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Strangers from the Sky

Page 23

by Margaret Wander Bonanno


  Everything the do-ityourself sorcerer needs.

  Astrology charts, home remedies for everything from

  bellyache to unrequited love, all neatly

  labeled in English and Latin and what I assume

  is Arabic. Shelves lined with skulls, most of

  them human, all the latest up-to-the-minute

  necessities for turning lead into gold, eye of

  newt and toe of frog, even a genuine crystal

  ball!"

  Something in the shape of a largish melon sat alone

  on a small table in the center of the room, glowing

  softly.

  "You may sneer, Mr. Mitchell," Parneb

  said lightly, "but those trappings will earn me a

  marginal living in a less enlightened era than this.

  And the "crystal ball" actually works."

  Kirk had gone at once to one of the high arched

  windows; the view from there confirmed his worst 203

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  fears. Centuries of debris had built up

  around the walls of their underground room, forming a tel

  that from the outside gave the appearance of a natural

  hill. At the base of that hill, some three

  stories below them, a busy street out of any

  Middle Eastern metropolis teemed with

  pedestrian and vehicular traffic. But it was all

  wrong. The vehicles, the clothes people wore, were at

  least two centuries out of date.

  Kirk moved away from the window. Among the

  runes and glyphs and zodiacal symbols everywhere

  about the room, his eye caught a perpetual

  calendar, conveniently set at October 2045.

  Perfect! Kirk thought.

  "Okay, Parneb," he said, rubbing his

  hands together. "We're convinced. What do we do now?"

  "You sit," Parneb advised, availing himself of a

  small prayer rug on the floor. "And indulge

  me by listening to a fable."

  "That does it!" Mitchell exploded, immediately in

  character. "Jim, how much more of this are we going to take?

  I've had it up to here with this clown and his mystical

  mumbo-jumbo his

  He lunged at Parneb as Kirk had

  downstairs. Kelso, playing along, intercepted

  him.

  "Easy, Mitch his

  Mitchell shoved him aside, grabbed for the

  crystal ball, and let out a genuine yelp of pain.

  "It gave me a shock!" He shook his hands

  to stop their stinging. "The damn thing's wired or

  something."

  "Actually, Mr. Mitchell" Parneb had not

  batted an eyelash during the entire performance "it

  is attuned to my wavelength. That makes

  it sensitive to being touched by anyone else. Next

  time, consider that one man's

  "mumbo-jumbo" may be another's science and a

  third's religion."

  "Parneb?" Elizabeth Dehner was

  once again taking surreptitious readings with her

  tricorder, humoring the 204

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  conjurer in her own psychiatrist's fashion.

  "Does your "fable" have to do with getting us back

  home?"

  "It most assuredly does, dear lady." He

  sighed, looking at Mitchell askance. "However,

  some require a demonstration first. Malesh, I will

  indulge Mr. Mitchell's scepticism!"

  From beneath his djellaba he produced a thin silver

  chain, pendant from which was a smaller piece of the same

  "crystal" as the large orb on the table, except that

  neither was crystal at all, but some murkily glowing

  opalescent stone that at times seemed to grow softer,

  change its shape, become gelatinous, pulsating,

  almost alive. And, at its center, it created

  images.

  Parneb closed his eyes, clasped the smaller

  crystal in his two hands, concentrated. The milky

  center of the larger crystal grew clear, became a

  starscape in which floated an angry flaring sun and

  its single gray-green unprepossessing planet.

  "Kapeshet!" Jim Kirk recognized it.

  "And M-155."

  "Is that what you called it?" Parneb wondered,

  opening his eyes. "Oh, dear, how boring! Well,

  but it is a boring little planet, isn't it?

  "I chose this boring little world for my experiment,"

  he went on, "because it was so remote and I thought

  uninhabited. Also,

  admittedly, the name of its sun intrigued me,

  Kapeshet being a contemporary of mine in

  Ancient Thebes. But how was I to know my

  interstellar sleight-of-hand would attract your

  attention and bring you poking around down there? By the time

  I saw you all stirring up dust it was too late.

  If I had not retrieved you and brought you here, well

  . . ."

  He let his voice trail off, frowned at the

  crystal for a moment before reverting to his normal

  benign expression. "At any moment now you will see

  your Enterprise placidly orbiting as if nothing

  has happened. Because, you see, as far as they are

  concerned, nothing has yet."

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  "How does it work?" Kelso gawked at the

  crystal, awed by a device that worked without visible

  mechanism. "Where does it come from? How do

  you his

  "Pretty impressive holography." Gary

  Mitchell sneered, still in character.

  "Mr. Mitchell, I assure you his

  "I don't see the Enterprise," Kirk said

  tightly. "What's happened to my ship?"

