STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  For he was alien. Alien, foreign, not of Earth or of any sane place. The fluid that dripped from the slashed thigh and knee and oozed from the puckered and abraded flesh around the burns on the hands and face was clearly analogous to blood, but it was a thick, dark green in color. The skin, waxy with exhaustion, had a greenish cast to it, and the rubbed and blistered bruises ringing the bony wrists were colored like no human flesh.

  Who, and what, and from where, Stemple did not know, nor could he imagine. But not human, for all the human shape.

  He knelt beside him cautiously, and turned the unconscious man on his back. The face of an intellectual Satan, thought Stemple; pinched and sunken with the marks of the last extremities of pain. The dark eyebrows slanted inhumanly upwards; the ears were wrong, different. High cheekbones stabbed whitely through the taut and wasted skin. The dark clothing was of a texture Stemple had never encountered before, though he’d spent most of his childhood sewing garments in the sweatshops of the Boston slums—a strange and metallic texture.

  Alien, he thought. Nothing of the human Earth.

  And hurt. Dying, maybe. Stemple knew that sunken look from his slum childhood as well. He felt the man’s face and hands, and found them clammy with shock. Searching, he found the big vein in the wrist, and felt the slow, weak movement there.

  At least he has a pulse. That implies a heart to move it.

  Stemple leaned forward, and dragged the man up onto his shoulders. The man—creature—alien—was taller than he, but not so heavy. Still, it was a struggle to get him through the wet and slippery ferns up the slope to the road again. At the scent of unhuman blood the horse shied, and Stemple, cursing, laid his burden down and went to blindfold the beast with his handkerchief against any further trouble. Between the unaccustomed weight of a limp, unwieldy body and the frantic jittering of the horse, it took him a good fifteen minutes to get the alien slung over the saddle, secured like dead venison. By the time he was done Stemple’s coat and shirt were soaked with dew and mud and dark green blood.

  He had already decided what he must do.

  His mind shied from the thought of taking the alien to Seattle. He knew what his own first reaction had been, to destroy the alien thing. There were those, among the half-educated loggers of the town, who’d have the same initial response, and others who would give the matter more mature consideration and come to the same conclusion. Indeed, Stemple was not entirely sure that this would not be the best course. The alien was an utterly unknowable quantity, and the implications of finding him here, on the Olympia road, were myriad and terrifying. It might be that some train of circumstances was starting that could be stopped now, and only now, by a single well-placed bullet.

  But Stemple knew himself not the man to fire that bullet. He had foreclosed on widows and orphans in his time, but there were things he knew he could not do.

  That left only the cabin on Eagle Head Point.

  It belonged to Stemple, and had in fact been his home for two winters, before his town house by the mill was built in ’62. He still stayed there occasionally, for it was within a half hour’s walk to the town. It could be reached from here by back trails. Unless he ran into some of the Bolt brothers’ men as he trespassed his way across the footslopes of Bridal Veil Mountain, he could get the alien there completely unseen.

  And when I get him there, thought Stemple, wiping the muck of sweat from his brow with a kerchief that was scarcely cleaner than his sleeves, there’ll be time enough to figure out what to do with him. Beyond that he did not permit himself to think—Stemple was a man who knew his own limitations.

  It was raining.

  It was always raining, in Seattle. Lottie Hatfield, laboring up the long pathway from town, listened to the slivery patter and trickle of water on pine needles and reflected that, since her coming to the young town eight years ago, she had seen an average of maybe a year’s worth of sunny days.

  Good for the trees, of course, and for her own trade of selling drinks to cold, wet men who’d been cutting trees in the rain all day. Tonight would see good business in the saloon. But there was something that had to be seen to first, if the old skinflint would let her see to it.

  She hoped Aaron wasn’t in any kind of trouble.

  In the grayish light of the last of the afternoon the rain beat against the trunks of the trees like breakers, flinging back clouds of spray. Despite the hood of her oilskin cloak Lottie’s frizzed blond bangs were wet and drooping, and water dripped into her eyes at every step. Puffing as she trudged, her corsets creaking and her taffeta petticoats weighted with damp, Lottie cursed Aaron Stemple for putting his hideout so far from town, and for—whatever it was.

