Strange New Worlds IV Read online

  “Like music to my tired old ears,” Scotty whispered, the whalesongs filling his chest with relief and happiness. He knew he’d finally get some sleep at last.

  [FIRST PRIZE]

  The Name of the Cat

  Steven Scott Ripley

  Dr. McCoy sat in a heap of sand at Mears’s side, holding her hand and whispering hollow comfort. The shuttle rattled around them, groaning under the assault of the fierce dust storm. A squeal of air whistled in through the ruptured hull. The doctor couldn’t see much; the shipboard lights were history and the storm lent only a swirling mush of mustard-tinted gloom to the darkness. But he could see enough to know his patient was about to die.

  He’d healed the lieutenant’s minor injuries well enough, his med kit stocked to treat the electrical burns on her arms, the multiple contusions to her torso and head. But when the shuttle crashed the flight console didn’t just fry, it shredded. A tricorder scan detected several lethal foreign masses lodged in Mears’s abdominal region. She needed non-invasive surgery, intensive care, and all the fine resources of the Enterprise sickbay. All she got was a hypospray to ease her pain, though she never actually regained consciousness.

  The doctor angrily muttered the time her heart stopped, glaring at the monsoon sands blowing past the cracked shuttle window. “Mars!” he said. “Of all the goddam places in the universe to die. In our own backyard!” He was pretty sure Lieutenant Mears hadn’t expected to meet her maker this close to home. She’d survived the nasty crash of the Galileo on Taurus II a few years back. Didn’t that count for anything?

  Apparently not. She took the brunt of the crash, but apart from a few aches and bruises, and a sore back from where he’d been tossed to the deck on impact, McCoy didn’t have a scratch on him. Was that how luck or fate or whatever damn fool thing you called it worked? A shuttle with your name on it?

  Or both their names. Their craft was wrecked, nobody knew they were in trouble, and the sands outside were leaking inside. Good thing this rock had some atmospheric pressure to speak of these days, or the hull damage would have popped the small ship open quicker than you could say bladder. McCoy inspected the jagged open scar of metal in the forward hull, below the twisted remains of the flight console. A chirrup of air gusted in, surging with yellow particles of dervish dust that relentlessly piled up on the deck. Mears’s body was already half-covered with Martian desert. “What a tomb,” McCoy said in horrified awe.

  It might be his too. The doctor flipped his communicator open for the tenth time since the crash, but he still couldn’t hail his ship, or anyone for that matter. Between the ionic disturbance caused by the Mons Lights and the severity of the local dust storm, he was completely cut off from the outside world. He and Mears were both on forty-eight-hour shore leaves. Unless there was an emergency, two days might pass before the crew missed them. He’d be ten meters under by then, buried alive.

  McCoy stumbled over to the locker, digging around inside until he found a soft blanket. He spread it out and gently draped the cloth over Mears’s body.

  “Dammit. You deserve better than this.”

  Her strong, beautiful features were flecked with motes of shadow gold, delicate helix spirals of powder braiding her hair. She was sinking, melting into a sand dune. McCoy flinched with sorrow and pulled the edge of the blanket over her face.

  A simple shore leave. The Enterprise was in spacedock above the planet, getting a major overhaul after a grueling skirmish with a Klingon bird-of-prey. McCoy and Mears decided to shuttle to Mars to see the spectacular phenomenon known as the Mons Lights. Jim was due to join them, but got called away at the last minute to attend some pain-in-the-ass diplomatic event Starfleet Command sprung on him. So the two of them piloted the Schrodinger planetward, at first threading between a pair of slowly ascending terraform ships. Each duranium-gray behemoth was ten times the size of the Enterprise, both empty now as they returned from their deliveries of millions of tons of algae for the nascent Martian atmosphere. The shuttle sailed through without incident, then down and across the cloud-speckled peach-pink sky, steering for the amorphous blue-green blotch situated on the surface in the northern hemisphere.

