STAR TREK - TOS - 53 - Ghost Walker

GHOST WALKER

Chapter One

It was in the Moon of the Blue Berries, in the

third year of the twelfth cycle of the Treecat

star in the thousand and forty-second turning of the

Wheel of the Universe, when the Hungries first

began to appear and disappear in the Bindigo

Hills. At first they seemed to be like children or like

the giant running-apes, not knowing anything but doing

no harm; then they began to catch animals and

make them disappear, and tried to catch people as well,

but the people ran away and hid in the warrens. Later

the Hungries began to kill people, and roasted and

ate their flesh. Then the hunters of the Bindigo

Warren and the other warrens near where the Hungries

appeared began to slay them, as they hunted the

Flaygrubs and Hootings.

Only in the fifth year of the twelfth cycle

did Kailin Arxoras, patriarch [n.b.

designation unclear] of the Bindigo Warren and

memmietieffos [concept unclear--

untranslatable from Midgwin language *]

draw close enough to the Hungries to walk in their

dreams as they slept, and to realize that they were,

after their own fashion, people too.

* See Enchar T'Krau Shorak,

"Telepathy Among the Midgwins,"

Journal of Intercultural Contacts

very. 93-3, and Neary, R. Jr.,

"Communications Problems with Non-Verbal

Alien Languages," JIC very. 30-

9.

From Songs of the Midgwins, translated and

introduced by Dr. H. H. Gordon, Oxford

University Press.

"Cute little critters, aren't they?" Dr.

Leonard McCoy, hands on hips, surveyed

the silent crowd of rotund, shovel-headed

Midgwins gradually forming in the pale twilight

at the end of the box canyon where the landing party had

materialized. Now and then a Midgwin would

raise its head on an extensible neck, adding

another foot and a half to its insignificant

height, to look with luminous gray eyes over the

heads of its fellows. But mostly they just gazed.

Every pair of bony, three-fingered hands held a

flower; wreaths of flowers circled many

pairs of narrow little shoulders or rested on the

long, webby manes of their hair, and against the

gathering twilight the pale blossoms seemed

to float disembodied, the fragile honey scent of

them unbearably poignant against the faintly musty

odor of the Midgwins themselves.

"Don't let them hear you say that, Bones,"

Captain James Kirk reproved his ship's

surgeon softly. "They killed a dozen of our

scouts and contact personnel before we convinced them

that there was a difference between us and the Klingons."

McCoy looked indignant at the

possibility of being mistaken for a Klingon. Behind

him, Dr. Helen Gordon laughed softly and

said, "I expect we all look alike to them."

"We do." A man's quiet voice spoke

from the shadows of the fat-trunked, almost leafless

barrel plants that huddled thick among the

canyon's stones. "But not in the way you think."

Kirk turned quickly, startled, and annoyed with

himself. Though the planetary contact team had

reassured him repeatedly that the landing party would be

in no danger and must be kept to the absolute

minimum, he was slightly on edge without the

safety margin of Security personnel. He

should, he knew, have heard these newcomers arriving

at the landing site.

They stepped from the encircling blue gloom into the

open two Vulcans and an Argellian in

hard-worn khaki coveralls, led by half a

dozen Midgwins, the foremost of whom was so old that

his smooth, purple-brown skin had faded to a

dusty gray under the whitish ridges of the whorled

scar tattoos. His eyes had faded too. They

were glacier-gray, wise and sad, and the skin around

them, and over his hard little beak, was white, as were the

silky strands of mane that hung down over his

knobby shoulders. Alone among the Midgwins,

he carried nothing in his hands, though he walked with

their rolling two-legged stride instead of--as the

others occasionally did--assisting himself now and then with

one long arm touching the ground.

The male Vulcan, a small, neat little man

whom Kirk knew to be the anthropsychologist

Dr. Shorak, stepped out ahead of the white-faced

Midgwin and presented Kirk, McCoy,

Gordon, and the other two members of the Federation

contact team with two flowers each. "Hold one in

either hand," he advised softly. "It is said that you

cannot lift a hand in anger if it holds a

flower."

