STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael Read online

  “Speaking of the New Bedford ladies,” said somebody else, “Tom Naismith tells me his wife looks to be presenting you with your first godson.”

  Jason beamed. Having arranged to bring the thirty New England girls around the Horn to wive the settlers in Seattle, he felt a paternal interest in them, quite apart from having a personal stake in seeing them all married or at least spoken for by January. He had stood up for every one of them who had so far had weddings, playing father of the bride with as much pride as if they really were his daughters. The thought of it made Lottie smile. Jason, big and strapping and a handsome and eligible thirty-two, was a sight to behold when he was being paternal.

  Then the closing of the door against the night drew her attention across the room, and she caught her breath in a quick gasp of shock.

  In her mind she heard Aaron Stemple’s voice again: “How many of them are passing for human?”

  Passing for human. Were these?

  There was nothing markedly alien about them, not like the man in the cabin. Two men, strangers, swarthy and bearded and dark. An odd look about the tufted eyebrows, she thought, but perhaps it was only her imagination. She found herself looking covertly at the way their thick black hair hung down over their ears. But it was not this, so much as their eyes, that frightened her.

  Even at this distance, through the wavering shadows of the kerosene lamps and the smoke that hazed the room, she knew that they were alien. Alien and evil.

  One of them stayed at the corner table, watching the room with an expression in his eyes that Lottie had last seen in the eyes of the buyers at the Natchez slave markets before the War. The other came to the bar, and paid silver for whiskey. Watch him though she would, she could see nothing different about him, except for the look in his eyes. But as he crossed back to his partner she shivered.

  “You all right, Lottie?” She turned, startled, at the sound of Jason’s voice.

  “I’m fine—it’s hot in here, that’s all.”

  The tall man frowned, looking closely at her. She drew a deep breath and patted Jason’s wrist. “Just a turn,” she went on with forced brightness. “Maybe I’m sickening for a cold. Can I get you another whiskey?”

  Bolt nodded, and took his drink to join the two strangers at their table. Lottie busied herself pouring a drink for one of the mill-hands whose week’s owl-hoot money had just gone into Josh Bolt’s pockets, and she found her fingers were trembling. He’s injured, she told herself. He’s harmless. He can’t hurt Aaron.

  Passing for human. A train of events that could be stopped now. Maybe I am sickening for a cold, she told herself firmly. I’ll be seeing boogies and burglars like Biddy Cloom does in another five minutes.

  But turning back to the room, she caught sight of them again, talking casually to Bolt. In their faces was an alien arrogance, a terrible assumption of superiority that has nothing to do with snobbery, but rather with the placement of the boundary line between who is accorded the rights of a human being, and who is not.

  “... humanitarian?” she heard Jason say in answer to some question, and laugh. “It takes leisure and civilization to be a humanitarian, and around here, mister, believe me we’ve got neither.”

  “It also takes money,” said the shorter of the two strangers. “A luxury of the rich.”

  “Well, in these parts you don’t get rich by loving your fellow man,” responded Bolt, grinning. “And the richest man in the settlement’s also the meanest, with a heart like a Pierce and Hamilton safe.”

  Lottie thought she saw a look pass between the two strangers, a look and a small shrug. The conversation turned to other matters—politics, the Reconstruction of the South, representation in Congress and when Washington would be accorded statehood. When they left, Jason made his way back to the bar, half his whiskey still in his hand—Jason would nurse a drink or two along all night—and stood leaning quietly on the elbow-smoothed planking for a time, watching the door that had shut behind them.

  Lottie asked, “Just passing through?” as casually as she could.

  He glanced at her, picking up the uneasiness in her voice. “They say.”

  “But you don’t?”

  He shrugged, and shook his head. “I got the feeling they were looking for someone.”

  The alien, thought Lottie. Their partner—maybe their spy. I have to warn Aaron that the creature he’s harboring is evil.

