Strangers From the Sky (4 page)

“I don’t buy that, Bones,” Jim Kirk said, moving about the room winding those of his antique clocks that needed winding, a nightly ritual. “Sounds like a pretty big fish story to me.”

“Not if you consider the era we’re talking about,” McCoy argued. “Earth was less than fifty years away from Khan’s war, had just begun to consider itself a united world, and it had its growing pains. People still living who’d lost family and friends in that war and could never be reconciled, some cities still in ruins, a lot of grievances and old vendettas still festering. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the best or the worst time for a bunch of aliens to come dropping in out of the sky.”

“By the time
Amity
found that Vulcan ship adrift off Neptune all that was over,” Kirk said, resetting a particularly recalcitrant grandfather clock, half listening. “We’d already been to Alpha Centauri—”

“You haven’t been listening to a damn word I’ve said, have you?” McCoy said disgustedly. “This happened a full twenty years before that.”

Kirk restarted the grandfather’s pendulum, closed the glass fronting, and frowned.

“What?”

“This Vulcan ship fell to Earth while the Centauri mission was still three years from its destination. We’re talking sublight, remember? The crew heading for Centauri had no idea they’d find an advanced civilization, had no idea
what
they’d find. This was the Dark Ages of interstellar travel, and here’s an interesting point: mankind had been sending and listening for radio messages from other worlds since the 1970s. We were actively seeking contact, but only on our terms. We had to be the aggressors. It was okay for us to go outside our system and find ‘them’—whoever ‘they’ were—
out there
, but God forbid ‘they’ presume to set foot on our soil without knocking first. Worse, not only did they look funny and talk funny, but they had all these spooky habits like reading minds and suppressing their emotions and living practically forever from our standpoint, and being stronger and smarter and having warp drive…”

Kirk sat slowly, fiddled with the fireplace poker, watched the flames.

“Zefram Cochrane is credited with the breakthrough in warp drive,” he said adamantly, as if it were set in stone somewhere.

“As far as
human
technology was concerned,” McCoy corrected him. “The Vulcans already had it.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it? They were out in space centuries before we were. You’ve heard Spock’s lecture on ethnocentricity, on how just because
we
haven’t discovered something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist? How many superior species have we discovered since? That’s the whole crux of the problem, Jim, the whole thrust of the book. It was the
timing
that was wrong. The
Amity
story makes good copy. Brave Earthmen rescuing injured aliens from their damaged ship and all that. But you of all people should know that human history is seldom that neat. By the time of the
Amity
incident we were receptive to alien contact. Twenty years earlier Vulcans or anybody else were just as likely to be burned as witches or blasted out of the cornfield with a 12-gauge as they would’ve been in any prior century. Neither Vulcan nor Earth wants to admit to that, but there it is. That’s why it’s been hushed up until now.”

“Earth and Vulcan, joined in some—conspiracy—to keep this secret all these years?” Kirk mused, shook his head, rejected it. “Sorry, Bones, you’ve lost me there.”

“The Vulcan Archives were sealed until the death of the last survivor,” McCoy explained patiently. “Nothing conspiratorial about it. By reason of her credentials, Dr. Jen-Saunor was the first person—and the only human, by the way—to have access to them. On the human side, on the other hand, all contemporary Earth accounts were mysteriously ‘misplaced.’ Government files chewed up by computers, witnesses gone to ground, the usual nonsense.”

“That much I can accept,” Kirk said. “But not the sealing of the Vulcan Archives. It seems—uncharacteristic. Isn’t the truth supposed to be accessible to all?”

“Not when it causes embarrassment to both sides,” McCoy reiterated. “With the exception of the few who tried to help, most humans came out of this looking like hysterics or spoiled children. And the Vulcans could hardly be pleased with having to be less than completely truthful about certain pertinent details of the event.”

“Convenient for the author, though,” Kirk remarked dryly. “She’s the only one with access to the files, no one on Earth knows enough to refute her. No wonder the book’s so controversial. I’ll refrain from calling it an outright scam, but—let’s say it’s an ‘artful fabrication.’ Fiction passing itself off as history. Like those
Ancient Astronaut
books a few centuries back.”

“Now wait a minute—” McCoy growled.

“Another thing—” Kirk interrupted. “This novelistic style of hers. Reproducing dialogue as if she were actually in the room when it happened—”

“What’s wrong with making history accessible?” McCoy wanted to know. “Anyone from a ten-year old to a Starfleet admiral can read this and understand it. And the dialogue, by the bye, was taken from the journals of one of the Vulcan survivors. As I’m certain you know from personal experience, once a Vulcan says something, he never forgets it.”

“Sort of like studying Hannibal’s campaigns from the perspective of the elephants,” Kirk suggested. McCoy was not amused.

