STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael Read online

  He was sorry he had lashed out at the alien.

  Quietly, he went back into the parlor. It was empty, as was the tiny bedroom. Listening in the silence for the familiar dragging limp, he realized that the rain had stopped.

  The alien was sitting outside on the stump in the dooryard, a slim dark figure in his borrowed shirt and jeans. The wind soughed in the dark pines, making a noise like the roaring of the sea, breaking the black cover of the clouds.

  The alien was looking at the stars.

  They spread in fierce glory behind the shadow of his head, the Milky Way unfurled like a banner of light, the Hunter of the Heavens coursing his jewel-eyed hound. Aaron paused in the doorway, awed by that great beauty; the alien heard his step, and turned his head.

  “It seems,” he said in his quiet voice, “that although I do not remember, I recognize things that I have seen before. This ...” The movement of his hand took in all the turning firmament. “I ... I know. I have seen it before, know the names and magnitudes and distances from one star to the other, and the navigation of the darkness between. I feel that I know things about the stars that I would remember at once, if only I could be reminded. But I know them.” In the star shadow his face was unreadable, but there was life, and a kind of mild amusement, in his voice. “If this much is possible, perhaps it is within the bounds of possibility that I can—pass for human.”

  Stemple had been going to say something else, but he smiled, though the cold wind bit into his shirtsleeved arms. “If that much is possible, maybe you can answer me a question.”

  The alien considered. “So far my success in that field has been limited. Yet unlikeliness of an answer places no stricture upon the asking of a question.”

  There was absolutely no jest in his tone, but Stemple detected some note in it that told him that the alien was not without humor. And that in turn implied both humanity and acceptance of life. “I think you can answer this,” he said. “How are you at accounting?”

  A quick, startled turn of the head, recognizing the offer, and touched by the welcome and all that it implied. In the starlight, one slanted eyebrow lifted.

  Chapter 4

  SPOCK’S VOICE CRACKLED, harsh and strained but perfectly level, into the silence of that small room.

  “White dwarf, Khlaru, Tillman’s Factor, Guardian.” There was a long pause. Then, as calmly as if the words had not been his death sentence, “Eighteen sixty seven.” Then again that riddling silence, broken only by the faint hiss of the recording machinery until Kirk touched the button that stilled even that.

  After a long pause McCoy said, “The Guardian.” He folded his hands around his glass of bourbon, stared down into its clear gold depths for a time, going back for a moment to memories that were largely a nightmare blur of madness. Kirk remained unmoving at the small console that contained both recorder and terminal to tap into the Starbase Twelve central computer. “He knew you’d understand.”

  From the depths of a very old-fashioned overstuffed armchair, Base Commander Kellogg asked, “What was the Guardian?”

  Kirk started to speak, then let his breath out unused. He sat silent for a time, wondering how he could best explain the Guardian that stands in the ruins of the City on the Edge of Forever.

  The official part of his report to Base Commander Kellogg was over. Kirk had detailed for the record his own minor infringement of the Organian Peace Treaty, the disappearance of the Klingon ore transport and with it that of his science officer, now listed MIA. The recording machines were off now, and Kellogg had returned with him to the visiting officers’ quarters for the unofficial part of the interview, for bourbon and supposition and thought.

  Like the rest of the visitors’ quarters of the base, this sitting room between Kirk’s room and McCoy’s was essentially Karsid in appearance, part of the far older hive of tunnels that base funds had been too limited to refurbish. It was a sort of bubble in the rock of the planetoid itself, slightly larger than humans would consider comfortable, with a little round fireplace set halfway up one wall. The massive table beside the fireplace was Karsid, too, of the last decadent period, fluid and overly serpentine-looking, especially in contrast to the rest of the furnishings, which were of a style Lieutenant Uhura generally referred to as Star Fleet Ugly. The small terminal/video unit and the overstuffed armchair in which Kellogg now sat had the appearance of lost travelers from separate galaxies who had wandered in by mistake.

