Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  "The Domina has spoken to you already of methods by which your people can be caused to forget things which happened. These methods are also known to us, to the Yoons, to the savants who have studied the healing of the mind. I think that it would be best for all, if I and my friends came to your ship and removed these things from the minds of your crew—indeed, removed everything which happened from the moment that the Nautilus appeared on your long-range scanners. I understand that Mr. Spock will be able to perform a similar service for your ship's computers and logs."

  Kirk was silent for some time, looking down into those round, amber-colored eyes. Thinking about the future—about the possibilities for the future. About the good the Consilium did, before it turned to evil; about the world that would be saved, and the gamble he had taken in the hopes that the scruffy little band of rebels could save it again.

  About why a man turned left instead of right, why a woman said yes instead of no, why one particular child might laugh at danger instead of running away in fear. Once you started tampering, he thought, it would all change, and who knew the results?

  "Captain…"

  He looked up quickly, into the dark, brooding eyes of the Romulan Varos.

  "I give you my word," Varos said, his deep voice halting, as if he found words difficult, "that these Yoons, these savants, will be the only ones who cross to your ship; the only ones who touch the minds of your crew. I promise you, I will see to that."

  Varos held out his hand, and the seared black gaze met Kirk's, hatred settling out of the initial pain into long and waiting cold. And hatred, Kirk realized with a start, not aimed toward him at all.

  "Captain, farewell," he said quietly. "To have met you was…an honor. And an enlightenment."

  He departed, to prepare for the beaming-across of Kirk and his party, with the last of the Sages of Tau Lyra, the old Yoon, shambling in his wake.

  Kirk felt a strange sense of loss at the realization that he could have known this man better, had there been time or better circumstance. And now he would remember not even what he had known.

  On the viewscreen, the yellow star of Dylan Arios's ship lost itself in the vast field of eternity, swallowed up by the glow of the Crossroad.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "MR. SPOCK'S HERE to see you, Chris."

  Chapel moved her head a little, so that she could see the chronometer, and her breath escaped her in a little sigh. It was twenty-one hundred hours thirty. It was foolish—and selfish beyond words—to feel hurt that he hadn't come earlier, for she knew that something very strange had taken place on the ship which could not be accounted for, even as she had no clear recollection of what had happened to her, though she knew in her bones that she had nearly died.

  But she did feel hurt.

  "Thanks, Diana, yes. Ask him in."

  Somewhere, buried under a tangle of drugs and pain, lay a dim impression that she'd wanted to talk to Ensign Lao about something important, but about what, she couldn't recall. Uhura had told her that Lao was in sickbay, too, suffering the effects of a severe phaser hit—source unknown—and what appeared to be the aftermath of sleep-deprivation and stress.

  She thought there might have been a phaser-line blowout but couldn't imagine why she and Lao had been the only ones nearby when it happened.

  "Nurse Chapel."

  He stood in the doorway, the brighter light of the corridor outlining sloped, slightly stooping shoulders in blue, glistening on smooth black hair. Hands behind back, head tilted just slightly to the side in a characteristic pose. She remembered the first time she'd seen him, standing beside Mr. Kyle at the console of the transporter room when she'd beamed aboard—remembered Captain Kirk introducing them. She remembered the first time she'd heard his voice.

  She'd been too preoccupied with Roger—with her hunt for the man she had loved—to give him much thought. That hadn't come until later.

  "I am glad to hear from Dr. McCoy that you are recovering."

  Chapel nodded, and moved to hold out her hand to him, but she felt too weak to make much of a gesture. In any case, a true Vulcan, Spock tended to avoid physical contact.

  "I don't…remember clearly what happened." She was surprised at how strong her own voice sounded. She suspected she looked appalling, haggard and gray and thin, her face printed with the spoor of dreams she could not now recall, but if she did he made no comment. There was only calm interest in his dark eyes, reserved and neutral and very slightly abstracted, as if his mind were on some other problem.

