and looked at his friend.
Are you?
Reassured, he too contemplated McCoy,
who if anything waxed louder.
"It's a shame he's got no volume
control."
"That can be remedied," Spock se-id
solemnly.
Effortlessly he lifted the limp figure from the
chair,
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
intent upon carrying the doctor into the bedroom where
he could snore to his heart's content. McCoy
responded to the change in position by wrapping his arms
around Spock's neck, snuggling into his shoulder, and
mumbling something that caused him to smile in his sleep.
""Rosebud"?" Spock repeated
quizzically.
"A girl in the bar he frequents," Kirk said
vaguely. "She glows in the dark."
"Indeed."
Wearing an expression of great long-suffering,
Spock transported the doctor into the next
room. He returned to find Kirk at the window
wall, contemplating the twilight. His face, part
shadow in the fading light, was set in the human
equivalent of a mask, firm of mouth, hard of
jaw, but the eyes (windows of the soul, Spock thought;
a human metaphor, appropriate to one most
human) looked wounded.
Kirk started slightly at the Vulcan's
reflection in the glass.
"Spoek . . ." The human shuddered, steadied
himself against the window frame, passed one hand over his
eyes, tried to smile, grew serious. "Parneb
must have short-circuited our memories to cover his
tampering."
"Precisely." Spock stood close,
protective. "So that our memory of the past was
forgotten or distorted."
"I'm cold!" Kirk said suddenly, surprised
at himself. He set about laying a fire in
the barren hearth. Spock remained at his side,
to warm his soul.
Kirk stirred the fire, poured himself another
brandy, could not speak.
They had had dinner. Kirk had actually slept
some, dreamlessly for a change, had awakened in chagrin
to find Spock keeping the watch and the dinner dishes
cleared away. Spock had permitted himself a single
restorative brandy.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Vulcans were for the most part impervious to the
effects of ethanol; if they imbibed at all it was
largely out of curiosity or for the sake of abiding
by human customs when among humans. Spock, more
abstemious than most, rarely drank even on such
social occasions.
But the long mindjourney had taken its toll on
him as well, and if his spirit was beset with thoughts of
T'Lera and of Jeremy Grayson, what better
way to restore it than to seek a place of warmth and
quiet, the companionship of a friend, and the esthetic
contemplation of what was essentially a potable work of
art?
Nothing that is is unimportant.
Spock studied the play of firelight in the amber
depths of the vintage Armagnac. There were some things that
transcended even the self-imposed discipline of the
Vulcan.
"We were wrong!" Kirk said suddenly, poking at
the fire. "We spirited T'Lera and Sorahl away
from Earth on a totally false premise.
Suppose the United Earth Council had decided
to
welcome them, initiate diplomatic relations?
We may have done more harm than good. Spock, did
we save the Federation, or set it back twenty
years?"
Spock picked up Kirk's bound copy of
Strangers from the Sky.
"If, as he intended, Captain Nyere had
allowed the journalists onto his ship, the stage would
have been set for the kind of "media circus" which, in
our shared nightmare, was prelude to the
metaphorical blood-onthe-walls scenario,"
he said carefully. "If, as she intended, T'Lera
had by then relieved all human agents of the
responsibility for her death by taking Sorahl's
life and then her own, our nightmare would have been
realised. The means she would have chosen would not
have been as violent the blood-on-the-walls
metaphor is yours, Jim but the end would have been the
same."
"Human journalists would have burst in on the
bodies of two dead aliens and drawn all the
wrong conclusions."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Precisely."
"Whereas you believe that we, by simply being there,
prevented that?"
"So it would seem."
"And our subconscious minds, triggered by my
metaphor and unable to keep the secret forever,
finished the worst-case scenario we'd journeyed
to Antarctica to prevent," Kirk said slowly,
piecing it together. "The signposts were there throughout the
dreams my tennis game with Melody, your dream
about your mother. Because your memory of Jeremy
Grayson was blocked, you dreamed instead about his
great-granddaughter."
"Indeed."
"And because we were both needed to tell T'Lera the
truth, neither of us could complete the dream alone any
more than we could have
completed the job alone. And Elizabeth Dehner
became the key, because she alone could
galvanize us into forgetting our differences . . ."
"Therefore, Jim, despite our occasionally being
cast as buffoons, we were necessary to the outcome."
He handed Kirk the book.
