STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “But you did follow the path they’d have taken,” pointed out Joshua. “There is only one path back to town.”

  “But we half expected to find them safe here,” Stemple said. “It’ll be daylight in an hour—we can begin the search then.”

  The hunt started as soon as it was light enough to see clearly. Stemple noticed with a stab of his old uneasiness that Ishmael was able to distinguish finer details in the dim gray light of the rainy morning far sooner than any of the Bolts or their men. Biddy, rather typically, had refused to be escorted back to town, insisting upon joining the searchers herself. In this, Ish unexpectedly seconded her.

  “But it’s no job for a woman,” protested Stemple indignantly.

  It was the first time he’d seen the alien nonplussed by anything he had said. An eyebrow tipped up in the closest thing to surprise he’d ever seen out of Ish. “What is the logic of that statement?” asked Ish after a moment.

  It was Stemple’s turn to be stumped. “Er—that is—she’d only be in the way!”

  The other eyebrow went up. “As I would, Aaron. Miss Cloom has nearly eight months’ more experience with these woods than I have, and moreover is not lame.”

  Aaron struggled for a moment, then fell back on the age-old clinching argument, “But she’s a woman!”

  “An astute observation, Aaron,” replied Ishmael. “Perhaps you would care to enlighten me as to what her gender has to do with her ability to locate missing persons?”

  “Dammit, Ishmael ...”

  Ishmael waited politely for a continuation of the sentence. When none seemed forthcoming, he said, “ ‘Dammit, Ishmael’ does not seem to be an argument remarkable for its cogency, Aaron.”

  Aaron watched him in exasperation as he turned back toward Biddy, and reflected that perhaps where Ishmael came from the standards of ladylike conduct were less rigidly drawn. Well, of course, he thought, a little disgusted with himself for his own automatic assumptions. It didn’t make it any easier to put up with Biddy, but it did make him pause to think.

  That was, Aaron had found, one of the curious things about Ishmael. Aaron had accepted him as an alien, a stranger trying to blend into his surroundings, to the point where he found himself forgetting that Ish was not of this world. But there were times when Ishmael would not and did not blend, and his calmly critical observations had a way of making Aaron wonder about those surroundings which he had always taken for granted.

  Ishmael might have lost all memory of the world that gave him birth, thought Aaron, as they pushed through the misty silence of the dawn woods, but that world had left its mark on him, almost visible, like a reversed image in an empty mold.

  Biddy’s voice broke into his thoughts as they turned from the main path to follow yet another obscure trail. “But why would they have come this way?” she wailed, hoisting her clammy skirts clear of the wet ferns that blanketed the ground. “There isn’t anything out this way!”

  “If they had become lost in the woods in the rain,” replied Ishmael back over his shoulder, “they could have wandered anywhere. And if, as you say, ‘anything’ could have befallen them, logically there is no telling where they would finish up.”

  They halted, for the dozenth time, to let Biddy catch up, and Ish stood looking around him at the cathedral depths of the woods, now thick with curtains of drifting gray mists through which the voices of the other searchers drifted faintly, increasingly far away as the search widened.

  Quietly, Aaron said, “Jeremy’s a good woodsman. It isn’t likely he’d have gotten lost between here and town no matter how hard it was raining.”

  “Precisely my thought.” Ishmael glanced around him again, and his slanted eyebrows moved slightly downwards in annoyance.

  “What is it?”

  Ish gestured. “Nothing. It is just that I know there is an easier way to conduct this search. A way to scan large tracts of territory for life-form readings.” His hand moved again, as though to conjure the familiar weight and shape of some instrument in his hand.

  There it was again, thought Aaron, looking doubtfully up into the younger man’s Mephistophelean face. A turn of phrase, a way of putting words together—a speech pattern emptied of its context but springing unconsciously to Ishmael’s unguarded tongue. The phrase “life-form readings”—whatever that meant—was like his assumption that a woman could join into a man’s task of searching the woods or would even want to, a spar thrown up out of the dark sargasso sea of lost memory.

  Ishmael went on, “Was there somewhere that they might have taken refuge when the rain was at its worst? It was very bad toward midnight.”