  She’d known for a week there was something wrong. It wasn’t like Aaron to turn hermit like this. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of a gay blade, but he would usually drop around the saloon of an evening, to exchange gossip and hear the news if Captain Clancey happened to be in port. One of the men who worked for Stemple at the mill had said something last night about the “old man” being sick.

  Not sick, thought Lottie, as the warm gold lights of the cabin glimmered ahead of her through the trees. She’d seen him yesterday, on his way back from the mill, though earlier than usual; had noted then how drawn he looked. For all he was a closefisted and shut-hearted man, she knew the look of trouble when she saw it. Twenty-five years and more of pouring drinks had taught her that.

  He opened the door to her knock and stood for a moment, the light from the lamp behind him touching an edge of gold on the white of his shirtsleeves. “Lottie,” he said, surprised. Perhaps he’d thought no one would notice his changed behavior, or maybe he’d just assumed that no one would care.

  “Aaron,” she greeted him, and pushed back the hood of her cape.

  After a moment’s hesitation he stepped aside to let her in, and took her cloak to hang in the shelter of the lean-to kitchen. “What brings you so far from town?”

  He looked bad, she thought. His saturnine face had a harried look to it, and there was an upright line between his low black eyebrows that she hadn’t seen before. As he preceded her into the small parlor and reached to turn up the lamp she saw on his wrist and hand livid purple-brown bruises, as though impossibly powerful fingers had all but crushed the bones.

  “I was worried about you,” she said simply. “You’ve been holed up here like a wintering bear since you came back from Olympia. I was afraid you might be in some kind of trouble.”

  Stemple was so touched by this that he didn’t even make his usual sarcastic reply. “I—thank you, Lottie. But it’s nothing. A man’s got a need to be by himself now and then. ...”

  She brushed off the obvious lie. “Are you ill?”

  He shook his head. “But thank you, truly, for your concern.”

  “Is it anything I can help with?”

  “No. No, it’s a—a personal problem.”

  In the softness of the lamplight that threw their magnified shadows across walls and ceiling, Lottie could see that Stemple had been reading. Not reading, really, she thought, looking around her at the books strewn over the desk among the accounts and financial papers of the mill and stacked on every piece of the cabin’s simple furniture. Searching for something through the pages of every volume he possessed.

  “I won’t pry,” she said softly. “But if there’s anything I can do to help—anything any of us can do—you’ll let me know?”

  Stemple hesitated, torn between his desire for secrecy and his need for help. It occurred to him that Lottie could aid him, for she had doubtless done her share of pool-table first aid and backroom midwifery in a checkered career that spanned the Natchez river-boats and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. For all there had been a time he’d looked down on her as a common saloonkeeper, life on the frontier had changed things for him. He knew that this stout, handsome, competent woman, who could outcurse a British sergeant of marines, had a good and gentle heart. Few things could shock or frighten her anymore, and he
stood in desperate need of clearheaded advice.

  “I don’t know whether you can help,” he sighed. “Or whether anyone can. In fact I don’t really know what kind of help I need. Come here, Lottie.”

  He took her arm, and guided her to the small door that led into the tiny bedroom.

  The lamp there was turned down dim. She saw the shape of a man beneath the quilts of the bed, the face a darker blur between the white of the pillows and the white of bandages. Bandaged hands lay on top of the cover. There were more books here, and the small litter of medical aid: the ends of bandages, stained dressings, scissors, the smell of sickness and herbs and tallow. She glanced quickly at Aaron, his heavy features obliquely lit by the glow of the fire in the other room.

  “Who is it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I found him in the woods seven days ago, on my way back from Olympia.”

  She moved in a rustle of heavy petticoats to the bedside. “But why didn’t you—”

  Stemple reached to turn up the lamp. “That’s why.” He heard the woman’s breath catch in something like horror.

  The quickening light revealed the man’s features, and the color of the blood that stained the discarded wrappings. Lottie whispered, “What on God’s earth ...”

