Its Hour Come Round Page 3

  “One wouldn’t think that after all we as a people have been through, the simple loss of a pet or the fact that we will never smell the scent of noggik wood again would sadden us so much, and yet it does.”

  She hesitated, as if she had lost her train of thought. She hadn’t meant to end on such a negative note. Kirk’s death was affecting her more than she realized.

  “I do not mean to sound ungrateful, Gentles,” she managed. “But it is necessary for you to understand that the decision whether or not to join the Federation will not be an easy one. Some are concerned that it could mean a continuation of our dependency on your charity….”

  There were nods and murmurs from some members of the Zamestaad.

  “Others need time to understand exactly what such an alliance would entail, how much more of ourselves and our identity we would need to sacrifice in order to fit in.”

  Still more consensus from those gathered.

  “Ultimately,” Raya concluded, “we will hear all arguments and discuss all details, and should the vote end in a tie, I will cast the deciding vote. But in all honesty, as of this moment, I cannot tell you what my vote would be….”

  “Well,” McCoy said, watching the proceedings on a feed that Uhura had just patched in to the datacenter where he’d be working for the next few weeks. “At least she’s being honest.”

  “Raya’s always been honest,” Uhura replied from a comm center across town. “Often to her detriment.”

  On their respective screens, Raya had stepped down from the podium, and several members of the Zamestaad were already trying to be heard, even though protocol required that both Spock and Azetbur add their remarks to Raya’s.

  “Let the games begin!” McCoy remarked, then muted the broadcast. He pretty much knew what Spock would say, and anyway he could get a replay later. For now, he had work to do.

  He’d been paired with a Klingon healer from Azetbur’s party. Their assignment was to review all the medical data on outcomes from the Pulse that had been gathered since the last time McCoy had been here. Where it wasn’t heartbreaking—people were still dying of melanomas and respiratory ailments, birth rates were down, there were incidences of blindness and questionable genetic mutations, and the Payav life span overall was still nearly a decade lower than it had been before the Pulse—the work promised to be tedious beyond measure.

  The Klingon healer’s name was Rajhemda’la, and she eyed McCoy skeptically underneath her brows and shrugged.

  “You’re almost as thin as a Payav. We’ll have to fatten you up. How do you like your gagh?”

  “Not at all, thank you,” McCoy replied, trying to be civil.

  His Klingon counterpart was anything but thin, and as he observed her eating habits over the next two days, he could understand why. She seemed to spend as much time at the replicator as she did at her console. Still, despite his initial grousing, he found he was able to work with her. They divided the sector grids exactly in half, collected the data, and then flagged it for the other to cross-check and verify. There was no small talk, just a lot of demographics flowing by on a screen, and by the end of the second day, McCoy couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. It was somewhere in that in-between state that he stumbled on something that intrigued him.

  “Hello,” he murmured, suddenly very much awake. “What’s this?”

  Once the initial shock value of having the Klingon chancellor herself on their world had worn off, the Payav lost no time in peppering her with questions, both during the official sessions of the Summit and during press conferences and even casual encounters in the corridors.

  “You would have us believe that you are here solely because your homeworld has suffered a similar fate?” Deman elKramo was the principal gadfly, but he had plenty of allies. He made certain always to ask his questions when there were news cameras about. Even the growl and reflexive reach for his weapon on the part of Kra’aken, Azetbur’s bodyguard, did not faze the man.

  Inwardly, Spock sighed. He had expected that the negotiations would entail a long and arduous process. He hadn’t expected open hostilities to erupt quite so soon.

  Excelsior and its Klingon counterpart had left orbit as soon as both diplomatic parties had beamed down. Both would return within the month to retrieve their respective parties, regardless of what decision was reached. The month would be spent in negotiating, first with one faction, then another, to try to reach some consensus on what was best for Mestiko.

  The first order of business, Spock realized, was to convince the Payav, despite past history, to trust the Klingons.

  After three days surrounded by these hairless, fragile-looking, contentious creatures, Azetbur had stopped trying to tell them apart, addressing each simply as “Minister.” It seemed to serve.

  “Is that not sufficient reason?” she asked tightly. “Or is the fact that I am Klingon reason enough to suspect my motives?”

  “Your people and ours have a past!” an elderly female Payav piped up from the back of the crowd. “A past that cost me several family members. Don’t blame us if we are bitter!”

  “Bitter about the past?” Azetbur inquired. “So you should be. But neither my father’s regime nor mine has ever done you any harm.”

  “So you don’t care if Mestiko joins the Federation in defiance of your empire?” someone else demanded in a non sequitur which made sense, Azetbur supposed, only if one were Payav.

  “Frankly it’s my belief that you and the Federation deserve each other!” she said with an edge to her voice just as Raya reached for the ancient noggikwood gavel which would, hypothetically at least, restore order to the proceedings.

  “Alternatively, you could always ally yourselves with the Klingon Empire,” Azetbur said just loud enough to be heard. “What better way to learn how we deal with contentious citizens?”

  This caused further uproar, which Raya did quell with a rap of her gavel before adjourning for the first day.