  Aaron didn’t inquire how he had deduced that. As far as he knew, they had both been in their respective beds and asleep long before that time. He only said, “There used to be an old mineshaft hereabouts, that somebody dug back in ’53 hoping they’d find gold. The main tunnel fell in years ago, but there were half a dozen smaller entrances, plus a couple of airshafts.”

  “It doesn’t make sense for them to come out here.” Biddy stumbled through the ferns to join them, holding up handfuls of skirts to reveal stoutly laced shoes and quantities of dew-soaked cotton petticoats.

  Ishmael turned to give her a hand up the trail. “Nor does it make sense to me for Miss Pruitt to have walked three miles in the pouring rain to preserve some obscure propriety about spending the night under the same roof as an unmarried man.”

  She slipped on the wet ferns, and Ishmael steadied her with an effortless strength that made Stemple remember the crushing power of the man’s grip during his delirium at the cabin. In the weak, rainy daylight Ishmael’s face looked harsh and strange, alien in spite of the dark hair that hid its odder angles. For a moment Biddy, looking up as Ish caught her arm, seemed to see it, but his remark distracted her and she said, “Oh, but she would! Candy would. You see, for her to stay there would be all the worse, because she and Jeremy ... Well, there might be talk.”

  “And talk, I suppose, is more to be dreaded than pneumonia?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Ishmael turned, and led the way into the deeper woods. As he brushed past him, Stemple thought he heard him mutter, “Humans!” to himself in disgust.

  “It’s true,” pointed out Biddy, holding Stemple’s arm for support as they started off after him. “You can always get over pneumonia.”

  The wind came up, slashing at the black branches of the pines that surrounded them and roaring with a sound like the sea. Laboring along the rising trail in Ishmael’s wake with Biddy Cloom hanging for support onto his arm, Stemple wondered how someone with a bad leg could move as quickly as Ishmael did. Black clouds were moving in off the sound, darkening the gray daylight. In another hour the search would have to be abandoned.

  They broke through the deepening shadows of the trees. Ahead of them, on the open ground of the rocky mountainside, Aaron could see Ishmael standing alone, the wind billowing his oilskin cloak around him and catching in his long black hair. For a moment, silhouetted against the violence of the cloud-wracked sky, he looked wholly uncanny, alien and unhuman, and Stemple heard Biddy gasp with a kind of uncomprehending shock. Then the gust of wind died, and in the resulting silence Ish stood head bowed, listening for some sound that only he could hear.

  Stemple made a move to go to him, but Biddy’s hand tightened over his arm, as if for a moment she feared to go forward.

  Ish raised his head. “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  Ish raised his head for silence. A gust of wind shook the branches overhead, threw rain on Stemple and Biddy as they stood listening.

  “Voices,” said Ish quietly. “Voices in the ground.”

  Stemple and Biddy looked confusedly at one another, but Ish was already moving, swift as a cougar, his head still bent to catch some unheard sound. After a puzzled shrug and a traded glance of bafflement, they followed.

  They caught up with him where the woods grew thicker again, on the other side of the r
ise of land. He was standing near a collapsed wooden structure, like a smashed outhouse half-buried under a wild tangle of vines.

  “Why, it’s one of the airshafts of the old mine,” said Biddy. “They put these buildings over them to keep animals and things from falling in. ...”

  “Be silent for once in your life,” snapped Ish, “and listen.”

  Biddy obeyed. Stemple said after a moment, “I don’t hear anything.”

  Impatiently, Ishmael laid hands to the fallen mass of struts and lumber, ripping them aside with a strength that was suddenly frightening. The shaft, a narrow hole down into the darkness of the rock, was almost completely choked with weeds. Ish knelt on one knee beside it, his head bent. Hesitantly Stemple followed suit, and finally faintly heard something—voices in the caved-in galleries of the old mine, a man’s and a woman’s, singing in the darkness.

