Its Hour Come Round

by Mere Anarchy

  The disturbing thing was that the bioweapons did not affect Alangabi, only Nehdi who had inherited a certain gene sequence, causing the mutations that resulted in premature aging and death. While the original experiments had been done only on animals and then abandoned, the intent was clear. Taken to their logical extreme, these experiments had been meant to produce a bioweapon to be used against the Nehdi.

  “So all we have to do now is reverse the process,” McCoy told Raya, trying to make it sound easy. “I’ve lost three more patients in the meantime, but with the added data, we should be able to put a stop to this. Now, can you do something to get rid of the reporters camped on my doorstep? It’s a nuisance having to step on them every time I go outdoors.”

  “I’ll do my best, Doctor,” Raya promised, remembering what it was she’d always admired about this man. “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow to…what is the term? ‘Kick ass and take names’?”

  It wasn’t quite that easy. Raya brought the Elders of the Alangabi to meet with Ejo and Sorodel on neutral ground and try to resolve centuries of enmity in a single morning. In an inspired move, she also brought representatives of the young people, the “wild ones,” from both sides to attend the negotiations.

  After several days of intensive talks (during which there were rumblings from vosTraal, where Spock, Azetbur, and the Zamestaad continued the Summit in Raya’s absence, though some of her constituents were less than pleased to do so), the two sides reached a rapprochement.

  The Alangabi agreed to clean up and destroy all traces of the experimental pathogen. In exchange, the Nehdi agreed to offer their medical expertise to heal those like the wild ones who had suffered so much during the aftermath of the Pulse.

  Both tribes drafted anyone with even a smattering of scientific or medical background to read through the mountains of paperwork generated by the animal experiments in order to help the Dinpayav doctor McCoy refine his treatment regimens so that the pathogen would claim no more victims.

  Sorodel, watching Chimeji play out under the sun, wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

  “So unnecessary!” she whispered to McCoy. “My daughter and son-in-law should have lived to see this day. So unnecessary…”

  McCoy put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. After all these people had been through, he could find no words that sufficed.

  But Sorodel was an Elder, and hers was not the only loss among the Nehdi this day. Her people expected her to be strong, and so she would be. Silently clasping McCoy’s hand where it rested on her shoulder, she looked toward the future in the person of her grandson, running free under Mestiko’s sky, promising hope.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Raya elMora hooked her four thumbs into the buckle of the shoulder harness and snapped it into place. Checking wind speed and direction, she began to set the shortest course back to vosTraal, then hesitated.

  What was the rush?

  To everyone’s surprise, she had named Deman elKramo as deputy in her absence, and he would speak for her as first Spock, then Azetbur, presented their respective cases for Mestiko’s admission to, or independence from, the Federation. The presentations, arguments and counterarguments, could be expected to last at least a week.

  All Raya needed to do was to be present at the end in case a tie-breaking vote was needed.

  Thanks to Commander Uhura, the global grid was up and running. Raya could listen to the proceedings and still take the leisurely route home.

  As a teacher, a small eternity ago, she had traveled occasionally, saving up her salary and taking all the recommended tours to the historic places, gathering up memories, never knowing that in the blink of an eye many of those places would be either gone forever, or rendered uninhabitable without drastic alterations that would render them historic in an entirely different way.

  As Jo’Zamestaad, every journey had been one of duty: formal tours to inspect the devastation and make decisions about who needed to be evacuated, who could stay, and under what circumstances. Later there were more inspections to see that the restorations were progressing as promised, that corruption and inertia were kept to a minimum, that people got what they needed.

  Since things had been “going well”—that is, since she and her government had returned from exile—it seemed she hardly left vosTraal.

  This afternoon, she would remedy that. If she set the skimmer for maximum speed, she could chase the sun around her world, and see vast swathes of it, good and bad, before nightfall. She had rations enough for several days, and if the Jo’Zamestaad herself couldn’t sometimes bend the rules, who could?

  She logged in a flight plan that would give her an ETA at vosTraal sometime tomorrow evening, and left a channel open to the Summit proceedings, where she could hear Spock’s sober, reasoned tone laying out the terms under which Mestiko might join the Federation without losing any of its autonomy as a sovereign planet.

  Raya deliberately left the channel on listen-only, not wanting to alert any one of her ministers as to her location or her availability. She did not wish to listen to the objections and reminders of unfinished business she knew would greet her if she let them know where to find her.

  As she followed the sun, she somehow felt as if she was not alone.

  It was difficult for her to admit even to herself how much she had been looking forward to seeing James again. Primarily, of course, she had been eager to show him how much progress her people had made since the last time he’d been here; but also, in light of that progress, she’d hoped, at last, to be able to take some time for herself, to capture some of what she’d sacrificed of a private life when the Pulse occurred.

  Had she been out of her mind to even consider spending some of that private life in the company of Starfleet’s living legend, James T. Kirk?

  She knew from their years-long correspondence that he still harbored some guilt for his part in failing to stop the Pulse from ravaging Mestiko. She had hoped somehow to help him confront that guilt and begin to heal it.

