Crossroad

by Barbara Hambly

  Sometimes at night Cymris Darthanian would weep out of sheer exhaustion, torn between his grief for his family, for his people, for the world he had grown up on for ninety-seven years, and the wonder and delight of this dazzling and unlikely universe into which he had been catapulted.

  It was very difficult to realize that Yoondri—Tau Lyra—his home—had been a charred ruin for two hundred and fifty years already, suddenly, in the blink of a yagghorth's hellish inner eye.

  Iriane was out there somewhere, he thought. They were all out there, the descendants, the inheritors, of those friends and fellow-prisoners he'd last seen rushing onto the Savasci's shuttle as the great steel doors of the bay slipped closed. The re-makers of his civilization. The new savants of the Yoons.

  Soon, Dylan Arios would be contacting them, for help against the Consilium.

  Needless to say, the world to which he, Darthanian, had directed the attention of this woman before him was very far away from the Crossroad Nebula. If no trace of a colony was found, well, it had been nearly three hundred years.

  The only ones who had known Yoondri were his brother-savants here on this ship, and Iriane. He prayed for her nightly, hoping that the burden of her rage would burn itself out, as he prayed for the lifting of his own. Sometimes, in the living inner whisper of his mind, he would hear her far-off singing.

  In time, they would meet.

  "You're sure?" McKennon's voice was the sulky voice of a spoiled and vicious child.

  Cymris Darthanian nodded. "Trust the unreeling of the future, Domina," he said quietly. "Events befell because it was their nature to fall that way. Duplicate the conditions, and they must and will fall that way again."

  This was, he knew, an unmitigated lie—and absolutely preposterous for anyone who knew anything about the composition of Time. He had sensed, in his brief conversation with Dylan Arios, that the renegade Master knew it, too. The past was the past, but futures were infinite. The node at the Crossroad had been a major one, with branches of possibility leading in every direction. In some futures, he knew, he himself and the other sages had not escaped the cataclysm of Yoondri; in others, the shuttle with its survivors had not made it out of the Savasci's hull. In others it was, in fact, Dylan Arios who had fired those torpedoes into the sun; Dylan Arios as he would or might or could have been, had other events changed or branched the treed bundles of pasts and futures along the way.

  In one or two, it was James Kirk.

  "There are a thousand thousand infinite futures," he said softly to the woman seated behind the desk against the glowing backdrop of those alien stars, the woman who was so young to have acquired such power, and who held the power without the wisdom that true savants acquired along the way. "But each of us possesses the key to only one." He bowed low, to take his departure. "Your servant, Domina."

  Another unmitigated lie, he thought, amused, as he left her presence. But she wasn't going to find that out until it was much, much too late.

  "…so, I got tired of this after a while and I went out and bought the oldest, junkiest, nastiest old planet-hopper I could dig up." Ed Dale's big hands, callused and strong but well-formed as a woman's, gestured expansively, and the grin on his face was like the sun coming up. "I mean, this thing should have been made into a planter in some city park about fifty years previously. You'd need a slingshot the size of the Galactic Courts Building to get it out of the atmosphere."

  He leaned across Varos's table, one elbow on the final printout of the Crossroad mission report. Behind him, Jupiter smoldered red and amber, a Polyphemus eye of wounded rage in the dark. A veil of asteroids sparkled like a chain of diamonds beyond Dale's shoulder, clouds of interstellar dust glimmered around his head. A careless war-god, a displaced Viking, joyful only to be alive. His voice had the slight slur it got when he'd had a couple of ales—like most Earthmen, he had little tolerance for ale.

  "I did just enough work on it to get the engines running, lifted off, and headed back to that 'exclusive country club' of theirs, that 'private Elysium'…"

  Varos reached out and keyed off the holo as the sensors in the corridor signaled someone approaching. He slipped the tiny cube out of the player and replaced it in its box, at the back of his desk drawer.

  It was the only holo he had of his friend, telling that same absurd story of boyhood pranks and youthful wildness. Varos knew he should be ashamed for still digging into that bleeding wound.