  “The incident of the Guardian,” said Kirk finally, “dealt with the retroactive alteration of history. The Guardian itself is a gateway—a gateway to Time.”[1]

  He kept his voice neutral as he spoke of the events leading to the death of a woman whose voice he still occasionally heard in dreams. McCoy’s gaze flickered sharply to him, then away.

  “That section of the Enterprise Log is classified, for obvious reasons. Spock, McCoy and I are the only ones who know the full story.”

  “Could the Klingons have found out?” asked Kellogg worriedly, folding her long fingers like a pile of ivory spindles on her bony knee. “Could they have discovered it for themselves, for instance?”

  “They could have,” said Kirk. “But it’s a great distance from here. They’d have to pass through huge tracts of Federation space to reach it, or else travel sectors out of their way. And the Federation does keep an eye on the planet. Always supposing they knew where and what it was, I don’t think they’d be able to get down to the surface.”

  “If they had some kind of new weapon they might not have been worried about the Federation guards.”

  “Might they have been on their way there,” asked McCoy somberly, “and they entered the Tau Eridani Cloud simply as an evasive maneuver, to lose us? For that matter, they could have been destroyed in the cloud itself. With the gravitational effects of the white dwarf star it must be twice as difficult to navigate—they could have been blown to ions.”

  “They could have.” Kellogg leaned back in her armchair and slung a casual knee over its arm. The dim colors of the lamplight and fire gleamed on the gold of her tunic. “I’ll bet you Metebelis crystals to little green apples that they didn’t, though. The Klingon imperial representative on this base never reported that transport missing, in spite of the fact that the Rapache passed within hailing distance on its way back to its home turf.”

  Kirk’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, really?”

  A wry smile flicked at the corner of her lips. “The imp rep here might not like dealing with a woman BC, but he follows the regs like they were his hope of Heaven. It’s standing orders that any ship, even drones, that disappears anywhere near that cloud gets reported. That thing ...” She gestured, a casual motion of the hand to indicate the unplumbed hole in the cosmos at the heart of the Tau Eridani Cloud. “... seems to be variable. Nobody’s ever really figured out what it is—not even the Karsids, and it was smack in the middle of their space. I think they put this base here for the same reason we did—to keep an eye on it. It—changes. It does funny things sometimes. And it’s a damn sight too close for comfort. So anything strange that goes on in or near the cloud has got to be reported, to the Science Section and to me, personally. And the imp rep hasn’t said dicky bird.” She shrugged, and reached for her bourbon glass again. “So your friends might still be headed for the planet of the Guardian.”

  “They might.” Kirk stared for a long time at the reflection of the firelight in the liquor, as though, like a seer, he could call images in it of things far away. “But on the other hand, Spock had only a second or two to work with, and he was picking his words very carefully. He knew the transmission might be intercepted. He might have been speaking metaphorically—that the Klingons’ goal was not to tamper with the Guardian per se, but to accomplish the same thing in another fashion—the retroactive readjustment of history.”

  There was silence, broken by Kellogg’s uncomfortable murmur, “They can’t really do that, can they?”

  “I damn near managed it,” retorted McCoy
bitterly.

  “They can,” said Kirk, his voice almost inaudible, as if he spoke to himself. “Believe me, they can. But if they’re in the past now, it means they already have.”

  “There is no past now,” pointed out Kellogg. “And anyway, what would they change? And where and when? Even if they could create a time warp.”

  “That’s just it,” said Kirk, glancing up at them in the restive flickering of the shadows. “Time warps can be created—generally accidentally, but I’ve heard rumors of civilizations that deal in them as a matter of course. What made the incident of the Guardian so nearly disastrous was that we were operating at random. We had no idea what would be changed, what kinds of ripples of events we would set up. If that could be predicted ...”

  “Could it?” McCoy demanded.

  Kirk and Kellogg exchanged a glance. “If you had a big enough computer,” Kellogg said finally, “you could narrow it down pretty close.”