  At the very least she’d hoped to persuade him to stay a little longer on her world than protocol demanded, to linger for a while when the diplomatic mission was over. As her world emerged at last from its years-long nuclear winter into something resembling normalcy, she might have offered him a beach to walk on.

  But now he was gone forever. The might-have-been brought tears to Raya’s eyes. There had been times when she’d hated him, and said as much, times she’d accused him of not doing enough, until she’d realized that what he was in fact doing was helping her people to do for themselves.

  In mourning him, she was mourning everyone she had lost. But was she losing sight of everything her people had done? Its evidence was all around her. Dashing away her tears, she smiled.

  “Well, James?” she said aloud. “I think I’ve learned more from you than either of us ever realized.”

  The Mestiko of her youth was gone forever. But in its place was a pristine, beautiful world of forests and ice-fields and oceans and fields, of gleaming cities rising from ruins or places where there had never been cities before; and for all the many dead, there were as many living, giving birth, flourishing. It would never be the same, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good.

  Raya thought of the terrible ordeal she and her people had been through in the wake of disaster, and how it had in some ways strengthened them, and in other ways shown their vulnerabilities.

  Not for the first time, she could not help wondering how her life, and all their lives, might have been different if the Pulse had never passed their world. Then again, what if the Federation hadn’t been there to first mitigate the effects of the Pulse, and later help the Payav survive and restore their world?

  What-ifs, Raya realized, were as dangerous as if-onlys, and she made up her mind at that moment to stop second-guessing herself. Somehow she suspected James would approve.

  McCoy eased his weary bones down onto a stone bench in the quiet rear courtyard of the me
dical building. The oldest building in town, it had been built many centuries ago of native stone, on a rise above the valley so that there was no need for stilts. The inner courtyards had once been a maze of small gardens. Most were barren now, waiting to be replanted. Nevertheless, it was a peaceful place to spend the latter part of a long day.

  It was early evening, and construction on the new housing across the plaza had ceased for the day, restoring the natural quiet. Some of the hospital staff were leaving work, some arriving for the night shift, and they nodded to the Dinpayav doctor without speaking, respecting the man and his solitude, particularly after what he’d been through recently. If there were no words sufficient to thank him for saving an entire generation of their young people, their respectful silence would have to suffice.

  Off in the direction of the encircling hills, McCoy could hear birdsong. He wasn’t versed enough in the local fauna to know if they were native species that had somehow survived, or some new hybrid species the locals would find as alien as he did. In any event, it occurred to him that he was enjoying the sound.

  He was enjoying the view, too. For the first time, he noticed that the medical building had been positioned so that the morning sun graced the elaborate front entrance and the brilliance of the sunset flooded the inner courtyard.

  And it was brilliant indeed. There were still some traces in the atmosphere of the noxious elements kicked up by the pulsar; McCoy supposed Spock or that young pup Tuvok could quote him the chemical breakdown to the last molecule, but he didn’t care. Whatever the chemistry of it, the sunset was spectacular, and he intended to enjoy it on that level alone, thank you very much.

  An odd thought struck him. This was the first time he could remember actually enjoying anything since…since Jim had died.

  Oh, he’d gone through the motions, eating and sleeping when he needed to—knowing too well what the consequences would be if he didn’t—getting out of bed when it was time to go back to work, putting one foot in front of the other to get where he had to go. And the work itself had been both challenging and meaningful. But he couldn’t have described a single meal, or remember lacing his boots or told you whether his socks matched or if the weather on the walk over here had been warm or cold, clear or misty. None of it had mattered.

  He’d known it wasn’t healthy. How many people had he lost over the years? He knew the five stages of grief and could almost predict their duration each time someone he knew passed on. So many days for denial, so many more for anger, this many for bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. But he’d gotten stuck somewhere in depression this time, a depression, oddly, colored by guilt.

  Not the I-was-there-and-should-have-saved-him guilt that Scotty was going through—McCoy made a mental note to stay in touch with the grizzled engineer to make sure he didn’t do anything dangerous—but more of an I-wasn’t-there-and-should-have-been guilt.

  Patently ridiculous, of course. He’d been invited—they all had been—to attend the commissioning of the Enterprise-B, but he’d been up to his ears in a research project, had growled something about dress uniforms and begged off. No one had really expected him to do otherwise.

  But if he’d known he’d never see Jim Kirk again after that day…

  You’d have done what, you old fool? he chided himself. You don’t have psychic powers or even that weird telepathic sense that Vulcans have that told Spock the Intrepid had been destroyed from parsecs away, so why don’t you stop feeling sorry for yourself and…

  And enjoy the damn sunset, he decided, his shoulders slumping. The fact that he’d even noticed that Mestiko had a sun, and that it set in Technicolor every evening, was, he supposed, a sign the depression was lifting. The final step would have to be acceptance. Yes, James T. Kirk really was dead, and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do to bring him back.