  But friends did not forget their friends.

  McKennon had let him die.

  The Consilium had let him die.

  McKennon had forced him, Varos—Dale's sworn friend, his blood brother, the man whose life he had saved in the filthy swamps of Deneb—to turn away from Dale as he lay dying, ripped to bloody shreds but savable. Savable had they gotten him into a freeze box quick enough.

  But she'd wanted Dylan Arios, wanted James Kirk. And there were more security chiefs in the Fleet.

  Hatred—the bitter heat at the core of the Romulan nature—was iron in his belly, sulfur and salt in the cut wounds of his heart.

  The Consilium would pay. They had the power of pleasure and pain over him, but he knew there were techniques to overcome that. His will was his own.

  Anger is the heart of the will, his grandfather had said. Friends do not forget their friends. Varos had always thought himself a Fleet captain first, a Romulan second. Now he saw that this was not true.

  It was Karetha's step in the corridor, and he touched the opener as soon as the uneven tread came to a halt. Many of the crew, especially the Secondaries, were terrified of her, more and more so lately. Dale had never been. "Come," Varos said, his voice welcoming.

  She started to hiss a greeting, then recovered herself. Her head came back and her eyes returned to being a woman's eyes. An old woman, tired and troubled; wrapped in the soft black robe she wore off-duty, her black hair braided down her back, as it was when she slept. She took a seat in the chair Dale had usually occupied, and sat instead of crouched, which she did sometimes now when she forgot.

  She said, "I weep with thee, Captain," and he nodded, and held out his hand. Her nails were like claws, long and hooked. She and Khethi—so named after the smallest species of sand lizard on their world—played scratching games and she didn't like always losing to him.

  "You're abroad late."

  She sighed and ran her claws through her hair. "I slept some, after the jump," she said. Her hands were smutted with chocolate and there was a coffee stain on the front of her robe. She had been neater, years ago. "In the jump—and afterward—Khethi…was with me about all he had learned from the yagghorth of the rebels."

  "The yagghorth of the rebels?" Varos sat up straighter, interpreting the odd, roundabout speech she used to describe her dealings with her insentient partner's thought processes.

  Stun only, McKennon had said. As if more would hurt a yagghorth.

  Karetha nodded. "I did not realize that Khethi missed his own kind," she said softly. "He is—Khethi is…" She frowned, unable, as always, to divide what the yagghorth said or thought. Varos had discovered over the years that most empaths made up their own languages, their own terms for communication with their counterparts, is most frequently being substituted for says or thinks. It was difficult for them, he gathered, to think in any coherent terms except shifting colors and the smells of the stars.

  Her hands moved a little, fingers cricking like the echo of claws. "He is not entirely of his own kind anymore," she said. "As I am not. There are… Romulan parts in his mind, as there is now a good deal of yagghorth in me. Yes, I know it," she added, and her smile was a woman's, and sad. "He was—pleased—to encounter Nemo, this yagghorth of the rebels. Thoughts passed from mind to mind. Khethi…" She hesitated, struggling to say what she had come to say.

  "Khethi will join the rebels." She brought the words out very quickly, as if hoping Varos wouldn't actually hear. Then she flinched, as if expecting a blow, or worse. Knowing, thought Varos, that to tell any Fleet
captain this would be signing Khethi's termination papers—Khethi, whose life meant more to her now than her own.

  He also knew that as a Fleet captain, he should hit the Summons button at once, before the yagghorth vanished, as the Nautilus yagghorth had vanished from the red-lit darkness of the Savasci's hold.

  He remained still, listening, watching.

  "Khethi…wanted me to tell you," she said softly. "I do not understand why it was in him that you should know."

  No, thought Varos, settling back in his chair. Under his stillness the anger raced hot, a scalding river. But Khethi understood. Khethi, whose heart was the heart of the Savasci, whose mindless awareness spread through the ship's fabric like the web of the swamp-spider, which could cover forty square kilometers in its deceptive silvery fragility.

