STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “Land of song,” sang the warrior bard,

  ’Tho all the world betrays ye,

  One sword at least thy rights shall guard,

  One faithful harp shall praise thee.

  Clancey hesitated in silence; stronger, surer now, Jeremy and Biddy swung into the second verse, with Ishmael singing alone.

  The minstrel fell, but the foeman’s chains

  could not keep his proud soul under.

  The harp he bore ne’er spoke again

  for he tore its cords asunder ...

  And Clancey revived, joining his whiskeyed voice to the deep baritone,

  And said, “No chain shall sully thee,

  Thou soul of love and bravery,

  Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

  They ne’er shall sound in slavery.”

  Aaron sighed, and glanced sideways to catch Lottie’s troubled eyes. He leaned across to her, and under cover of the blending of those diverse voices he said softly, “Why, Lottie? If he were entirely alien, I would understand. You saw him. You know what he is. But this—this half-ness. How can he speak English, let alone understand things like shanghai-ing and water-witches? Why does he recognize things that he couldn’t possibly know? The land around San Francisco Bay—the words to an Irish song? That’s what troubles me. Not that he’s alien, Lottie—but that he’s not.”

  Chapter 11

  “IT WAS A MISTAKE,” said Trae of Vulcanis thoughtfully, resting his thin hands on the faintly glowing console of the larger of the two computer terminals in his study, “for the Klingon imperial representative to panic. Offhand I can think of no clearer way in which he could have told anyone who was interested that they were on the right track.” He looked out at the three humans who sat in a semicircle on the small island of white couches in the midst of the cluttered and shadowy sanctum.

  “All right,” said McCoy. “So what was Khlaru working on?”

  Trae’s glance shifted to the doctor, an inflectionless query as to why Kirk had seen fit to saddle them with the retarded.

  “It isn’t that simple, Bones,” said Kirk quietly. “It might not be a single event. And it might not have been told about directly. We’d need ...”

  “Well, it would have to be a simple event, wouldn’t it?” McCoy said impatiently, a little tired of dealing with that maddening Vulcan superiority. “If the Klingons are tampering with time, it would have to be something very simple, and very small, because you said yourself, Trae, that we’d be dealing with an exponential progression of random factors. Every incident they tampered with, they’d run the risk of compounding the problem—every alteration of an event would put them in greater and greater danger of getting in their own way later on down the line. If it’s predictable, it has to be simple, and it just about has to be single. Doesn’t it?” He looked defiantly from Trae to Kirk, then back to the ancient Vulcan again.

  “I agree,” said the historian unexpectedly. “Yet such an incident as we seek might not have appeared to its contemporaries as important, and would not be recorded as such. To answer your question, Doctor—Khlaru, like myself, was working on translating and cataloging the Karsid outpost records discovered here ten years ago. The data had not been put in order even by its original compilers. It is a random assortment of intelligence reports, captains’ logs, scientific studies of the Tau Eridani Cloud, trade invoices and data readouts from the base computers, information much as you collect today, Commander Kellogg. Khlaru and I both filed periodic reports on our findings. I can only assume that the information from which the Klingons began their plan was taken from one of Khlaru’s reports.”

  “And where would those be?” asked Kirk.

  “Copies of the reports are logged in data retrieval.” Trae turned back to the terminal, long fingers poised over the console. “Logically, we can rule out reports filed within the last two years, as it would have taken the Klingons at least that long to evolve the mathematical theory and the hardware to implement their plans.”

  “Two years?” said Kellogg, aghast. “How many reports are we talking about?”

  “Seven years’ worth. Each report is approximately sixty thousand words, a total of roughly twenty reports to be read through for clues as to the Klingons’ intentions.” He tapped in a line of commands; from where he sat next to Kellogg and McCoy on the couch, Kirk could see the Vulcan’s thin face lit by the reflected green glow of the readout screen.

  “You’re kidding,” moaned McCoy.