  Then someone opened the back door of the saloon, and boots thumped on the board floor. With the sound came the roaring of fresh rainstorms from outside. Jeremy, the youngest of the three Bolt brothers, came in, wet as though he’d just swum up out of the sound. He’d been walking out, it seemed, with Miss Candy Pruitt. “Have you been out there?” he asked, shaking out his long wet hair. “It’s p—pouring oceans.”

  Jason grunted with distaste. “Josh? Let’s get going. In another hour the trails back to the cabin will be flooded out.”

  Joshua pocketed his monte winnings, and collected mackinaws from the pegs beside the door. The mill-hands and loggers had been thinning out for the last half hour or so—as the Bolt brothers left, the last customers to go, Captain Clancey was already helping Wu Sin to snuff the lamps.

  Lottie stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the brothers make their way up the sodden black street; two tall shadows with Jeremy’s short, sturdy one between them. The unpaved street was already several inches deep in water. The trails up to Eagle Head Point would be drowned.

  Her warning to Aaron would have to wait.

  Chapter 3

  THE CABIN ON EAGLE HEAD POINT was filled with warm lamplight and the murmur of rain falling in the dusk outside. Aaron Stemple, sitting with a ledger and a bundle of financial reports in the wing chair in the small bedroom, listened to the plashing of rain and the moan of the wind and wasn’t surprised that Lottie had not come up from town that day. Fresh storms were coming in, by the look of the sky that afternoon. It looked like a long siege.

  He sighed, and turned back to his figuring, the rustle of papers a dry whisper in the small room. The mill was showing good profit, and would show more with the town building up as it was. There’d be more still in January, when he took over Bridal Veil Mountain from Jason Bolt.

  Not that he didn’t expect Bolt to put up a struggle over it. Well, he thought, let him. I have the papers, signed and witnessed. Because he knew for a fact that at least one of those girls would be unspoken for come January. Stemple couldn’t imagine any man who would trade the joys of bachelorhood for matrimony with Biddy Cloom.

  Biddy was Stemple’s hole card. Five years older than the oldest of the other New Bedford girls and desperate for a man, Biddy had the coy predatoriness of one already treading the perilous line of old-maid-hood that would drive away even the slightest expression of masculine interest.

  It wasn’t that she was a bad girl, really, thought Stemple. Just plain as a mud fence, and screechy-voiced and featherbrained into the bargain. A good heart coupled with an appalling lack of tact. Stemple chuckled to himself at the joke Fate had sprung on Jason Bolt. It might, he thought, just might, be worth it to see Bolt marry Biddy out of desperation. He’ll cheat me out of the mountain, but at what cost to himself!

  Stemple glanced up from his books, suddenly aware that the alien was watching him.

  Their eyes met. The alien’s were black, somber, intelligent, with the incurious calm of extreme weakness. Human eyes.

  Stemple got to his feet, moving without haste, and came to the bedside. “You’re among friends,” he said quietly, knowing that the alien would not understand but knowing also that the sound of the voice alone can calm.

  But the alien asked, “How did I come here?”

  Stemple halted in his tracks. He did not know what he’d been expecting. But not that. Not English, and a deep, slightly rough-textured human voice. The host of implications of an English-speaking alien, with the ability somehow to have reached Earth from whatever planet he called home, crowded disturbingl
y to his mind. But he only replied, “I found you in the woods, eight days ago. You were unconscious, hurt badly. You’re in the town of Seattle. My name is Aaron Stemple.”

  The stranger’s gaze traveled slowly around the room, taking in the low, beamed ceiling; the fogged glass of the windowpanes with the dark tossing shapes of wet branches beyond; the clay-brick fireplace and faded oatmeal paper of the walls; the rag rug on the puncheon floor and the muted reds and blues of the quilt’s kaleidoscope pattern. Then back, weary beyond curiosity or wonder, to Stemple’s face. He said hesitantly, “Thank you.”

  “What happened?” asked Stemple. “How did you come to be hurt?”

