Strangers From the Sky (12 page)

“Not if you come into your doctor’s office seeking a medical consultation,” McCoy said mildly. “Look, Jim, there’s nothing I can do for you without a scan. I don’t know if this is boredom, depression, anxiety, an overdose of ground assignments, change of life, or some new virus that’s going around. I do know, from my vast experience with certain personality types, that it’s evolving into a full-blown obsession. It’s driving you crazy, and before I allow it to drive me crazy I’m taking evasive action. You will report to Psych for that profile with all due expediency. Now, do you want that in writing, Admiral, or can we try to be adult about it?”

Kirk held up his hands in surrender.

“I’ll try to fit it into my schedule.” McCoy gave him a venomous look. “All right, all right. First thing tomorrow.”

“Fine!” McCoy growled, pocketing the mediscanner and making paperwork motions. “Now get the hell out of here, will you? Some of us have work to do!”

And the next time I recommend a book to you I’m going to have my head examined, he thought to Kirk’s retreating back.

Nowhere is it written that Vulcans do not dream. Nevertheless the misconception persists.

Logic suggests that the more highly evolved the intellect, the greater the potential, the greater the need, for the seeming formless randomness of dream. It has been proven that those centers of the brain which in some species produce telepathic impulses are closely interconnected with the places where dreams are born. It has been suggested that disembodied intellects—Thasians, Organians, Medusans—spend their entire lives in a realm of ever-flowing dream.

Among the Vulcan Masters, there are mind techniques that make logical use of dreams, channeling them to the solving of specific intellectual problems, suppressing them entirely to transform the time of sleep into the vast empty blankness where logic is All. It is said that the High Masters scarcely sleep at all.

For the average Vulcan, the realm of dreams may perhaps provide release for those emotions kept in check while waking. This is a matter for Vulcan privacy, and not for the curiosity of outworlders. Those who have observed the Vulcan in sleep may doubt that dreams transpire beneath the stillness of that repose. What the Vulcan dreams, what use he makes of such dreams are his concern, but that the Vulcan dreams is fact.

Sometimes it is necessary to dream.

Abandoning his nightly meditations at last for sleep, Spock dreamed.

“
You cannot do it alone,” the female insisted. “You
cannot
do it
…You
cannot do it…You cannot…You cannot alone…You alone…alone…alone
…”

“
Mother?” Spock asked the darkness, sensing rather than seeing her
.

She was standing beside him, her hand on his arm in a gesture he tolerated from no other
.

“
Mother, if I fail…your people and my father’s will never meet
—”

“
And you will never be,” Amanda finished for him. “Is that what motivates you, my son?
”

Spock shook his head
.

“
Personal concerns are of little consequence in a situation of this magnitude. It is the thought of Earth without the benefit of Federation
—”

“
And the benefit of Vulcan wisdom?” Amanda asked. “Poor little Earth! How ever will we manage?
”

Spock stood on his dignity even in dream
.

“
Mother, it is a fact that without Vulcan intervention the entire food supply of Earth would have been endangered by the year
—”

“
And as even your father will admit, it is a fact that without the mitigating influence of humans, there was a 67.6 percent probability that Vulcans would have logicked themselves to death within a millennium,” Amanda countered. “Assuming they survived the Tellarite Insurgency in a Federation that did not contain humans. And where was Vulcan, I’d like to know, during the Romulan Wars? Which of your worlds do you argue for, Spock? And why not both?
”

Spock had no answer
.

“
Neither Vulcan nor Earth could have achieved what they have without the other. Neither could do it alone. Nor can you. You cannot do it alone
…”

It was not Amanda who stood beside him in darkness, but T’Lera who stood before him in the light. Vulcan and commander, dweller in the void of space for more years than Spock had lived, she awaited his argument with the equanimity of her station and her years
.

“
Commander,” Spock began, wondering for the first time in his life which of his worlds he spoke for. “What can I say to persuade you?
”

T’Lera now studied him, making no effort to mitigate her gaze. This one, whatever he was, would not fear her. She must know why
.

