STAR TREK: The Original Series - Garth of Izar

by Pamela Sargent

  “Then what do you suspect?” Spock asked.

  “They know that relatives and friends are now exiled on Acra,” Garth replied, “and that knowledge is impelling them to go east as a protest. It has created a bond of sympathy among them. As Wenallai explained to Captain Kirk before, her people aren’t telepathic, but they do share a kind of deep empathy at times. That may be why those Antosians seem to be entranced—they are, in their own way, a very suggestible race. Otherwise, those who became rebels wouldn’t have been quite so susceptible to my mad ideas.”

  “In other words,” Spock said, “their minds and their thoughts can, under certain conditions, change shape as easily as their physical selves do when they are changing shape.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Garth said, “even if the reality is somewhat more subtle and complex. It’s why Empynes believed that the only way to put a stop to the rebellion and prevent widespread bloodshed [201] was to isolate the dissidents at Acra, and also why Gyneesesfelt that he could control the rebels for his own purposes once they were exiled. It means that a more forceful mind, or a more powerful will, can impose itself on other Antosians by drawing on that natural empathy.”

  Sulu had flown their shuttlecraft ahead of the procession. Spock considered what Garth had told him, then said, “I think that Mr. Sulu and I should remain here and observe these people a while longer. I propose that we continue on to the cliffs, land a short distance from the Antosians, and then wait to see what they will do next.”

  “My prediction,” Garth said, “is that they’ll stay therefore a while and then either turn back to the city or go off on their own to start their own rebellion. There won’t be much you can do in either case, Commander.”

  “Stay there as long as you feel it’s necessary,” Kirk added, “but don’t interfere.”

  “I intend only to observe,” Spock said.

  Garth approached the captain’s station. Kirk looked up at his fellow captain, who had been followed to the bridge by McCoy.

  Garth drew himself up. He seemed steadier now, ready to resume an officer’s duties. Lieutenant Farley Longstreet had taken over at Sulu’s helmsman’s station, while Ensign Enrico Carulli was at the navigator’s post usually occupied by Chekov.

  [202] “Perhaps you can take over Spock’s bridge duties,” Kirk said. He might have ordered Garth to do so, but he would observe the courtesy of treating the other captain as his equal as long as the man seemed up to the responsibility.

  “Of course.” Garth went to the science officer’s station and sat down.

  McCoy came toward Kirk and stood at his left. “There’s nothing more I can do for Empynes,” the physician murmured. “His life signs are just about flat. I left him in Ilsa Soong’s care, but it’s largely up to Wenallai now, and I don’t know how much even she can do for him.”

  “I’m sorry, Bones.”

  “I’m damned sorry myself.”

  Kirk studied the latest sensor readings on the viewscreen. The second group of Antosians to leave Pynesses was gaining on the first group, and a third group was massing in the northeastern end of the city, as if preparing to follow the first two. He wondered how many more would join the protest, how many more might decide to carry on the fight that the exiles had begun.

  Sulu had set the Galileo down near the edge of the cliffs. Spock stood with the lieutenant near the edge of one precipice. Ahead of them, to the east, stretched the vast calm expanse of the Antosian ocean, a blue-green sea with gentle swells. Nearly a kilometer below them, at the bottom of the high sheer scarp, [203] waves lapped against a shoreline of black sand and flat black rocks.

  Spock turned away from the view and looked northwest. On the horizon, he could just make out the tiny forms of riders on elleis. The Antosians in vehicles fanned out from the riders, moving southeast across the flat plain of grass.

  “It looks,” Sulu said, “as though they’re getting ready to spread out in a long row along the edge of the cliffs.”

  “A reasonable assumption, Mr. Sulu,” Spock said. “I suggest that we fly farther south, so as to keep our distance from them. We do not want them to feel threatened by our presence.”

  More Antosians appeared on the horizon, in carts and on elleis, moving steadily east as Spock and Sulu hurried toward the Galileo.

