Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (66 page)

Thinking over what Spock had said, Jim headed back to the control chamber.

At the helm, Sulu looked out across twentieth-century Earth. He kept the
Bounty
hovering above San Francisco. The city avalanched in light down the hillsides that ringed its shore. The lights ended abruptly at the bay, as if the wall of skyscrapers caught them and flung them upward.

“Is still beautiful city,” Chekov said. “Or was, and will be.”

“Yes,” Sulu said. “I’ve always wished I had more time to get to know it. I was born there.”

“I thought you were born on Ganjitsu,” Chekov said.

“I was raised on Ganjitsu. And a lot of other places. I never lived here more than a couple of months at a time, but I was born in San Francisco.”

“It doesn’t look all that different,” McCoy said.

Jim returned to the control chamber, and overheard McCoy’s comment.

“Let’s hope it isn’t, Bones,” he said.

But it did look different to Jim. He traced out the city, trying to figure out why the scene made him uneasy. Unfamiliar tentacles of light reached across the water: bridges. In his time, the Golden Gate Bridge remained as a historical landmark. But the other bridges no longer existed. The lights must be the head-lamps of ground cars, each moving a single person. Jim located the dark rectangle of undeveloped land that cut across the eastern half of the city.

“Mister Sulu,” he said, “set us down in Golden Gate Park.”

“Aye, sir. Descending.”

As the
Bounty
slipped through the darkness, Jim discussed the problems they had to solve with his shipmates.

“We’ll have to divide into teams,” he said. “Commanders Chekov and Uhura, you draw the uranium problem.”

“Yes, sir,” Chekov said. Uhura glanced up from the comm board long enough to nod.

“Doctor McCoy, you, Mister Scott, and Commander Sulu will build us a whale tank.”

McCoy scowled. “Oh, joy,” he said, almost under his breath.

“Captain Spock and I,” Jim said, “will attempt to trace the whale song to its source.”

“I’ll have bearing and distance for you, sir,” Uhura said.

“Right. Thanks.” Jim gathered them together with his gaze. “Now, look. I want you all to be very careful. This is terra incognita. Many customs will doubtless take us by surprise. And it’s a historical fact that these people have not yet met an extraterrestrial.”

For a second no one understood what he meant. They lived in a culture that included thousands of different species of sentient beings. To think that they would meet people for whom a nonhuman person would be an oddity startled and shocked them all.

They looked at Mister Spock.

Spock, who often felt himself an alien even among his own people, did not find Admiral Kirk’s comment surprising. He considered the problem for a moment.

When he had in the past been compelled to pass for human among primitive humans, his complexion had aroused little comment and no suspicion. His eyebrows had engendered comment, but only of a rather pernicious kind that could easily be ignored. Of the several structural differences between Vulcans and humans, only one had caused him any difficulty: his ears.

He opened his robe, untied the sash of the underrobe, and retied the sash as a headband. The band served to disguise his eyebrows, but, more important, it covered the pointed tips of his ears.

“I believe,” he said, “that I may now pass among twentieth-century North Americans as a member of a foreign, but not extraterrestrial, country.”

James Kirk gave a sharp nod of approval. “This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture. Mister Chekov, please issue a phaser and communicator to each team. We’ll maintain radio silence except in extreme emergencies.” Jim glanced around to see that everyone understood the dangers they faced. Given the fears of the people of the late twentieth century, perhaps it would be better if his people did not look official. “Scotty, Uhura, better get rid of your uniform insignia.”

They nodded their understanding and complied.

“Any questions?” Kirk said.

No one spoke.

“All right. Let’s do our job and get out of here. Our own world is waiting.”

Monday mornings were always worst as far as garbage was concerned. His heavy gloves scraping on the asphalt, Javy scooped up the loose trash and pitched it into the park garbage can. He and Ben were only supposed to empty the cans, but Javy hated seeing Golden Gate Park trashed after every weekend, so sometimes he broke the rules.