  There was another uneasy pause. McCoy rose from his chair with a kind of explosive restlessness. “Great. Just great, Jim. They’ve narrowed it down pretty close, but the rest of us are left with an eternity of time and every possible point in the galaxy to choose from.”

  “Not every possible point,” Kellogg corrected him, and glanced over at Kirk again. “What’s Tillman’s Factor?”

  “According to the mathematicians in the Science Section, it’s a mathematical constant dealing with acceleration past light-speed. I suspect there’s some relationship between that and the white dwarf star that the Klingons might have used to create a temporary time slip.”

  “And the numbers?” asked Kellogg. “Could they be a triangulation?”

  Kirk shook his head. “We thought of that. Navigationally they’re meaningless, either as eighteen, sixty and seven, or as eighteen and sixty-seven.”

  “Time, then? Though that would have been 19:07,” she answered herself. The way she said it, nineteen-oh-seven, triggered something in Kirk’s memory.

  “Time in another sense, maybe?” he said. “An Earthdate?”

  “No,” she said disbelievingly.

  “Old Reckoning,” said Kirk. “Without the B.C. or A.D. or O.R. We’re so used to thinking in Stardates and Standard—but it could be an O.R. Earthdate.”

  “Yeah, but even in O.R. they’d still use B.C. or A.D.,” protested Kellogg.

  “Not necessarily,” said McCoy suddenly. “Edith ...” His voice barely paused over the name of the woman whose life Kirk had prevented him from saving. “Edith Keeler didn’t.”

  “No,” said Kirk softly. “I remember her saying, ‘Nineteen-thirty,’ not ‘A.D. nineteen-thirty.’ And besides,” he added, “Spock had to keep it short.”

  “It would tie in,” said McCoy. “What’s Khlaru?”

  “I fed that into the Enterprise computer,” said Kirk. “There were several possible spellings and pronunciations, though I tried to stay as close to Spock’s inflection as I could on vocal. Khlaru is a place, a province on Klinzhai itself.”

  McCoy’s eyebrows went up. “Klinzhai?” he said. “That’s going to be tough if we’re going to try to second-guess them, Jim. My Klingon history is about nil.”

  Kirk nodded glumly. “So’s mine, I’m afraid. All I know is that they were taken over by the Karsids about six hundred years ago, and went from a feudal society to a space-flight one—albeit as mercenaries of the Karsid Empire—without any interim development. In a way they’re a sort of object lesson in the noninterference directive. It was their rebellions that hastened the downfall of the Karsids. Their own empire is founded directly on Karsid technology and Karsid ruling systems. They simply stepped into the power vacuum when the Karsid Empire crumbled. But about individual events of Klingon history, particularly before the takeover, I’m afraid I’m as ignorant as you are, Bones.”

  “And I thought you majored in history,” McCoy grumbled.

  “I did.” Kirk’s grin was rueful. “But space flight put the oar into generalized history of any kind. Commander?”

  Kellogg’s eyebrows shot upwards. “Don’t look at me, Jamie, I’m only an engineer. But I’ll tell you one thing—Khlaru isn’t just a place on Klinzhai.”

  She rolled to her feet, and set her glass down on the dark, shining surface of the room’s big table. “About ten years ago they dug a cache of old Karsid records out of the rock here, the only ones they’ve found outside the Klingon Empire. There’s been a couple of research teams going through them for years. One of them’s funded through the Vulcan Academy of Archives—the other one’s Klingon. The head of the Klingon team is a man named Khlaru.”

  “An interesting supposition.” Trae of Vulcanis tented his thin fingers and regarded Kirk, McCoy and Kellogg over them with wise, ancient black eyes. He was old, even for a Vulcan, his hair turned snow white and his faced seamed with marks of an age more awesome, in its experience and intelligence, than any human can survive to achieve. He was well into his third century and, if he did not choose to die before that time, looked good to make it into his fourth.