  “I’d taken refuge in one of the old shaft entrances from the rain,” said Candy, many hours later, when she sat wrapped in blankets in the dormitory parlor, her long hair still streaked with filth and water from the mine. She accepted a cup of cocoa from the solicitous Biddy, and choked a little on the brandy Jason had stirred into it. Outside, the renewed rain hammered viciously against roof and walls. “Jeremy followed me. I suppose it was foolish, because the whole hillside was so wet it was a wonder it hadn’t caved in before that.”

  Jason shook his head. “It’s not something you usually think of happening.” He rubbed his damp, mud-splattered hair with a towel. Most of the men who had participated in the wet, laborious task of digging out the airshaft had gone home by this time. Only Jason and Joshua were left in the dormitory parlor with Ishmael, Stemple, Biddy and Candy. The rescue, once it came down to a matter of digging, had taken most of the day, and the light was fading now, the glow of the fire and of the few lamps that had been lit making deep patterns of apricot gold against the charcoal gray of the parlor’s long shadows.

  Joshua asked, “Why were you singing?”

  Candy hesitated before answering, turning the china mug slowly between hands that were still red and stiff with cold.

  “Did you expect to be heard?”

  She shook her head. “We found a draft of air that Jeremy said he thought was a shaft—it was pitch-dark, we couldn’t see and the roof was too high for either of us to reach. We’d been calling for hours. We knew no one would hear.” She glanced up, the firelight picking the green flecks in her hazel eyes. “I suppose you could say that was why we were singing. Because we were afraid. Because we knew we’d never be found.” Her eyes went to Ishmael, standing silently in the shadows beside the chimney breast. “Thank you.”

  Biddy said, “I still don’t see how Ish could hear ...”

  The kitchen door opened, and Lottie came through, rolling down her pushed-back sleeves. “Jeremy will be fine,” she said, in answer to Jason and Joshua’s inquiring looks. “Just a bump on the head, and chilled through. Keep an eye on him for a few days—if the pain gets worse or he starts seeing double ...” She broke off. If there were complications beyond her rough-and-ready skills, there was nothing to be done about them. There was no doctor closer than San Francisco.

  Jason sighed, and some of the harsh lines that the last twelve hours had seemed to carve into his face relaxed. After a moment he said, “I guess that elects you to go to San Francisco with Ish and Aaron after all, Josh. Can you be ready to sail in the morning?”

  Biddy, never one to release a promising topic, reiterated, “But I still don’t see how Ishmael could have heard you. ...”

  “Well,” broke in Stemple, with slightly exaggerated cheeriness as he gathered up his and Ishmael’s mackinaws, “if we’re going to sail in the morning, Ish, we’d better get the last of our packing done. We’ll see you tomorrow, Joshua.” He threw open the door, and Ishmael followed him obediently out into the rainy afternoon. They walked back toward the mill in silence.

  Only when they were passing through the woods that divided the mill and the house from the rest of Seattle did Aaron speak. “You’ll have to be careful about that. Human hearing isn’t that good. If you have any other abilities that are different from ours ...”

  “I have no way of knowing that, Aaron, until the occasion arises,” replied Ish. Their boots brushed through the wet weeds that fringed the path; all around them, the dark woods murmured with pattering rain. Ahead the rushing of the millstream was a faint thunder in the murky semidark. “By what means could I have convinced Jason that I had located them? A forked stick?”

  Stemple’s head whipped around. “What?” He frowned. “Do your people have water diviners, too?”

  An eyebrow went up slightly. “Wholly aside from the illogic of that method, there is no free ground water on ...” He stumbled to a halt, putting his hand instinctively to his head. Aaron, who had been walking a little ahead, came swiftly back to where he stood.

  “What is it?”

  Ish shook his head. His breath was harsh in the darkness of the tree shadows. “I—I do not know.” He pressed his other hand to the place where, Stemple knew the square greenish burn scars still marked his forehead. “A memory ...”

  “Of what?”

  There was a long silence, Ishmael staring with unseeing eyes into the distance, seeking that place, Aaron thought, that had no free groundwater. Then he lowered his hands, and sighed. “It’s gone,” he said simply. “I thought for a moment—the place that I came from—but it is gone.” Subconsciously he rubbed the scars that circled his wrists, an absentminded gesture, and began walking again.