“You don’t like your preconceived notions challenged, do you, you old dinosaur?” he badgered Kirk. “Don’t like your safe little textbook version of history threatened. You’re getting conservative in your old age, Admiral. Very bad business!”

“You want some coffee?” Kirk asked innocently, stifling a yawn.

“Not the kind you serve!” McCoy grumbled. “Closest it ever came to a coffee bean was in a dictionary. Right under ‘bilge water.’”

“Well, don’t mind if I do.” Kirk meandered out to the kitchen, punched a single preset button on the synthesizer.

“Curious,” McCoy heard him say.

“What is?” the doctor asked, contemplating the harbor lights.

“Assuming I believed any of it,” Kirk said, returning from the kitchen sipping something that at least was hot, “and I’m not saying I do—here you have two Vulcans stranded on Earth twenty years too soon. Their ship is beyond repair, and they’re totally at the mercy of humans and their primitive technology. How’d they get back home?”

“I’m not saying they did,” McCoy replied.

“You’re not going to tell me they spent the rest of their lives on Earth!”

“No, I’m not going to tell you that, either. I’m not going to tell you a damn thing.”

“I can just see them putting in a request for a sublight ship,” Kirk mused. “Or having to bob their ears and assimilate. I can’t imagine a worse fate for a first-generation Vulcan. Or doesn’t your highly acclaimed historian tell you?”

McCoy didn’t answer.

“Time I was moving on,” he said pointedly. “Got a six
A.M
. consult and a morning full of office hours staring me in the face.”

Kirk tried to block his way to the door, only half kidding.

“Come on, Bones, tell me. What happened to the Vulcans?”

McCoy slipped his disk copy of
Strangers from the Sky
out of a pocket and held it out to Kirk, tantalizing. “Why don’t you read it and find out?”

Kirk looked at the garish little plastic disk and almost took it. Something about that era of first contacts had always made him uneasy, perhaps the very thing McCoy had been on about all night: the innate Murphy’s Law capacity of humans to botch whatever they put their hands to. He thought about an isolationist Earth, alone against a universe rife with unknowns. No Federation, no Starfleet. No half-Vulcan first officer, who was also his friend…

Kirk handed the disk back to McCoy. “Thanks, no, Bones. Maybe some other time.”

“Your loss!” McCoy growled, stalking past him to the door. “I’m going home to find out what does happen!”

“Destruction before detection.”

It was the axiom etched on every scoutcraft commander’s soul. Nevertheless, no commander could depart for what until recently had amounted to a several decades’ journey without the formality of having the words reiterated by the commanding prefect. It might be illogical to hear repeated that which one knew as first principle of one’s profession, yet it was required.

“Destruction before detection.”

It was the definitive distillation of the precepts of
T’Kahr
Savar, first to hold the office of prefect for offworld exploration upon its creation some 170.15 years ago. It could also, of course, be inferred from the philosophy of IDIC as found in the writings of Surak long before such exploration was feasible.

“It is not given to us,” Prefect Savar had written in his declaration of intent before assuming office those many years ago, “to influence or affect in any way the normal course of events upon any world we may observe in our journeys. The sociopolitical implications of any such intervention are too grave.”

Subsequent study of those near worlds with advanced civilizations confirmed the wisdom of Savar’s precept. It was found, for example, that the blue-skinned and antennaed inhabitants of one such world had grounded their cosmology in a complex polytheism that rendered their solar system the whole of the universe. To confront them with living proof of the existence of an alien species—pointed-eared, green-blooded, different in all respects—was to throw them into possibly irreconcilable theological turmoil.

In another instance, the suidaen inhabitants of the 61 Cygnus system, despite their own recent history of space exploration, were a conspicuously xenophobic species, prone to violence when their beliefs, however erroneous, were challenged. To communicate with such a species would only provoke the violence Surak had sought to eradicate among his people.

And while the inhabitants of the Sol system were highly advanced, heterogeneous, open to the new and strange, and had in fact been actively seeking communication with other intelligent life for over seventy of their years, they had only recently found peace among themselves after a series of global wars. Any threat to that tenuous peace from without was anathema.

“It is our purpose to study these worlds, with a view toward a time when first contact is deemed practicable, without giving any evidence that we ourselves exist,” Savar had concluded in his declaration. “For that reason, any craft disabled within an inhabited system must self-destruct before its presence is discovered. Destruction before detection.”

Destruction before detection. In the ensuing years it had never yet come to that, yet every scoutcraft was equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, and every commander was prepared at all times to activate it.

Destruction before detection. It was the first application of the Vulcan Prime Directive.

Commander T’Lera, offspring of the same Prefect Savar who had composed those words, stood before the current prefect, awaiting her final departure orders.

“The commander’s choice of crew complement is of course at her own discretion—” Prefect T’Saaf began, contemplating the roster before her.