  Natural, of course, for the science officer.

  He was silent for some time before replying. "Of everyone on the ship, it is not expected that you would."

  "Everyone…?"

  "There seems to have been a…a most curious and widespread… disorientation. Whether this is the result of the phaser burn-through, or of some unknown type of radiation given off by the star Tau Lyra when it went into flare-up…"

  "Tau Lyra?" The name snagged in her mind, a shock and a small, cold stab of grief. Surely she had dreamed something…?

  Spock regarded her with sharpened interest. "The star Tau Lyra entered a brief phase of core instability some time in the past five days," he said. "We are now in orbit around its third planet, taking up what artifacts we can find of the civilization there."

  He frowned, as if something worried him, and Chapel felt swept by inconsolable sorrow. There was no need to ask what had become of any civilization whose primary had "entered a brief phase of core instability."

  "I dreamed…" she began. But the dreams were gone. Only the image of a broken, froglike doll floated to the surface of her mind, then sank at once into darkness, never to be retrieved again.

  "There have been some…most curious effects," Mr. Spock went on. "All ship's logs have been excised for a period of five standard days, during which approximately half of the crew is able to recall events—the commonplaces of routine duties. Unfortunately, when compared, none of their stories agree—both the Engineering and the Security bowling teams, for instance, have clear memories of winning the final tournament match. And Dr. Maynooth and several of the physics technicians report the 'impression' that one of our probes in the Crossroad Nebula reported a small planetary system there, for which neither data nor probe coordinates can be found."

  He remained for five or ten more minutes, conversing mostly on the subject of what might have happened during the so-called Time-Out, and his efforts to put together a theory of what had taken place during the missing days. Chapel offered a few suggestions about brain-chemistry testing and magnetic analysis of the rec-room game chips for possible clues, and the self-consciousness that had sometimes existed between them melted away; they had, as she was drawn into it, one of the better conversations of their awkward friendship.

  Only as Spock was preparing to leave for a meeting with Kirk on the subject did Chapel say, "I know my logical abilities aren't anything next to yours, Mr. Spock, but if I should come up with anything that sounds like an idea I'll let you know."

  Spock regarded her in surprise. "The ideas you have already given are as good as any presented at Science Department briefings," he said. "Indeed, I have never considered you as anything less than brilliant—certainly your work as Roger Corby's student, at least the work with which I am familiar, bears this out."

  "You read my work with…with Roger?" She wondered why it had never occurred to her that he might.

  "Of course." Spock tilted his head. "In my opinion," he added slowly, as if reminding himself that Roger Corby might still be a sensitive subject with her, "within a few years you would have surpassed him, had you continued your studies rather than abandoning them to seek him."

  She started to say, I had to …but could not finish. I loved him.

  But when she had finally found him, or the android he had built to house his mind and personality, he had built for himself an android geisha, petite, submissive, gorgeous, and, as Uhura put it, dumb as gravel. Which sort of indicate
d, thought Chapel wearily, what he was looking for in a woman.

  She closed her eyes, and drifted into sleep.

  A little to her own surprise, she found herself in the observation lounge on Deck Ten. She was in her civilian togs, sweatshirt and tights, which meant it must be very late at night—she frequently wore them to do research, when she couldn't sleep.

  Over this past year, there had been many nights when sleep did not come easy.

  It had to be late, she thought. The ship's lighting was dimmed to night-watch power, a soft twilight gentle to the circadian rhythms of men and women forced to live for months at a time in an artificial environment, and conducive to late-night thought. With the lights dimmed in this fashion, the starfield on the other side of the crystalplex walls of the lounge seemed to fill the room, to fill eternity: burning diamonds sunk in the chasms of the sea, velvet and fire.

  For some reason, she was with a Vulcan boy.

  In the detached peace of her dream—for she knew that she was dreaming—she wondered if this were Spock as a youth, but even as she wondered she knew it simply wasn't Spock.