Belching diesel fumes into the foggy, salt-tinged air, the truck backed toward him. Javy hoisted the can onto his shoulder and pitched the contents into the garbage crusher. His first few weeks on the job, he had thought of a different metaphor for the machine every day, but there existed only a limited number of variations on grinding teeth or gnashing jaws. His favorite literary image contained a comparison of the garbage-crushing mechanism to a junkyard machine smashing abandoned cars into scrap. Minor garbage and major garbage. He had not quite got it worked out yet. So what else was new? He tried comparing the unfinished metaphor to the persistently intractable novel he was trying to write in the same way he compared the garbage crusher and the car crusher. Minor unfinished business and major unfinished business. Maybe he should try putting the manuscript into the garbage crusher.

You’re really straining your symbolism here, Javy,
he told himself.

He hoisted the second can and dumped the contents into the crusher.

Sometimes he wondered if he should go back to teaching. But he knew that if he did, he would get less work done on the novel than he did now. He needed a job of physical labor. Now the book went better than before. But he still could not finish it.

Javy jumped on the back of the truck and hung on till the next pickup spot, where a whole row of cans waited. Ben climbed down and joined him.

“And then what happens?” Ben said.

Javy was telling him a scene from the novel. Every book on writing and every creative writing teacher he knew of said that writers who talked about their stories never wrote them. For years Javy believed it and never told anyone anything till after he had written it down. But recently he had met a writer, an actual published writer.

“Everybody’s different, Javy,” the writer had said. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you you’ve got to work the same way they do. Don’t let them make your rules for you. They’ll screw you up every time. You’re supposed to be in the rule-breaking business.” He was drunk, so maybe it was all bull, but just as an experiment, Javy broke that first law of writing and talked about a story. To Ben, as it happened. And then he went home and wrote it. He had not sold it yet, but at least he had finished the damned thing. So far it had three reject slips. Javy was getting attached to his reject slip collection. Sometimes that worried him.

He grabbed a crumpled newspaper off the ground and flung it after the other garbage.

“Come on, Javy, what happens?” Ben said. He dumped a can of trash into the crusher. Javy tried not to pay too much attention to what all went past. His first couple of weeks on the job, he noticed with fascination what people threw away, but now the stuff grossed him out. He supposed he would eventually become oblivious to it, but then maybe it would be time to start looking for another job.

“ ‘So I told her,’ ” Javy said, in the voice of the character in the scene, “ ‘if you think I’m laying out sixty bucks for a goddamn toaster oven, you got another thing coming.’ ”

The onshore breeze came up. It blew away the diesel fumes and brought a marshy, low-tide smell from the sea. Soon it would disperse the mist. Javy liked working the early shift; even on foggy days he liked dawn. A few minutes ago, before sunrise, he and Ben had seen a shooting star, surprisingly distinct in the fog.

“So what’d she say?” Ben asked, as if Javy were telling him about a real argument with a real person. Ben was a great audience. The only trouble was, he never bought books. He watched TV. Once in a while he went to a movie. Javy wondered if he ought to try writing the novel as a movie script instead—it would never make it as a TV movie; it was too rough and raw for TV—and take it down to L.A.

The onshore breeze freshened, then stiffened.

Suddenly the loose trash scuttled past Javy’s feet like fleeing crabs and the wind blew trash out of the cans, knocking the cans over, swirling up whirlwinds of dust and leaves, whipping past so hard that even Ben had to grab the side of the truck to keep from being pushed over too. Javy stumbled and Ben grabbed him.

The wind stopped as abruptly as it had started. It did not die down or fade away; it simply ceased.

“What the hell was that?” Javy said.

He winced at a sharp pain in his ears. The pain became a high-pitched shriek, a zoned-out whine. Light fell out of the gray dawn. He looked toward it—

—and saw, amid the fog, on a terraced bank above him, a ramp descending, from nothingness, a light shining, from nothingness, and people appearing, from nothingness. He stared, speechless.

Ben grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the front of the truck.

“Let’s get outta here!”

Too stunned to resist, Javy stumbled up into the driver’s seat. Ben shoved him over, flung himself inside, grabbed the wheel, and snatched at the gearshift. He jammed his foot on the gas pedal and released the emergency brake with a jolt as the truck lurched forward.

“Wait!” Javy shouted. He lunged for the door on his side. Ben grabbed him by the shirt collar and dragged him back. Javy struggled with him, but Ben was about twice his size. “Did you see that?”