  They saw the Mons Lights. Utterly amazing. Due west of the mammoth volcano Olympus Mons lay a kilometer-wide, bowlshaped valley, where a shipment of algae had been deposited by one of the cargo ships a few weeks before. Over the algae lake, a panoply of dancing spheres and streaks and spirals of gold and silver and green undulated in the sky, a sensuous display of light as this side of the planet turned serenely from day to night. It was as if the shimmering field you saw while being transported had been blown up a millionfold and stretched across the heavens. The air was already ripe with carbon dioxide and water vapor, and now, as the algae interacted with the CO2, releasing oxygen via photosynthesis, the setting sunlight bounced off refractive liquid molecules, revealing a glory of colors in the Martian sky that had not been seen there for untold eons, if ever.

  “I know it’s just a terraforming by-product, but it’s kind of a miracle, in a way,” Mears said at the awesome sight. “Makes you feel lucky to be alive, to see something like this.”

  A few minutes later, as they drifted in mellow contentment and watched the flickering lights, a small, unidentified and fast-moving object struck the bow of their shuttle, and sent them hurtling downward. Probably a meteor: they’d never know for sure. The shuttle crashed in the rocky foothills south of Olympus Mons, smack into the middle of a dust storm.

  “Lucky,” McCoy said gloomily. Losing a patient—and a friend—was his worst nightmare, awake or asleep. When he was tired or feeling low, the doctor sometimes imagined he carried the weight of all those dead souls around on his shoulders, their spirits swirling in a miasma of despair around his head. Of course it wasn’t true; one of those darkly gothic notions he was raised on, better suited for a ghost story on a dark and stormy night. Still, it always hurt. His job was to heal, not to announce deaths to Jim. He’d grown a pretty thick professional hide over the years, but he still couldn’t tolerate defeat. In his line of work, failure was deadly.

  McCoy stepped into the airlock and slipped on a space suit, preparing to venture outside. He did a quick unit check and—it figured—the suit’s communication system, useless in his current straits, worked just fine, but the external helmet lamp was blown out. “When you really need it,” he said laconically, then shrugged and let it go. Worried that his tricorder and med kit, both usually slung over his shoulder, might strangle him or blow clean away in the high wind, McCoy jury-rigged his gear, one to each forearm, with strips of duct tape.

  He nodded tearfully at Mears’s blanketed body. “Vaya con Dios.” It seemed a pathetically inadequate goodbye, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  McCoy slammed an airlock control and a few moments later stepped into a maelstrom.

  Lurched was more like it. His body tottered, bent into the gale. McCoy squinted at his tricorder, trying to get his bearings. Couldn’t see the readout. Sand pounded the polarized visor of his helmet. The noise around him was deafening, an endless wail of rushing air. After several hapless moments of him stumbling about, a finger of stone loomed into his path, probably the crag their out-of-control shuttle slammed into. He crouched and laboriously crab-walked around the rock until he was partially blocked from the blast of the wind.

  “No good,” he said, out of breath and already sweating like a targ. “I’ve got to get out of this.” He’d never be able to hike to the nearest settlement. The closest Martian burrow was ten kilometers away. That was beyond what even Jim might be able to do. Spock, maybe. But Spock had green blood. “What was I thinking?”

  Time for Plan B: find a cave to hunker down in and ride out the storm. McCoy sidled along the lower edge of the crag, poking feverishly at his tricorder to find cover. He recalled glimpsing a nottoodistant cliffside overhanging their crash site. If he could just make this confounded tinker’s toy work properly. The tricorder throbbed again
st his forearm, the device’s metal casing growing warm, the barrage of dust particles gumming it up. The small viewscreen finally flashed up a vicinity terrain map … you are here … the cliff face … then an unexpected red blip glowered onto the map, at a point north by northeast within the cliffs, less than a klick away.

  The location of the blip suggested a sheltering cave inside the cliffs. The red blip itself could mean only one thing. “A life sign! What the—”

  McCoy crawled in the direction of the cave with renewed vigor. With any luck it could be a surveyor tooling around on Terraform Command business. Or even—

  The overtaxed tricorder suddenly screeched and went dead.

  McCoy swore a juicy Romulan curse.