  The sense about him of the limitless piling of ages, of wisdom garnered and unforgotten, melded the old man with his rooms, making him one with them as a dragon is one with his hoard. Beyond the small cleared space that surrounded the semicircle of padded couch, the place was an archive, piled high with boxes of microfilm runouts, crates of discs and tapes, photocopies of original records curled together like ancient scrolls and pages of jotted notes scattered like leaves after autumn winds. There were books there, too, massive and leather-bound, and Kirk’s whole bibliophile soul so yearned to touch that he had to put his hands behind his back. In the midst of it all rose two computer terminals, like islands in the shifting seas of time. They hummed and blinked at one another as if conversing in their operator’s temporary absence.

  Kirk turned away from surveying this enchanted sanctum at the sound of Kellogg’s voice. She asked, “Is it scientifically feasible?”

  “A time warp?” The Vulcan considered, with the relaxed immobility that humans never attain—no shrug, no gesture, no motion whatsoever, still and quiet as air. “I am not a scientist, Commander. But as a historian I have come to believe that any scientific achievement is not only feasible, but at some time, on some planet, has been commonplace.

  “Nevertheless,” he went on, regarding them from those old, wrinkled eyes, “this—retroactive readjustment of history. Writers of speculative fiction revel in it. Scientists, theoretical physicists, examine the mechanical constructs and fear dreadful consequences. But how much could one do, by simple means? Contemporaries dabble in it all the time, optimistically attempting to change the course of history, but what does it bring them? To use the paradigm of your own planet, Commander Kellogg, the death of Julius Caesar did not prevent the imperialization of an already politically moribund Roman Republic.”

  “You may be right,” agreed Kirk, turning from the stacks of books to face the three who stood between couches and computer terminals, restless in the shadows like some black-and-gold, scholarly tiger. “But the incident of the Guardian proved that change can be affected, at certain times and under certain conditions. It doesn’t have to be a big change. It could—in fact it would almost have to be—a very small one, analogous to the rerouting of a single synapse in brain tissue.”

  “Which,” added McCoy quietly, “they’ll be able to do in a very few years.”

  “The fact that the Klingons are attempting it at all—have taken as much trouble as it appears they have—indicates to me that they are working to gain some specific end by a specific act.” He came back to stand before the Vulcan, the faintly blinking lights of the larger of the two terminals alternating in red and green patterns over them like a water reflection. “What was your colleague Khlaru working on?”

  “Nothing so melodramatic as you seem to believe,” replied Trae steadily. “Like myself, Khin Khlaru was engaged in the cataloging of Karsid records for this sector covering the last fifty years of the Kar
sid Empire’s occupancy of this asteroid. Copies of official correspondence, technical readouts from the base, reports regarding the shifts within the Tau Eridani Cloud, shipping cost indexes. That is the true stuff of history, Captain, and the reason that history is more difficult to rewrite than it seems. The information is only valuable to those with an interest in the final days of the empire’s hegemony, and in the effect of the first Orion revolts upon outpost stations. There is nothing in it that would save the galaxy, or alter the course of the empire’s inevitable decay.”

  His deep voice was still expressionless, but Kirk thought he saw a faint flicker of something at the back of those dark eyes. “Moreover, my colleague Khin Khlaru is, like myself, first and foremost a historian, and a man of honor and intelligence. As a military man, Captain Kirk, you have become accustomed to regarding all Klingons as unquestioning servants of their emperor. I assure you that in Khlaru’s case this is an error on your part.”

  He folded his narrow hands upon the sable of his sleeves. “To tamper at all with time is almost unfeasible because of the veritable mountain of random factors involved, factors which could be neither foreseen nor controlled. If the tampering were done in a pre-space-flight society, anything that far away from us in time would be subject to a Doppler effect of cumulative events. In a space-flight contact society the exponential progression of the ripple effect would be totally unmanageable. Khlaru is not a fool, Captain, nor is he any man’s puppet. I sincerely doubt that even were such a project afoot within the Klingon Intelligence and Security circles he would have anything to do with an act so appallingly irresponsible.”

  “Very well,” Kirk said quietly after a moment. “Could Spock have been referring to the old realm of Khlaru? Could 1867 be a pre-Karsid Klingon date?”