Epilogue
Having been assured that their planet was safe for the
moment from talking petunias and little green men, the
majority of humans shrugged and resumed to the realm
of the mundane.
Unbeknownst to the majority, however, the continuum
had been subtly changed. Life on Earth would
never be quite the same.
Yoshi returned to the agrostation to find his entire
acreage suffering from advanced kelpwilt. He
immediately contacted Agrolnternational, submitting
"his" formula for an organic cure, and
volunteering his station as the test site for Sorahl's
synthetic enzyme. Within three days of treatment, the
fungus was completely
consumed. Patented at Yoshi's insistence under the
name "Sorahlaze," the enzyme was made available
to all agrostations at cost and eradicated
the kelpwilt fungus from the entire planet within a
solar year. Sorahlaze is still the specific for
kelpwilt on any number of planets
Federation-wide.
Did this contribution to Earth's science by an alien
who officially did not exist in fact save Earth from
famine? The true magnitude of
Sorahl's contribution can never be measured. And
this was only the beginning.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
While terrorism had been virtually eliminated
from Earth's political makeup even before the deaths
of Racher and Easter, these deaths were in a sense the
final blow. The rank and file lacked direction,
/>
and soon disappeared into cracks in the society that had
spawned them. The arms dealer who had equipped both
task forces was exposed and virtually bankrupted.
Aghan and the others who were captured were "reeducated"
well before the Mind Control Laws would have made this
impossible. And while any human society will
perforce always have its lunatic fringe, Melody
Sawyer's laser rifle ensured that the remainder of
Earth's twenty-first century was remarkably free
of terrorism.
At the same time other, more positive
movements were absorbing human attention
and energies. Notable among these was
Welcome, a society devoted to preparing
humans to accept other intelligent life forms.
Begun when Icarus left Earth for Alpha
Centauri, Welcome do not become a recognised
global entity until it included in its membership
one Tatiana Bilash.
Tatya returned to the agrostation with Yoshi for a
time, but while the two remarried deeply
affectionate and eventually had a child whom Yoshi
raised, their paths had already begun to diverge.
Deciding for reasons she could not define mat her
life required new direction, Tatya Crew
all her energies into Welcome, becoming its chief
spokesperson. She was part of the delegation mat
welcomed the first Centaurians to Earth, and was one
of the elder statespersons to sit at the first Babel
Interplanetary Conference in 2087.
How much did Tatya remember of the events that
sparked His new career? We will never know. What is
known is that for all her travels, me one world she
never visited was Vulcan.
Yoshi, however, did journey
to Vulcan, as part of an exchange of scientists and
agricultural experts in the year 2073. He
never returned to Earth, but sought
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Vulcan citizenship and was granted a teaching
fellowship at ShiKahr, where all trace of him
eventually vanishes into the privacy that is
uniquely Vulcan. Perhaps he simply retired
to the desert, perhaps he became dVeltnahr, a
Vulcan-by-choice, an honor that has been
granted to few humans. One can only assume
that he at last found the peace he could never have found
on Earth. Whether he and Sorahl ever me again,
whether either retained any memory of the other, is also
lost to their respective privates.
Back on Earth, all was not order and
tranquillity. In the mop-up operation following
the incident, the real Dr. Bellero was recalled from
Marsbase and interrogated about her
supposed presence in Antarctica. The true
identity of the woman who took her place was never
determined, nor were the identities of the two
strangers one charismatic, one
Bomber who succeeded in changing a
Vulcan's mind.
Perhaps the key to the entire mystery is Parneb, but
our knowledge of Pameb begins and ends with Sorahl's
journals. The young Vulcan made astute
observations of the
flamboyant human who drove the rescue party
through the Western Desert, chattering all the way, then
sat drinking tea with Dr. Bellero while the others
refitted the sleeper ship. But once that ship
leaves Earth, Sorahl can offer us no further
insights on Parneb or the unnamed strangers.
Whoever they were, their trail conjoins with Pameb's
somewhere in the
timelessness of the desert, then vanishes.
Attempts to identify a Mahmoud Gamal
al-Parneb Nezaj result in the discovery of
several persons of that name, including one who married
into the vast, extended al Faisal family some
years after the Vulcan incident, though there is
evidence that this Parneb was a much younger man. Whoever
he was, he is
quickly lost in the Byzantine intricacies of a
clan whose roots extend both to the ruling family of
what was once Saudi Arabia and to the Bedouin
tribes extant in the Suez
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
from ancient times, and whose present
descendants include former High Commissioner of
United Earth Jasmine al Faisal. The
marriage produced no offspring, and that seems to be
the end of Parneb.