  "Undoubtedly it is orbiting the far side,"

  Parneb said too quickly, slipping the smaller

  crystal back inside his robe. The image in the

  larger crystal vanished abruptly. "Malesh, I

  must rest now. Later we will devote ourselves to finding

  your Vulcan."

  He resettled himself on his prayer rug, waited

  for Dehner to finish her tricorder readings. "Yes,

  my dear?"

  "Do you realise that when you go into

  that trance or whatever it is with the crystal," she

  said, "your body readings all go paranormal? Your

  pulse was over two hundred just now, and your

  neurological patterns his

  "Yes, it is quite exhausting actually." Parneb

  sighed. "The price one must pay, I suppose.

  Which is why you are best advised to do as Mr.

  Mitchell has suggested, and humor me."

  Mitchell managed to look surprised

  at being found out.

  "Which is not to say you are not a consummate actor,

  Mr. Mitchell. You almost had me fooled. But you

  see my hearing is also paranormal . . . A

  fable, then," he began once he had everyone's

  attention. "The tale of a being, seemingly human,

  who for some inexplicable reason was born backward in

  time, a being whose tms are yesterdays, whose destiny it

  is never to be entirely certain if what he

  remembers has already

  happened or is about to happen at some future

  time, with or without his participation."

  "Merlin," Elizabeth Dehner said out of nowhere.

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  Her three contemporaries goggled at her.

  "There's one version of the Merlin legend I think it's
<
br />   T. H. White in The Once and Future

  Kin tilde whereMerlin's magic is explained

  by his having been born backward, so that he can

  foretell the future because it's actually his past."

  "Except that Merlin was only a legend,"

  Kirk pointed out, vaguely irritated. One of his

  officers an Egyptologist, another suddenly an

  expert on medieval legends; it was all

  rather unsettling.

  "Interesting," Parneb mused. "Except that it was

  not entirely true of Merlin." He looked

  fixedly at Kirk. "Merlin was not legend,

  Captain. That one's dilemma win be an

  immortality similar to mine, though he will have the

  advantage at least of running with the clock. I will

  know him as Ahkarin, in quite another century. If I

  live that long. Are you beginning to fathom the

  magnitude of my problem?"

  "You're asking us to believe that you

  were" Kirk struggled with it "born in the

  future, and that you win live out your life in the past?

  How is that possible?"

  "How is it possible that you are here, in a time before

  you were born?" Parneb countered mildly.

  "But where were you born, when? Who were your parents?"

  "I do not knowI" Parneb said plaintively..

  "I have no clear recollection of my origins,

  though I know I was born not far from here. The past and the

  future flow together and switch back on each other

  until I scarcely ever know where I am. I seem

  to have lived in your twenty-third century; the scant

  knowledge I have of that time seems to confirm it. And I age

  far slower than an ordinary mortal. I

  have already survived several centuries and am doomed

  to live for several thousand years more, at least until

  the twelfth century B.c. when I shad his

  "Parneb," Lee Kelso said. He was not

  addressing the sorcerer by name, but recalling something

  he knew

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  from history. "Parneb of Thebes. Construction

  boss under Ramses III, master architect under

  five pharaohs. You're not you can't be his

  "I'm afraid I am, Lee," Parneb said

  sadly, familiarly. "Or will be. That is why I

  was curious about what you thought of the chamber beneath us. I

  will design a temple, and supervise its construction

  on this site, in 1198 B.c. It is one of the first

  and last things I remember."

  Lee Kelso lapsed at last into silence. It was

  all too much for him.

  Jim Kirk was far less awed.

  "Now that you've explained it," he said to Parneb,

  "it makes sense for you. But what does it have to do with

  us, with that planet?"

  "I had hoped, by means of a science I

  mastered will mastery in another century

  to use the crystal to focus my innate psychic

  abilities and reverse the chronology of my

  life," Parneb said, as if it were simplicity itself.

  "All I have ever desired is to be an ordinary

  human being, to live out my life in the proper order

  and to die in the fullness of time. When I succeeded in

  moving that lonely little planet across time and space,

  I thought I had found the key. But the experiment

  proved a failure, and in addition it endangered you and

  your people, Captain. I am sorry!"

  No one spoke for a long moment. Suddenly

  Parneb seemed no more nor less a madman than

  any of them might be, given his circumstances.

  "I ask you to consider" there was no trace of joy

  on his usually smiling face "the plight of one who

  awakens each morning not knowing if he is older or

  younger, who dares not give himself in friendship or love

  lest he watch those he cherishes grow younger even as his

  children live to become his elders. Consider one who must

  stand helplessly by as humanity unlearns what it

  knows, grows ever more superstitious and diseaseridden and

  primitive. If he tries to intervene, to speak

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  what he knows, he is stoned for a fool

  or persecuted for a sorcerer. I will live to see

  six thousand years of war beset this part of the world,

  Captain, and there is nothing I can do about it. Even

  you, who are here because of my dilemma, believe me

  only because to deny my reality makes you the madmen!"