  Trae glanced up. “No logical purpose would be served in my ‘kidding’ you, Doctor McCoy.” He returned his concentration to the screen before him as it flickered and changed.

  “There’ll be four of us working on it,” said Kirk comfortingly. “Six, if we can get Sulu and Uhura to help. They already know some of what’s going on—I don’t want to spread the circle any wider than that because we can’t risk letting word that we know what’s going on get back to the imperial representative. It won’t take more than a couple of ...”

  There was a sound from the console, a faint, sharp hiss of intaken breath that drew Kirk’s eyes as though it had been a cry of raw rage. Trae was standing, gazing at the screen before him, the green flicker of its lights playing across the eroded lines of his face. Even in the stillness he seemed to smoke with wrath. His voice was perfectly uninflected.

  “I fear not, Captain.” The dark folds of his garments caught the sheen of the lights as he moved down toward them again. “It seems that the imperial representative is not so foolish as we had thought. He has wiped all of the reports.”

  Only Kirk, a historian himself, understood the extent of the Vulcan calm and control behind those expressionless words. He knew himself to be only a dabbler on the fringes of the field, a dilettante—a history major rather than a historian. Yet he still felt a hot blaze of anger that anyone would destroy a historical record. In his days at the Academy he had met mousy and mild-mannered members of the history faculty who would savage anyone who laid a hand on their notes, and for the most part they had only been involved in the love of history for forty or fifty years. The Vulcan had been steeped in records of the past for six times that long—were he any other man he would have been in a killing rage. As it was, the silence that surrounded him and emanated from him was as cold and weighty as the slag of a dead star.

  Kirk said quietly, “We can come back later.”

  Trae’s dark eyes flicked to him, and for a split second he glimpsed the molten anger in their depths. “No,” said the Vulcan softly. “Delay would solve nothing. My—anger”—he almost could not pronounce the word—“is illogical, and I hope that I am sufficiently disciplined to think past it. Delay would only give the Klingons time—and of that, they already have more than a sufficiency.”

  His own attempted murder, thought Kirk, with wry amusement, had not angered the Vulcan nearly so much.

  “Logically,” Trae continued, “our best course now would be to re-extrapolate the data from the original sources.”

  “But that could take years!” protested Kellogg, aghast. “Hell, it took you years!”

  Trae’s glance touched her briefly, and moved away, dismissing the consideration as frivolous.

  “Let’s look at this another way,” said Kirk. “Spock had only a second or so of transmission time—anything he said had to be vital. We’ve ruled out 1867 as navigation points or computer codes or dates of anything else—I’m virtually certain it has to be an Old Reckoning Earthdate.”

  “If it was 1867 it would have to be Earth,” remarked McCoy, “because the Klingons couldn’t go anywhere but Earth in this part of the galaxy without running into the Karsids and getting tangled up in their own history.”

  “Your argument is circular,” said Trae crushingly, and turned his calm gaze back to Kirk. “But your point is well taken. I concede it conditionally.”

  “Thank you,” said Kirk.

  “Well then,” McCoy said, “what happened in O.R.-1867-A.D.?”

/>   “The forcible opening of Japan to Western trade, which precipitated the Meiji Restoration the following year,” replied Trae unhesitatingly. “Unrest in the Southern portions of the United States following an abortive revolt. The beginnings of the American policy of systematic genocide against the original inhabitants of the North American continent and the Pacific Islands. Opium wars in China. Victoria I was queen of England and Tzu Hsi de facto empress of China. Early attempts at agricultural reform and the freeing of the serfs in Russia. All things that would have come about without the presence or absence of any single man or woman.”

  Kirk folded his arms, and gazed for a moment into the dimness of that age-cluttered room. His mind told him that the old Vulcan was right. No single event could displace Earth’s history radically enough, predictably enough, to warrant the enormous expense and effort of going back to change it. And yet ...

  The memory of the Guardian returned to him, the cold in the bones as he had stepped through the stone circle of that icy gate. The stink of carbon monoxide and rain in the air and the sound of Edith Keeler’s voice. The knowledge of what he had to do, to undo what had been changed ...