  He wore a robe of gray toweling, Starfleet issue, knee-length and ugly, and he wore it like a knight's cloak, a king's robe. His black hair was tied back in a tail, as thick as her forearm and nearly as long, down to the center of his back. He walked with his hands clasped before him, one hand holding the other wrist, with all of Spock's withdrawn bearing, but in his case his reserve was not intimidating but conducive of something close to pity. His hands were marked all over with cuts and scratches, as if he'd wrangled with a huge cat.

  "It is absurd to say I miss him," the Vulcan boy was saying. He walked to the windows; Christine followed, and thought she saw, in the deep seas of night, something dark hanging in the deeper darkness to port and below the ship itself, something huge that did not catch the light. "We are in mental contact, but that isn't the same." A wry smile touched his lips. "Certainly it is illogical for me to worry about Nemo the way he worries about me. But then, illogic is the foundation of empathy."

  "Is it?" asked Christine. She felt she ought to know who Nemo was; felt, moreover, that she ought to be shocked, disconcerted, at his words. What was it about Nemo, she wondered? Someone had once told her who that was and she had been horrified.

  "Of course." The Vulcan boy looked back at her over his shoulder. "At least, for empathy with someone other than another Vulcan. We are trained to think clearly, and to put the dictates of reason above the clamor of the heart. To empathize is to accept on the partner's own terms, to drink of that partner's soul and dreams, whatever they might be. Vulcans do not do this lightly. Afterward, one knows more than one would like to. Frequently, one feels…stained."

  He looked away from her for a moment, stroking the leaves of one of the many plants that grew in boxes among the gray-upholstered couches and chairs of the lounge. His skin had an unhealthy pallor, as from long sickness, and there were pain lines in the corners of his dark eyes. She wondered who he was, and why she dreamed about him. Why she felt she knew him, in some ways better than she had ever known Spock.

  Christine frowned, trying to understand. "But Vulcans are capable of bonding," she said. "That is…" She hesitated, not knowing quite what she wanted to say or if she wanted to go on. "Mr. Spock…" She could barely say his name. "…is—friends—with the captain, however much he avoids admitting it."

  He is capable of love, she thought. He is.

  "Friendship is not the same," said the Vulcan boy, his dark eyes meeting hers levelly. "It is not friendship of which we speak. You know that."

  She knew that. He had read her feelings for Spock, when she had covered his hands with hers, trying to quiet the terror of his dreams. She wondered now how deeply he had seen into her own dreams.

  "Mr. Spock's friendship with the captain would—and will—remain the same were they to be assigned to different vessels for ten years, or twenty. When I return to my own time, though I shall never see you again, we shall remain friends."

  "Yes," said Chapel softly, knowing it, meaning it. "Yes, we shall."

  "Love is different. In friendship—the kind of friendship Mr. Spock bears to the captain—there is no drive to proximity." His voice hesitated over the words. "No sense of peace in presence which vanishes with absence—illogical, but true. No hunger." He turned to look back toward the stars, toward the half-guessed dark shape looming in the wan glow of the Crossroad's streaming dust clouds.

  "I do not know whether this is something the Consilium had to instill in me, or whether the process of bonding simply released what most Vulcans keep buried so deeply within themselves that they have forgotten its existence, its very name."

  The starlight picked sudden lines of sadness on his forehead, in the corners of the too-young mouth.

  "I do know that bonded as I am—illogically caring as I do—I am not a proper Vulcan. It is true that very few Vulcan empaths go ashore on their homeworld, and those who do, lie about what they feel."

  Then the scene slipped away, and she was wandering through the darkened corridors of Deck Six, the lumenpanels dead slabs of cinder above her in blackness. All around her she heard, glimpsed, people blundering in the dark. Someone moved through a doorway ahead of her, glanced back over his shoulder as he vanished, and she saw that it was Roger. How she knew him in the dark she couldn't be sure, but the set of those broad shoulders under the blue-and-green canvas coverall could not be mistaken, the graying fair hair, the wide-set, intelligent blue eyes.

