Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  "Sissy."

  Cooper grinned. His hair had been lightened to a nondescript sandy brown to match the mustache, and in the red shirt and black trousers of a security officer he would, Kirk reflected, pass pretty much unnoticed.

  Unless you looked closely. As a student of history, Kirk had always been fascinated by old portraits, and more than once had been struck by the difference in the faces from era to era. Seventeenth-century faces were different from nineteenth, which differed in turn from twentieth—none of them had quite the cast, the expression, of twenty-third. The differences were subtle but real: one barely noticed them except in contrast, when some strange ringer somehow got through. Out of dozens of Bellocq's photographs of nineteenth-century New Orleans prostitutes, one girl had a twentieth-century face; among pictures of twentieth-century rock musicians, there was one who looked like he should have been born in 1640 instead of 1940.

  Dylan Arios and Phil Cooper did not have twenty-third-century faces.

  Or maybe it was the wariness grained like dirt into a dilithium pocket miner's skin, the air of always looking over one's shoulder, that touched him with anger at the Consilium, that made him have to fight against despair. That made him willing to take this risk to help their cause.

  A future when everyone had eyes like that.

  "It may not be necessary," said McCoy.

  Kirk, Cooper, and Arios all regarded him in somewhat blank surprise.

  "I've been charting the regrowth of your wiring, and Sharnas's." The doctor returned the forceps to their drawer, passed his hands across the cleansing screen, and gestured to the latest internal photographs where they lay on the counter. "Nurse Chapel brought this to my attention about half an hour ago: in four days there's been virtually no regrowth of the wire. You said yourself the regrowth time 'depends.' My theory is that it depends on the presence of trace elements—iron, calcium salts, and minerals in the bloodstream—that the microprocessors in the wire itself use to rebuild. Now, it so happens that rhodon-gas poisoning—which all of you underwent when your coolant system blew—has the effect of stripping these trace elements out of the blood."

  Arios sat up slowly on the table; Cooper put up a hand, almost subconsciously defensive, to cover the back of his neck.

  "You mean if I take a big whiff of rhodon gas before I go across to that ship I'll be fine?"

  "I mean if I give you a big shot of vitamin D-seven," said McCoy, holding up the silver tube of an injector, "the elements will remain in your blood, but they won't bond with the wire. You'll experience fatigue and you may get a little short of breath until your body readjusts, but it's better than the shock of having the wiring burned off the nerves."

  "Is there any way to delay going over?" Chapel handed Arios the red shirt of a security officer and looked anxiously at Cooper. In the past four days she had grown very fond of all of them.

  "McKennon would suspect something was up," said Kirk. "She thinks I have these men under lock and key." He glanced at the chronometer, something he'd been doing for the past fifteen minutes, the adrenaline rising in his veins. "I can't give her any reason to think I don't. We've got thirty minutes, and we need at least one person besides Arios who knows the layout of a Federation/Consilium jumpship."

  McCoy grunted. "Sharnas is too young and God knows how we'd disrupt Thad's wiring, and McKennon will know there are no Klingons and damn few Orions in Starfleet."

  "Right now, anyway," said Arios reflectively. His eyes, too, had been dyed dark. With his sharp features he had the appearance of an oddly half-caste Indian. "The first Klingon officer in Starfleet serves on this ship, you know… Not this Enterprise, but the Enterprise-D. After that there were a lot of them."

  Kirk felt again that oddness that had come over him at Adajia's Oh…That. The knowledge that he was dealing with people who knew his future as past.

  "They made—make—damn good officers, too. The Empire and the Federation—and the Romulan systems as well—were in a state of almost complete detente when the plague came along, though I can't tell you how it came about—we still don't know. If they hadn't been, I suppose the Romulans would have been completely wiped out. Their culture pretty much was."

  He glanced over at Chapel, asked, "If Phil's going to get the D-seven and beam straight over to the Savasci with us, maybe he should have a hit of tri-ox and some adrenalase?"

