Krista shut off the viewer.
"Left untreated," she said, toying with the fringe
on one of the pillows she'd stitched herself but looking
McCoy straight in the eye, "it can result in
severe stress, increasing disorientation, instances of
selective amnesia. It can indicate possible
latent schizophrenia." She leaned toward
McCoy, put one hand on his arm. "I couldn't be
more reasonable than in suggesting that this man get immediate and
concentrated help. In an enclosed environment."
McCoy let it all sink in. How could a thing
like this happen?
"Leonard?" Krista Sivertsen dropped her
profes- sional voice, exchanged it for a
personal, caring one. Her hand was still on McCoy's
arm. "I know he's a close friend of yours. I
want to help."
"I know you do, Krista." McCoy patted her
hand absently, baffled. "I just don't understand it.
What could cause something like this to happen to a man like
Jim Kirk?"
"We're not really sure," Krista said, back
in her professional mode. "It's only recently
been identified as a separate phenomenon. In the
old days it was clumped in with all the other
schizophrenias and treated with varying degrees of
success. The only place I've ever encountered it
these days is in certain kinds of drug addicts."
She chose her next words carefully.
"Sometimes a man like Jim Kirk, a man of
great personal dynamism, finds it hard to adjust
to a ground assignment. Is there any chance he might
be experimenting with some of the new synthetic soporiffs
the renegade labs have been peddling under the counter?"
1 1 3
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Of course not!" McCoy said. "I know the kind
of dependence those alterants create as well as you
do! Jim Kirk's not that kind of man!"
"I'm sorry," Krista said sincerely. "But
I wanted to eliminate that as a factor right off.
There are so many variables to consider. I ran his
medical history before I sent you the results of the
scan. It's incredible how many times the man's mind
has been tampered with in his deep-space years.
It's quite possible that any one of those old
traumas . . ."
McCoy thought about it. From Sargon's initially
benevolent "borrowing" to Parmen's literal mental
cruelty to Janice Lester's outright theft, Jim
Kirk had had more people poking around in his mind than any
other ordinary mortal in history.
"Even a Vulcan mind-meld can trigger
erratics in certain unstable individuals,"
Krista Sivertsen was saying. She had never met
Kirk until he'd turned up in her office that
morning, but the story of this human and a certain
Vulcan was legend. "Do you understand what I'm
saying, Leonard?"
"Yes. Yes, I do. But I can't believe
Krista, let me ask you: is it possible a
Vulcan mind-meld could undo something this severe?"
"Oh, no you don't!" She knew what it cost
McCoy to ask this; the story of this human and a
certain Vulcan was legend also. "If you'd thought
that, you should have gone to a Vulcan healer first. You
dropped this in my lap, and it's my
responsibility. No band-aid therapy and no
pointed-eared witch doctors allowed." She was
trying to make him laugh, but McCoy was
preoccupied, beyond humor. "Leonard,
trust me. With today's techniques it'll be a
matter of a week or two. He can take some
vacation time, and I promise you we'll keep it off
his record. But only if you do it my way."
"How how soon?" McCoy asked vaguely.
"As soon as possible. Tonight. I can free up a
bed within the hour. Where is Admiral Kirk now?"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"That's the problem," McCoy frowned. "I
don't know."
"Estimated arrival time Sol III?"
Spock asked his navigator.
"Seven solar days, Captain," Lieutenant
Mathee reported. "Stardate 8097.4, as per your
original log entry, sir."
"Very well," Spock replied evenly, giving
no evi- dence of how heavily that time would pass with
him. "Helm, maintain warp two. We are going
home."
Rapa Nui. Easter Island. The World's
Navel. It had many names. Kirk had of course
heard of it, recognised the rows of solemn
gargantuan statues facing out to sea,
knew something of their history.
He was not prepared to find that the entire island had
been transformed into a museum, the Museum of the
South Pacific, centered in the ultramodern
glass-andrhodinium structure rising beside Rano
Raraku, the volcanic crater lake near the
island's eastern tip. Nor was he prepared for the
museum's curator.
Dr. Galarrwuy Nayingul was an Australian
of the ancient races dark-skinned, deep-eyed,
shorter than Kirk but solid, immutable, as if
rooted in the Earth his people had inhabited perhaps longer
than any others still living, his thick white hair and
beard framing a face that was ageless. On this tiny
island 9,000 kilometers from his birthplace near
Darrinbandi, he was farther from home than Jim
Kirk.