  Nothing for it. He bellied along on memory and intuition. Fortunately there were plenty of scattered boulders to shield him from the worst of the storm. So this was how a worm felt, slithering through the shifting earth, bumping blindly into rocks, sightlessly groping around obstacles. But always moving, until the day it died on a fishhook.

  He clambered into an expanse of empty space. No boulders here. No protection. The ground felt harder beneath his chest. McCoy panicked. A voice in his head screamed to go back. He didn’t know where he was. He was going to perish out here, like Mears, buried beneath the indifferent elements. Somehow he kept going by dumb momentum, though his bones shook and he bit his lip wet and salty. His helmet rattled ceaselessly against his skull. Grab and heave, slump and thump just like a—

  Thud. His head struck a hard surface and he sprawled backward.

  A dark stretch of wall, shrouded by a writhing curtain of sand, rose above him … the cliff.

  Now for the cave. The wind blew strong from the east so he guessed it must have pushed his course too far to the west. He struggled up, plastering himself flat against the cliff wall, then sidled to his right, quick as he could, tapping and kicking the wall, which he could hardly see, feeling his way, terrified the hole might be above his head or not even—

  The noise of the hurricane wind switched off as he fell into a silent grave of darkness.

  Dazed, McCoy found himself sprawled across what felt like a layer of soft pebbles. The sound of Martian purgatory still growled behind him, less excruciating now, gusting past the thin crevice he’d toppled into. He stumbled to his feet. The passage was dark and narrow, but wide enough to squeeze forward and scrunch his way through.

  He couldn’t tell at first, with his helmet on and the storm close behind, but after several tortuous curves farther in he was pretty sure he could hear water dripping. A hallucination from shock? But the ground he trod felt increasingly damp and muddy. He cocked his eyes and glanced up at his helmet’s internal sensor display. The oxygen level here read 115 millibars. There were plenty of breathable organics present.

  Impossible. The terraforming efforts on Mars were advanced in their progress but not that much. Giant orbital mirrors had slowly melted the ice caps and released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere these past several decades, and miners had drilled down and liquefied part of the permafrost layer to create water vapor. But these tasks were stretched out over a century, low-impact enough not to harm the existing colonies here. Terraform Command had only shipped in the algae from offworld this past month, to engineer a greenhouse effect and thicken the atmosphere to life-sustaining levels. This was too much, and far too soon!

  Mistrusting the readout of his helmet, McCoy performed a simpler test. His suit’s emergency supply pouch contained a vial of self-lighting matchsticks. He fumbled out a stick in the dark, held it in front of his nose, and flicked it. He stared wide-eyed at the result: a blue flare as the sulfur ignited, followed by a wavering yellow flame.

  So it must be true.

  The match sizzled out. McCoy dropped it and shrugged. “What have I got to lose?”

  He took off his helmet and cradled it under an arm, inhaling several times in succession. The air felt icy and wet on his lungs but not corrosive. No gag reaction. He blinked thickly, his eyelids encrusted with dust.

  “Well, I’m still alive.”

  McCoy trudged onward. As he had always done. He might be a garrulous smart-ass and a cynic and even an overemotional cretin just as Spock always lectured him, but no one could say Leonard McCoy wasn’t a good soldier when the going got rough. “God knows I’m not in this for the money,” he muttered. He felt tired.

  The passage wound on, zigzagging and growing damper with every step. It was bizarre, the cold, dry Martian air turning muggy and lush. This was beyond seasonal, beyond planetary, as if somebody had cooked up a private swamp in here, balmier than a midsummer eve in Mississippi. The doctor found it pleasant, actually. Reminded him of his childhood on Earth.

  The walls were spongy, pliant with moist clay and lichen. McCoy grabbed a hunk of moss—he still couldn’t see a blasted thing—and sniffed it. Smelled like bitter tea. He felt in the dark and found his med kit still taped to his forearm, managed to stow away a piece of the lichen for further study. It couldn’t be indigenous to this region, nor even to Mars. What had he stumbled into?

  “Name your time.”

  It took McCoy a stunned moment to realize he hadn’t uttered these words. He wasn’t carrying a Universal Translator: the strange voice spoke English. Not that what it said made any sense at all.

  The voice in the dark sounded again, deep and tremulous, like rumbling drums.