  Chapel glanced at McCoy, who nodded. As the door swished shut behind her, the Master turned back to Kirk. "The plague attacked the central nervous system, distorting mostly the sensory nerves, especially the interface between instinctive and cognitive centers of the brain. In most of its victims it produced violent rages, paranoia, random slaughter…hideous scenes. The endorphins from blind rage were one of the few things that lessened the pain. There was a wave of wars, because so many of the leaders—not to mention the troops in the field—were affected without anyone knowing. When the Consilium—only they weren't called that, then—finally got a med team down to Romulus, there was damn little left but smoking ruins. Ships can still pick up Remus on radiation detectors on the other side of the quadrant. That was…the damn thing about the Consilium."

  Arios stepped aside, watched with interest as McCoy put the injector to Phil's arm and fired it with a soft phut!

  "How is that stuff produced?" he asked, and, when McCoy raised his brows, added, "You've got to remember that for a hundred years now the Consiliar Institute is the only place where they teach medicine."

  McCoy's mouth twisted in a wry grimace; he went to the terminal on the end of the bench, tapped in a sequence of commands. The printer hummed faintly, as if giving the matter thought, then extruded a sheet of pale green flimsiplast. "Simplest thing in the world."

  "It better be," remarked Arios, "since we're going to be cooking it up in the galley. But you see, without the technology that made wiring cheap enough to be available on a wide scale—without nanocellular interfacing, and implants to the psionic centers of the brain—they'd never have been able to broadcast the low-level psionic alpha waves that kept people from going over the edge and killing everyone they saw. It was like a…a blanket of dust on a fire. Like turning down the volume on the pain that was driving everyone mad."

  "But the price of healing," said Kirk softly, "was that everyone had to be wired."

  "For a generation, yes," Arios said. "Afterward it wasn't as necessary—after the plague and all its little side viruses had been vaccinated against, and the thing mutated every couple of years for decades—but it was real common. By that time whole populations were showing major genetic damage. Half the population were Secondaries anyway, long before the Consilium started snipping people's DNA to get them that way. The wars left radiation everywhere, and there was incredible havoc from the side effects of early tries at medication. The Consilium were the only ones to have the facilities intact for cloning from the healthy genetic material that was left. Thad's one of about two thousand 'lines' on Earth. Every now and then new genetic mutations still surface, some of them pretty scary. Phil's not a clone," he added with a grin. "Makes it hard for him to buy shoes."

  "You want to navigate your way back through the Crossroad with an astrolabe, or what?" retorted Phil. He had turned a pasty gray color and seated himself, rather quickly, on the operating table.

  "Speaking of gene splicing," added Arios, "watch out for the Security Specials once we get to the Savasci. Lao and I will be able to shut down the doors and the gravity for a short time on the ship—long enough, I hope, to get the Yoons out of their prison and into the big cargo shuttle while Mr. Scott foxes the engines—but you'll probably have to hold them off us, at the end. Where is Lao, anyway?"

  As he spoke, the door hissed open and Christine Chapel entered, carrying a tray with the injectors required. McCoy gave Cooper the tri-ox at once, and the Nautilus's astrogator regained a little of his coloring. Mr. Spock, who had entered on Chapel's heels, said, "I have prepared launch and autopilot instructions, per Mr. Cooper's information
, for the Savasci's cargo shuttle; Rakshanes and I have also programmed a slicer program which should work on the Savasci's computer, provided it is not a generation newer than two months before the Nautilus entered the Crossroad. However, Ensign Lao has not reported for briefing as instructed."

  "I saw him an hour or so ago," said Chapel, handing the adrenalase to McCoy and turning, puzzled. "He said he was going to his quarters to try to sleep."

  Kirk wondered about that for a moment, then realized with a start that at 0900 this morning—less than twelve hours ago—they had gone down to the steaming hell-pit of Tau Lyra III, and seen all that remained of the civilization of the Yoons.

  No wonder Lao was exhausted. He wouldn't even know, Kirk realized, that some of the Yoons had survived. That there was a chance, now, to help the rebels win.

  "He did not respond to a signal," Spock was saying.

  "Try him there again," said Kirk. "He may be deep asleep."

  "He didn't look well," added Chapel.