  Only Spock knew. Only Spock and McCoy had been with him. Spock’s voice came back to him, haloed in static. ... “White dwarf, Khlaru, Tillman’s Factor, Guardian ...”

  Abruptly, he asked, “If you were a Klingon, what event would you choose to disrupt?”

  The Vulcan replied, “I would have placed a single low-scale nuclear warhead on Washington, D.C. in October of O.R.-1963-A.D.”

  “Why?” asked McCoy, startled at the selection. Like most people he tended to think of Washington, D.C. as a somewhat down-at-the-heels tourist trap notable chiefly for overpriced fried chicken and tours of crumbling monuments.

  “At the time it was the capital of the United States,” said the Vulcan. “At that date tensions between the Allies and the so-called Communist bloc had reached maximum levels. A bombing would have precipitated instant and destructive war. Five hundred years later, Klingon takeover would have been easy, as soon as radiation levels had gone down. The result predictable, but the event itself marginally before any other space-flight civilization had contacted Earth.”

  “I see,” said Kirk softly. “Then we aren’t really talking about Earth history at all.”

  “But if A.D. 1867 is an Earthdate ...” protested McCoy.

  “Might I remind you, Doctor,” said Trae dryly, “that to fully a third of Earth’s population at the time, the date was not 1867 A.D. but the Year of the Snake in the reign of T’ung Chih.” He turned back to Kirk. “Whether the date is of Earth’s history or not, all history is governed, in a large part, by economics. I fail to see how the Klingons could alter the course of world political and economic history to the point where it could be of any possible benefit to them.”

  “I agree,” said Kirk quietly. “I think we’re looking in the wrong league.”

  “Hunh?” said McCoy.

  “Clarify,” requested Trae.

  “I think you’re right,” said Kellogg.

  “I’m not sure how to put this,” said Kirk, moving restlessly away from the edge of the console where he had been standing and pacing the narrow length of the couch. “Earth history before we made contact with other space-flight civilizations is too limited for what we want. If the Klingons are taking the trouble to create a time warp and send someone back on a retrohistorical mission, they’re going to be damn certain that it will benefit them. It is simply too expensive and too risky to be experimental. Now if, as you say, history is a history of forces, of economics, what single event that early could have changed it to their benefit? What event could have had intergalactic, rather than simply Earth, repercussions?”

  “In 1867,” commented Maria, “not many.”

  After a moment of thought Trae nodded. “I understand your argument,” he said. “For that reason I doubt that Spock’s second transmission was genuine. The date is too early to be feasible.”

  “You mean,” said McCoy, “that the second transmission could have been faked by the Klingons to mislead us?”

  Kellogg broke in, “But we checked that. It’s Spock’s voice, all right. The voiceprints are identical.”

  “A trap.” The Vulcan shrugged. “The Klingons have a store of convincing arguments.”

  “No,” Kirk insisted. “They could have cut Spock to pieces before he’d lead us into a trap.”

  “He was half-human,” Trae commented, “and—weak—for a Vulcan. But if we accept the transmission as genuine, with what are we left? A date from which he assumed we would extrapolate both the place and the nature of the event—an event, as Dr. McCoy has deduced, necessarily small, but with intergalactic repercussions. There was a remarkable paucity of intergalactic incidents taking place on Earth in 1867 A.D.”

  “An event?” asked Kirk softly. “Or the absence of an event? Maybe it’s a paucity we’re talking about.”

  “I give up,” sighed Kellogg. “If we’re going to get into things not happening ...”

  “Something that should have happened but didn’t?” Kirk went on. “What didn’t happen on Earth in 1867?”

  “Klingon intervention, presumably,” said McCoy, a little snidely.

  “No,” said Trae suddenly. “Not Klingon intervention—Karsid intervention.”

  The three humans stared at him.