  On the beach below, Hala-Jyusa was striding up and down in front of the massed Antosian rebels. Uhura watched from the hillside as the Antosian woman opened her arms, gestured at two of the large shore birds as they flew overhead, then turned to point to the late afternoon sun in the west. Hala-Jyusa was speaking to her comrades, but Uhura was too far away to hear what she was saying.

  “I wonder what they’re doing,” Yeoman Wodehouse said next to her.

  Chekov squatted at Uhura’s left. “It looks as though she is making some sort of speech,” he murmured.

  [204] Uhura reached for her communicator, wanting to be ready in case they had to beam out of there quickly. Another Antosian, a tall man with blond hair, went to Hala-Jyusa’s side and lifted a hand; he seemed to be pleading with her. Hala-Jyusa shook her head at him; the man took a step back. Then the Antosians on the beach began to line up along the shoreline in three rows, still gazing to the west.

  Suddenly the Antosians were changing, their bodies flowing, “They are morphing,” Chekov said as he stood up.

  Uhura quickly got to her feet.

  The necks of the people below were lengthening. Their clothing vanished as feathers sprouted from their bodies. She heard a high-pitched, almost hysterical shriek coming from the morphing Antosians. The human figures were gone, and hundreds of tall, gray-feathered birds covered the white sand.

  “Uhura to Enterprise.”

  “Kirk here.”

  “Captain, the Antosians on the beach have taken on the form of large birds. They—”

  Uhura broke off as the birds nearest the water line extended their wings and then lifted, flying out over the sea. Others flapped their wings and quickly took off after them.

  “They’re flying west, over the ocean,” Uhura finished.

  “They’re trying to escape,” Kirk’s voice said.

  More birds lifted out across the ocean. Far over the [205] water, a swarm of winged creatures was flying sunward. A chill passed through Uhura; the sight reminded her of a Durer engraving depicting the escape of devils from hell. The western sky was filled with fliers emitting a piercing sound, like laughter. Below, on the beach, a few Antosians had taken on humanoid form once more. They looked up as the last of the large gray birds took off after the swarm.

  “They can’t make it, Captain Kirk,” Garth said from the science officer’s station aft. “They won’t have enough strength to keep that shape long enough to reach the coast, much less to carry their own greater weight. They’re too far away from the continent to make the flight.”

  Kirk realized that the escaping Antosians had also taken on the forms of birds much smaller than themselves. A morphing Antosian could not decrease his own mass, which would be too great to keep him aloft for long.

  “What can we do?” McCoy asked.

  “A shuttlecraft,” Kirk said. “We might be able to turn them back.” He pressed a panel next to the comm at his station. “Kirk to Spock.”

  “Spock here,” the Vulcan replied. “Captain, the Antosians are lining up about a third of a kilometer to the north of us. They are standing near the edge of the cliff, looking east across the ocean, as though they are expecting—”

  “Are they morphing?” Kirk asked, thinking that [206] some of those Antosians might also begin to change shape and transform themselves into birds.

  “No, Captain.”

  “The Antosian exiles at the beach on Acra have morphed into birds,” Kirk said, “and they’re flying in your direction. You and Sulu are to take off immediately. Fly toward those birds as fast as you can and try to make them turn back.” Kirk turned aft. “Captain Garth, come with me to the shuttlebay. We’ll take the Colum
bus down and see if we can herd them back to Acra.”

  “Of course, Captain,” Garth said as he headed toward the lift.

  “And I’m coming with you,” McCoy said as Kirk stood up. “Those fliers will be burning up every bit of energy they have. You might need a doctor there.”

  Uhura hurried down the hillside and thrashed her way through a thicket of shrubs, Chekov and Wodehouse at her heels. On the darkening beach, the few remaining Antosians milled around nervously before the breakers, still looking out across the sea toward their invisible homeland five hundred kilometers away. Over the ocean, the cloud of fliers grew smaller. A dark-skinned man suddenly morphed into a large bird and lofted, flying after the distant cloud.

  “Stop!” Uhura cried. “Turn back!” The other Antosians backed away from her and then fled up the beach.