  "Brief him on the mission; have him meet me in Transporter Room Two at twenty-fifty." Kirk glanced at the chronometer. Twenty-thirty-six. Where the hell had the time gone? "Tell him he'll be able to sleep after that."

  So will we all, he thought, and strode out of sick bay and around the corridor to the turbolift.

  In twenty minutes, he thought, he'd beam across to the Savasci, to deal with the red-haired woman who had spoken so convincingly of the good the Consilium had done.

  To see exactly what kind of people would—at least for a time—be his heirs.

  To do what he could to remedy a situation almost three hundred years in the future, about whose ramifications he knew next to nothing.

  As he donned his formal tunic, took from their boxes the small ribbons denoting the medals he'd won, he felt a queer disappointment, like a child realizing that the pirate's treasure he has achieved is only rocks after all. Whatever could be done in the meantime, the Federation was still in for some dark years.

  The bright slips of color were memories: ten wounded men beamed up to the Republic, all alive; a Klingon ship exploding in a glare of white and yellow over the distant pink-amber surface of Thalia III. Another Klingon ship departing into the darkness of stars, its mission unfulfilled.

  The smell of burned insulation and blood in the intermittent glare of the Van der Vekken's scorched-out bridge. The Kargite president shaking his hand.

  Edith Keeler stepping off a curb…

  Pieces of ribbon.

  He closed his eyes.

  And this—this impossible, crazy mission on the Savasci…

  The door chime chirped. At his button touch, Dylan Arios stood in the doorway, almost unrecognizable with his dark skin and dark eyes, the crimson security tunic slightly too big on his narrow shoulders. No green showed at the roots of those eyebrows, and even the lashes were dyed dark. He said, "Before the fireworks start, I want to say thank you. Thank you for believing us. There's no reason for you to, you know."

  Kirk sighed, and settled the green satin of his tunic on his body. "Somebody lied about those missiles. It wasn't you."

  "No," agreed the Master. "But I don't know a whole lot of Fleet captains who'd check after seeing evidence like McKennon handed you. Especially not after being wrapped up in engine tape and shoved in a closet."

  Kirk smiled. "I'll have to rewrite my recommendations for improvements in ship's design and training," he said. "In handwriting on paper, to keep Raksha from pulling it out of the computer when nobody's looking." He glanced over at the ribbons on the bureau. "Not that I'm a hundred percent sure it'll do any good."

  The dyed eyes flicked to him, then to the ribbons, as yet unmounted on his shirt. Quietly, he said, "I did my best not to tell you."

  "Was that for my benefit, or to keep us in the dark about your capabilities?"

  Arios grinned. "Well, both," he said. "You might have been a Starfleet setup. It's been done before."

  He frowned, leaning his narrow shoulders against the doorjamb. "Is there a reason you're planning to put the Yoons on the Savasci's cargo shuttle to transport them over to the Nautilus, instead of trying to get them down to the Savasci's transporter? We can run a scramble on the Nautilus's transporter entry code to keep the Savasci computers from reading it."

  "The Yoons aren't going on the Nautilus after they're rescued—if we manage to rescue them." Kirk's voice was very quiet. "Spock has an autopilot program with the coordinates of that small planetary system—the one Mr. Scott calls Brigadoon—inside the Crossroad Nebula. From what you've told us about the continued isolation of the nebula in your own time, they should be safe there—from the Consilium, from the plague, from Starfleet—until you contact them, two hundred and eighty years from now, in your own time. By then they should have a fair little colony going."

  "Ah." Arios considered the tips of his boots for a time in silence. "Is that because of the danger of us getting blasted before we reach the singularity point, or because you still don't trust us?"

  "I trust you," said Kirk. "We'll give you the coordinates of Brigadoon, before we wipe them out of the computer so there'll be no way McKennon can get her hands on them, if she happens to get access to our mission log. I just want the Yoons to be able to make up their own minds."

  Arios was silent for a few moments. Then he reached out a finger to touch the bright scraps of ribbon in their box. "That's what the Federation is really about, isn't it?" he said, suddenly shy. Without looking up, he went on, "At one time I dreamed about winning some of these. I can name every one you hold—and the ones you'll still win. You were the reason I went into Starfleet, you know."