“
Who are you?” she asked, slowly approaching him. “Who are you…?
”

“I’m taking the afternoon off,” Kirk told his Coridani aide. He had a sudden desperate need to be alone. “Get Kinski to cover my 1400 briefing, hold all my calls, and you can have the water-ballet tickets for tonight. If you don’t mind sitting next to Commodore Hrokk.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.” The girl lowered her bifurcate eyebrows at him. Commodore Hrokk had two hands more than the average humanoid. “Where will you be, Admiral?”

“Anywhere but here,” Kirk said shortly, putting the time lock on his desk, jingling the activator for the aircar he’d left in the flag officers’ hangar. Before the results of this morning’s psychoscan came back he would be long gone. “And don’t have me paged unless the world’s coming to an end. Clear?”

“I thought you and
Enterprise
solved that the last time, sir,” his aide quipped. Kirk stopped in his tracks. “I only meant—it’s a running gag around here, sir. V’ger and all that.”

“Yes, I know,” Kirk said. “‘Admiral Quirk’ is what they call me behind my back, isn’t it?”

When Coridani blushed, they went from gray to mauve.

“It’s not that we don’t appreciate what you did, Admiral, only—”

“Only what, Ensign?”

“Only it’s a little awesome working for a living legend, sir. Particularly one who’s so—down to Earth? Is that the expression I want?”

“It’ll do,” Kirk said grimly.

Living legend! he thought, navigating the corridors in quick time before someone waylaid him with some new idiocy. They’ll cast me in bronze if I don’t keep moving. Living legend! That hurts almost as much as the one about being “down to Earth.” As Spock would say: precisely!

Kirk let the aircar down on its pontoons and waited for it to stabilize. The sea was calm, but he’d come in rather fast and kicked up a local wake; he’d have to wait for it to dissipate. Meanwhile he opened the overhead iris to 360 degrees and had a look around. He’d never been to this part of the Pacific before, had no idea it was so built up.

The picture of it he had in his head was two centuries old.

That clump of submersibles riding at anchor on a massive free-floating dock he’d passed to the west he recognized as belonging to DownUndersea, an entire underwater city built out from the coral reefs off Brisbane almost to the Solomons. But this far out, well east of Norfolk Island and south of Pitcairn, he’d expected open sea.

Instead he’d landed in the middle of a number of little pontoon villages built entirely on the surface of a reasonably quiet South Pacific. No doubt they had some kind of shielding against major storms; all the same he’d hate to be bobbing around like a cork on that ocean in a typhoon, Kirk thought. But the inhabitants of these villages were seafolk—Maoris and Samoans and the hard-as-nails descendants of descendants of
HMS Bounty
’s Pitcairners; they could probably weather anything.

Kirk opened the hatch on the aircar and breathed deeply of the salt air. It was beautiful here. He would have to come back sometime when he could stay a few days, get to know the people and their world. There was still so much of his own planet he knew nothing about, and he could find much to like in this part of it.

But what he’d come looking for wasn’t here.

McCoy popped the results of Jim Kirk’s psychoscan out of his viewer and scowled. This was more serious than he’d thought.

“Get me Admiral Kirk’s office,” he barked into the comm.

Within seconds he was talking to the Coridani ensign, who was extremely sorry, doctor, but—

“What do you mean he’s gone for the day?” McCoy blustered. “Where the hell is he?”

He rang up Kirk’s apartment and left a message with the computer. He called the museum at Alexandria on the odd chance he might be poking around in the library. He called all of Kirk’s usual haunts. No one had seen Jim Kirk in over a week.

Ever since he got hold of that damn book, McCoy fumed.

Ordinarily he’d let it go. Jim was a big boy and could take care of himself. But in view of what had turned up on his scan there was something ominous about his choosing to disappear right now.

McCoy had one last resort, and that was to use his clout to have Kirk found via the intracranial senceiver flag officers were required to have implanted whenever they were planetside. McCoy had always hated the device, balked at it as a major invasion of privacy, and he wouldn’t use it unless he was sure the man was in real danger.

And he wasn’t at all sure of that. Yet.

Taking the scan tape with him, McCoy headed for the Psych Division. There were some people he had to talk to.

Kirk aimed the aircar toward the nearest of the float villages, adjusted its engines for oversea, felt it kick in like an outboard and churn up a great frothing wake. He lowered the overhead dome, keeping only the windscreen in place, enjoying the wind in his hair and the spray on his face. As he neared the piers extending out from the village like the spokes of a wheel and the variety of sea- and air-going craft moored to them, he slowed to a leisurely bobbing pace, cutting his wake to almost nil.