Controversy continued to plague the captain and first
officer of the Delphinus. If there were innocent
victims of the event other than the Vulcans, these
two were among them.
Jason Nyere put in for early retirement from
Aeroationav not long after the incident he was not
permitted to remember. Subsequent hospital
records indicate his treatment for repeated bouts of
depression in his later years. One can imagine him
scanning the night sky from his home near Lagos,
uncertain of what he sought, but seeking nevertheless.
Jason Nyere died of an unspecified fever in
2064, the year before the Vulcans came to Earth
again.
There is no evidence that Melody Sawyer
suffered any recollection of the incident. Given her
own command of the survey ship Xeno, she earned a
reputation over the next twenty years as a
hard but fair captain. She is recorded as
rescuing all hands following an engin tilde room
explosion before going down with her ship. Ironically,
an engine design developed by Vul- cans and
eventually used in Earth vessels could have saved her
life.
Sorahlof Vulcan kept a precise record
of his ship's voyage home, which in fact took far
less time than his human rescuers had estimated.
Well beyond the Sol system, he encountered, whether
by serendipitous coincidence or simply excellent
navigation, a Vulcan robot ship prospecting for
antimatter in the interstellar void. He was able
to piggyback the adapted Earth vessel onto the
robot ship and bring both to his world in under a year.
This soon a return, and the account of their rescue as
given by Sorahl and his commander, were significant to the
Offworld Service's decision to continue its study of
Earth.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
A curious footnote to the event comes from the
transcript of T'Lera's debriefing by the Oftworld
Service and members of the Vulcan Council, in which
she refused to reveal the identities of her
two Earthbound saviors. Under questioning, Sorahl was
able to state only that "I have no knowledge of them," implying
that his motherst-mander had for her own reasons re- moved that
knowledge from his mind.
Thereafter it is recorded of Sorahl only that he
resumed active duty in the Oftworld Service, and
served on or commanded a variety of
exploration craft until his death at the age of
247. His meticulously kept journals were the
basis of much of this author's research, for which she is
most grateful.
; Of T'Lera there is no further record at
all. Following her final statement to the Vulcan
Council that "It is not a lie to keep the truth
to oneself, and some truths are best left
unspoken," she simply disappears from her son's
journals, from history, perhaps from the realm of the living.
T'Lera herself becomes the final unspoken truth.
Those of us born into a Federation five hundred
planets strong may forget how tenuous were its
beginnings. Those of us nurtured in a Federation that has
kept the peace for a
hundred years may forget that history is never
simple, never linear, never predetermined, but is in
fact the outcome of a tangle of
subtext, chance, coincidence, and what-if? No
individual reading this can deny that the presence of
Vulcans has in some way affected all our
lives....
Spock walked alone through the crowded
streets of Thebes. Something drew him
inexorably toward a place where he had walked
before. He found the tel more by direction than
recognition; the entire area surrounding it was now a
warren of high-rises, and Parneb's neo- Fathy
house was long gone. Perhaps someday the tel itself would be
levered in the name of progress, un
401 STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
earthing all its buried secrets. For now,
however, it endured.
Spock did not expect to find that which he had
left in this place in a time before he was born. His
coming here was motivated more by nostalgia than by logic.
He had come to pay homage to his ancestor.
Jeremy Grayson's body had long since gone
to dust; his Katra lived on in the people of a world who had
at last learned the lesson of his small amulet,
and in the green blood of his unique offspring. If
the amulet itself was lost in Earth, that was as it should be.
"Your pardon, sir Vulcan?" A
small boy tugged at the sleeve of Spock's
uniform, smiled a Cheshire-cat smile at him.
"I believe you have misplaced this?"
He had picked up a fine silver chain from the
dust at their feet, offered it to Spock, who studied
him carefully. Too tall for his weight or too
thin for his height, he was somehow terribly familiar.
"Surely this is yours," Spock answered,
attempting to give the chain back to him.
The boy smiled. "But you see, I already have one,"
he said, showing Spock the milky uncut crystal that
hung about his spindly neck. "That one belongs to you!"
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