Strangers From the Sky (18 page)

“Krista said it was bringing the weirdos out in droves,” McCoy remarked, fiddling with his medical tricorder. He looked at Kirk. “Sorry!”

“However,” Spock went on as if McCoy had not spoken, “that which began as dream soon increased in frequency and intensity, becoming more immediate, more ‘real,’ if you will, than our waking lives. There was a sense that we were involved with these historical personages, knew them intimately, including details that were not present in the book. There was also a growing sense of ominousness, of something indefinable gone awry. And there is more.”

He watched McCoy fuss with the tricorder, preparatory to recording everything that transpired in this room for the next two days—though he would, of course, only pick up fragments of what had happened through the mind-meld—as evidence for Krista Sivertsen’s files. McCoy noticed the prolonged silence.

“Go on, go on, I’m listening!”

“Several of our dreams do not overlap, but remain separate to each of us,” Spock continued. “As if we were interacting with different individuals at different times. These separate dreams are totally in keeping with our personalities. You, Jim, engage in a tennis match with Melody Sawyer, with all of its subsequent consequences, whereas I—”

He glanced again at McCoy or, more accurately, at the intrusive presence of the tricorder, and hesitated.

“What is it, Spock?” Kirk urged him gently. “If it’s too personal—”

“I,” Spock said slowly, “dreamed about my mother.”

Briefly he told them the content of his dialogue with Amanda.

“Dreamed about your mother, did you?” McCoy asked, sensing Spock’s embarrassment, trying to bluster his way around it. “So what? A little of the old human nature creeping in. Even you must let your guard down during a REM cycle. Or are you going to tell me Vulcans have an Oedipus myth?”

“Doctor—”

“Or maybe it’s symbolic,” Kirk suggested. “Your mother subconsciously represents your human half, the half you’re pleading for with T’Lera.”

Spock considered it.

“A possibility. And so we come to the crux of the matter.” He took a deep breath, gathered himself. The ticking of the clocks seemed to grow louder. He had both men’s undivided attention. “The recurrent, virtually identical dream.”

“The blood on the walls.” Kirk suppressed a shudder.

“The dream which runs counter to history,” Spock said. “The dream whose outcome is violent death and an Earth withdrawn from interstellar contact out of xenophobic terror. The dream in which each of us tries and fails to offer T’Lera an alternative to what she believed she must do. The dream which each of us experiences in precisely identical detail, with two very significant exceptions.

“One: each of us is the solitary protagonist of his own dream. It is as if we are interchangeable, and the words we utter identical. Two: each of us is haunted by the voice of an unidentified female reiterating the single phrase ‘You cannot do it alone,’ yet you are able to glimpse her, however incompletely, whereas I am not.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” McCoy chimed in. “Jim can’t resist noticing things like the color of a woman’s hair, what she’s wearing, even in dreams. You can.”

“Doctor, in an instance where the identity of the speaker hinged upon such incidentals as gender and hair color, I submit my powers of perception—”

“Gentlemen,” Kirk interjected softly.

“Finally,” Spock concluded, “our psychoscans indicate identical mnemonic dysfunction, implying identical incipient psychoses.” He waited for McCoy to comment on this, but the good doctor was busy polishing his halo. “The odds against such an occurrence in two unrelated individuals from such diverse backgrounds who are also acquainted with each other,” Spock went on, “are in the billions.”

“That as accurate as you can be?” McCoy couldn’t resist. “You are slipping!”

“In my conversation with Dr. Nayingul,” Spock continued, ignoring McCoy, “he informed me that the sharing of similar dreams is common among those who participate in mutual Singings in Dream-time. However—”

“That’s useful,” Kirk interjected hopefully. “Is it possible that you and I, because of the frequency of mind-melds—”

Spock shook his head.

“I had considered that. But if the dream ‘belonged’ to only one of us, we should both experience it with the same person in the central role. If it were your dream, for example, I should dream of you conversing with T’Lera, not myself, and vice versa.”

“I see,” Kirk said thoughtfully. “Conclusions?”

“I believe Dr. Nayingul is correct,” Spock said evenly. “There is more to this than dream. As illogical as it may seem, Jim, I believe as you do that we were both in fact participants in this event. And our unshakable belief in this alternate reality, despite what we know to be ‘true,’ has caused what appears to be mental dysfunction on our psychoscans.”