“No!” Ben shouted. “And neither did you, so shut up!”

For a minute Javy considered jumping out of the truck, but Ben had it going nearly fifty. Javy tried to see behind them in the side mirror, but the light and the ramp had vanished, and he could make out only shadows.

Jim led the way out of the
Bounty
and signaled for the ramp to withdraw. It disappeared into the cloaking field. The hatch closed, cutting off the interior light.

“Do you hear something?” Sulu said.

A low rumble changed pitch, fading.

“It’s just traffic,” Jim said. “Ground cars, with internal combustion engines. Shouldn’t be too many around this early, but later the streets fill up with them.”

The oily smoke of the ground cars’ exhaust hung close. Trash littered the path and the meadow. Someone had turned over a row of garbage cans and spread their contents around the park. Jim worried about how he and his people would be able to get along within a culture that took so little care of its world, the world that would be theirs. In Jim’s time, Earth still bore scars from wounds inflicted during the twentieth century.

Under his breath, McCoy grumbled about the smell. Spock gazed about with detached interest, his only visible reaction to the fumes a slight distension of the nostrils.

“We’ll stick together till we get oriented,” Jim said. “Uhura, what’s the bearing to the whales?”

Uhura consulted her tricorder and gave him the distance and bearing. Before they departed, Jim fixed the surroundings in his mind. He could find the
Bounty
by tricorder, but he could also imagine needing to get back inside the ship without pausing for an instrument reading.

They set off across the meadow in the direction Uhura indicated.

“Everybody remember where we parked,” Jim said.

Jim and his shipmates left the park and entered the city at dawn. The sun burnished adobe houses with gold and burned away the fog. Long, fuzzy shadows shortened and sharpened.

Jim had not walked through his adopted home town in a long while. Climbing the steep hills, he began to wish he had come on the voyage in a good pair of walking shoes instead of dress boots.

Ground cars and pedestrians crowded the streets and sidewalks. Jim’s tension eased when no one gave him and his group more than a second glance. Even Spock received little notice. Jim could not help but wonder why no one bothered about them, especially when they reached an area in which everyone wore similar clothes—dark jackets, matching trousers or shirts, lighter shirts, a strip of material tied around the neck—and carried similar dark leather cases. But here Jim’s group did not even get first glances—

A man suddenly stopped and glared.

“What’s
your
problem?”

“Nothing,” Jim said, suppressing an irrational urge to tell him. “I don’t have a problem.”

“You will if you don’t watch who you stare at.” He shoved past Jim, then looked back. “And how you stare at them!” He turned, nearly ran into Spock, snarled as he circled him, and strode angrily away.

Jim
had
been staring at the people he passed, but he did not understand why one individual had reacted so strongly. He kept going, and he still watched people, but he watched more surreptitiously. He wondered why everyone dressed more or less alike, though not alike enough to be described as “in uniform,” at least as he understood the term.

He stopped at an intersection with the other pedestrians. They waited, gazing at lines of ground cars that moved at a crawl in one direction and stood dead still on the cross-street.

A group of glass-screened boxes clustered together, each chained to a steel post.

Good,
he thought.
News machines. They might tell me what I need to know. If I can key on whales…

He glanced quickly over the headlines: “I was abducted by aliens from space!”

Jim frowned. Had he stumbled into a first encounter of human beings with another sentient species? If so, he would have to keep his people and his ship well out of the way. But he distinctly remembered—he thought he remembered—that the first contact happened in the twenty-first century. It happened when humans left their solar system, not when another species visited Earth. And he certainly did not recall anything about abductions of humans by extraterrestrials. He would have to ask Spock if he knew for certain, but not here on a crowded street corner where their conversation could be overheard.

Other headlines: “Talk Service Exposé.” “Congloms Glom VidBiz.” “Dow Jones Bull Turns Bear.” The first two he found completely incomprehensible. He assumed the third to be a report on genetic engineering, though he did not quite understand why Jones would want to change a bull into a bear.

“Nuclear Arms Talks Stalled.” That one he understood.

“It’s a miracle these people ever got out of the twentieth century,” McCoy said.