“—nevertheless the prefect is justified in questioning at least two of my choices,” T’Lera finished for her, her voice perhaps a shade drier than the occasion warranted. “I am open to discussion.”

T’Saaf moved her eyes away from the roster to the imperturbable face before her. It was said that T’Lera had qualified for the prefecture before her and refused it, preferring instead the reaches of space where she had spent most of her life. T’Saaf studied that face, handsome even in middle years, the eyes never quite fixed on any planet-bound thing but always elsewhere and afar, and could well believe it. So to her had fallen that which her abilities merited, but only because this one had refused it. T’Saaf would indeed welcome a discussion of the liberties T’Lera sometimes chose to take.

“The choice of
T’Kahr
Savar as your historiographer—” the prefect began.

“—was at his own behest, Prefect,” T’Lera said. For once her eyes came close to focusing on the near-at-hand. “My father is old. He has not many years left to him. If he wishes to spend them in service, it is my judgment he is within his right.”

“He
has
served,” Prefect T’Saaf pointed out. “In the reaches of space, and in this office, for many years and admirably. No further service is required of him.”

She got no answer to this. T’Lera’s true reasons, and Savar’s, were other than those stated.

“Does his healer deem him fit for such a journey?” T’Saaf demanded.

“He has made the journey thrice before the breaking of the light barrier,” T’Lera reminded her, not precisely answering the question. “Six decades of his life have been spent in the void between the stars. It is logical to assume that this mode is more congenial to him than the confines of any planet.”

“Nevertheless, if he is unable adequately to perform his duties…”

T’Saaf did not finish. The suggestion that her predecessor might be in less than optimum health or strength might be cruel, but its logic was unarguable. A scoutship’s personnel space was at a premium, its food supply limited. Every crewmember would be employed to the fullest, and no one, not even a former prefect, had the right to voyage as a mere spectator.

“None can know the future,” T’Lera replied, though she did not offer it as an excuse. “Savar is well aware of his responsibility to the rest of the crew. He will accept the consequences.”

In another the tone might be pleading; in T’Lera it was only reasonable.

“If my father desires to make the journey one final time—”

“‘One final time,’” Prefect T’Saaf repeated. “And if he does not return?”

“That, too, at his own behest,” T’Lera replied. She unstiffened her rigid posture for the briefest moment, came as close as she could to making a personal request. “He has not long, and there is nothing that holds him to this world. One who has lived in space is entitled to die in space.”

T’Saaf gave no answer, but locked her eyes with T’Lera’s, forcing the latter to focus down, to remain with the planet-bound, the temporal, the personal.

“I accept the responsibility,” T’Lera said, undaunted, her far-searching eyes all the more penetrating for their narrowed focus. “For my father’s sake.”

“
Kaiidth!
” T’Saaf acknowledged, and T’Lera had her will, at least in this.

Yoshi and Tatya brought the hydrofoil back to the agrostation without speaking. There didn’t seem to be any words for this particular situation.

Yoshi steered the foil one-handed around the perimeter and down one of the access lanes that radiated like wheel spokes from the hub of the station, his eyes never leaving the horizon. The hand that gripped the wheel was white-knuckled; the other lay clenched in his lap.

Tatya stayed below with her patients, sitting on her heels on the deck between the bunk where the male lay and the stretcher that held the female. Now that she knew, or thought she knew, what they were, the idea of touching either of them made her quail.

You’re going to have to touch them sooner or later, she told herself. You’re a paramedic; it’s your job. When you get them back to the station, what then?

She’d plunged her bloodstained hands into seawater up to the elbows, trailing them over the side until Yoshi started the foil again and it lifted out of the water. Her skin still tingled with the shock of it; she couldn’t seem to get her hands clean. Now she forced herself to take a wad of sterile gauze from the medikit, dampen it with cool water from the galley, and swab the blood off the female patient’s face, making sure none of it got on her hands. When they got back to the station, she’d have a proper scrub and put on her gloves and—

She finished what she was doing and tossed the gauze in the disposal, trying not to look too long at the strange female’s face, which disturbed her deeply. The alien’s nose was shattered, several of her teeth were loosened and the gums bleeding, at least one cheekbone was broken, the surrounding tissue bruised and beginning to swell. She must have impacted against the helm console during splashdown to do that much damage. It wasn’t anything Tatya hadn’t seen before. What disturbed her was not the extent of the injuries, but the alien’s response to them.

The alien, Tatya thought. Well, all right, what else am I supposed to call her? She’s the alien, until someone tells me otherwise.

