. I feel responsible for them. And I won’t have them hurt…”

Savar’s precepts had never made provision for the situation his grandson found himself in, but like any Vulcan beyond seven years Sorahl was well trained in survival. Immediately upon awakening, he had assessed his circumstances and his surroundings, and attempted to rise from the waterbed. His unpracticed movements on this alien device, however, set it to undulating violently. The motion threatened to awaken T’Lera, who lay beside him, comatose as he had been, but in no immediate danger. Sorahl ceased his movements and considered what to do next.

He had been intrigued by the notion of a liquid-filled sleeping mat as soon as he determined its nature, added the sensation to the multiplicity of alien sights, sounds, and smells that assailed him. There was also the lighter gravity, with its accompanying strange sensations. Every waking moment increased the young Vulcan’s knowledge about Earthmen and their world considerably.

This tiny room, safe haven from the strange and tumultuous seascape he glimpsed through the window port, spoke more eloquently of this world and its people than decades of long-range study. The homey furnishings and simple decor, jars filled with seashells and water-worn rocks, dog-eared paper books in several languages and on a variety of topics, bits of driftwood and Tatya’s Ukrainian artifacts (Sorahl did not yet know them to be either Tatya’s or Ukrainian, but would learn such things in time), the ordinary clutter of personal effects kept in the privacy of a sleeping room where one did not expect strangers to venture…

Sorahl did not move, touched nothing, would not presume to violate the privacy of those to whom he owed his life. Nevertheless their artifacts surrounded him, and he could not help contemplating them. Given an opportunity to examine his room at the Academy, what would Earthmen surmise about him and his kind?

He did not intend to eavesdrop on their argument, either, but how could he avoid it? Their voices assaulted his sensitive ears; their discordant emotions were more strident still. Yet their struggle to come to terms with what had been thrust upon them struck the young Vulcan profoundly. At last he began to understand his grandfather’s obsession, his mother’s fascination, with the species. He remembered that he had called them primitive, and was ashamed.

His shame was short-lived. There were things he must do. Gingerly he made another attempt to get out of the waterbed. This time he was successful.

Standing, he realized he was weak from hunger and shock (how long since the crisis that had brought them here, how long had their craft floated unnoticed in this alien sea?), but his youth and Vulcan stamina would work in his favor, and the human female in slapping him to lighten his coma had unwittingly given him the means to cure his own concussion. She had also dressed his burns, cutting away the charred tunic lest the fabric become embedded in the wounds. Bare-chested, Sorahl shivered. It was cold on this human planet; Selik’s instruments had recorded remarkable extremes in temperature pole-to-pole.

Selik, my best teacher, Sorahl thought with a sudden flash of memory, seeing the stark face over his shoulder, instructing him. Circumstance has taken your life and spared me mine. Whatever I do henceforward must honor the memory of those whose lives were lost.

Again he shivered. The burns, residual shock, lack of sustenance, the lingering traces of concussion, exacted their toll. Sorahl wondered if it would be a breach of propriety to take the brightly patterned afghan thrown carelessly over a chair and wrap it around his shoulders.

Instead he put aside his own needs and went to his mother. Carefully he touched his fingers to the reach centers of her ravaged face. He was no healer, but if he could start her on the healing trance and stand by until she needed him to bring her out—

Mother
, he thought to her knowing it was the one word that would tell her the most, bring her back through memories of the crisis, the abortive self-destruct sequence, the plummet to Earth, let her know that he was here and whole and required her presence. If she thought him dead, her mission would be complete; she would have no reason to preserve her own life.

Mother
, he thought, searching for her through eddies of trauma and recent memory…

“Malfunction Retro One, Commander,” Helm T’Preth had reported in her usual imperturbable tone. No matter that an irreparable malfunction of their retro-rockets could mean death for all of them this far from home.

“Compensate,” T’Lera ordered with equal calm. “Are you in need of assistance?”

The others were already on alert: Stell leaning over Sorahl at the navcon to provide a third pair of hands should two prove insufficient, Selik and T’Syra coordinating readouts as they scanned for some external factor responsible for the malfunction. The ancient Savar had moved without sound to the airlock; it would be he who led the self-destruct if it came to that.

“Negative, Commander,” T’Preth replied, nimble fingers flying across her console. “Compensation adequate at present.”

“Affirm,” T’Lera said as the others returned to station as if the alert had been just another drill. “All stations, causative scan.”

Silently all complied.

They had circled Earth for forty-seven of its days, pursuing their research and watching a thousand sunsets, undetected by the most sophisticated of Earth’s scanning systems. Under Selik’s tutelage, Sorahl had devised a remarkably flexible and intricate navigational pattern that brought them in under satellite tracking stations and maneuvered them around ground-based observatories, bringing them closer to the planet surface than any scoutcraft had dared venture before. Their impulse engines, recharging on solar while they were on dayside, allotted them fifty days of such observation, and then they must return home.

“Compensation insufficient, Commander,” Helm T’Preth reported some moments later. “Retro Three now indicating variable instability.”

Silently each resumed alert status.

“Causative, Science?” T’Lera addressed Selik crisply, pivoting her chair in his direction.

“Unknown, Commander,” Selik replied at once. “No external damage. Calibrating for internal malfunction now.”

T’Lera swung her chair forward again.

“Bring us up, Helm,” she said sharply. “Twenty thousand perigee. Navigator, oblique angle. We must not be seen.”

“Affirm, Commander,” T’Preth and Sorahl said in the same breath, but T’Lera was already out of her chair and under the engineering con with Stell.

“Scanning Two and Four as well,” Stell reported, and T’Lera merely nodded. She was listening to something else, sensing something.

“Status, Helm?”