  So after a long day of squinting through a microscope—refusing to take the computer’s word for the fact that the regen batches were uniform and free of artifacts—McCoy closed his eyes and felt the warming rays on his face, breathed in the clean air of a restored Mestiko the way he’d seen Payav do every time they emerged from an underground shelter, never again to take it for granted…and realized he was not alone.

  Chimeji stood beside him, silent, not so much as letting his shadow fall over the old man’s face to disrupt his enjoyment of the sunset.

  “How do, Chimmy?” McCoy smiled in spite of himself. Until today, the kid had been the only thing on Mestiko to make him smile. “Whatcha got there?”

  The boy’s grubby fists cradled something small and dirt-covered as if it was incredibly precious.

  “Treasure,” he said in that blunt, shorthanded way of his, waiting for McCoy to hold his hands out so he could deposit his “treasure” there.

  Rocks, McCoy thought at first when he took them. He was holding five uniform-sized roundish lumps, automatically brushing the dirt off them to see what was underneath. Like all kids his age, Chimmy thinks he’s found pirate treasure or a gold mine. Do I encourage him in his fantasy, take his mind off his dead parents, or…?

  But the objects were too lightweight to be rocks. Hoping he wasn’t holding the petrified scat of some long-dead animal, but intrigued in spite of himself, McCoy hauled himself up off the bench and motioned for Chimeji to accompany him inside. Back in the lab, he rinsed the dirt off the “rocks” and scowled.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Could these be what I think they are?”

  “Computer’d tell you,” Chimeji suggested, his upturned face expectant.

  McCoy looked down at the boy with renewed admiration.

  “It might. But the records from back then aren’t complete. We don’t want to make any mistakes, get people’s hopes up unnecessarily. Sometimes it’s better to do things the old-fashioned way.” Placing the objects reverently on a specimen tray, he dried his hands and hit the intercom. “Dr. elKanai, are you still on the premises?”

  The medical center had a staff of experts in biologicals and herbs. Jana elKanai was not long in arriving. Her eyes widened when she saw what Chimeji had found. She picked the objects up gingerly and examined them for a moment without speaking.

  “Could be…” she said carefully, as if trying not to get her own hopes up. “But even if they are, no guarantee they’re viable, or that they’ll germinate, or that the seedlings will survive any more than…”

  She stopped herself, seeing the crestfallen look on Chimeji’s face.

  “Whatever happens, Young One,” she assured him, “you’ve earned yourself a tattoo for finding these.”

  “Maybe not,” the boy said, looking down at his feet.

  “Ah,” Jana said. “I can see I’m not being a good scientist. The first thing I should have asked you is where you found them.”

  Something there was about small boys and construction projects which spanned solar systems and species. Not only did the Nehdi need new homes and shops and offices to replace those damaged and left fallow following the Pulse, but new housing was being built to accommodate the arriving medical and environmental workers, and new construction was everywhere. The soil had finally warmed enough for large earthmovers to dig deep excavations, well below the former frostline, for the foundation of more-than-temporary shelters. And the local kids couldn’t stay away.

  Playing near the excavation no matter how many times the workers chased him away, Chimeji had apparently found some seedpods buried in the softening permafrost. He didn’t have to say a word. Jana knew.

  “Your elor will not know whether to scold you or reward you,” she suggested.

  The boy shrugged. “Probably both.”

  “So are these what I think they are?” McCoy interjected, strangely excited.

  “Indeed they are,” Jana concurred. “Whether they’ve been dormant for centuries or only since the Pulse, they are in fact the seeds of a noggik tree. The scanners should tell us how old they are and whether or not they’re the original strain and not a more rece
nt hybrid. Beyond that, we can only hope.”

  As she proceeded to scan the seedpods, McCoy couldn’t help noticing the expression on Chimeji’s face, something he hadn’t seen before in the brief time he’d known the boy. Hope, indeed.

  There’s a lesson here, he told himself, about life, death, things of that nature. This youngster’s lost a lot more than you have, and yet he can find hope in a little thing like a handful of seed pods. The young heal faster, but still…

  “Are they, are they?” Chimeji could barely contain his excitement as the scanner worked its magic. A grin as wide as he could make it without showing any teeth lit up his face. McCoy squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

  “Whether they are or not, there’s enough dirt on your neck, youngster, to grow a forest of noggik trees….”

  Was this acceptance, the final stage of grief? he wondered. It no longer felt like depression, anyway.

  Dammit, Jim! he thought, watching Jana and Chimeji clasp hands as the scanner reading showed that, yes, the seed pods dated to around forty years before the Pulse, and that three of them showed 90 percent viability and the other two 40 and 30 percent, respectively. He found himself sharing their delight vicariously. Chekov’s wrong, and so’s Sulu. Heroes die all the time, usually at a greater rate than us ordinary mortals. You did this deliberately, left us here to mourn you…

  …or to carry on your mission, the way Raya’s doing, the way the entire population of Mestiko is doing, even as they’re working at cross-purposes the way Spock and I used to.