The alien, unlike her male counterpart, was at least semiconscious most of the time, and the broken facial bones, along with second- and third-degree burns similar to those the male had sustained, must have been excruciating. But except that the broken nose forced her to breathe through her ravaged and swollen mouth, she made no sound. Only her eyes moved. And those eyes…

The swelling had reduced them to slits, but they remained open as long as she was conscious—the color of jet, as sharp as lasers and, to Tatya, positively chilling. They fixed themselves on some distant point beyond Tatya’s shoulder, and they made her insides quiver. If they ever looked right at her…

Tatya shivered, turned her attention to the male, whose eyes, mercifully, were closed. Fingertips tingling, Tatya forced herself to reach over and gently slap his face several times, bringing him up to a less profound level. When he’d stabilized, she sat back on her heels and studied him.

She had to admit he was beautiful. Even with burns covering a third of his face (further burns on his hands and visible through the charred fabric of his uniform), he was more beautiful, God help her, than Yoshi—his face all planes and angles beneath golden skin, his eyelashes thick and black and centimeters long, his dark hair silky to her tentative touch. She could almost forget that the blood beneath that golden skin was green, so mesmerized was she suddenly by the exotic upsweep of those alien eyebrows, and those ears.

Those ears. She’d thought at first they were the result of some form of cosmetic mutilation, like the custom of piercing on Earth, but on closer examination she could find no surgical scars, and the pinnal curve was simply too natural. They were supposed to be that way.

Tatya sat back on her heels and tried to imagine a whole race of beings like him. Perhaps a whole planetful, a solar system, a galaxy. She wondered what they would think of humans, red-blooded, stunted-eared, bizarre.

With a sudden thrill up her spine she realized that the female, still gasping for air through swollen lips, was looking directly at her. Tatya would have jumped up and fled (fled where, though, in a hydrofoil in the middle of the Pacific?) anywhere to escape those eyes, if just then the foil hadn’t nosed against the dock, its motor dying to silence as Yoshi called down unnecessarily:

“We’re here!”

“By virtue of his service,
T’Kahr
Savar could have requested and been granted a place on your expedition without your intervention,” Prefect T’Saaf said to Commander T’Lera with particular emphasis. Let the proud one know that the exception was made because of who and what her father was, not she. “But the choice of Sorahl as your navigator is insupportable.”

“On what grounds, Prefect?” T’Lera’s voice once again held that dry, almost ironic tone. “Because he is without rank, or because he is my son?”

“There are six others of full rank as qualified as he,” T’Saaf replied, and to address both issues: “Nepotism is not only illogical, it may in this instance prove dangerous!”

The charge of nepotism was grave, freighted as it was with implications of favoritism and a lack of judgment, equally serious violations of both a commander’s code of ethics and a Vulcan’s honor. T’Lera did not permit it to perturb her; she knew T’Saaf’s methodology and had been prepared for this.

“If the Prefect will refer to the addendum to my preflight report.” She struggled mightily to control her voice, which had slipped beyond the bounds of dryness into outright irony, if not sarcasm. “She will note that of the six of rank whose skillscans equal or surpass Sorahl’s, four are already assigned to other ships, one is on leave of absence, and the sixth is Selik, who is already aboard my vessel as astrophysicist and cartographer. It was in fact he who recommended Sorahl, as the most promising of the senior cadets, to accompany us.”

Prefect T’Saaf did not condescend to look at the addendum; she knew it would read as T’Lera said it did.

“As to the matter of rank…” T’Lera continued. Salt in the wound, a human might have called it; the Vulcan had no equivalent metaphor. “I respectfully remind the prefect that this is a technicality. The commencement ceremony for senior cadets transpires six days after our optimum departure date. Am I to delay my ship’s departure by what may prove a dangerous margin? Or am I to deprive my crew of the best available navigator because he lacks the formality of rank designation on his uniform?”

She would not burden T’Saaf with the tale of how she herself had accompanied her father on his second voyage to the Sol III system when she was a child. T’Saaf would point out, and rightfully so, that regulations had been less stringent then and that as prefect Savar had been free to take certain liberties no longer permitted. That T’Lera had departed Vulcan a half-formed child of eleven years, to return two full decades later—in the days before warp speed the journey took that long—as a mature adult and unique among her kind for having spent those years in the void, was self-evident. Never again could a planet entirely contain her, and that was both her gift and her burden.

Did she presume to visit the same fate on her son?

But Sorahl was older, in his nineteenth year, and with the breaking of the light barrier a scoutcraft could now reach Earth within ten days, not ten years. The entire journey, including mapping and research, would be completed in a matter of months. It was not the same.

But these were deeply personal things, and none of the desk-bound, planet-bound, convention-bound T’Saaf’s concern. The unarguable fact was that Sorahl was qualified and available, and his commander wished him to go. That his commander also wished to show her son what her father had first shown her—that there was that to be found in the misnamed void between the stars which knew no words in its exquisiteness, that there was that on other worlds which was as beautiful and diverse as Surak had envisioned it, juxtaposed with strangeness and squalor and a striving for perfection that no matter how imperfect was fascinating to observe—would not be spoken of in this official context.