  “There were intelligence reports here regarding a Karsid attempt to initiate an infiltration of Earth. It was scheduled to follow their usual pattern of trade concessions, followed by increasing interference and then enslavement. But it was delayed by stiff resistance from the first Terran government they contacted. The delay was evidently critical, because word reached them in the interim of the revolts in the Orion systems. The project was shelved, and, as those revolts turned into full-scale revolution, scrapped along with all new infiltration projects.”

  With smooth swiftness he rose, and crossed to the maze of shelves that filled the entire rear wall of the study. The pigeonholes were unmarked, each containing a pile of faded flimsiplast scrolls and the newer fiches of translations. After a moment’s study Trae withdrew a photocopied translation, a stack of computer floppies and a yellowed original; his long fingers flicked through them, checking the one against the others. Then he turned back to Kirk. There was, as before, no sign of anger about him; only a sense of condensed rage that even his own attempted murder had not aroused within him.

  His voice was steady and quiet. “The originals are still here,” he said quietly. “They are intact. The imperial representative could destroy the reports by tapping through Base Central Computer, but without knowing which original documents to destroy, he would have had to destroy them all. Only Khlaru and I knew which of these was the original from which the reports were made.”

  He held up the roll of flimsiplast translation. “The next time you speak of the subservience of the Klingons to their imperial masters, Captain, and their lack of personal honor and integrity, please remember that it is inconceivable that Khlaru was not asked to identify this document.”

  Evidently, thought Kirk, Trae wasn’t the only stubborn historian upon the base. It must have been at that point that Khlaru had been sent back to his home-world, to what fate Kirk could only guess. He looked back at the Vulcan, and understood suddenly why Vulcans place the strictest possible bounds upon the expression of anger. The rage in Trae’s eyes was like a silent and contained explosion; the implacable quality of it reduced the hatreds of lesser races like humans, Klingons, or Kzinti, to mere short-term pyrotechnics.

  From his own seldom-spoken-of friendship with Spock, Kirk understood how rarely a Vulcan will admit to friendship and how deep that friendship must be before it is articulated. Yet Trae had spoken of Khlaru as his friend. There was nothing any of them could do for the Klingon historian, now that he had been called back to his home to face the consequences of his stubbornness. Spock’s death at the hands of the Klingons was uppermost in h
is mind as he said, “I am sorry.”

  “Indeed,” whispered Trae. “And one hopes that the Klingons will become a great deal sorrier.”

  He returned to them, the flimsiplast of the translation falling in a long wave down from his narrow fingers, like some arcane proclamation of a world’s doom.

  “Khlaru was the one who did most of the work on Karsid intelligence documents. He worked on this particular report, but as I recall ... ah.” He tapped a place in the middle of the report with a light finger. “At the time I attributed the resistance to native xenophobia—though it was curious that it was highly developed enough to prevent the acceptance of new technology. But according to the reports the resistance to the Karsid offers was largely the doing of one man—a minor government official who led an almost fanatical campaign against them. It is doubly curious considering the stage of economic development at which the Karsids attempted to intervene—a time of industrial expansion and the putting-aside of old taboos and fears. Here.” He looked up from his scroll.

  “What year was it in?” demanded McCoy, perching on the back of the couch.

  “Karsid Imperial 1056.3, which correlates ...” He leaned across to his keyboard, and tapped out a rapid sequence of letters. The tilt of his eyebrow was the most violent display of outer emotion Kirk had seen from him. “Earthdate O.R.-1873-A.D.”

  “Eighteen seventy-three?” McCoy traded a swift glance with Kirk. “That’s ...”

  Trae straightened up from his console again. “The Karsids habitually monitored a prospective planet by means of automated drones for at least three Karsid Imperial years before first contact. That would place the first appearance of their drones in O.R.-1868-A.D.”

  “That’s close,” whispered Kellogg, into the silence that followed the Vulcan’s pronouncement. “That’s damn close.”

  “So it had to be 1867,” said Kirk. “Any later, they would run into the drones. What was the name of the man they’d be looking for—this minor government official who managed to save the planet?”