Jim set it back down without tasting it, rose, and walked from the lounge, eyes front. He was very much aware of Morrow, watching him with concern, very much aware of all the other senior Starfleet officers, deliberately avoiding him.
This was the world in which he had lived for thirty years, the world in which he always before felt comfortable and welcome. The palpable chill said: The pressure finally got to him, Jim Kirk finally cracked.
The rumors would fly across Starfleet at transwarp speed, grow, and take on a life of their own.
He left the lounge, stepping out into the terminal of the spaceport. Restrained conversation and low lights gave way to brilliant illumination and the hubbub of crowds. He felt more out of place here than he ever had on any alien world. He wondered if there was any place left for him at all.
He looked around, feeling conspicuous in his Starfleet uniform. Finally he found Sulu and Chekov. They were a hundred meters across the terminal, wearing civilian clothes and sitting together on a circular bench, people-watching. Chekov wore a jumpsuit of relatively severe tailoring, while Sulu wore jeans and sandals and an embroidered white Filipino festival shirt. Sulu saw Kirk first and nudged Chekov. They waited for him with elaborate casualness. Kirk glanced around carefully, looking for other Starfleet personnel. He wished he had asked the two younger officers to wait for him somewhere more private. The way things stood, the less they were seen with him the better. He needed their help, but with any luck he might be able to get them out of all this relatively unscathed.
He saw no one else he recognized, so he joined Sulu and Chekov.
“The word, sir?” Sulu said.
“His word is no,” Kirk said, gesturing with a jerk of his head back toward the senior officers’ lounge. “But my word…is given.”
“Count on our help, sir.”
“I’ll need it, Hikaru.” He had nearly slipped, nearly said, “Thank you, Commander.” But he remembered hearing about Sulu asking to be removed from the captain’s list, and he even turned down the Excelsior. Kirk knew it was loyalty to him that has cost Sulu his own command. While it was Sulu’s choice Kirk felt responsible.
“Shall I alert Doctor McCoy, sir?” Chekov asked.
“Yes. He has…a long journey ahead.”
Leonard McCoy strode down the crowded street. His body felt like someone else’s. He could smell the pungent scent of eight different volatile recreational drugs. He was familiar with them all, of course: he was, after all, a doctor. But he should not be able to sort them out so efficiently from the surrounding smells of the dirty street, the fog, the rain, incense and warm oil from one establishment, raw meat from another. He could hear more clearly than usual. He listened to five simultaneous conversations, one in Standard, two in more traditional Earth languages, and two—no, that was a single conversation being carried out in two different dialects of the same offworld tongue.
He arrived at the meeting place. He paused before its brightly lit come-hither sign. He could feel the colors of the neon script illuminating his face with another dozen different languages, evenly divided between Earth and other worlds. He rubbed the scratchy stubble on his jaw. There was something else he was supposed to be doing, something Jim had told him to do. Oh. Right. Jim had told him to shave and put on more beard repressor. Was this as important? He remembered what it was he was doing. It definitely was more important than shaving.
But is it the right thing? he wondered. There’s still time to turn back, go to the nearest hospital, confess to being stark raving mad, and make them lock me up before I get violent.
He reached into his pocket, but it was empty. He had forgotten his tranquilizers. He shrugged. They had not been doing him much good anyway.
He plunged into the tavern.
The noise, the smoke, the appalling scent of sizzling meat assaulted him. He staggered and only managed to keep from falling by grabbing onto the nearest person. She turned, ready to fight, then looked at him more closely and laughed.
“Honey, you look like you’re having a tough time of it,” she said. She supported him easily. She was half a head taller than he. Her heavy, curly black hair spread around her head and down her back. She wore the black leather pants and jacket favored by independent couriers, with the jacket fastened only at the bottom and nothing beneath it. The skin of her throat and the inner curves of her breasts looked like warm sable. She was black on black on black, except her eyes, which were a piercing pale blue. He stared up at her and fell in love with her instantly. Only that saved him from abandoning his appointment and asking her for the help he needed. He did not want to drag anyone he loved into the trouble he was heading for.