  The alien started to answer, then stopped, slanted brows pulling together into a frown. “I—I do not—recall,” he said. “It is all—a silence.” He stared into space for a moment, his breath suddenly coming quicker. Pain, or the memory of pain, lurked at the back of those haunted black eyes. “I have tried to remember why—what happened—where I was. ...” He looked up at Stemple, fear and weariness and puzzlement clouding his face, making it more vulnerable and suddenly far more human. “I cannot. I do not even—remember—what I am called. I think ...” The pain returned to the eyes, exhausted and baffled. “I’m so tired,” he said quietly, and there was a break, like a hairline fracture, in the timbre of his voice.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Stemple encouragingly. “It’ll come back to you when you’re stronger.” But he was shaken to the core. He had been prepared for any knowledge, but had not counted on continued ignorance. “You’re safe here,” he continued. “Do you feel strong enough to sit?”

  The stranger nodded weakly and Stemple helped him to a sitting position, surprised again by the strength of the man’s grip. Then he heard the alien’s breath catch; followed his shocked gaze across the room to the mirror on the wall and the two faces, human and alien, reflected in the glass. He looked quickly back to the alien, and read shock in the dark eyes. “One of us,” said the alien slowly, “is—different. Who are you and who am I?”

  Stemple shook his head. “I’m very much afraid,” he said, “that it is you who are different. You are—obviously—not of my people, not even of this world. I believe you are from some other world entirely, one that we have no knowledge of. Not even human, as we reckon human. I’m sorry,” he added, watching the stricken horror on the man’s face. “I was hoping you could tell me, but it doesn’t matter.”

  The alien shook his head, numbly trying to gather what was left of mind and memories, to find something to hold to. “All of this”—his small gesture took in the room, the rain-light and trees beyond the window; his voice was hoarse with pain—“this is nothing that I remember—and now, nothing that I can be part of. It is all—emptiness, like a white hollow in my mind, as if I had never been. But if—if I am not even of this world—then there is nothing—nothing—” He paused, groping for the fragments of speech and thought that would let him go on accepting, not only isolation from his own world, his past, his self, but from his new world and his future as well. He sat for a long moment, lost in thought; then his hands began to shake, and a vast, sustained tremor took hold of him as he sank down, shuddering, his face buried in his hands. Stemple laid a compassionate hand on the quivering shoulders, but there was nothing that he could say to ease that terrible gulf of hurt. The stranger made no sound, but watching him, Stemple knew that Satan cast out of Heaven must have wept so.

  For the next three days torrential rains turned the paths down the mountain to floods, and isolated the little cabin on the point. It was a silent world but for the roaring of the water. Stemple found that his fears regarding the alien had reversed themselves, for he saw the man as human now, human and far more vulnerable than the weakest of his race. Far from being without a soul, he saw in him a soul that was broken, and though the alien was able to be up and about now, Stemple had in the back of his mind the fear that he would not live long.

  Something had broken in him. Whatever lifeline holds being to body had come loose, and the man was drifting. Stemple saw it in his eyes, haunted and frightened and puzzled; heard it in the enormous silence of the man’s hesitant presence; felt it in the shaken, flinching movements as he limped around the cabin. He would listen politely to Stemple’s endless coaching on the things of this world—what to do, what to say, what not to say—but there was no spark to him. Stemple felt he was only waiting his time to die.

  On the third day of this Stemple had had enough. He was explaining something—the United States Government or tipping one’s hat to ladies, it scarcely mattered which—the stranger listening and absorbing it all with the same quiet, commentless interest—when he glanced up, and saw the stranger’s eyes. Something stopped his words in mid-sentence.

  Exasperated, he snapped, “Talking to you is like talking to a wall. At least if I talked to a wall I’d get an echo.”

  “I am sorry,” said the alien quietly, folding scarred and wasted hands on the table between them. “I have nothing to say. What you tell me is unfamiliar, and I have no comment.”

  “Well, say anything, dammit!” rasped Stemple. “Ask a question, give me an opinion, anything!”

  The alien began to speak, stopped, fumbling for words. Then, “Aaron—what purpose is served by telling me all this?”