  “Well, whatever the reasons,” sighed Aaron, falling into step with him once again, “if it hadn’t been for you being whatever you are, Candy and Jeremy would have died in that mine before they were ever found. So maybe it’s best that you did come here—for whatever reasons you came, and from wherever it is that you came. It hasn’t been a wasted trip.”

  “No,” said Ishmael suddenly, stopping once again. Before them, the open stretch of ground that surrounded the mill lay in desolation, scaled with the gleam of rain puddles. Ishmael’s voice was hoarse with strain. “No. I came here to do something, Aaron.”

  “Here?” said Aaron quietly. “To Seattle?”

  Ish pressed his hands to his forehead again, and Aaron could see the sudden beading of sweat on that curious, alien face. Ishmael’s breath had grown swift and harsh again, as though with an inner struggle.

  “I don’t know,” Ishmael whispered. “I don’t remember. But there was something I had to do—something vital—yet when I try to recall there is only the memory of pain. I must ...”

  A memory of pain, thought Aaron, watching him worriedly, that seemed to amount almost to pain itself. He touched the alien’s shoulder, and felt the shivering of his flesh. There was active torment in those dark eyes.

  “Ish,” he said quietly. “You say that you do not remember, but that you recognize things which you saw before. Isn’t it—logical—that when the time comes you will recognize what it is that you came here to do?”

  For a time Ishmael made no reply, but Aaron could feel him relax, and his shivering stopped. He had drawn back from trying to pierce that inner wall that cut him off from all that he had been. At length he said, “Perhaps.”

  “Who knows?” said Aaron, trying to break him out of that strange mood of desperation that was so close to his earlier despair in the cabin at Eagle Head. “It may be something you’ve already done, unawares.”

  “True,” agreed Ishmael, turning back to the path toward the mill. “And it is equally possible that I have, unawares, done something to prevent it ever being accomplished.”

  Chapter 7

  “OH, HELL, JAMIE, the base is crawling with scientists.” Kellogg strode ahead of Kirk through the steel and con-bast corridors with her familiar, long-legged stride. “Half the galaxy showed up to watch the fireworks caused by that damn dwarf star. We’ve been tripping over them for months. We might as well get some use out of them.”

&nb
sp; She turned and passed through a double door marked LAB DOME VII, her boots rattling briskly on the punched aluminum steps. Kirk followed. “And you think Dr. Steiner might help us?”

  “I know she can.”

  They emerged into the lab dome. After the claustrophobic rock of the older hive of tunnels, the newer part of the base felt weirdly airy for an enclosed space. This dome was half-unfinished, the aluminum floors still untouched by plastic patina and wads of insulating material visible through the con-bast shells of the inner walls. The place smelled of ozone and echoed eerily with the voices of people—human or otherwise—moving about in lab smocks or their equivalent with purposeful (if varied) motion.

  “Aurelia’s one of the finest practical astrophysicists I’ve ever met,” went on Kellogg, leading the way down another corridor, this time with no ceiling but the far-off roof of the dome itself. “She trained in the engineering section of the Potemkin, so she has a better practical base than most of the neutrino-splitters you’ll find around this place. If the Klingons did figure out how to create a time warp of some kind, she’ll be able to deduce how they did it and probably how you can do the same. If they didn’t she might be able to extrapolate from the data you collected when the transport disappeared and tell you what the hell they did do.”

  Kirk nodded, impressed. Kellogg, he knew, had been chief engineering officer on the Starship Republic, a circumstance curious for several reasons, among them that she had been one of six humans in the crew. He cast back in his mind, reviewing the women engineers he had met, for an Aurelia Steiner.

  Then Kellogg said, her hand hovering over the opening plate of the doors of Astrophysics Lab 14, “Oh, by the way, do Drelbs make you nervous? Aurelia’s a Drelb. She just took that name for administrative purposes.” And she preceded him into the lab.

  Like Maria, thought Kirk, following her with a wry grin, to have forgotten to mention it. She seldom thought of aliens as aliens—one of the qualities that made her such an excellent BC. For all her claims to be a simple engineer, Kellogg displayed an uncanny knack for intuitive xenopsychology that had more than once saved her life.