“I’m…I’m all right,” he said. He drew himself up straighter. He still had some dignity.
She kept a steadying hand on his elbow. “Sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Okay.” She let him go.
Somehow he kept his feet and continued farther into the bar. A tiny plane whizzed past his face. Startled, he stepped back and nearly fell. A second plane whined past, its propellers blurred, minuscule guns blazing with a sharp snapping sound like a fire of pitch-pine.
The planes were holograms. Nearby, two youths lay in game couches, their eyes closed and their hands on antiqued controls. Behind their eyelids they were experiencing the dogfight of the two early twentieth century biplanes. McCoy watched the three-dimensional images zoom high over the heads of the bar patrons. Each aircraft was the size of his hand, and exquisitely detailed. Suddenly they dove straight toward him. The Spad 7 vanished into his shirt front, the Albatros D-III close behind. He hardly had time to flinch. He looked over his shoulder to watch them soar into the heights again, unscathed by their passage through his strange and alien body. The fleeing Spad suddenly executed an elegant loop-the-loop, came up behind the Albatros, and quite abruptly shot it out of the sky. The Albatros screamed into a dive, emitted holographic flame and clouds of holographic smoke—and disappeared a handsbreadth from the floor. The Spad zoomed victoriously toward the ceiling and faded away.
“Gotcha!” cried one of the youths.
“Okay, okay—want to make it three out of five?”
“That is a wager.”
They were dressed alike—McCoy wondered if that was some new style he had been too out of touch to notice—and they looked so alike that it was impossible to tell if they were two of one gender, two of the other, or one of each. He supposed they knew. That was, after all, the thing that mattered.
McCoy pushed on ahead. The illumination was very dim, but he could see quite clearly, in an odd and glowing way that he had never experienced before. Nevertheless he could not find the person he was looking for. Instead he found a small unoccupied booth in the corner of the room and settled down to wait.
Beneath the din of the tavern he heard footsteps quickly approaching. He glanced up.
“Long time, Doc,” Kendra said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah…” He would have liked to talk over old times with her. “Anyone…been looking for me?”
“I have,” she said. “But what’s the use?” She smiled. “Well. What’ll it be?”
“Altair water.” He drew himself up grandly. “ ‘Specially carbonated from underground fissures.’ ”
Kendra snorted at his recitation of the advertisement.
“Not your usual poison.”
“To expect one to order poison in a bar is not logical,” he said, and then he realized—though it surprised him to hear a tavern employee admitting it—that of course she meant alcohol, which was indeed a poison despite its wide use as a recreational drug.
Then he wondered what in heaven’s name he was talking about. He simply did not want a drink, that was all. He had not had a drink since—since before Spock died, as it happened. This is it, he thought. Sheer lunacy. I’m talking to myself. I always talk to myself, though, it helps me think. Have since I was only a tad. Doesn’t mean a thing. As Freud said,
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. He noticed Kendra watching him curiously. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m on medication.”
“Got it.” She went away to get his water. As her footsteps receded among the hubbub, another set approached.
The alien slid into the booth beside him. “Hello! Welcome to your planet.”
“I think that’s my line, stranger,” McCoy said.
“Oh, forgive. I here am new. But you are known, being McCoy from Enterprise.”
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. You are—?”
“I name not important. You seek I. Message received. Available ship stands by.”
“Good. How soon and how much?”
“How soon is now. How much…is where.”
“Where…?”
“Is yes. Where?”
“Somewhere in the Mutara Sector.”
“Oh. Mutara restricted. Take permits many…money—more.”
“There aren’t going to be any damn permits!” McCoy shouted. “How can you get a permit to do a damn illegal thing?” He glanced around hurriedly to see if anyone had noticed his outburst, then continued in a softer, more conspiratorial tone. “Look, price you name, money I got.”