“‘Appears to be’?” McCoy repeated. “Spock, much as I respect present company, and much as I hate to find myself in agreement with a machine, in the history of modern psychology no scan has ever been found to be in error.”

“For everything there is a first time, doctor,” Spock said. “I remain convinced that neither of us is insane.”

“That’s what they all say!” McCoy snorted.

“Bones!” Kirk warned. “An unshakable belief in an alternate reality,” he said thoughtfully, reiterating Spock’s words. “And you think that belief has a basis in fact?”

“A distinct possibility.”

“Meaning we were somehow transported backward in time…” Kirk pondered it. “Lord knows we’ve done it often enough, voluntarily and at the behest of others. But why don’t we remember it?”

“Or why did we not remember it until now,” Spock corrected him. “Perhaps someone or something does not wish us to remember. Following your hypnosis, Dr. Sivertsen stated that you were ‘blocking’ something. So, apparently, am I. My dreams have resisted all attempts at meditative resolution. Yet something in Dr. Jen-Saunor’s book has triggered what I can only conclude is not dream but memory.”

Kirk nodded, absorbing it. It was what he’d felt in his gut all along, what had driven him to the South Pacific to find Galarrwuy, who had said essentially the same thing.

“Then it’s simply a question of determining when it happened and why we didn’t remember it.”

“Oh, is that all?” McCoy blustered, feeling distinctly left out. “All you’ve got to do is comb through nearly two decades of shared history to see if anything’s missing. Every mission, every log entry, every time one of you sneezed and the other forgot to say ‘God bless you.’ Nothing to it; couldn’t be simpler!”

“That
is
why we are here, doctor,” Spock pointed out. “And we have forty-eight hours. And, thanks to you and Dr. Sivertsen, we also have a point from which to begin.”

“Elizabeth Dehner,” Kirk said after a long moment.

“Precisely.”

“Of course!” Kirk said. It made perfect sense to him, even if McCoy was goggling at him. “Which reminds me. Will you accept an apology that’s about fifteen years overdue?”

“Perhaps,” Spock said, bemused.

“Then I apologize. You were right.”

McCoy was heard to sigh thunderously. “This is what I get for leaving my decoder ring at home!” He addressed his familiar gods or perhaps only the ceiling. He directed his ire at Kirk. “Either you let me in on this particular mystery of the Intergalactic Brotherhood of Space Cadets or—”

“Or what?” Kirk teased. His mood had lightened considerably with freedom and present company. “Spock, should we tell him?”

“It has to do, doctor, with ‘the sometimes serendipitous impact of coincidence upon the course of history,’” Spock said as if he were quoting something.

McCoy didn’t recognize it. Kirk did.

“Then you have read it?”

“Of course.”

“I find it intriguing that the author keeps such a low profile,” Kirk observed. “There’s no biographical material available on her at all.”

“Dr. Jen-Saunor holds Vulcan citizenship,” Spock said; he would know such things. “This implies a degree of privacy more pronounced than most humans would aspire to.”

“Isn’t that somewhat rare for a human?” Kirk wondered. “At least, I’m assuming she’s—”

“Goddammit!” McCoy had listened to enough.

“Sorry, Bones.” Kirk gave him his sudden undivided attention. “Do you remember who introduced me to Elizabeth Dehner?”

“Do I remember? I did, the first day she was assigned. Why?”

“Because until today,” Kirk said, pacing—it always helped him think better—“I’d totally forgotten how I first met her. I thought it wasn’t until Mark Piper brought her onto the bridge with—no, wait, Bones; it’s important. I’m now convinced Elizabeth Dehner is the mystery woman in the dreams, even though I don’t know why.

“I said I owed Spock an apology that was about fifteen years overdue? All right, ancient history: Dr. Elizabeth Dehner signs aboard at Aldebaran; you introduce me to her the same day. Mark Piper relieves you while you lay over at Starbase 6 for some unfinished business or other—”

“Yes, yes, go on!” McCoy said, uncomfortable with the memory even after all this time; part of his unfinished business had included a bitter accusatory comm-pic from his daughter Joanna, who was taking his ex-wife’s side of the never-ending argument on alternate weeks. “I have to admit there was a bleak moment at the bar when I almost talked myself out of it. I’d never committed to a five-year mission before. But, hell, I thought. Burned all my bridges, and you’ve been stuck with me ever since. For weal or for woe, as they used to say. God knows it’s been six of one ever since.

