Strangers From the Sky (39 page)

“Then you’re set?” Kirk wanted to know.

“On the supply side, yes. But I’ll need a clear head and a quiet place to work before I dare try hypnosis under such primitive conditions.”

“We’ll see you get everything you need,” Kirk said with more assurance than he felt.

“Everything she needs for what, Kirk?” Jason Nyere was beyond the amenities by now, hadn’t bothered to knock. “I came to ask you to give Melody a shot of something.” He addressed Dehner. “Calm her down, help her sleep, and, frankly, keep her out of my hair for the next couple of hours.”

“Of course, Captain,” Dehner said.

“I’ve just come from topside,” Nyere said to them all. “The blizzard looks to be letting up some, which means we’ll have reporters spewing out of those choppers and swarming up the sides in no time. And it’s been half an hour since the last message from Command. That gives me less than that much time to find a way around an order that in conscience I can’t obey.”

He handed Dehner a key. “I’ll show you where we keep the prescription stuff.”

“I know where it is, Captain.” Dehner took the key from him, thinking wryly of all the skulking around she’d had to do last night. “I won’t be long.”

“Thank you!” Jason nodded. Nothing this bunch did could surprise him anymore—he thought. He waited until Dehner had left. “Everything she needs for what, Kirk?”

“About your orders, Captain,” Kirk stalled, though he already knew what he was going to do. “Are you so sure what they’ll be?”

“Kirk, I’m career AeroNav,” Nyere said wearily. “That makes me an authority on Murphy’s Law. I’ve also lived long enough to know that it’s human nature to solve a small problem by turning it into a bigger one. This Vulcan way of logic begins to sound very appealing after a while.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Why am I telling you this? I’ve been staring down the barrel of a general court-martial since I first met the lady with the ears. It doesn’t matter anymore who you are or if I can trust you; I’m finished.”

“What are you going to do?” Jim Kirk asked him quietly.

Jason sighed. “It may be a fate worse than death, but with the lady’s permission I’m going to turn her and her son over to those reporters as soon as the weather clears. I don’t know anyone else who could hold up better under the three-ring circus, and once she does not even the PentaKrem can pretend she doesn’t exist.”

“Captain,” Jim Kirk said tightly, “that’s the worst thing you can possibly do.”

“Oh, is it?” Jason said mildly. “Says who?”

“I guess we still have a lot of explaining to do,” Kirk said.

“I’d say that was about right,” the captain of the
Delphinus
conceded dryly.

“Well!” Kirk said breezily, rubbing his hands together. Once the decision was made, the rest was easy. Sort of. “Captain, I think you’d better sit down. What we have to tell you is more than a little incredible.”

“So if you tell T’Lera what you’ve just told me…” Jason Nyere said after he’d absorbed it all.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Captain,” Kirk said.

“Why not? It would solve everything. If she understood she and her son were interfering with history—”

“We cannot burden T’Lera with certain knowledge of the future, Captain Nyere,” Spock explained. Nyere had not been able to take his eyes off this new Vulcan, this confirmation that there really was a planet full of them, and offshoots scattered throughout the galaxy, and who knew what manner of other strange, exotic beings out there to be encountered in a future Jason Nyere would not live long enough to share. The knowledge Kirk had given him was both a joy and great bitterness; he would be glad to be free of it. “Vulcans cannot be made to ‘forget’ by means of drugs and hypnosis as humans can; therefore whatever information we gave T’Lera, she would have to retain for life. Further, if we are to enable her and Sorahl to return to Vulcan, as I assume we are—”

“Gary may have come up with a solution to that,” Kirk interjected, giving Mitchell the floor.

“We may be able to ‘borrow’ a spacecraft,” Mitchell said, ungluing himself from the doorframe where he’d taken to lounging. “There’s an abandoned missile installation left over from the Third War dug into the rock under the Western Desert; I flew over it on the way here. PentaKrem records state everything portable’s been removed, but there are still three DY-100 sleeper ships unaccounted for, and it’s my guess that unless they’ve been stripped for parts, they’re still down there. Not exactly your late-model heavy cruiser, but since I don’t think we’re likely to scrounge up any antimatter, much less dilithium—”

“Antimatter?” Jason Nyere frowned. “Di-who?”