"If I stick one behind the wrong ear, will someone

proposition me?" McCoy inquired, sniffing

at the tiny, intoxicatingly sweet blossom.

Dr. Gordon smiled teasingly. "If they

don't, I will," she promised, and Kirk hid

a grin. Unlike Dr. Mei Chu and Dr.

Nomias Gzin, the other two representatives

of the Federation Xenological Institute, Helen

had not kept to herself in the two weeks they'd been

on the Enterprise. She had instead fallen

easily in!comradeship, not only with Kirk, but with

many of the crew. It was becoming difficult for

Kirk to remember what it had been like without her

big-boned, awkward presence among them in the

rec rooms or the labs--without the sound of that soft

husky alto, and the knowledge that she'd be somewhere around when

he came off-shift.

Shorak said, "This is Kailin Arxoras,

patriarch of the Bindigo Warren and ..." He

hesitated fractionally, then decided against giving

whatever other title he would have given. Instead he

took Kirk's hand lightly but firmly in his,

deftly tucking one of his own flowers out of the way

between skeletal fingers, as Kirk saw the

Midgwins do, and reached out to Arxoras with the other.

"Would you permit him to--to see into you? It is not

like the mind meld--it is a surface affair

only, to reassure him of your good intentions. If

you permit it, would you close your eyes, think of

nothing, and count backward from twenty?"

Kirk hesitated as the instinctive caution of

years of dealing with unknown factors balked within

him. "And how will he reassure me of his good

intentions?"

Shorak gave the matter momentary consideration.

After an eighteen-month stint in the bush, he was

heavily bearded, his long black hair braided

back into a short queue. His face, darkened

slightly by exposure to the honey-colored rays

of the star Elcidar Beta, was grotesquely thin,

and under the worn khaki his joints had the

disquietingly knobby look of borderline starvation,

though he seemed healthy and alert. Other than that

he was perfectly neat, sleeves rolled down,

trouser legs tucked into boot tops, every tab

affixed, which was more than could be said of his wife,

Dr. L'jian--a xenoanthropologist of

awesome credentials and comprehensively rumpled

appearance--and Thetas the Argellian, under

whose rolled-up sleeves Kirk could glimpse the

whorled marks of Midgwin tattoos. Both

L'jian and Thetas had Shorak's look of

unnatural thinness, and with it his incongruous air of

health. Kirk noticed, too, that unlike his

Vulcan Science officer and every other Vulcan

Kirk had ever met, Shorak showed no hesitation

about physical contact with relative strangers.

He logged the anomaly in his mind and saw the

half-suspicious puzzlement that narrowed Bones

McCoy's eyes.

"I am not sure you would comprehend it if he

did," the Vulcan answered him after a moment.

"Due to the nature of the local predators, the

Midgwins have evolved communications which are

largely telepathic, and few humans have the

capacity to interpret or even receive them. It is

not imperative that you permit this."

For a moment Kirk balanced his natural

suspicion of unknown--and formerly hostile--

aliens with mind-probing powers against his natural

inclination to demonstrate goodwill, and his innate

faith that if goodwill were shown, in a

significant--if not overwhelming--majority of

cases, it would be returned. But what actually

won out was his curiosity.

"All right," he said, and closed his eyes.

The Vulcan's dry, twiglike fingers

closed on his.

Twenty, nineteen, eighteen ...

To say that he felt nothing would not be entirely

accurate, but at the time he had absolutely no

way to describe what it was he did feel. The

closest was perhaps the psychic equivalent of standing

with shut eyes while a horse sniffed at his

cheek.

... three, two, one.

He opened his eyes, and blinked. Arxoras

looked up at him with that sad gray gaze and said

haltingly, "T'ank 'o, Kep-i-tan," the

two soft tongues shaping words as best they could

around the hardness of the beak. It was difficult

to understand, but with careful listening, Kirk could make

out the words. "They have made a bright warrior their

patriarch, this warren floating in darkness like a

flendag nest in a stream." And releasing

Shorak's fingers, the old Midgwin reached out

to gently stroke the back of Kirk's hand. "I

share to others what I learn of you?" With a

graceful gesture he indicated the other

Midgwins grouped behind him, squatting on their

haunches, watching with those enormous eyes.