Jim waited for the headline to dissolve into a news story, but nothing happened. He wondered if the news machine was broken. Probably street machines were not as reliable now as they were in his own time. He looked for a way to key it to the subject he needed, but saw no controls. Perhaps it was more sophisticated than it looked and could be operated by voice.

“Excuse me.” A man in quasiuniform stepped around Jim, bent over the news machine, inserted metallic disks into it, and opened it. Jim thought he was probably going to repair the machine so its screen would display more than headlines. Instead, the man took a folded bunch of paper from a stack of similar bunches of folded paper inside the machine. It was not an electronic news machine at all, but a dispenser of printed stories. Newspapers? That was it. The antique novels he had read sometimes mentioned newspapers, but never newspaper machines. They described young newspaper carriers running down the street crying “Extra!” Jim wondered how anyone kept up with the news here. These headlines must be hours old.

The man folded his paper under his arm and let the machine’s spring door slam. The disks he had fed into it rattled in their container.

“Damn,” Jim said softly. “They’re still using money. We’re going to need some.”

“Money?” Chekov said. “We should have landed in Russia. There, we would not want money.”

A couple of the twentieth-century people standing around them reacted to Chekov’s comment with irritation. Jim heard somebody mutter, “Pinko commie exchange student.” He recalled that the stalled nuclear arms talks referred to in the newspaper were arms talks between North Americans and Russians.

“In Russia,” Chekov said, “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” He smiled at a glowering citizen of twentieth-century North America.

The traffic pattern changed. The crowd at the corner flooded into the intersection, dashing around and between ground cars and sweeping away the belligerent citizen. The cars on the cross-street lurched forward, honking and screeching and outmaneuvering each other.

“Mister Chekov,” Jim said,
sotto voce,
“I think that keeping quiet about the glories of Russia would be the better part of valor. At least while we’re walking around on the streets of North America.”

“Very well, Admiral,” Chekov said, plainly mystified.

On the other hand,
Jim thought,
it would be awfully convenient if we could receive according to our need just long enough to do what we need to do. Maybe we could have vanished before anybody asked us what our abilities might allow us to contribute.

At any rate, they needed some money, physical money, and they needed it soon. Jim’s conspicuous group would not get far with a zeroed-out credit balance.

He tried to remember more history. He thought that the age of electronic credit either had not yet begun or had not yet taken hold. Staring glumly at a sign across the street, “Antiques: We Buy and Sell,” he recalled that the economy of twentieth-century Earth was still based on buying and selling.

He had some pieces in his collection back home that even here, a couple of hundred years in the past, might be worth something. But if he sold anything he had brought with him from his own time, he would introduce anachronisms into history. This he must not do. Besides, he could hardly hope to pass off a tricorder or one of McCoy’s medical instruments as an antique.

Then he remembered something.

“You people wait here,” he said. “And spread out. We look like a cadet review. Spock—”

The others moved apart, looking almost as self-conscious as when they clustered together. Jim started across the street without thinking. Spock followed.

A high shriek, an oily burned smell—a ground car’s wheels spread black streaks on the gray street and the nose of the car stopped a handsbreadth from Jim’s leg.

“Watch where you’re going, you dumb ass!” the driver shouted.

“And—and a
double
dumb ass on you!” Jim yelled, startled into a reaction and still trying to fit in. Flustered, he hurried across the street. The driver blew a deafening blast of the ground car’s horn. The car accelerated, leaving a second set of black streaks on the pavement.

On the far curb, Spock gave him an odd look, but said nothing. Jim’s pulse raced. It would be ridiculous to travel years and light-years through space-time in order to meet his end under a primitive vehicle in the street of the city where he lived.

He would have to be more careful. All his people would, especially Spock. If the Vulcan had an encounter with contemporary medical authorities, no matter how rudimentary their techniques, his headband would not conceal his extraterrestrial characteristics.

Back on the curb, the shipmates breathed a collective sigh of relief that Kirk and Spock had made it past the traffic.

How disorienting it is,
Sulu thought,
to be in a place that looks so familiar yet feels so alien.

“Ah! Hikaru oji san desu ka?”

