Strangers From the Sky (22 page)

He linked his arm in Kelso’s and within moments the two were off on a tour around the room, nattering away as if they had all the time in the world. Kirk collected his wits and looked around him at the others—Dehner sitting with teacup in hand as if she didn’t know what else to do, Mitchell poised on the staircase like a deceptively sleepy cat. Alice through the looking glass, Kirk mused, had had to keep running in order to stay in the same place. Exhausted, he climbed up to sit beside Mitchell.

“Gary, I’m stumped,” he said. “I can’t seem to get through to this character at all.”

His manner was not consistent with any regulation command technique he knew, but he was wise enough to recognize his own myopia and seek a second opinion. He had relied on Mitchell’s advice for so long….

“Patience and diplomacy, kid.” Mitchell’s lips barely moved, his eyes never left the white-clad figure of their host, as if he suspected him of overhearing their conversation even at this distance. “Humor him, like Lee’s doing now.”

“Lee,” Kirk said testily, “is off on his own little cloud somewhere. If I hear one more discourse on architecture I’m going to—”

“Is he, Jim?” Mitchell wondered. “You know Lee as well as I do. He can be a maniac sometimes, sure, but he’s never lost his perspective. Ever since this Parneb character popped up, he’s been playing him like a violin. Lee was the one who found out we were in Egypt.”

Kirk watched the two figures on the far side of the room, suddenly saw Kelso’s seeming flakiness in a new light.

“The Good Cop/Bad Cop scenario.” He smiled.

“All I know is, it’s old,” Kelso had explained it to them, preparatory to using it to extricate them from some jam or other. “Earth origin, variation on the Devil’s Advocate scenario. One guy plays the Bad Cop—real mean, ready to beat the guy in the middle to a pulp. The other guy plays it sympathetic, like it’s all he can do to hold the first guy off. That way the guy in the middle trusts the Good Cop to protect him from the Bad Cop, and he’ll tell him anything.”

“And you’re the Bad Cop,” Kirk said.

“Perfect bit of casting, no?” Mitchell grinned. “And you’re the quarterback.” He grew uncharacteristically serious. “Lee and I’ll block for you, Jim, you know that. But it’s still your play.”

Kirk smiled his gratitude. A man was fortunate to find such a friend once in a lifetime; a commander who could claim such a man as his confidant was doubly blessed.

“Captain?” It was Elizabeth Dehner, who’d been observing Parneb too. “Much as I hate to find myself in agreement with Mr. Mitchell, the technique is psychologically sound.”

“There you are!” Mitchell said dryly. “Now that you’ve got the UFPMA Seal of Approval—”

“Easy, Gary, easy!” Kirk felt like laughing for the first time. “Save your act for Parneb.”

“Who said I was acting?” Mitchell wondered with a quizzical look at Dehner.

Before she could say a word Parneb was suddenly, silently among them again. There was no telling how much he’d overheard.

“It is time now,” he announced with a wave of his hand. “If you will all come with me…” He chose to make a conventional exit this time, moving up the stairs as if there were not several tons of stone between them and freedom. Kirk, right behind him, was strangely unsurprised to find that there were not.

Mitchell uncoiled himself from the steps and let Kelso pass him.

“Come on, Alice in Wonderland,” he called down to Dehner. “Tea party’s over.”

Dehner shouldered her tricorder and glared up at him.

“Someday, Mr. Mitchell, I’m going to look inside your head and find the cause of that calculated misogyny,” she said coldly.

“I’ve got nothing against women,” Mitchell objected, trying to take her arm. “They’re some of my favorite people. When they act like women.”

“Maybe you’re just jealous of my trying to get between you and your captain,” Dehner suggested, wrenching free of him, ignoring the insult—not the first of its kind she’d heard, certainly.

“My advice has saved Jim Kirk’s life more than once,” Mitchell said stonily. Playing the Bad Cop already? Elizabeth Dehner wondered, or did he really mean to sound so menacing? “If he needs your advice, he’ll ask for it.”

The staircase spiraled upward through several narrow turnings within windowless, featureless stone walls that Kelso assured them, to Parneb’s obvious delight, were of much later construction, opening out suddenly into a suite of airy, almost-modern rooms. Kelso was ecstatic.

“Mud-brick construction, domed ceilings, rounded arches!” he raved. “It looks like a Hassan Fathy. Parneb?”

“Close, Mr. Kelso,” Parneb beamed at him. “The architect will be a disciple of Fathy’s at the end of the last century.”

Mitchell, meanwhile, was not looking at the architecture but at the mass of medieval miscellany contained within it.

“He’s got all the trappings, Jim!” Mitchell sounded amazed. “Look at all this stuff! Everything the do-it-yourself 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 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—”

He lunged at Parneb as Kirk had downstairs. Kelso, playing along, intercepted him.

“Easy, Mitch—”

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 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 skepticism!”

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.”

“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—”

“Pretty impressive holography.” Gary Mitchell sneered, still in character.

“Mr. Mitchell, I assure you—”

“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 realize 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—”

“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 tomorrows 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. Her three contemporaries goggled at her. “There’s one version of the Merlin legend—I think it’s T. H. White in
The Once and Future King
—where Merlin’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 will 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 will 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 know!” 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 shall—”

“Parneb,” Lee Kelso said. He was not addressing the sorcerer by name, but recalling something he knew from history. “Parneb of Thebes. Construction boss under Ramses III, master architect under five pharaohs. You’re not—you can’t be—”

“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 master?—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.