Curiously, now that he was a little used to them,

Kirk had begun to distinguish their various

expressions. The crowds of them still squatting around

McCoy, Helen, and Doctors Chu and

Nomias in the scuffed circle of crowding stones

at the end of the canyon were watching their alien

visitors with a look of childlike absorption in

their deeply folded, curiously juvenile

faces, but these grouped around the three researchers

were evidently not so uncritical. Several of them

were old, if the fading of color from skin and hair

was an indication of age; the folds of loose skin

around the protruding beaks were deep and baggy.

All were tattooed to one extent or another. But

in the eyes of some he could see skepticism,

wariness, hostility, at variance with the odd, old

manstchild physiognomy.

"You may share," Kirk said, and turning his

head, caught a worried glint in Shorak's

eye.

In turn, Shorak presented the others of the

new contact team and Bones McCoy to the

patriarch's psychic scrutiny. "A speaker who

will teach us the speech of the Hungries," Arxoras

said of Helen, touching her hand where Shorak, still

acting as link, held it. "A flower that has

felt sun for the first time." And, studying McCoy

for a long time, he said softly, "A healer living

in pain." McCoy turned his face away.

"I shall be glad of the presence of a relief

team," Shorak of Vulcan said later. Full

dark had fallen. They were sitting outside the

door of what Thetas the Argellian solemnly

referred to as the Elcidar Beta III

Xenological Research Institute, a mud and

wattle hut less than three meters in

diameter a quarter of a mile from the outskirts

of the village. A small campfire burned in

the center of a ring of flat river stones and

desiccated chunks of the soapy, soft-textured

local wood; and the low, flickering orange light

highlighted more strongly than ever the thinness of the

researchers' faces, the boniness of the Vulcan's

gesturing hands. He went on, "The civilization

here, though almost completely lacking in

instrumentality, is enormously complex."

"This?" McCoy's eyebrow went up

and he struggled unsuccessfully to keep an

incredulous chuckle out of his voice. Up the

straggling path through the hard, wiry bush jungle of

thorn thickets, rocks, and barrel trees the

first of the Midgwin houses could just be made out in the

gathering gloom, lumpish excrescences of mud that

stuck to the towering rocks, the squat trees, and

to each other, straggling in all directions up and

down the canyon and along the stream. Oddly enough,

even downstream from the village, the water was

clear, though there wasn't a great deal of it. Through

the soft, dust-smelling haze of evening the piping

voices of the Midgwins sounded no louder than the

chirping of cicadas in the night.

Thetas the Argellian nodded--Dr. Thetas

Farnakos Sredji Akunas, whose work on

societal structures was standard reading in every

anthro class from here to the Barrier, Kirk

reminded himself. The photographs Kirk had

seen of him had showed a plump little man with very bright

black eyes in the smooth Argellian face;

only by the eyes had he been recognizable.

Kirk had seen McCoy taking surreptitious

tricorder readings of all three of the researchers

--and had seen him double- and triple-check them.

As if oblivious to all of this, the Argellian

went on, "The rules of social interchanges--

the hierarchies of respect--the philosophical

education--to say nothing of their songs and legends--

all of them are among the most refined I've ever

encountered." He craned his head a little to see through

the tangled jungles toward the center of the

village. "It's truly a delight to work with

..."

Kirk got to his feet and followed the little

man's gaze back toward the lumpish shapes of the

mud huts among the thorn trees. Rose-amber

moonlight drenched the scene, dyeing the towering

rocks golden and outlining every thorn, every twig of the

jungle in numberless shades of orange,

cinnabar, and peach. Dimly he saw shadows

moving in the moonlight, more and more of them, and became

aware that the Midgwins were gathering in force. The

intermittent chirps of the verbal part of their

language had blended now into a soft, thrumming

murmur, like a cat's purr; he thought he could

see long lines of the Midgwins forming, setting

into thick, ridgy, concentric rings, like the rocks

themselves, shoulder to shoulder, hands linked, eyes

shut.

"What are they doing?" he asked softly,

turning back to the little anthropologist.