“Thank you, Mr. Mitchell,” Kirk warned. “No need to get too technical. Or to give Captain Nyere too much to forget. What he’s saying, Captain, is the same thing you and I discussed a few days ago: if we can get the Vulcans out of here, we can conceivably crank up one of those old sleepers and get them safely off the planet. Granted, it might take them ten years to get back home, but considering the alternatives—”

“You’ll have my help, Kirk,” Nyere promised. “
Captain
Kirk. Although I don’t know how much help that can be without my crew.”

“We’re—not inexperienced in running a ship, Captain.” Kirk eyed Gary thoughtfully. “For the moment, I can at least scare you up a decent navigator. Under duress he’s even been known to get his hands dirty.”

“Mr. Mitchell,” Nyere said, shaking his hand incredulously. “Welcome aboard!”

“Spock, help me!”

This was not a voice Spock had ever heard before. It was not the dispassionate voice of a commander issuing an order, not the sarcasm-tinged tone of the sometime-martinet who had chewed him out on the bridge of the
Enterprise
in a time that had not yet happened, but the voice of a man who had been to the abyss and understood his chances of falling—a man humbled, vulnerable, in need. To fail to respond to such need would be not only illogical, but cruel.

“Help you, Captain? In what way?”

“Instruct me,” Kirk said. “Tell me what to say to T’Lera. Because I must go in there, Spock. I must know what to do, what to say to her. And I keep seeing blood on the walls if I fail.”

“Captain,” Spock hesitated, not wishing to give offense, not knowing how to avoid it. “I do not think it is possible to teach you to fully—understand, to counter T’Lera’s reasoning—to think—”

“Like a Vulcan?” Kirk finished, more frustrated than angry. Spock’s long hoped-for reappearance had solved nothing. He must speak to T’Lera, but what could he say that he had not said already, and to no avail? He rose from his bunk, all but started out the door. “I have to do something!”

Impatience serves no purpose, Spock thought, and considered what he might have done if Kirk were not here. Had T’Lera come from his own time, a victim of Parneb’s tampering as he was, his choices would have been simpler. Nevertheless—“There is an alternative. Logically, I am better able to persuade T’Lera to our ends. If I can do so without revealing my true identity—you must permit me to go alone.”

“No!” A clatter of bootheels announced Elizabeth Dehner’s return. “You cannot do it alone! Neither of you can! Don’t you see? The risk is too great. T’Lera has to know what her actions will do to future history. There is no other way. The way she sees it now, she’s caught between a rock and a hard place, and she’s fully prepared to sacrifice two lives to what she believes must be done. And you two sit here squandering what little time you have left, perpetuating the myth that humans and Vulcans are so different there can be no common understanding, when—”

“That’s enough, Doctor—” Kirk began.

“I don’t think so!” she snapped, her pale hair flailing about her face in her intensity. “Haven’t you learned anything about trust, Captain? Or you, Mr. Spock? How can you expect to convince T’Lera that humans and Vulcans can work together if you don’t believe it yourselves.
You cannot do it alone
,” Dehner repeated.

Kirk met Spock’s eyes and held them. Both were silent for a moment.

“Do we know where T’Lera is now?” Kirk asked of no one in particular. If what Dehner said was true, every second counted.

“In her cabin,” the psychiatrist reported. “Sorahl told Yoshi they would ‘await the Council’s decision in their own privacy,’ unquote.”

It was all Kirk needed to hear.

“We go together then, Mr. Spock,” he said. The Vulcan was already on his feet. “Together, or not at all.”

T’Lera stood alone in the darkness of her cabin, considering the hordes congregating outside the ship.

Some, she thought, would put us on display, and Jason Nyere would permit them, for the sake of the greater good. Others would kill us merely because of our differences, and Melody Sawyer would join them.

They are not ready, she thought. And we must not force them.

Mine is the error, she thought, for not acting sooner. Now mine will be the solution.

“Mother?” Sorahl stood uncertainly in the doorway, framed by the light from the hall.

T’Lera’s thoughts had summoned her son. She turned to face him.

“Sorahl-
kam
…” she began.