“While I was gone,” he finished, watching Kirk carefully, “you managed to get into that mess at the edge of the galaxy, and both Liz and Gary—”

“Gary…” Kirk said softly—the hurt, the sense of a life unfinished, still evident in the catch in his voice. The admiral cleared his throat, pulled himself together. “Gary, Lee Kelso, and I went on only one landing party together while you were gone, Bones. Along with this Vulcan officer I’d inherited from Chris Pike, who, frankly, intimidated the hell out of me.”

“I know the type, Jim,” McCoy said, eyeing the silent Spock, sensing something ominous in the wings and trying to lighten up. “One of those superior, know-it-all sorts who—”

“We’d beamed down to have a closer look at this odd little planetoid that kept disappearing and reappearing,” Kirk went on as if McCoy hadn’t spoken. “Nothing unusual about the mission, except we never did find out what made that planet behave the way it did. Nothing unusual about the report that followed, except that historically it marks the first time Spock was right and I was wrong and I had to pull rank on him to make it come out my way.” He gave Spock a wistful look. “God knows I wish it had been the
last
time, but—”

“Jim,” Spock interjected quietly, “there is no need to recall that particular memory now.”

“Oh, yes there is,” Kirk said adamantly, beginning. “Planet M-155. Gary dubbed it ‘The Planet That Wasn’t There.’ For a while it became a rather cruel joke at—someone’s expense…”

Captain James T. Kirk sat in his quarters signing reports on the day after his best friend died.

“And thus ends the report on ‘The Planet That Wasn’t There,’” he said tonelessly, scrawling his signature across the slate with his bandaged hand, trying to rouse some enthusiasm for this, for anything, in the wake of Gary’s death. “Unless you have something to add, Mr. Spock.”

“I regret I have not, Captain,” the Vulcan replied solemnly. “Records of like phenomena are virtually nonexistent, and all efforts to extrapolate from available data have proved inconclusive.”

“Then that’s sufficient,” Kirk said flatly. “Tell Yeoman Rand to append my log entry on the mission to your science report and let it go.”

“As you wish, Captain,” Spock said, though the inadequacy of his findings gnawed at him. And there was something else. If he were not an innate perfectionist, he might have relegated it to the realm of human error and let it pass, but…“Captain, I have noted the omission of Dr. Elizabeth Dehner’s name from your log entry on M-155.”

“The landing party on M-155”—Kirk had the report on Delta Vega before him now; it was all he could do to keep his hands steady, much less his voice—“was comprised of you, me, Gary, and—and Lee Kelso. They’re all listed in the log.”

Ironic, Spock thought. Bitterly ironic that the very same individuals had comprised the landing party on M-155 and the ill-fated participants in the events of Delta Vega. Three once living, three now dead. The inclusion or omission of that final name would not alter the course of the cosmos, and yet—

“Captain, Dr. Dehner was with us on M-155.”

“Dr.—Dehner,” Kirk said tightly, ominously, his eyes locked on the report on Delta Vega, though its words were a blur to him, senseless, “joined us at Aldebaran and I never laid eyes on her until five minutes before we hit the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy!”

“Captain, I must differ with you—”

“
Spock!
” Kirk fixed him with his eyes for the first time, eyes that burned with the tears he would not shed, eyes that would have made a lesser being quail and turn away. Spock merely held them with his own. The tension left Kirk’s body; he passed a hand over his eyes and sighed. “Mr. Spock, it may not occur to you that your merely human captain has been through sheer hell in the past few days, and the last thing I need is to have the names of those three people—flaunted at me—”

“Captain, I assure you that was not my intention. If you wish, I shall make the correction to your log entry myself. It is unfortunate that those who accompanied us to M-155 are the same three who died on Delta Vega. Nevertheless—”

“Spock!” Kirk’s voice was pained, his face bewildered. “I’m telling you I know who was on that landing party. Elizabeth Dehner wasn’t there! Why are you doing this to me?”

It was Spock’s turn to be puzzled. He knew little enough of the function of human memory. Was the captain so blinded by grief he could forget the details of recent events? Or had something happened to him while they were on M-155, that dusty, treacherous anomaly that defied all their attempts at research, endangered all the humans’ lives with its thin atmosphere, its extra-atmospheric disturbances…