  “Name your time,” it repeated.

  “Time?” McCoy asked. “Who is that? I can’t see you.”

  “I am not to be seen,” it replied calmly. No emotion in the voice, as far as McCoy could tell. A simple statement of fact.

  Which annoyed the doctor: it reminded him too much of a certain Vulcan who also drove him crazy with his harebrained cyborg logic. “Well I am not to be seen either,” he said. “It’s pitch black in here. Do you have light? I want to see you.” As with Spock, he laid it all out like talking to a precocious child: statement, request, need.

  Miraculously, his linguistic ploy worked. A light source almost instantly glowed into view a few dozen meters forward and above McCoy’s head. He stood at the end of the passage, at the lip of a small round cavern. The cave walls dripped with the same lichen he’d collected, gray-green and bristling with hairy strands. Mud squelched beneath his feet, leaving boot prints as he slowly walked toward the occupant.

  A humanoid creature, sort of, short and fat, sitting in what looked like a gleaming blue steel wheelchair. The alien’s torso was spherical, studded with knobby nodes like a bumpy white beach ball. The bald head was a smaller round white sphere poised atop the torso, featured by squinty eyes, a flat nose, tiny twists of ears and a slit of a mouth. No arms or legs. A snowman without the snow. McCoy wished he had a working tricorder, aching to get a reading on this creature’s internal anatomy. He’d never seen anything—anyone—like it.

  The alien stared at him, saying nothing, looking placid. Its tiny marble black eyes glittered brightly, as if it had a warp core lurking inside its skull.

  McCoy approached, wary and smiling nervously. There was an established Starfleet protocol for first contacts, but he sure couldn’t remember any of that nonsense at the moment. He extended a hopefully friendly hand. “I’m McCoy. Leonard McCoy. What’s your name?”

  The alien gyrated its neckless head about, a full 360-degree turn. “Irum,” it said when the astonishing rotation was complete. “Name your time, McCoy.”

  The doctor shook his head, exasperated. “I don’t know exactly what time it is. Anyway we’re on Martian time now, and I was on ship’s time up until a few hours ago. My tricorder’s busted, so I really couldn’t tell you.” McCoy blushed, knowing he was blathering.

  The alien tilted its head forward, and forward, and forward … until its features vanished into its shoulders as its ball-bearing head swiveled down and around, then appeared again a few moments later as they rotated up from behind and back to their starting point.

  For his part, McCoy’s jaw
dropped.

  “I am Irum,” it said when its mouth was visible agian. “I am alone in time. Be in time, McCoy. Think in time.”

  McCoy didn’t know what Irum was going on about. He wanted to ask how it was doing the spinning trick with its head, but figured that might be thought rude this early in the conversation. “We crashed near here in our shuttle,” he said instead. “Did you also crash here?”

  Irum only swung its head back and forth a little—nothing too extravagant this time—before it replied. “McCoy. Please, please, please speak my name.” A plaintive request, almost begging.

  “I—Irum,” McCoy said hesitantly.

  “Thank you.” A long sigh of relief, a note of happiness in the sonorous voice. “Speak my name, McCoy, and I will speak your name.”

  McCoy was beginning to suspect that for all its complex physiology, Irum was a bit of a blunt pencil, but he saw no harm in obliging the creature. “I will, Irum. Say, when did you crash? How long have you been here, Irum?”

  “I crashed in time here several thousand of your years ago. I am alone, McCoy.”

  Several thousand? Yet Irum did sound as old as the echoing winds that blew through the ancient canyons of Valles Marineris. He believed it. “Where is your ship, Irum? Was it destroyed?”

  “Yes, McCoy.”

  “Do you want to leave this cave? Maybe I can help you, Irum.”

  Irum spun its head down and around again. When its face returned, it said, “I must leave soon, McCoy. I like it here. Quiet. With memories. But now they make wet noise in the air, flashing lights in the sky. Not so quiet. I know I must depart, though I do not want to.”

  He realized Irum was talking about the terraforming going on outside, the algae and the Mons Lights—they were disturbing its brooding nest here in the cavern. “Where will you go, Irum?”