  “That, Lottie,” said Stemple quietly, “was exactly my question.” The lamplight stitched in brief gold the line of his watch chain as he leaned one shoulder against the doorpost, then left him as only a dark cutout of shadow. Behind him, rain drummed faintly on the curtained windows.

  Hesitantly, she extended a hand to feel the man’s face, and drew it back in alarm.

  “He’s been hotter than that,” said Stemple’s voice over her shoulder, “but never cooler, once he came out of the first shock. He seems to be sleeping easily now, so I’d say that’s his normal temperature. If his blood’s not like ours, why should the rest of his body be? But you can see why even if there was a doctor closer than San Francisco I couldn’t send for one.”

  “No.” Lottie had seen men lynched for the color of their skin before this, let alone the color of their blood. “Has he spoken?”

  “No.” Stemple shifted his weight against the frame of the door. “I’ve sat with him for seven nights now. He’ll go into delirium sometimes, dreaming things—seeing things—reliving whatever experience brought him here.” He held up his bruised hand. “He’s tremendously strong. Whatever it is he dreams about, I have no desire to experience. Those injuries on his face and neck are laid out in a pattern, Lottie—they were deliberately inflicted. Yet in all his dreaming, he’s never uttered one word, Lottie. He’s never made so much as a sound.”

  He came into the room, to kneel beside her where she knelt next to the bed. He went on, “When I found him in the woods, the ferns on all sides were covered with dew, dew that hadn’t been disturbed. But there was none on his clothing, except where it had been brushed off when he moved a little. But no trail—no track.”

  “But where—where had he come from?”

  “It isn’t where that bothers me so much, Lottie,” said Stemple, “as why.”

  She glanced sharply aside at him. “Why?”

  “Why is he here, Lottie?” He gestured to that still, strangely boned face in its frame of straight black hair. “Whoever he is, whatever he is, wherever he’s from—he isn’t on the Earth by accident. He can’t be.”

  “On the Earth?” she repeated. “You think he’s from—not on the Earth?”

  Stemple shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. But I do know that mankind has explored most of the corners of the globe by this time, and though they’ve found some fairly strange people, they’re all human. From the Hottentots of Africa to the Laplanders to the Chinese, they all have red blood. Earth is a planet, like Mars or Venus. Is it inconceivable that, like Earth, those other worlds could be inhabited as well?”

  Lottie made no reply for a time, gazing down at the face of the man on the bed, seeing him for the first time as a man, not an alien being. Saw that he was a man in his full prime, tall and spare and dark; that his supple, sensitive fingers had never been broken by manual labor. His nose had never been broken, either. Not a fighting man, she thought. Then she looked back at Aaron, struggling with thoughts long unexplored. “Not—inconceivable,” she said slowly. “But—how would he get here? What would he be doing here?”

  “We may learn that,” said Aaron, “when he wakes up. But what I’m wondering is—what about the others? Others like him, healthy, unhurt, walking among us. His hair is almost long enough that if he combed it forward to cover the tips of his ears, who would know? How many of them are among us now, passing for human?”

  The woman shivered, though the room was warm.

  He got to his feet, prowled to the window where now only darkness lay beyond the rain-streaked glass. “I don’t even know if I did right by saving him. If he comes from somewhere—Mars, Venus, some other world entirely, since they tell us every star is really a sun—it would have taken him—them—a great deal of trouble to get here. They wouldn’t have made the trip for no reason, Lottie. The deliberateness of those wounds tells us something about the people who inflicted them. What if they came with ill intent, toward us, toward the Earth?” He turned back to her, his dark face grave and lined with tiredness. “I don’t even know whether he’s human or not—what we would call human.”

  Lottie rested her arm among the blankets on the edge of the bed where the alien lay motionless. Seven nights, she thought. He has sat here seven nights, beside that silent, tormented sleeper, with those thoughts his only company.

  “What is human, Aaron?”