  Stemple was startled into momentary silence. Outside the light rain drummed on the cabin roof, puckered the reflections of the last evening light that grayed the sheeted water in the flooded door yard. “When you leave here,” he said at last, “you’ll have to make your way in this world. People are mostly ignorant and vicious, and fear the unknown. If you’re not going to be spotted as an alien, a misfit, and killed out of hand, you’ll have to know enough of the ground rules to get by.”

  The alien regarded him in silence for a moment. By the lamplight Stemple noticed uneasily that he’d lost flesh, that he looked drawn and wasted, worse instead of better. He asked, “What makes you think that I shall live long enough to put your advice into practice?”

  It was Stemple’s turn to fish for words, and find none. “What?”

  “Aaron—has it not occurred to you that my only logical course of action is to die?”

  “What?” He had known the alien ate next to nothing—it had not occurred to him before this that he might be deliberately starving himself. “What in hell does logic have to do with it?”

  “It is logical,” insisted the alien quietly. “I am less than nothing in this world. A stranger in a strange land, with every man’s hand turned against me. I am neither myself nor anything else. Death is my only alternative.”

  “The hell it is!” roared Aaron.

  The alien only regarded him with those sterile dark eyes, registering the display of emotion without feeling any in return. “I am sorry, Aaron,” he said, quite sincerely. “I appreciate your motives in giving me the choice, but—how much do you think I can learn? With no experience, I shall be identified very quickly, and, if your estimate of human conduct is correct, very likely killed in short order. As is logical, for if your civilization has no space-flight capability, my position here is an anomaly which it would be easier to eliminate than to let stand. And even were I not killed, what would it be worth to me to continue the masquerade? I will always be different. I will always be alone. What is life worth to me on those terms?”

  Stemple regarded him for a moment, seeing, and wishing he did not see, the sharp cant of the eyebrows, the strange ears half-concealed under the long black hair, the black eyes empty of everything save pain.

  Oddly enough, Stemple remembered a time when he himself had been trapped and alone. Ten years old, sewing in the blazing heat of a Boston sweatshop, with no place to stay but that single crowded room and nothing to eat but what they chose to give him for his labor. No money, no way to escape and nowhere to go if he did. The despair came back to him like the taste of the watery soup and the stink of stale sweat. No way out, and no one caring.

  “Life is li
fe,” he said quietly. “You’re alive and you hope.”

  “Hope?” The black gaze shifted from him to the mirror and back again, with calm irony.

  “Hope you can get away with it another day,” said Stemple wryly. “Hell, hope you may meet one of your own people here on this planet one day.”

  “I would not recognize them if I did,” pointed out the alien reasonably.

  “Maybe not. But they’d recognize you.”

  The alien considered this, expressionless. Stemple pushed his point. “You came here for a purpose,” he said, “you have to have. Whoever sent you, whyever they sent you, they wouldn’t have sent just one man. I don’t think you came alone and I don’t think your memory will be gone forever. And if you don’t remember—you will have a different life than you had before, that’s all.”

  Still the alien remained silent, and Stemple could feel him retreating, drawing back into that polite, wary shell. Suddenly weary of the whole business, Stemple got to his feet and made his way back to the lean-to kitchen, leaving his strange visitor to puzzle that one out for himself. He had said all he could say.

  Maybe too much, he reflected, digging around in the cupboard for bread and salt beef and cheese. Maybe death was his only way out, though it chilled him to hear the alien refer to it as a logical alternative. But that was like this man—precise, well-reasoned, intellectually considering even the most appalling of alternatives with that chill calm. He dumped a handful of coffee into the pot and set it on the back of the stove, cursing as the steam burned his fingers.

  Still—memory was a strange thing. He’d forgotten his own days without hope, until tonight. Well, not forgotten. He’d remembered being hungry, being cold, being scared—being scared all the time. From a vast distance he contemplated that skinny, hook-nosed little boy in his shabby, cut-down knee pants and man’s shirt, sleeves rolled up over bony wrists. He’d always remembered that. But not until tonight had he recalled how it had felt, to know that no one cared. If he had died then, of cold or hunger or whatever it is that children die of in the slums of Boston, no one would have cared. He remembered how it had felt to know that.