“You name place, I name money. Otherwise, bargain no.”
“All right, dammit! It’s Genesis. The name of the place we’re going to is Genesis.”
“Genesis!” The being recoiled.
“Genesis, yes! How can you be deaf,” he muttered, “with ears like that?” I used to say the same thing to Spock, McCoy thought.
“Genesis allowed is not. Is planet forbidden.”
“Now listen to me, my backwards friend!” He lurched forward and grabbed the alien’s collar. “Genesis may be ‘planet forbidden,’ but I’m damn well—”
A hand closed around his arm. McCoy tried to pull away, but the grip tightened painfully. He looked up. The civilian, an ordinary man, so ordinary he should have looked out of place here, but did not, smiled at him pleasantly. When he leaned forward he loomed, and McCoy realized how big he was.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but your voice is carrying,” he said. “I don’t think you want to be discussing this subject in public.”
“I’ll discuss what I like, and who the hell are you?”
The alien tried to pluck McCoy’s hands from his collar. McCoy considered going for his throat, but instead clenched his hands harder around the fabric. The civilian tightened his grip again.
“Could I offer you a ride home, Doctor McCoy?”
What shreds of control McCoy had regained disintegrated.
“Where’s the logic in offering me a ride home, you idiot! If I wanted a ride home, would I be trying to charter a space flight?” He scowled, beginning to perceive the civilian as an obstacle to his quest. “How the hell do you know who I am?”
The plain young man lowered his voice. “Federation security, sir.”
McCoy realized just how serious an obstacle the young man was. He lurched away, loosing his grasp on the alien and trying to break the security man’s grip. He crashed into Kendra, bringing his Altair water, which tumbled off her tray and splashed over the alien’s face and shoulders. The alien leaped to his feet, brushing at the drops and stains. Kendra, surprised by the fray, fell backwards against the next table, sending icy drinks into customers’ laps.
“You—you horrible doctor!” the alien cried, still brushing at the water.
“Come in here and punch people, will you?” yelled a customer as bits of crushed ice slid down the front of his sheer trousers. “Whyn’t you go across the street where you belong?” He punched the alien, who rolled with the blow, let himself fall over a chair that tripped up the ice-drenched patron, chose the better part of valor, and left his commission behind him.
McCoy bowed to the wisdom of his former and all too brief colleague and headed for the door. Unfortunately the Federation man still had hold of his arm. He brought McCoy up short. McCoy swung around, panicked, and grabbed the man at the vulnerable point between neck and shoulder. He squeezed with all his strength and turned to flee without even waiting to see what happened.
Nothing had happened at all.
The Federation man, his grip unbroken, dragged McCoy to a halt. He looked into the doctor’s eyes. “You’re going to get a nice, long rest, Doctor,” he said gently. “Please come along.”
McCoy had a choice: walk or be carried.
He walked.
Eight
Saavik followed the blurry, half-obscured tracks across the snow. The wind blew ice crystals against her face, whipping them across her cheeks and freezing them to her eyelashes. She squinted to try to see into the blizzard. Movement caught her eye, and she headed toward it. The snow made ghosts all around her. She would have believed she was seeing phantoms if David’s tricorder had not continued to bleat rhythmically.
She trudged through the snow, cold and unhappy, trying to ignore both sensations. But she discovered that once she had released her self-discipline, even for only a few days, she could not easily regain the complete Vulcan control she had worked so hard to learn.
With the discovery of the creatures around Spock’s coffin, her hopes had crashed; a few moments later, when she saw that the coffin was intact, unsealed, and empty, her hopes had risen just as abruptly. This emotionalism was dangerous; in addition, it was illogical, for even when she dropped her mental shields completely, she could find no sense of Spock anywhere.
She knew she had erred. Whatever happened, whatever she and David found, she must re-establish dominance over her feelings and aspire to eradicating them.