“Retro One shutdown, Commander,” T’Preth barely whispered even as it happened. “Three on blue line. Temporary hold at fourteen perigee. Downspiral estimated nineteen seconds—mark.”

And the rest was nightmare.

Mother!
Sorahl thought to her, drawing her away from such thoughts lest the healing trance prove impossible.
Mother!

I am here, Sorahl-kam
, T’Lera replied at last, and engaged the healing trance as he took his hand away.

Outside the wind was howling now, whitecaps churning, thunderheads roiling on the horizon. It was typhoon season, and someone was getting a lot of rain.

Several kilometers distant, along the bottomless rift known as the Mayabi Fault, the ocean floor slipped slightly, and a spacecraft of no known Earth design slid grating across the bottom. Under the silent silver stare of a thousand sea creatures it teetered and vanished over the edge of the crevasse in a churning of sand and was gone.

In the sleeping room of the agrostation, a young and shivering Vulcan wrapped a human-made afghan about his naked shoulders, keeping watch over his mother and looking out over the heaving sea.

And in the other room, two humans continued to argue.

“…don’t even know what they eat. Suppose they need some kind of special environment? We may be endangering them by keeping them here, doing nothing—”

“You just don’t want the responsibility!” Tatya nearly shouted. “Shrug it off like you always do, dump it on someone else. You
know
what the bureaucrats will do to a find like this. Turn them into zoo specimens, destroy them. Over my dead body!”

“I beg your pardon—”

His voice was very soft, accustomed to speaking to more acute ears, but it brought them both to an instantaneous, electrified silence. Yoshi felt the hair on his neck start to prickle again.

“I mean no intrusion. It is obvious that we have caused considerable—disruption in your lives. We ask forgiveness.”

Tatya moved toward him like a sleepwalker, reached out a hand, and almost touched him, exotic apparition like a genie from a lamp, except for the burn plasters on his chest and arms, then stopped herself.

“You’re awake,” she said unnecessarily, the paramedic in her taking charge, holding at bay the wonder, the incredulity. “H-how do you feel?”

“I am—well. Some physiological damage, but functional. As T’Lera will be, in time. Your concern for our physical well-being is no longer necessary.”

He looked from one stunned face to the other. Was it possible they did not understand him? Or was it the incongruity of his speaking their language?

“But you had a concussion,” Tatya blurted. “At least, I thought—”

“It is no longer a factor,” Sorahl said. Studies indicated humans had no telepathy, no self-healing. There was no purpose in broaching such subjects now. It would serve only to confuse and frighten them. And in his hurry he had neglected the most basic of amenities. “Forgive me. I am called Sorahl. The other”—he gestured toward the sleeping room—“is T’Lera. My mother, and commander of our vessel.”

It was Yoshi’s turn to move forward. Instinctively he held out his hand in a typical human gesture. Sorahl, recalling the record tapes, extended his own hand and, the reluctance of the touch-telepath held firmly in check by the student of IDIC, made actual the first human-alien handshake.

“So-rall,” Yoshi said carefully, sensing the reluctance, releasing the warm, dry hand; truth to tell, the moment terrified him. “And—Talera?”

Sorahl assented. Inaccurate, but it would suffice. Yoshi seemed pleased.

“My name’s Yoshi. Yoshiomi Nakamura, actually. But Yoshi’s fine. And this is—”

“Tatya,” she said firmly, waving Yoshi aside. Tatiana Georgevna Bilash was someone she’d left behind on the mainland, along with three younger sisters and an inordinate number of bossy female relatives. She went to shake Sorahl’s hand as well, was surprised to see him hesitate, seemed to shrink back slightly. “I’m sorry! Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” Sorahl extended his hand a second time, touching hers briefly. How explain that among his kind a betrothed male did not…“It is simply not our way.”

“I guess we have a lot to learn about each other,” Yoshi said quickly, covering their varying degrees of embarrassment.

“Indeed,” Sorahl said, and fell silent.

“You must be starved!” Tatya said suddenly, remembering the practicalities. “You just sit right here and I’ll get you something to eat.”

Halfway to the kitchen area, she stopped.

“I’m sorry, I—that is, we don’t know—”

“We are vegetarian by philosophical choice,” Sorahl explained carefully, remembering his amazement that other intelligent species could eat meat. “We will eat neither animal flesh nor the products of animals. Anything else is acceptable.”

“I see,” Tatya said slowly, temporarily nonplussed. It was an awesome responsibility, serving the first meal to an alien guest. What was appropriate?

“There’s some tofu in the fridge,” Yoshi supplied helpfully. He was consumed with curiosity, wished Tatya would stop fussing and give him a chance to ask a few of his thousand questions. “Dried fruit, brown rice. Look around.” He turned toward Sorahl. “We’re due for supplies shortly. Tomorrow, in fact.” He shook his head. Tomorrow. Oh, gods, tomorrow! “The joke is, of course, that we’re sitting on one of the staple foods of the planet, only it’s not as if you can step out onto the porch and clip a few leaves for salad. What we grow is industrial-grade kelp. It has to be reprocessed.”

“I quite understand,” Sorahl said patiently. Food production had been Stell’s area of expertise, and he had instructed his young pupil well. Yet another ghostly face, this one strong and benevolent, swam before the young Vulcan’s vision.

“Tofu, then,” Tatya was muttering to herself, clattering around in the kitchen area.

“You said, ‘we,’” Yoshi said intently, taking the chair beside Sorahl’s, marveling at the sight of an alien occupying his beanbag chair. He must not stare. If it weren’t for those ears…“Who exactly are you? And how did you get here?”

“We are the Vulcan,” Sorahl began, and proceeded to explain.

The Vulcan captain of a human crew continued the age-old tradition of his kind, asking nothing of those he commanded that he would not do himself.