  He found himself wondering, not for the first time, just exactly what Khethi knew.

  "And you?" he asked gently. "What do you want?" They were speaking in the up-country Romulan dialect they shared. After years of Federation Standard, it was still the language of their hearts.

  "I go where Khethi goes, of course," said Karetha. "Does he choose to be rebel, then rebel I will be."

  "Does he know how to find them?"

  "I don't know. I think he can go to Nemo again."

  "Ah," said Varos softly, and reached out, to take her hand. "Then, my old friend, once we reach Earth and this crew goes ashore, will we all be rebels together, you and Khethi and I. And then," he added, his voice sinking almost to a whisper, "the Consilium will be sorry that it ever ordered the Savasci to enter the Crossroad, or make contact with the ships and captains of the past. They have forgotten now—Kirk and his crew, who answer to no master but their duties as they see them, and the dictates of their judgments and their hearts. And this is as it should be. But I have not forgotten. Nor will I, so long as I live."

  It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures, Spock had said to her once. At the time she thought he was referring to the problem then at hand, the appalling drive of Vulcan physiology, which forced him back to his home planet at a time appointed by Vulcan stars and Vulcan genes.

  Lying in the twilight borderland on the far side of sleep, Chapel realized that he had been speaking of the relationship between them.

  And it was a relationship, she realized. It simply hadn't been the relationship she was after.

  And wouldn't be.

  There had been times in the past four years when she'd felt that if only she could get to the other side of that impenetrable wall, she'd see the real Spock. But now she knew that if she got around that wall, all she'd see was the back side of the wall.

  A fading dream had whispered to her in sleep, a strange dream about walking in the Deck Ten lounge with a Vulcan boy, a boy with long black hair and strange, small cuts on his hands; a boy with a face like a young prince.

  There is no drive to proximity, he had said, of Vulcan friendships. And, I am not a proper Vulcan.

  Proper Vulcan or not—and she did not recall just why he had said this last—she had understood, finally, the depth of difference it made, to be a Vulcan.

  When I return to my own time, Nurse Chapel, I will always be your friend, though we shall never meet again. And, Love is something different.

  Her relationship with Spock was far from over. But it was what it was, and would continue, she understood, in the Vulcan fashion—a friendship, distant at times when they were physically distant, but lifelong. If she wanted it that way.

  She had given up enough, she realized, pursuing shadows among the dark spaces between stars. Nine years, pursuing one man, and then another who was kind, only to find, upon catching up with them, that they were not what she had dreamed them to be.

  In a way, she supposed, she had wanted Spock to be Roger…and God only knew who she had wanted Roger to be. But Roger was only Roger…and Spock was only Spock.

  It was time to return to her own work. McCoy would help her—had helped her! God! All the practical experience she'd gotten in xenobiology…! Spock would applaud, with genuine joy, her receipt of her M.D. and her specialized credentials, something she now guessed—had then guessed?—Roger would never have done. Spock would be her friend, her supporter, wherever he was.

  Not the comfort that she sought, in her heart of hearts—but comfort, nevertheless.

  After supper, when she felt a little stronger, Christine asked for a reader, and ran up the end-of-mission form she'd been putting off from day to day.

  RETURN TO CIVILIAN STATUS?

  Yes

  No

  DESTINATION OF OUT-MUSTER?

  San Francisco—Earth

  Memory Alpha

  Vulcan—Central Port

  Other __________

  She typed in FEDERATION SCIENCE INSTITUTE and keyed in for the application to that university. With luck, she calculated, she'd get the okay on it by the time the Enterprise returned to Earth in three months, its mission done.

  Epilogue

  IT HAD HAPPENED shortly after the start of the evening shift. Whatever "it" was.

  Kirk remembered sparring with Ensign Lao in the gym, remembered—half-remembered, in a kind of misty dream—someone calling him to the comm link for a message from the bridge.