  “You tell me. I’ve met wealthy and educated gentlemen who didn’t consider their own slaves human. I’ve looked ...” He gestured toward the books that piled the room’s wing chair and small table. “What makes us human and not beasts? He looks like us, Lottie, but he may have no more soul than a panther.”

  Aaron returned to her, and gave her his hand to help her up, her whalebone corsets creaking as she moved. They paused in the doorway to the parlor, and she looked back at the still face of the alien, the pity she felt for him as a man in desperate trouble struggling for a moment against her fear of the unknown. “You did save his life, Aaron.”

  “True enough,” agreed Stemple cynically. “And if he isn’t human, that might mean he won’t turn on us, after all.”

  He took a lantern down from the parlor wall and lit it with a long spill from the fire. Lottie took it, and vanished into the rainy darkness of the night.

  As Lottie had foreseen, the saloon was thriving when she returned there. Wu Sin, the China boy who worked for her, gave her a solemn little bow as she came through the door and took her heavy oilskins as she shed them. Half a dozen loggers were bellied up to the rough planks of the bar, and a little knot of mill-hands was grouped around the larger of the room’s two tables, playing monte with Joshua Bolt, who was cleaning them out with his usual quiet efficiency. Joshua’s older brother, Jason, senior of the three brothers who jointly owned Bridal Veil Mountain, stood at one end of the bar. He nursed a whiskey and listened to Captain Clancey, just in from the San Francisco run, and holding forth about the possibilities of running a railroad from Independence, Missouri, through to California to replace the wagon and stage routes.

  “It’ll never work, Clancey,” someone was saying. “The Indians’ll kill off the crews. ...”

  “Ah! Listen, boy-o, if the United States Army could lick the Rebels, it’ll sure be able to lick the Indians. ...”

  “But they’ll never be able to get it across the Rocky Mountains. ...”

  Impromptu demonstrations of engineering were organized with whiskey glasses and twigs to prove the point all along the bar. The whole place was smoky and warm in the deep orange-gold of the kerosene lamplight, smelling of whiskey and damp wool and maleness.

  Lottie smiled to herself.

  Home.

  “Hey, Lottie me lass.” Clancey made a gr
ab for her which she ducked as lightly as if she’d been a girl of sixteen, and stepped behind the bar. “And how’s the belle of the Pacific Slope?”

  “Wet as a drowned rat,” she replied with a twinkle. “How’s the sound tonight?”

  “Rough as the road to Heaven and cold as an Orangeman’s heart,” said Clancey, but the tone in his boozy voice was one of love for the sea and the wild rainy weather. Thick-built, red-faced, with a great ruff of fading red whiskers, Roland Francis Clancey had spent the better part of his life on the sea, and though he would never admit his love for that wild and terrible mistress, he would follow the sea till he died. “And how have things been mindin’ themselves here?”

  “Never better,” said Lottie brightly, smiling away the disturbing shadow of the man who lay unconscious in the cabin at Eagle Head Point. “Miss Pruitt tells me that the New Bedford girls are planning a New Year’s celebration already, to mark their first year here in the town.”

  “That’s right,” agreed the sea captain, smiling, “January first it was that we landed here, after all that way ’round the Horn.” He gave Jason Bolt a wink. “And that’ll be the day your bet with Mr. Stemple is up, will it not?”

  Bolt shrugged, as if he had only just remembered.

  Clancey gave him a sly dig in the ribs. “You think you’ll be makin’ your bargain?”

  Jason smiled with expansive confidence. “No problem. They’ll all be spoken for by the first of January, bank on it. Which you probably have, if I know you. Aaron Stemple may have blackmailed me into putting up Bridal Veil Mountain as collateral for bringing the girls out here, but half of them are married already, and more spoken for. I’ll win that bet.”

  “And Miss Biddy Cloom?” asked Clancey slyly.

  “Clancey,” said Jason, “if it comes to January first and Miss Cloom hasn’t found a husband yet, I’ll marry her myself.”

  “Brave man,” declared one of the mill-hands with a laugh, and Lottie, angry for that plain and loud-voiced girl’s sake, shot him a look that silenced him.