Sulu started. He turned to see who had called him by his given name, and called him “uncle” as well. A young boy ran up to him, and addressed him in Japanese.

“Konna tokoro ni nani o shiteru’n desu ka?”
The voice spoke informally, as if to a close relative, asking what he was doing here.

“Warui ga, boya wa hitochigai nasaremashita,”
Sulu said. To tell the little boy that he had mistaken him for someone else, Sulu had to reach into his memory for his disused Japanese, learned in the classroom and from reading novels not three hundred but a thousand years old.

“Honto desu ne!”
the little boy said.
“Anata no nihongo ga okashii’n desu.”

Sulu smiled.
I’m sure he’s right, and my Japanese is strange,
he thought.
I probably sound like a character from
The Tale of Genji.

Embarrassed, the little boy started to back away.

“Boya, machina,”
Sulu said gently. At his request, the boy stopped.
“Onamae wa nan da?”

“Sulu Akira desu.”
The little boy told Sulu his name.

Sulu sat on his heels, and looked at him. The child, Akira Sulu, already possessed the intense gaze and the humor one could see in pictures of him as an adult and as an elderly man.

“Ah so ka,”
Sulu said.
“Tashika ni boya wa shogaianraku ni kurasu.”

The boy blinked, startled to be told by a stranger who looked like his uncle but clearly was not, that he would have a long and happy life.

“Ogisama arigato gozaimasu,”
he said, thanking Sulu politely.

Sulu stood up again. The little boy ran away down the street.

“What was that all about?” McCoy said. “Who was that?”

“That, Doctor,” Sulu said, still watching the little boy, “was my great-great-great grandfather.”

McCoy, too, gazed after the child.

On the other side of the street, Jim opened the door of the antique shop and entered, leaving the noisy traffic behind. His vision accustomed itself to the dimmer light of the interior. He stared around, astounded by the items in the shop. Antiques of this quality were nearly impossible to find, at any price, in his time. The years had been too hard on them.

“Can I help you, gentlemen?”

The proprietor, a man of about forty, wore his graying hair long and tied at the back of his neck. Jim believed the period of his costume to be somewhat earlier than the present: antique, perhaps, to fit in with his shop. The antique dealer wore gold spectacles with small round lenses, wide-bottomed blue trousers, patchy and pale with age, leather sandals, and a vest that looked to Jim like museum-quality patchwork.

“What can you tell me about these?” Jim said. He drew his own spectacles from his pocket. They resembled those of the proprietor, but his had rectangular lenses. Light flowed and flared along the cracks in the glass.

The dealer took them and turned them over reverently. He whistled softly. “These are beautiful.”

“Antique?”

“Yes—they’re eighteenth-century American. They’re quite valuable.”

“How much will you give me for them?”

“Are you sure you want to part with them?”

“I’m sure.” In fact he did not want to part with them at all, but he had no choice, no room for sentiment.

The antique dealer looked at them more carefully, unfolding them and checking the frame. He crossed the shop to get his magnifying glass from the counter, then squinted at the fine engraving on the inner surface of the earpiece.

Spock bent toward Kirk. “Were those not a birthday present from Doctor McCoy?”

“And they will be again, Spock,” Kirk said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He joined the owner on the other side of the shop. “How much?”

“They’d be worth more if the lenses were intact,” the antique dealer said. “But I might be able to restore them. It would take some research…” He glanced at the glasses again. Jim could tell he wanted them. “I’ll give you two hundred bucks, take it or leave it.”

“Is that a lot?” Jim asked.

He looked at Jim askance. “I think it’s a fair price,” he said defensively. “But if you don’t like it—” He offered Jim the glasses back.

“My companion did not mean to impugn your fairness,” Spock said. “He has been…out of the area…for some time, and I am only visiting. I am not familiar with prices, or with your current word usage. What is a buck?”

“A buck is a dollar. You know what a dollar is?”

Neither Spock nor Kirk replied.

“The main unit of currency of the good old U.S. of A.? You can buy most of a gallon of gas with it, this week anyway, or most of a loaf of decent bread, or a beer if you choose your bar right. Either you guys have been gone forever, or…did we ever meet in the sixties?”