  “I honestly don’t know what made me do that,” Azetbur told Spock wryly at the small reception in their honor that evening. “But they squabble worse than Romulans. The urge to knock their fragile little egg-heads together…”

  “You are playing devil’s advocate,” Spock suggested, then was compelled to explain the term and its origins.

  “Am I?” Azetbur asked, and so it went.

  The Federation, in the person of Spock, became the target of the next day’s session.

  “Can you restore our world to exactly what it was before this accursed Pulse destroyed it?” one delegate demanded. “Of course you can’t. So what are you offering us? It’s your fault all of this happened in the first place. We will overlook the loss of our many dead, but unless you can give us back the world we once knew…”

  “You are aware, Councillor Jolon,” Spock said, and the party in question seemed surprised that he remembered his name, “that restoring Mestiko to its original state is not possible. Nevertheless, every effort has been made to—”

  “Then we’re not interested!” Jolon shouted. The man did not seem to be able to speak in a moderate tone of voice.

  As much as she hated it, Raya let them rant. But by the end of the third day, even she had reached her limit. She pounded the gavel for a full six-minute, long after the last Servant had shouted himself hoarse.

  When the room had been brought to silence, Raya waited a judicious moment before announcing, “We will adjourn until tomorrow. Any further grievances, accusations, or simple complaints about the weather will hereafter be delivered in writing, and all such documentation must be read by all of the delegates before any can comment on them. That includes—” She raised her voice slightly over the expected groundswell of muttering. “—comments on my decision that all complaints must hereafter be submitted in writing. We are adjourned until tomorrow.” She kept her eye on Deman elKramo and Servant Jolon in particular. “I hope by then you can all remember your equanimity.”

  That evening there was no reception.
All of the delegates retired to their respective quarters for dinner and reflection.

  Spock found both interrupted by McCoy.

  “I need to talk to you!” McCoy burst in on Spock with a rudeness tolerable only in someone who had once shared the same brain, and got right to the point. “Assign someone else to the data gathering. There’s somewhere else I can be more useful.”

  It was the most animated Spock had seen McCoy in a very long time. “Indeed?”

  “There’s an ethnic enclave in the Ayanava province—a tribe, really,” McCoy said. “They call themselves and their valley the Nehdi. They refused to relocate when the pulsar passed, even though they were practically in its path. The folks in that region have lived through some of the greatest hardships of anyone on the planet.” McCoy paused for breath. “Still, they’re a resourceful lot, and they’d adapted, begun to reclaim their land so that they no longer needed to be dependent on government handouts, and now this…”

  “‘This,’” Spock repeated.

  “Some sort of wasting disease that targets the young people,” McCoy explained, “those who were children or young teens when the Pulse struck. As soon as they reach early adulthood, they begin to age rapidly for some reason, at a ratio of about a decade to a month. Organs break down, and they die. Local medical authorities are stumped.”

  Spock considered. “Only the young people?”

  “So far,” McCoy said gloomily. “I’m hoping it’s just a local phenomenon, but I’ve got to know for sure. I want to go in there and have a look around.”

  Spock pretended not to notice the spark of interest in McCoy’s eye, the slight straightening of his posture, which had seemed stooped with defeat and the burdens of the universe since the news of Jim’s death. He was rubbing his hands together in that Let’s get down to business gesture of his.

  “Have the Nehdi asked for your help?” Spock wanted to know.

  “Well, not exactly, but—”

  “I am concerned about the completion of the global medical survey,” Spock mused. The best way to make McCoy dig his heels in was to tell him he couldn’t do something.

  “C’mon, Spock. Anyone with a premed degree can stare at those grids and make a determination. You don’t need a senior medical officer.”

  “Perhaps not. But there is also the diplomatic delicacy. There should be a Federation presence of equal rank to Rajhemda’la so that the Klingons will not be offended.”

  “Nonsense!” McCoy snorted. “As long as no one gets between her and the replicator. Tell you what, that young pup from Excelsior that you brought down as an observer can fill in for me. What’s his name, Tuvok? Just on a hunch, Rajhemda’la would be a lot happier sharing the office with a handsome young Vulcan than with an old wreck like me.”

  Spock seemed to be thinking it over, timing it precisely so that McCoy would not guess he was being manipulated. He waited for the inevitable explosion. It was not long in coming.

  “Dammit, Spock! I’ve been watching the newsfeeds. You and Azetbur and the rest are going to be stuck haranguing with the Zamestaad for weeks. The sooner I can get my hands around this thing, the better. Maybe I can save some lives. What’s the usual mode of transportation in that part of the world?”

  CHAPTER

  5

  “I had to ask!” McCoy grumbled as the ancient bus paused for breath at the top of a switchback and some of the stronger Payav got out and began to push.

  As the normal change of seasons had given way to two decades of winter temperatures and poisonous atmosphere, transportation on most of Mestiko had been a challenge, but in these far-flung wilder areas it had often been close to impossible. With most roads at first inaccessible under several feet of toxic snow and eventually upheaved and torn apart by permafrost, the locals had learned to improvise.