  "It's insane!" Elizabeth Definer said

  quietly. All of her professional cool was

  gone; she was genuinely moved. "How sad!"

  "What's the crystal made of?" Mitchell

  asked, cutting across the mood, refusing to pity

  Parneb, refusing to succumb to any kind of feeling.

  "Where did it come from?"

  "A meteor," Parneb said dispiritedly, as if the

  whole subject wearied him more than he could say.

  "A chunk of rock of no composition I can

  analyze, retrieved from the desert, whence it drew

  me on a moonless night, and probably not mine

  to keep. I suspect it will in its time become an

  object of great value, even of worship. Perhaps the

  celebrated Philosophers' Stone? I do not

  know."

  Having told his fable, he seemed to gather it

  back into himself, put it back in its box while he

  resumed his characteristic affability.

  "Vulcans have a saying, do they not, that

  none can know the future? Obviously no Vulcan

  was ever trapped in my situation. Malesh, at least

  I have managed to encounter interesting people in my times.

  "I do not know entirely how the crystal works,

  lady and gentlemen, only that it works. In that

  respect I am not a scientist, only a sorcerer

  after all, Captain. But not a con man, nor quite a

  lunatic, if you please."

  "I'm sorry," Kirk said sincerely. "As my

  first officer might say, I have a tendency to

  be precipitous."

  "Which is why we must locate that first officer, in

  order that he might continue to perform that invaluable

  public service," Parneb quipped, unfolding

  himself like an oversize grasshopper and taking out the

  smaller 209

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  crystal again. "I surmise that in pulling him off

  the planet before I caught the four of you, I

  simply caused him to materialise somewhere else on

  Earth. The crystal is not without its flaws. I

  trust, Captain, he has sense enough to assess his

  situation and not tamper with present history?"

  "Of course!" Kirk said impatiently; he was

  surer of that with Spock than anyone else.

  "Assuming you didn't dump him at the North

  Pole or in mid-ocean, he's perfectly capable

  of surviving on his own."

  "And as he is the only alien on this

  pre-interstellar planet," Parneb said, leaning

  into the larger crystal as they all were, anxious for it

  to clear, "this should be quite simple."

  But it was not. The large crystal did not clear, but

  continued to swirl and glow and pulsate. Only

  Parneb saw something in its depths and what he saw,

&nbs
p; to judge from the expressions that came and went like

  lightning across his face, at first delighted, then

  profoundly distressed him.

  "Ah, there we are! Your Vulcan is in fact

  in the middle of an ocean, Captain, but altogether quite

  high and dry. He oh, dears"

  "What is it?" Kirk demanded, nerves stretched

  to the snapping point.

  "This is not possible! It is too soon!"

  Parneb cried, releasing both crystals and clasping

  his brow in distress. "I find not one Vulcan, but

  two!"

  Chapter Four

  WHAT DID MELODY Sawyer

  expect to find

  when she followed Jason out of the sunlight into the

  main room of the agrostation? Little green men, talking

  petunias, creatures so uncanny she could

  justify blowing them out of the water to protect future

  generations from the very sight of them?

  They are not human, she told herself over and over

  again. They are something completely other, and we can't have

  any idea what they want here. That makes them

  dangerous until proven

  otherwise.

  "You all right?" Jason inquired as she swung

  the red-detector up to him out of the skiff. "You

  look a little green."

  "Save that for 'them," why don't you?" Sawyer

  said wanly. "I'd feel better if I had my

  hardware is all."

  "State you're in, I'm damn glad you

  don't!" Jason rumbled. "If you didn't shoot

  your foot off, you'd get me in the back. Sure you

  don't want to wait in the boat?"

  "And let them kidnap you for a love slave?"

  Melody swung herself up onto the dock and grabbed

  the medical equipment. "Damn the

  torpedoes and all that."

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  "Right," Nyere said, and they went in.

  They'd had to wait on the dock while Yoshi

  brought the clothing bundle in. Now the young man

  held the door and tried to slip out past them.

  Melody's hands instinctively went for the weapon she

  didn't have.

  "Where d'you think you're going, Buster?" she

  nailed Yoshi with her voice.

  "Out!" he sulked. "It's too crowded in there,

  and I don't want to watch, okay? I have to go

  check my crops. I'll be back." He jerked his

  head angrily in the direction of Delphinus.

  "Besides, how far could I get?"

  "Let him go," Jason interceded before Melody

  could get hard-nosed about it. "See you're back before

  dark," he told Yoshi.

  "Sure!" Yoshi let the door slam behind them.

 

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