"It is the Consciousness Web," Thetas

replied. "They do it, not every night, but at least

three nights out of five. Each opens his or her

or its mind to the others, to feel their troubles,

to reassure one another of caring and love, to heal

sickness and hurts."

"So they believe," Shorak put in austerely

--if he hadn't been a Vulcan, he would have

squirmed. The shift of L'jian's eyes was

equally uncomfortable.

"Have you ever done it?" Helen inquired, folding

her long arms around her drawn-up knees. As

Kirk sat down again at her side, his elbow

brushed her shoulder, and he was acutely conscious

of her touch.

"It can be quite dangerous." There was a distinct

frost in the Vulcan's voice. "Any

psychoemotional melding ..."

"I've tried." The Argellian's dark

glance slipped teasingly sidelong at his

disapproving colleague. "My cold did go

away." He looked back at Helen. "It's

an unnerving sensation to have that much of your consciousness

scrutinized and not be able to do anything about it."

"Aren't there mental techniques to protect

certain areas of the mind from that kind of invasion?"

Kirk asked, recalling, uncomfortably, the

twenty-four hours of displaced consciousness he had

experienced not too long ago with the strange,

godlike alien entity Sargon, the few moments

of shared awareness. "As a Vulcan, surely you

would have some kind of shielding."

Thetas's next remark about wearing a cha/y

belt on one's wedding night was cut off

by Shorak saying "Indeed, both my wife and I

have had frequent occasion to utilize such

technique." He was, Kirk noticed, as

brusque and evasive about the topic of mind-sharing

and mental disciplines as Spock was, as guarded

about the dark shadow-side of Vulcan culture,

and Kirk was aware of L'jian's tilted

eyebrow as she exchanged a glance of speculation

with her husband about where an Out-worlder would have

acquired such knowledge in the first place.

Shorak nodded to Doctors Chu and Nomias

and said "We can instruct you in those techniques,

if you have not been so prepared at the Institute--

they are quite similar to certain Vulcan

mind exercises. In a civilization where they are

accustomed to reading one another's dreams, you might

find the disciplines of mental closure useful."

Shrill and sudden, a Midgwin voice cut

sharply through the milky stillness of the night.

Kirk's glance snapped back toward the

village, recognizing the sound of trouble, his every

instinct on the alert.

One of the Midgwin patriarchs had sprung up

on a stone--or maybe it was somebody's hut,

they weren't much bigger--in the center of the dreaming

rings of the Consciousness Web. There must have been

thirty or forty circles of them by this time, thousands

strong, podlike leathery bodies jammed together.

Their eyes were open, Kirk could see, a spiral

galaxy of dimly glowing stars.

The elder gestured, the sweep of his bony arms

filled with tension and fury; even at this distance

Kirk could see that his head was flat to his

shoulders, his beak tightened to the semblance of an

angry bird as he cawed and piped. The huge,

three-fingered hand jabbed out again and again toward the

shabby hut of the Research Institute, a cutting

gesture eloquent of rage.

"What's he saying?"

Shorak, who had risen also and stood, arms

folded, head down, listening, did not reply.

Helen, who had studied the Midgwin speech in

preparation for this mission, got to her feet and said

softly, "He's angry. He says the

Hungries will spread death upon everything they

touch."

"In a pig's eye," McCoy muttered, his

mouth twisting. "By the look of them, these people are

starving themselves to death--their population's outrunning

their food supply, if they're gatherers like you

say, Helen. I haven't seen anything

resembling organized crops ..."

"There aren't any," Thetas replied softly.

"But I do not think that is what the Ghost Walker

means."

"The Ghost Walker?" Kirk nodded back

toward the speaker, swaying furiously on his

rock. He was big for a Midgwin, his shiny,

reddish-dark skin just beginning to lose its color

around the eyes, his coarse black mane hanging

down over the ridgy folds of his back.

Tattoos covered his arms and shoulders like a

macrame cloak.

"Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost

Walker," Shorak said quietly, coming over

to Kirk's side. "Do not underestimate him. He

is said to be responsible for most of the disappearances

of the Klingon scout parties during the fighting here

five years ago."

Kirk raised an eyebrow and turned his gaze

back toward the fire, impressed that any of the

pudgy, harmless little race would be able to take on

Klingon armed scouts. "I thought you said they

understood the difference between us and the Klingons."