  Every surface vehicle became a multitasker. McCoy and Uhura had traveled most of the way from vosTraal in a wallowing skimmer-van that lumbered a few meters above the surface, picking up and delivering essential goods to certain hub cities along the general route they were headed. It took them three days to reach Ayanava province, but much of what they were onloading were medical supplies and a redi-lab for the new hospital that was under construction in the Ayanava Valley, and McCoy was kept occupied with inventorying and rearranging everything down to the last tongue depressor.

  Uhura, for her part, took advantage of the skimmer’s leisurely path to make onsite inspections of every communications relay in every town she visited. It was as much a sightseeing tour as an assignment. When McCoy got off in Ayanav, the regional capital at the southern tip of the valley, to continue his journey via local transportation, she would stay on the van as it looped around the entire valley and eventually returned.

  She was well on her way, mercifully, before McCoy had a chance to grouse about riding the local bus. That “honor” fell to Sorodel, the Nehdi Elder who had met the van when it touched down in the town square.

  “The bus,” Sorodel told McCoy, “predates the Pulse. You should be grateful you weren’t here during the depths of the nuclear winter. The mountain passes were impenetrable. And it wasn’t always possible for the flyers to navigate the poisonous murk. When the airdrops couldn’t make it, people starved.”

  That shut McCoy up for the moment. Whatever discomfort he was feeling, it was nothing compared with what these people had been through.

  A particularly stubborn and resilient group, the Nehdi had steadfastly refused to be resettled in the more temperate, better-restored regions of the planet, despite the loss of over half their population in the immediate aftermath and the dreadful hardships of survival in the years following.

  “Our ancient myths told that the gods brought us to this valley when the planet was just formed,” Sorodel explained as the bus started again with a roar and those who had been pushing scrambled to get back aboard. McCoy, wondering if this leg of the journey was better or worse than the skimmer-van, noticed that the other passengers were pointedly not staring at him, though he imagined they didn’t get many Dinpayav in these parts. “And while most Nehdi no longer believe that we will lose our souls if we venture away from our ancestral land, most of us refused to leave.

  “The Nehdi have belonged to the Land for as long as it has been the Land, at least as it is written in the ancient lore. Even the Pulse could not drive us away. Partly this is stubbornness, but the rest is about who we are.”

  Sorodel, McCoy guessed, was about his age, and he found her voice particularly melodious. It soothed his impatience.

  “Tell me more,” he said as the bus swerved around a hairpin turn and he grabbed the first thing he could reach to keep from tumbling out of his seat. He’d learned enough about the Nehdi Elders to be aware that Sorodel carried the history of her people in her mind. He wanted to keep hearing that voice to take his mind off the jolting of his bones.

  “In ancient times,” Sorodel obliged him, “it was forbidden for the Nehdi to leave the Land. This is not to say that some did not try. Throughout our history many had gone away to the wider world of Mestiko and not come back.”

  The bus coughed, stalled, made some sort of horrible gear-shifting noise, started again, and began to move slowly down an improbable downgrade, loose scree scattering under its rear wheels.

  “In ancient times, those who left and did not return were spoken of as if they were dead, mourned briefly, then not spoken of again,” Sorodel explained. “Those who went away for a time and came back were studied closely by the kin they had left behind, to see if they had lost their souls.

  “In ancient times, those whom it was decided had left their souls behind in the wider world would be prayed over. Some would recover their souls, some not. The latter were shunned, forming little groups of their own on the outer borders of the Land.

  “There was the occasional muttering that the Alangabi, who live on the other side of the ring of mountains which form the borders of the Land, are descended from those soulless ones, thou
gh modern, more urbane Nehdi dismiss that as ancient prejudice.

  “In short,” Sorodel concluded with a wry and close-mouthed smile, “my people have not always been without prejudice. But the Pulse and its aftermath showed us how petty those ancient feuds truly were.”

  “So I take it you and the Alan…Alangabi?” McCoy asked, and Sorodel nodded. “Your two peoples are no longer feuding?”

  The bus had begun what he hoped was the final descent of the final mountain. He didn’t think his innards could take much more of this. He thought he saw buildings in the distance on the hardpanned valley floor, and hoped they weren’t a mirage.

  Beside him, Sorodel sighed. “The hardships following the Pulse created an uneasy truce between us as we struggled to survive in its aftermath. But now that the world is returning to something resembling normalcy after all these years, the old rumblings have begun again.

  “In any event,” Sorodel concluded her narrative as the bus did indeed level out and begin to pick up speed across the hardpan, though it seemed to be cutting directly across the desert, and there was no road McCoy could see. “The role of the Elder, even before the Pulse, is to somehow reconcile opposing forces. Not only to make our ancient beliefs compatible with modern life, but also to try to keep the peace between Nehdi and Alangabi without losing her mind. My sphere of influence is smaller than Jo’Zamestaad elMora’s, but I know something of what she’s going through.” She held out her hands to McCoy in the characteristic Payav gesture of welcome, and he returned it—though he noticed that the Nehdi custom called for the arms to be angled inward and for each side to grip the other’s wrist tightly. He suspected that this was an older form that the isolated Nehdi had never changed. “And I cannot tell you how relieved I am that you are here.”