Time for Yesterday by A. C. Crispin

Author:A. C. Crispin [Crispin, A. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780671603717
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1988-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

RIDING A v-YKAR wasn't much like riding a horse, McCoy discovered. The beasts moved with a side-to-side motion that reminded him more of a camel. They wore bitless bridles, and were controlled more by the legs and voiced commands than by tugs on the reins. Still, sitting upright on the creature's back was infinitely preferable to being thrown across its withers.

Darkness had fallen over the slopes of Big Snowy as their little band pressed onward, up the Mountainside. The guards, their weapons bound with the blue peace-thongs, carried lit torches, but their light did not reach the center of the group, where the doctor rode.

McCoy hoped uneasily that his mount possessed better night vision than he did. Even though tonight was clear, Sarpeidon's lack of a moon made the darkness seem endless and looming. The doctor glanced up, seeing stars that were only vaguely familiar from his previous trip here, when they had brought Zar back for-he hoped-the first time.

McCoy experienced a sudden, aching nostalgia for the clear-eyed youth with the shy smile whom he had known for those seven weeks aboard the Enterprise. He'd virtually adopted Zar, becoming the young man's confidant and adviser. In a way, as Kirk had observed at the time, it was as though Zar were his son, rather than Spock's. When Zar had returned to the past, McCoy had grieved for weeks TwE FOR YESTERDAY

almost as he would have mourned his daughter, Joanna, if anything had happened to her.

The vykar lurched its way up the rocky path and stumbled, sending a rock spinning away from its cloven hoof.

The doctor sensed, rather than saw, the stone pitch over a cliff two meters to his left. He listened for the clatter of its landing, but no sound came. McCoy swallowed. "Be careful, buddy," he admonished the vykar, patting the beast's warm shoulder in front of the saddle and catching a whiff of its musky odor borne on the dark breeze. "It's a long way down."

His mount snorted, unimpressed, as it plodded on.

McCoy returned to his musings.

He was worried about Zar. The man he'd seen today was so different from the eager, impetuous youth he'd known fourteen years ago, that, except for brief flashes of familiarity, he could have been a different person altogether. The Zar he'd known before had been passionate and intense, quicktempered and proud (at times, arrogant), yet touchingly vulnerable in his loneliness.

The man McCoy had met today seemed little more than a hollow shell filled only by a bitter determination to do his duty. All the passion, the intensity, the pride, were gone.

Only the loneliness was still there-greater than ever. What happened to him? McCoy wondered, trying to dig deeper than the bare-bones recital Zar had given them, to unearth the old sorrows.

Obviously, the death of his wife is a good part of it ... he loved her very much, if I'm any judge. It must have been childbirth. Not surprising, in a society this primitive. Rather, it's a wonder that any of them survive .

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