"A pleasure, Admiral," he said warmly when
Koro had introduced them, gripping Kirk's
pale hand in both his dark ones as if he'd known him
all his life. "What brings you to this part of our,
you'll pardon the expression, mundane little world?"
Kirk shared in his laughter, which was rich and deep and
resonant with a more ancient, cosmic laughter.
115
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Curiosity, Dr Nayingul."
"Galarrwuy, please. Or if that's too much
of a mouthful, Galar will do."
"Galarrwuy," Kirk said carefully. "I
came looking for something Koro tells me is rarer
than the American bison. An early kelp
station."
"Ah!" Galarrwuy said, leading Kirk and the
suddenly diffident Koro down the aisles of the
closed-for-theevening museum, its display cases
filled with Micronesian artifacts and Maori
bird masks lighting automatically as they passed.
"You too have read The Book.
"I don't mean to sound like a tourist," Kirk
began. "I imagine you're swamped with them."
"Only those I choose to see. And you would be one
of them," Galarrwuy said, opening the door to his
private office, offering his guests the comfort of low
couches and freshly fermented pineapple juice.
"Though not overmuch for you, boyo," he scolded
Koro avuncularly. "You're going home soon."
"Ah, Galar, serious!" the boy protested,
looking from one to the other to see where best to plead his
case. "Morla el do! Tomorrow's good enough!
I've come for to have a listen. As part of my education,"
he added winningly.
"Seriously," Galarrwuy corrected him,
unimpressed. "Doubtless your kin know you're
barbering with me yet again, but it does get wearisome
having them ring me up every time you take a tail wind.
Sit you down and finish your juice, then home for
dinner. You can use my spare boat."
"Ar!"
The boy settled into silence in one corner, hoping
they'd forget he was there.
"You seek information about the old kelp stations,"
Galarrwuy told Kirk rather than asking him. "In
order to relive the experience of the young couple
Tatya and Yoshi, all innocently tending their
seaweed crop when,
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
on a crystalline night two hundred years
ago, the Strangers from the Sky, our cosmic
siblings the Vulcans, fell into their laps, so
to speak."
"It's curious you should use the term
'relive,"" Kirk said sincerely. "Because in a
peculiar way I feel I have lived the
experience before."
Galarrwuy's deep-set eyes grew intense.
"Truly? Are you a reincarnationist, James
Kirk?"
"No. At least I don't think so. Didn't
think so."
Kirk held out his hands helplessly. "I'm not
sure anymore."
Then he told Galarrwuy about his dreams.
There was an almost interminable silence.
"Koro," Galarrwuy said at last. "It is
time for you to go."
"I'm troubling Cone here," the boy grumbled from
his corner. He'd been listening, wide-eyed.
"Please, Galar, let me stay?"
Galarrwuy waited, as if he knew what the
boy would say next.
"You'll Dream-time with him, won't you? You said you
would teach me, when I'm old enough. I'm old enough
now. Why can't I stay?"
"Koro," Galarrwuy said at last
emphatically, unequivocally. "You will go. Now."
Kirk felt the hair on the back of his neck
prickle. He'd thought only Vulcans could do that
with their voices.
Whatever authority Galarrwuy had called upon,
Koro obeyed. Within moments the sound of an
aeroboat punctuated the island's uncanny
silence. When it had faded to nothingness, Galarrwuy
rose from his couch and went to the window, facing west,
contemplating the darkness beyond. Kirk had not spoken
since he'd told about his dreams.
"He is young," Galarrwuy said of Koro, as
if by way of apology. "And, as they say in the
islands, eeyulla. Impressed with his own
importance."
"He's a boy," Kirk offered, excusing him.
He'd
1 1 7
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
grown awfully fond of the young sea urchin in a
scant few hours.
"In my ancestors' reckoning he'd be three
years a man," Galarrwuy said sternly, his back
still to Kirk. "If he survived the desert
ordeals. The young today are spoiled.
Undisciplined."
"I believe that's endemic, Galarrwuy."
Kirk smiled, thinking how Vulcan this human
sounded. Here was one he could trust, whatever
happened. "Didn't Socra- tes make the same
complaint in his day?"
Galarrwuy chuckled, relinquished the view at
the wmdow.
"So he did." He grew suddenly, deadly
serious. "Do you know of Dream-time, James
Kirk?"
"I know it once comprised the whole of your people's
oral history," Kirk ventured. "That there were
songs that accurately predicted the future.
Cave paintings that depicted airplanes a thousand
years before they existed. I assumed there were rituals
not accessible to outsiders."
"You are partly correct," Galarrwuy said,
showing no surprise at the extent of Kirk's knowledge.