“She’s unarmed,” Kirk said as he and Spock hurried down the corridors. “Theoretically she could strangle Sorahl with her bare hands, but—”

“No, Captain. That is not what she would do,” Spock said, well aware of what T’Lera would do.
Tal-shaya
for her son, having sought his permission in mind-meld, then a variation on the healing trance for herself—a trance from which no one could waken her—would be T’Lera’s choice.

Spock froze in mid-stride, staggered, winced as if in pain. “
Captain!
”

They were just outside T’Lera’s door. Kirk grabbed him.

“What is it?”

“I sense—Captain, it has already begun. T’Lera has—”

Kirk crashed through the door, groping for the lights. Spock was right behind him.

Sorahl lay unmoving on the bunk. T’Lera had been seated beside him, her fingers at the reach centers of his face. She was on her feet at once.

“I had forgotten humans lock their doors,” she said, her eyes darting from Kirk to his unidentified companion, lingering perhaps overlong on the stranger before fixing on Kirk. “You will leave us.”

“No, ma’am,” Kirk said adamantly. “See if Sorahl is all right,” he ordered Spock, his eyes never leaving T’Lera’s.

Spock moved, but T’Lera moved faster, standing between her son and any outside force. Spock realized if he came any closer, if she touched him, she would know what he was.

“I surmise Sorahl is as yet unharmed,” he said, “though in deep trance. We have not much time.”

His words, his voice, drew T’Lera’s attention only for a moment.

“Do not interfere,” she said, her eyes still locked on Kirk’s. “This is no longer any human thing. Your world is not ready for us. By my logic, there is no other way.”

“But there is—!” Kirk said, and stopped himself. Was he out of his mind? Was the only answer to tell T’Lera the truth? Was violating a Prime Directive that did not yet exist the only way to guarantee a future in which it would?

“Commander,” he began, feeling his throat tighten around each word. A single wrong one would end everything. “What can I say to persuade you?”

T’Lera studied him, the intensity of her eyes damped down so as not to intimidate him. How vulnerable these humans were! Was it logical, was it ethical, to leave them isolated in a galaxy fraught with unknowns? For the briefest moment she might have relented for this reason alone. But that decision was not for her to make.

“Do not think to persuade me with words, Mr. Kirk,” she said slowly. “But if you offer a perspective which outweighs mine…”

Jim Kirk hesitated. And in that momentary hesitation, the burden fell to Spock—

—who studied T’Lera, and considered. She looked, he thought, precisely as he had surmised she might, given what she was. Vulcan and commander, dweller in the void of space for more years than he had lived, she would no more be moved by mere dialectic than any Vulcan. Nor was she the only Vulcan caught between a rock and a hard place. Could his human captain possibly understand the moral implications of what they were about to do?

For nothing less than absolute truth, Spock saw, would satisfy T’Lera. Nothing less than certain knowledge of the future would sway her from her present course. And once accepted, that truth, that knowledge would be hers to carry—alone, unrelieved, and in unbroken silence—for all time.

Neither word nor thought, neither mind-touch nor mere slip of tongue could reveal any portion of that truth to any other of her truth-seeking, telepathic kind. Self-exile would be T’Lera’s choice—an absolute solitude in which to preserve an absolute truth.

Spock had no doubt T’Lera would consider such death-in-life an equitable exchange for the life of her son and the fate of two species. It was logical. But it was a bitter thing.

T’Lera had been correct; this was no longer any human thing. Only a Vulcan could accept such responsibility. And only one neither human nor Vulcan could make it known to her.

“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, did not fear her. She must know why.

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

Spock hesitated. Since he had entered the room, all his energy had been given to blocking her thoughts from his, preventing her from knowing this very thing. He had only to open his mind…

“Who are you?” T’Lera said again, drawing very near. Somehow she sensed that her fate was in his hands, as his future was in hers. Yet she must know.

He is the same as you! Jim Kirk wanted to cry out against the awful silence. As I am, as we all are—more alike than different, stronger together than alone! Dehner’s words echoed in his ears, haunted him.

Kirk held his peace. Shouting would not serve. Mere words would not serve.

A perspective which outweighed hers, T’Lera had said. There was no other way.