A boy of about twelve, shirtless and barefoot, sat dangling his legs over the end of one of the piers. When he saw this exotic craft heading in his direction, he jumped to his feet and waved it toward him excitedly. Kirk killed the engine to an idling purr and came alongside.

“Whattaway!” the boy called the local greeting, just loudly enough to be heard above the aircar’s jets.

“Hello yourself,” Kirk replied.

“Mine’s Koro Quintal,” the boy stated, jerking a thumb toward his bare chest. “What’s yours?”

Squinting up at him in the afternoon sun, Kirk marveled at the diversity his planet could produce. Everything about the boy declared the variety of his ancestry. His first name, the wiry build, jet-black hair and tawny skin, even his abiding by the custom of not raising his voice close to the sea, revealed his Maori roots. His last name and the startling blue eyes in that burnished face made him offspring of one of Fletcher Christian’s crewmates. An Aussie accent the like of which Kirk hadn’t heard since Kyle made commander and shipped aboard
Reliant
completed the picture. Here was a thousand years of Earth history, looking down at him from a pier in the middle of an ocean named Pacific, hands on his hips, grinning.

“Mine’s Jim Kirk.”

“You’re lost, my word,” Koro observed, cocking his head like a bird.

“May be, son,” Kirk acknowledged, waiting for the boy to make the next move, enjoying the exchange.

“Could be I’d help y’find it,” Koro said, digging one diffident bare toe into a rift in the prefab surfacing of the pier. “Can I have a go-’round in that-’ere rum-looking rig of yours?”

“Sounds reasonable, Koro Quintal.” Kirk smiled, offering him a hand down. “Hop in.”

They’d made the circuit of the entire village twice and flown over it once for good measure, Koro’s eager hands on the controls, before Jim Kirk explained what he was doing here.

“Lot of outlanders been poking around this-here since that book come out,” Koro observed as they idled and bobbed, watching the gulls wheeling and coasting back to the haunts of man with the sunset. “Weren’t none of them a bloody admiral, my word.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve read it,” Kirk asked, bemused. He’d worn his civvies, hadn’t meant to tell the boy who he was, but news about living legends reached even here.

“
Strangers from the Sky
? Aye, sure thing. Assignment for school. Only it’s ancient, don’t y’see? Hasn’t been a kelp farm hereabouts in a hundred years.”

“If only there were someone who knew about that time,” Kirk mused. “A local historian maybe. Koro, who’s the wisest person you know?”

“That’d be Galarrwuy,” the boy said without hesitation. “He’s curator of the museum over to Easter. An outlander like you, Admiral-Jim-Kirk.”

Time to use that rank to advantage, Kirk decided.

“Would you introduce me to this Galarrwuy sometime?”

“Now’s as good as any,” the boy said, scrambling back into the pilot’s seat. “Can I steer her again?”

Kirk hesitated. It was early evening here, three hours earlier than San Francisco, and it would take him as many hours to get back. If he wasn’t at his desk by 0800 tomorrow, they’d send out an alert for him, and he wasn’t about to call in and let them know where he was. He decided to chance it. At least Easter Island was a thousand miles in the right direction.

“She’s yours.” He nodded at Koro. “Only take her up and over please.”

“Why?” Koro gunned the engine. “You apt to seasick?”

“No, but it’s faster.”

“Ar!” the boy marveled. “Caught on to me already!”

“The minute that book hit the stands they started coming out of the woodwork,” Dr. Krista Sivertsen told McCoy. “All the seekers and the searchers, every wide-eyed neurotic and flawed personality on the planet turned up claiming they were present in a previous incarnation when the Vulcans arrived, that they helped them escape or helped them pass for human or whatever. Some even claimed they were direct descendants of Sorahl by way of a variety of human females. Whatever it may have done for history, that book is playing hob with psychiatry. When your admiral told me why you’d sent him for a scan, I thought, No, impossible. He’s not the type at all. He’s strong, assertive, a totally integrated personality. McCoy’s doing a number on me. Then I read the results of the scan.