  And the next thing he knew clearly had been waking at 0400 in a cold sweat, from a dream of horror, a dream of something dark and chitinous, something that ripped men to pieces with casual ease…eyeless, tentacled, winged, and glittering darkly. A dream of a yagghorth, seen clearly visible in good lighting, unlike the dim and flickery image on the warning vid.

  But no one of the crew was missing or injured, save Lao and Chapel, in sickbay with extreme phaser shock.

  And further back than that, his memory would not go. Alone in his quarters, Kirk screened through the compilation of reports.

  Spock had done a hero's work. The moment the temporal discrepancy had been discovered—at shortly before 0800 hours that morning, when he himself had walked onto the bridge—Kirk had ordered every person on board, from Mr. Spock down to the disreputable laundryman Brunowski, to write up what they remembered of the past five days. Most people had very clear recollections of business as usual, but unfortunately, when collated, the accounts did not match. For most of the day Spock had been laboriously extracting what data from them he could, trying to align it with circumstantial evidence and come up with a coherent idea of what actually had gone on.

  And had come up with very little.

  Sheets of flimsiplast had been found in sickbay, with handwritten admissions notes for Chapel and Lao, listing severe phaser shock for both, complicated in Lao's case by sleep deprivation and nervous exhaustion; the stardates given for admission fell just at the end of the five-day "Time-Out." The notes were in McCoy's handwriting. McCoy remembered nothing.

  Fully 189 people—nearly half the ship's complement—remembered waking at or at about 0400 on the same morning, and of those, more than a hundred reported either a troubling dream or a sense of something deeply wrong.

  Phaser banks had been down to fourteen percent, with no photon torpedoes gone and none of the damage a battle would have caused.

  Thirty percent of the magnetic cover plates to the manual door latches and emergency kits were found to have been demagnetized, and were dangling uselessly from their hinges. The one on the door of the portside engineering head had been clearly forced by a makeshift degausser tinkered together from the electronic field controls of the flushing unit—apparently, according to fingerprints, by Mr. Scott himself, for what purpose even he was now at a loss to relate.

  Mr. Bryant, the third-shift communications officer, was rumored to be making discreet inquiries among several female crew members concerning the ownership of a garment he had found in his quarters.

  Yeoman Zink of Stores reported that she remembered an out-of-body experience and meaningful revelations about her past lives. Lieutenant Bergdahl of the anthrogeo lab gave a long and detailed account of being
taken onto an alien ship by small, glowing beings of unknown origins and forced to undergo invasive medical procedures. Adams, his assistant, reported that Bergdahl had put her on report for not properly tidying up after experiments of which there was no record, on artifacts from regions of the galaxy that they could not possibly have visited in the past five days.

  Yeomen Wolfman, Watanabe, and Chavez all reported dreams about yagghorth, though none of them knew the name of the creature, nor had any of them seen the vid.

  "I don't get it, Spock," he said, as the Vulcan stepped into the room a moment behind the door comm's chirp. Kirk gestured at the screen. "It adds up to something. . . ."

  Turning in his chair made his right leg ache, as if he'd strained a muscle…or, he now realized, as if he'd taken a bad phaser hit himself.

  Mr. Spock held out a yellow info-wafer to him. "My final correlation of data, Captain," he said. The pinkish color of his palms caught Kirk's eye—permaskin, keyed to human tones and jarring against the science officer's slightly greenish complexion. Even deep hypnosis had failed to unearth memories of the injury. McCoy had reported more permaskin missing than Spock's hands accounted for, as well as large quantities of the rare but harmless compound D7.

  "Any conclusions?"

  Spock was silent for a moment, turning the wafer over in his pi-colored hands.

  Something had happened. Something had happened shortly after the end of first shift on Stardate 6251.1, something that had touched every person on board to some degree. . . .

  Yet the leaves on the small potted plant on his desk—which his personal yeoman, a hulking young man named al-Jasir, was in the habit of trimming every day—had in fact been trimmed. Yesterday, by the look of it. How disastrous could the Time-Out have been?