  She cried his name, hurried after him, bruising her shoulder on a corner, stumbling into an unseen obstacle that hurt her shins. Doors refused to open for her that had closed behind him; she had to go around, up and down blind corridors, with the voices of other searchers muttering on all sides, the muted scuffle of footfalls everywhere in the dark. They're trapped, she thought. We're all blind and trapped.

  Another figure passed her, dimly seen. Again, though she couldn't tell how, she identified the black hair, blue shirt, the flash of a gold Fleet insignia. She would know the movement of his body, the way he held his back, anywhere, fifty years from now. She called out, Spock, but there was no sound in her throat. Fearful, desperate, she started after him, her bootheels clattering on the deck, her heart thudding with fear that she would lose track of him, lose him completely. Like Roger he moved ahead of her, leaving her behind in a blackness as dense as the voids of space. She followed him as she had followed Roger, wanting only to know that she would be safe with him. That she would be safe somewhere.

  Then a glimmering form materialized out of the darkness before her. She hurried to catch up, crying out a man's name, and this time instead of retreating the figure came toward her, reaching out for her as she held out her arms.

  Only when she reached it did she realize it was a mirror. The shadowy image that held out its arms to welcome her was herself.

  "Naturally, it was necessary to implant pseudomemories in certain key members of the crew." The fat, daffodil-colored savant widened his huge eyes at Germaine McKennon, as if surprised she hadn't considered the matter for herself. "How else would we gloss over the loss of five days?"

  "Why wasn't I told?" she demanded pettishly and thrust the tiny reader away from her, with the report it bore. "You said nothing would be changed, and now I discover you have changed things. . . ."

  "Nothing which matters, Domina. Truly." Cymris Darthanian folded his hands, dipped in that little bow that made him appear even more insignificant and humble than he was. McKennon had ordered robes made for him in the colors of the Consilium, gray and white—his own loose-woven, brightly dyed garments from the burned-out slagheap of Tau Lyra III were already shabby, and with missions as short as they were, there were few laundry facilities on ships of the line.

  "For the most part it is a technique akin to restoration of a damaged video image, duplicating what is already there. Most of the crew will believe that they went about their usual business for the past five day
s. Anyone who has ever worked in any sort of government installation," he added wryly, "will know how difficult it is to tell one day from the next under such circumstances. For the rest, they will conjecture…" He spread his lower pair of hands. "But to what end? What, after all, are dreams?

  "Their conjecture will not affect Christine Chapel's decision to leave Starfleet and enter the Institute of Xenobiology. It will not affect her research into the nanosurgery of the central nervous system, or her eventual discoveries on the artificial augmentation of psionic receptors. It will not affect her founding of Starfield Corporation, and the research which at last saves the Federation from the effects of the plague."

  He remembered her, the only glimpse he had had of the woman whose research would save a galaxywide civilization…and whose heirs would consolidate the unexpected harvest of technological reward and unbelievable wealth to forge the weapons that would destroy his world and the minds that would fire them. Stringy and awkward, as all these humans appeared to be, he remembered her lying broken on the high bed in the strange-smelling healing-place, surrounded by her friends. He knew too little of the history of this timeline to recall whether she would ever know what others did with her work.

  Somewhere, sometime, someone would say something to her that turned her feet from the current dead end on which she walked, to the new road of a different life. No one could tell when, or where, or who.

  He could only touch her memory, and wish her well.

  The Domina slouched back into the softness of her leather desk chair, turning a stylus over and over in her fingers, the silver click of it small as the snapping of bone on the obsidian hardness of her desk. Beyond the viewscreen—piped in from the bridge, but in all respects resembling a vast, dark picture window—the pastel gas-giants of Earth's system glowed against the blackness, orange or green-white, necklaced with moons or crowned with dazzling rings of ice.