He would expect such a man to know as much.
The room seemed darker than Kirk remembered,
as if something were absorbing all the light and only
Galarrwuy's eyes were clearly visible to him. Some
of the artifacts displayed around the room seemed less
than inanimate.
- "By the end of the twentieth century,"
Galarrwuy
began, sitting across from Kirk again, "my people were
almost extinct. They had lost their ways
to the ways of
the newcomers and no longer knew who they were.
Only a few managed to preserve the old ways,
and in time learned to use them in compatibility with the
new.
- "Today my people flourish, and Dream-time is
recognized as being as "legitimate" as any of the
other ways.
humans attempt to touch the face of Creation.
Never118
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
theless, to the uninformed the Singing still carries an aura
of mumbo-jumbo."
Kirk felt as if he were being offered a lifeline
in this storm of recent origin. Could it work? Could a
Dreamtime that could foretell the future also explain the
past? He would try anything to exorcise the voices
in his head.
"Galarrwuy, I've been to many worlds," he said.
"If I've learned nothing else, I have learned that
one man's "mumbo-jumbo" is another's
science and a third's religion. I have since tried
to keep an open mind."
Galarrwuy chuckled again, partaking of the cosmic
laughter.
"There is also an old saying from your part of Earth.
"Don't keep your mind so open your brains fall
out." I have never been to any world other than this," he
said, serious again. "At least, not in tilde body.
Yet my experience is much as yours, James
Kirk. There is more to what troubles you than dream."
"Galarrwuy, you sound like a Vulcan." Kirk
smiled, trying to lighten things.
"No, I do not. I sound like a human who has
lived within the influence of Vulcans, as well as
other admirable species. Do you see how
interdependent we have become? Do you
understand why, in whatever reality your
experience took place, you must return to that
reality, and be certain it conforms to history, and not to your
dream?"
Kirk struggled to comprehend exactly what
Galarrwuy was suggesting.
"You mean you don't think I'm crazy? That there
is some alternate reality present in these dreams?"
"I believe that you believe that," Galarrwuy said
intently. "And you have far more experience with alternate
realities than I. The logs you kept aboard the
Enterprise are available in the archives at
Memory Alpha. I have read them. Now,
you tell me: what is reality?"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Kirk shook his head, as if that would clear it of the
confusion. He held out his hands in
submission.
"I don't know anymore. Will you help me?"
"I will try. Yet what I am about to suggest
may place you in greater danger than where you are
now."
Why am I so hesitant? Kirk thought. He
could feel the fear cold in his throat, hard in his
stomach. Why is it so much easier to confront
external terrors than the darker corners of the mind?
If Spock were here, I would have no doubts. He
struggled with his fear, wrestled it into submission
until it was only confusion, only puzzlement, yet
he could not make it go away. Not alone.
Spock was still a hundred parsecs away; by the time
he returned it might be too late. Kirk must
trust in a human guide to take him where a
Vulcan had walked with him before. To leave the matter
unresolved, as Galarrwuy suggested, invited the
greater danger.
"I haven't gotten this far by ducking
danger," Kirk said, hoping he sounded more certain
than he felt.
"I had assumed as much," Galarrwuy said,
watching him intently. "Then Sing with me."
The room grew suddenly dark, and filled with shad
ows.
FIVE
Sorahi and T'Lera awaited the inevitable in the
metaphorical shadow of an Earth ship, a
seaship, a thing that had no counterpart on their
oceanless world' named for a creature no longer extant
on its own.
"Delphinus," Sorahl said, reading it off the
prow of the looming presence instrument of their fate which
no doubt contained weapons sufficient to destroy
whole cities, much less two unarmed outworlders,
though no weapons were visible through the window port of the
agrostation. "Named for the smaller
cetaceans dolphins? The great whales are
extinct, are they not?"
"By the beginning of this century, as
measured in their years," T'Lera replied, perhaps
wondering at a species that could permit such things
to happen, nay, could
actively cause them to happen. She wondered
also at her son. He knew the answer to the question he
had asked. For what reason, after all the words that had
poured from him at the Earthmen's behest while she lay
helpless in healing trance, did he find it necessary
to speak still? "You told them all?"
Sorahl stopped looking at the great ship through the
windowport but did not precisely look at his mother.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"I answered what they asked," he said, neither
apology nor excuse, merely explanation. "And
they asked much. I knew not what else to do, Mother.
To speak half truth seemed neither ethical nor
wise; its later contradiction might prove the more
damaging. Yet to remain silent would only augment