  [207] “Don’t they know they can’t make it?” Wodehouse asked. “Are they suicidal?”

  “That is why some of them stayed behind,” Chekov said.

  The winged fliers were now a swarm of insects against the glow of the setting sun. Uhura searched the sky for some sign of the Columbus, even though she knew it was still too soon to see it. A suicide flight, she realized, meant despair among Hala-Jyusa and her followers, and the end of all hope. She wondered at the depths of their feelings, of the desolation they must have felt at the coming defeat of their cause, and at the threatened loss of part of their physical heritage. The dream of flight, Uhura thought, the wish to escape on wings, was about to end in a nightmare of death.

  But somehow she could not accept that this was a mass suicide. Most of the fliers had to believe they would make it, despite the expenditure of energy required to keep their avian shapes, despite the added mass, regardless of the distance that had to be covered. Maybe they would make it, she told herself, silently cheering for them.

  Sulu was at the controls. Spock gazed through the Galileo’s three forward viewports at the distant flock of fliers as the shuttlecraft flew over the wrinkled blue surface of the ocean. He still thought that the Antosians who were gathered along the cliffs far behind them had left Pynesses to protest the exile of [208] their fellows, and were keeping a vigil along the eastern coast as a prelude to their own rebellion.

  Now Spock hypothesized that somehow, perhaps unconsciously, the Antosians on the cliffs had sensed that the exiles were going to attempt an act of desperation.

  Ahead of the shuttlecraft, the cloud of fliers began to resolve into individual figures. “Maybe they’ll turn back,” Sulu said, “now that they’ve seen us.”

  “Perhaps,” Spock said. He saw the flying Antosians clearly now; a few of them were losing altitude. Others seemed to be weakening, dropping lower until they were only a few meters above the ocean surface. Still they continued their flight; he saw that they were not about to turn back.

  Sulu banked to the left in order to avoid them, then circled the fliers in a wide arc. The sun was low in the west; a long golden band bisected the dark blue surface of the sea. Above, Spock noticed a small black object in the sky.

  “Kirk to Spock,” the captain’s voice said from the comm.

  “Spock here.”

  “I’m just above you, at the controls of the Columbus,” Kirk said. “Stay near them.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Sulu said.

  “They are not turning back,” Spock said, “and they are showing no signs that they will.”

  “Get in front of them,” Kirk ordered. “We’ll try some bird herding.”

  * * *

  [209] Kirk piloted the Columbus toward the cloud of flyers. The feathers of the Antosian birds were silver-gray in the light of the evening sun. He brought the shuttlecraft down directly behind them, then dropped below them. He saw now that several were flying perilously close to the surface of the water.

  At his right, Garth said, “They’re weakening.”

  The Columbus shot westward until it was under the flock. The shuttlecraft’s sensors indicated that the Galileo was north of them, also flying under the Antosians. Kirk slowed his shuttlecraft until he was matching the speed of the birds.

  There was a thud from overhead, as if something had struck the Columbus.

  “One of them has landed on top of us,” Garth said; he was studying the sensor readings on the console in front of him. “The instruments confirm that. They’re tiring.”

  Kirk glanced at the sensor readings on his console as another thud sounded from above; a second flier had landed on their craft. Suddenly a body dropped past the viewport; he caught a glimpse of what looked like a human body with wide feathered wings for arms.

  Icarus had fallen into the sea, he thought, and wondered how many others would follow.

  Garth took a deep breath. “It’s begun,” he said. Kirk looked toward the other captain and saw the expression of pain and horror on Garth’s face. “Some of [210] them are already losing their strength. Only a few will make it to the mainland.”

  “Maybe none of them will,” McCoy said behind them in an anguished voice. “Isn’t there anything else we can do?”

  Kirk looked up through the forward viewports at the dark shadow of the fliers, and realized that to turn the flock back would be difficult at best and would only tire the Antosians more quickly, unsuited as was their size to staying aloft long enough to cover either the long distance ahead, or even the distance back to the island of Acra. The point of no return might have already been passed, given the physical energy that was being expended with every moment spent in flight.