Now she understood why Vulcans denied themselves any indulgence in passion. It was to protect themselves from pain.
Saavik shivered and pressed forward against the howling wind and the snow.
The ground rose beneath her. She was climbing the flank of a glacier. In only a few kilometers’ distance it had changed from a thin blanket of snow to a sheet of ice many meters thick.
The frequency of the tricorder’s output increased until it was nearly a continuous shriek, even louder than the wind. Saavik stopped and motioned for David to turn the thing off.
Beneath the ragged whine of the wind, the skittering of snow across the ground, the creaking of the ice beneath her feet, Saavik heard a weak and frightened whimper. She walked toward it. Her boots crunched through the frozen crust. The snow reached halfway to her knees. The uneven footprints before her trailed atop the surface. She wondered if she was following some small and vicious predator that a member of the Genesis team had made up as “a little joke,” a little joke that now perhaps was injured and desperate. Saavik was growing impatient with the collective humor of the group. Her phaser made a comforting weight in her hand.
A great mass of stone, one moment concealed by the snow, the next a wall of tumbled gray blocks before her, thrust abruptly from the surface of the glacier. The ice had crumpled and cracked all around it, piling up in great heaps to either side.
Saavik saw the child.
He crouched in the meager shelter of a rock overhang, naked, shuddering uncontrollably with the cold. He saw her and tried to scrabble deeper into the cleft, clumsy on his injured leg.
David saw the boy and gasped.
“Your comrades appear to have added a humanoid species to the Genesis matrix,” Saavik said. She crushed out the spark of fury that rose in her against such presumption. She could not afford to lose her temper, not here, not now.
“We didn’t,” David said. “I’m sure nobody did. We discussed it, because we realized it was possible. But nobody did it. Nobody even argued for it—it was obvious to all of us that it would be completely unethical to include an artificial intelligence in the first experiment. Besides, nobody could have put such a complex program into the matrix without everybody else noticing.”
“David, the evidence is before your eyes.” She bolstered her phaser, opened the side pocket of her coat, and drew out Spock’s burial robe. She stepp
ed toward the child, carrying the heavy cloth in one hand, her other hand empty and outstretched.
“No,” David said. “The evidence is behind us, in Spock’s empty coffin.”
She looked at him sharply, unwilling to let herself begin to hope again.
The little boy huddled against cold stone, too tired to flee any farther. The wind whipped his scraggly black hair around his face and shoulders. The cold had given his skin a peculiar pallid tint. Saavik sat on her heels beside him and touched his shoulder gently. He flinched violently and stared at her, wide-eyed. She brushed her fingertips across his cheek. He continued to watch her, motionless, as she pushed back his hair, revealing his ears.
He was a Vulcan.
Saavik stared at him with wonder. She did not know what this could mean. Now was no time for analysis. The cold and the wind were too powerful. Whoever or whatever the boy was, she had to get him off the glacier.
She hoped she had shown him she meant him no harm. Moving slowly and carefully, she brought the black cloth forward, opened it slowly so he could see what she was doing, and wrapped it around his shoulders. He touched it with wonder, then hugged it tight.
“I am Saavik,” Saavik said in Vulcan. “Can you speak?”
He cocked his head at her, but did not reply. She felt no resonances from him, no mental emanations, no hint of Spock’s powerful intelligence. He was, rather, an innocent, a blank.
“It was the Genesis wave,” David said. “It must have been. His cells could have been regenerated. Reformed…”
Still moving carefully so as not to alarm the child, Saavik drew out her communicator. David’s theory was the most outrageous she could imagine…and the simplest.
“Saavik to Grissom. Captain Esteban, come in please.”
“Esteban here, Saavik. Go ahead.”
“We have found the source of the life signs. It is a Vulcan child, the equivalent of eight or ten Earth years of age.”
There was a very long pause before Esteban replied.
“A child! That’s…extraordinary. How did he get there?”
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 36