"What makes you think we understand the difference

between us and the Klingons?" Thetas inquired, bending

forward to rearrange the fire. "Yarblis's

contention is that there isn't any."

"Well, I'll tell you a great big one,"

McCoy retorted tartly. "If we were

Klingons sitting here, we'd be taking target

practice at our flat-headed little friend there instead

of discussing the matter in its philosophical

light."

"Watch out," Dr. Nomias said, and his short

antennae swiveled sharply in the direction of the

path. By this time they were all standing, looking back

up the twisting path through the brush toward the

village. With apelike nimbleness, Yarblis

Geshkerroth had swung himself down from his

makeshift stone rostrum and was waddling with

surprising speed toward the Research Institute.

Others had broken away from the circles of the

Consciousness Web and were following, Midgwins of

all sizes, most swinging themselves along on their

hands as well as their short, stumpy legs. They

moved easily through the thorn brush, their platy

hides making nothing of the barbed spears of the

plants; their eyes were a bobbing and luminous sea

in the dark.

Almost instinctively, Thetas and Shorak

closed their distance to Kirk and Helen; and equally

instinctively, Kirk gestured the others back and

walked out to meet the delegation alone.

"You ..." Squatting before Kirk, Yarblis

looked far more dangerous than a tubby little alien

with wide, glowing eyes should have. D rawn in on

himself, the thick wrinkles of his hide clenched to form

a protective armor, he was far from comical.

One big, three-fingered hand unfurled itself on the

end of the bone-thin arm. "Let me walk in," he

said, his voice shriller, his English and

pronunciation much inferior to Arxoras's. "Let

me see in your mind what you mean for

humankind." And by humankind, Kirk knew he

meant himself and his race.

Kirk hesitated. Sargon, savant of a

nameless and long-extinct race, had in their brief

time of shared consciousness taught him a certain

number of mental shielding techniques;

recently, Spock had been teaching him others.

Too frequently, starfarers who tangled with

telepathic alien races had found themselves enmeshed

in cases of possession that would have had any

exorcist in Earth's history reaching for his

crucifix.

"Let me see!" Yarblis insisted

furiously. "You hide from us why you have come!"

Behind him Kirk heard the scrunch of boots

on gravel, and from the tail of his eye he saw

Shorak coming toward them. Yarblis backed away

a little, hissing. "No! Not through this cold one with a

soul like a stone egg, who has never let us drink

of his dreams. By yourself and for yourself, unveiled

by lies."

From the direction of the village there was a stirring

among the Midgwins crowding the path. In the

gloom, Kirk caught a glimpse of a white

mane like a silken flag. Beside him, Shorak said

softly, "You don't have to ..."

Arxoras waddled from the darkness. Flowers were

braided into his snowy hair. "Please understand

my brother," he said to Kirk, reaching out one hard

hand to stroke Yarblis's bony back. At

Arxoras's touch, Yarblis relaxed visibly,

the taut ridges of his skin loosening, his head

rising a little on its neck. By the light of the

Institute fire Kirk could see the Ghost

Walker's arms were, among the tattoos,

blotched with the crinkly scar tissue left

by Klingon disruptors.

"He has said that you may be self-deceived--that

your belief is that, meaning us well, you can still harm

us. He asks to see deeper into your thoughts, to see

what you intend for us in this Federation your people speak of.

But if this troubles you or causes you fear, do not

regard what he says. I trust your people ..."

Yarblis twisted his head like an owl's on his

neck and hissed something at the old Midgwin.

Arxoras blinked calmly at him for a moment,

then turned back to Kirk. "I trust you," he

repeated.

"You don't have to--" Shorak began softly.

"No." Kirk held out his hands

to Yarblis and mentally concentrated his thoughts in the

best approximation he could find of the disciplines that

Spock and Sargon had taught him. "No, he

has a right to know. And we mean only benefits

to this world." He slowed and steadied his breathing, wishing

briefly he'd made more time to practice

meditation than he had ... An increase in the

production of food, he thought. Better ways of

STAR TREK - TOS - 53 - Ghost Walker

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