  Kirk opened a channel on his comm. “Kirk to Spock.”

  “Spock here.”

  “The fliers are getting weaker,” Kirk said. “At least two have landed on our craft, and one’s fallen into the ocean. Any ideas?”

  “It would appear to be hopeless, Captain, unless they turn back. But there is no sign that they intend to return to Acra.” Spock paused. “Two fliers have just fallen from the top of our shuttlecraft. We could slow down even more, and perhaps a few would be able to land on either the Galileo or the Columbus and hang on, but we would be unable to rescue more than a few that way—perhaps two dozen at most.”

  If the Antosians could not make it to the mainland, Kirk thought, they seemed determined to die in the [211] attempt. It was a suicidal gesture; only a few of them could still be deluding themselves that they would make it to the coast of Anatossia. There was a thud from above; another flier was desperately clinging to life.

  The Antosians who had remained behind on Acra huddled together on the beach, keeping their distance from Uhura and her comrades. She slowly walked toward them, with Wodehouse at her right and Chekov at her left. They shrank away from her as she approached, and she thought that they might suddenly flee up the hill or into the tropical forest that bordered the beach, but they remained where they were, and then she saw the tears on their faces.

  “We won’t hurt you,” Uhura called out. She held out her hands, to show that she was holding no weapons.

  “They will not make it,” a brown-haired woman said as Uhura and her shipmates halted near the group. “I was going to go with them, I wanted to go, I felt myself changing, but then I grew afraid.”

  “Something is wrong,” a bearded man said. “I feel it, I sense it. I believe that some of our comrades are already lost.”

  “Hala-Jyusa told us that it was our only chance,” a short, broad-shouldered man murmured. “She said that if we made ourselves into fliers, if we could cross the ocean and make it to the eastern cliffs of Anatossia, that our people would finally realize that we could not be defeated, that our cause was just. [212] She mocked those who thought that we could be bound by the limits of this island, that we would be content to live here passively with no resistance at all, without trying to reclaim our rightful destiny.” As the man spoke, his dark eyes grew lighter until they were golden yellow; his gaze was that of a fanatic, or of Hala-Jyusa herself. Then he looked away and bowed his head. “They cannot reach Anatossia. I have come to
understand it. The sea will claim them.”

  “Captain Kirk will do everything he can to save the others,” Chekov said. But Uhura doubted there was anything anyone could do for them now.

  Kirk heard the sound of another flier drop onto the roof of the Columbus and knew that there was something else he would have to try, as desperate a measure as it was.

  “Kirk to Spock,” he said into the comm.

  “Spock here.”

  “Stand by, Mr. Spock. Kirk to Enterprise.”

  “Scott here.”

  “We’re still below the flock of shape-changers,” Kirk said, “and we’ve lost a few already. Can you use the ship’s transporters to pluck them out of the air?”

  “It’s risky, Captain. Trying to capture a moving object with a transporter beam risks severe damage to the subject. I could try to track several fliers, so as to keep the beam steady relative to their motion, but it [213] would be extremely chancy. I’d have to allow for the ship’s motion, and we’d need all the transporter rooms even to—”

  “Do it,” Kirk said. “Save as many as you can.”

  “We will lose some of them, Captain,” Spock’s voice said.

  “It’s too risky,” McCoy said from his seat aft.

  “It’s either that or their certain deaths,” Kirk said.

  “We’ll not like some of what we rematerialize,” Scott said ominously. Kirk glanced at Garth and knew that the other man was remembering his own transporter accident.

  “We have no choice, Scotty,” Kirk said. “How long?”

  “Fifteen minutes to program the computers and get a crew on duty in every transporter room. You and the Galileo will need to fly well ahead of the rest of the flock for a wee bit, until I can get a fix on them. I’ll start picking them up from the rear, using your shuttlecraft as a primary coordinate fix.”

  “Acknowledged. Kirk out.” He increased speed and flew out from under the flock, feeling as though both he and the Antosian birds were chasing the setting sun. “Garth, how many have we lost?”