  Kirk stared at him. It was disconcerting to hear it, from a man not more than seven years younger than himself. From a man who'd managed to tie knots in his ship and had almost gotten away with it. For a moment he felt as if he were looking at himself as he would be in some unimaginable old age.

  "I was conceived and gene spliced and more or less raised under the aegis of the Consilium," said Arios, "but it was reading about you—reading about this era of spaceflight, of the Federation—that made me fight to go into officer training, instead of just consenting to be linked into the mind of a yagghorth and being useful, the way they wanted me to be. You're…a kind of hero, to those who know their history," he went on. "Like Cook, or Patton, or Lee. I'd read about you—about the voyages of the Enterprise, and of the other starships—and I'd think, That's what I want. That's what I want to be, and do."

  He grinned, with his old wry sweetness. "Of course, the minute I got into Fleet training I realized that being that kind of hero isn't possible anymore. That going out and finding new life, and new civilization—bringing them into the Federation, bringing the Federation into contact with them—doesn't happen anymore. Or if it does, they're probably pretty sorry. I can't even tell you…" He shook his head. "I can't even tell you what some of those instances were, because they might not have happened yet, but…You were an inspiration. And reading about you, and the way things were then—are now—made me look around at the Fleet in my own time and go, Wait a minute. What's wrong with this picture? I'm sorry if that sounds corny," he added. "It isn't meant to."

  "No." Kirk remembered his own heroes, his own idols, Gordon and Ise and Reluki, whose footsteps he had followed as best he himself could. "No, sometimes we need to follow a line of footprints."

  "I just wanted to tell you," said Arios. "You're known. You're remembered. Not just by me, but your name is known to a lot of the Shadow Fleet. The rebellion started in Starfleet, you know. It's still a place where idealists go, looking for the stars."

  "So if you'd taken Raksha's advice and killed the lifesupport when you could," said Kirk quietly, "you wouldn't be the person you are."

  He grinned, a little shyly, and said, "You heard about that?"

  "Spock told me," said Kirk.

  "It isn't that simple," said Arios. "It's never that simple.

  The person on your ship saved civilizat
ion, saved uncounted billions of lives, by doing the research that founded Starfield. It wasn't Starfield's fault that it got taken over by its founder's unscrupulous and greedy heirs. That it got merged with others who wanted to control, to rule—and those others were the only ones, at that time, who had the resources to do the good that Starfield couldn't afford to do by itself. Maybe there are cases in which you can kill one person, or tell them, Hey, don't do that, and change time for the better, but this isn't one of them. There's too much time involved, and too many factors. Too much good along with the evil. That's why I won't tell you who it is."

  Kirk nodded. "Because he isn't now who he's going to be," he said softly. "And any change would turn him into a different person from the man who—who saved all those billions of lives." He folded his arms, regarded the thin, unprepossessing figure before him, rather small in the red shirt of a security officer with a phaser at his belt. "Like yourself."

  "Maybe," said Arios, with his shy grin. "If I live. And things may turn out differently anyway.

  "You're my past, Captain, but I am not necessarily your future. There are a thousand possible futures, my people—the Rembegils—used to say, and one degree of alteration in a trajectory can change a starship's path by thousands of miles, and destroy, or save, a world." He shrugged. "But mine is the only universe I'll ever know about. All I can do is try."

  Kirk smiled, and picked up the ribbons to pin to his tunic. "So let's go try."

  "Idiots," said Dr. McCoy, watching Phil Cooper—mustachioed, blond-streaked, and buoyant with adrenalase—disappear through the doorway en route for the transporter room. "Every single one of them. Nurse Chapel, I know you're off shift now, but…"

  She shook her head, smiled. "Oh, come on, Doctor, you can't expect me to go to bed now."

  He grinned back, crookedly. "The captain seems to think it'll all go off like clockwork, but we'd better have adrenalase, anticane, and the usual emergency kits on hand. Can I ask you to do that while I get things in train to have a supply of D-seven beamed across to that cargo shuttle along with the things we brought up from the planet? Damn, I wish we'd had time to even have a look at them."