Author's Note: Thank you for all the nice reviews I've been getting! I'm trying to make it less confusing.
TRADING SPACES
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"What the hell?!?"
Archer looked up from the padd in his hand, eyes so wide Trip wondered briefly if they would fall out of his head. "That was pretty much my reaction, sir," he said. "Okay, good, as long as you see that Malcom wrote that too, then I'm not going crazy."
"Maybe it's mass hysteria, Trip," Archer said. He gulped and skimmed down through the whole length of the text. "There's a good forty pages here, Trip. Wherever Malcolm was when he wrote this, he was there for a while. Did you notice not everything is in English?"
Trip reached for the padd and looked at the part Archer had highlighted. "Son of a gun," he murmured. "What the hell?" The captain laughed, but it sounded nervous rather than amused. "He really was there a while. Or else someone else wrote in it, too."
"I bet our old friend Crewman Daniels could give us a clue if it's time travel," said Archer. "You say Hoshi said the book had been there for a long time?"
"We carbon-dated it," Trip replied. "Lucky the paper was made from plants pretty similiar to Earth's. It's two thousand, three hundred and seventy-six years old. Earth years. You could probably add three months of an Earth year to that, too, but I can't get any more accurate with the stuff we've got on board."
"I think we should go and visit Malcolm," said the captain, getting up from his chair. Trip nodded, and followed him out onto the bridge and into the turbolift, tipping his head to Ensign Mayweather at the helm as he passed.
"The doctor called Hoshi up there right before I came up to the bridge," said Trip as the turbolift hissed down past each deck. "She's probably still there. Maybe he figured something out."
The captain leaned against the wall. He looked a little pale. Trip chalked it up to Archer's own experiences with time travel. He was sure that something was going to happen, something bad, that would end up with Malcolm getting stuck two thousand, three hundred and seventy-six years in the past. And three months.
Of course that didn't explain why Malcolm thought, according to the book, that he had four fingers and green skin.
Maybe that electrical shock did more damage than we thought, mused Trip as they got off the turbolift and headed down to Sickbay. Could'a made him go crazy, maybe.
He snapped rudely out of his thoughts as the doors to Sickbay swooshed open and a loud, terrified shout greeted them.
"Demon magic!" cried a voice. Trip could not place it for a few seconds; he nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized that it came from the strapped-down Malcolm. But all the inflection, the stuffy, precise accent, all that made it Malcolm's voice was completely gone. The man fought tooth and nail against the restraints, muttering under his breath.
"Captain!" cried the doctor, putting a hand on the lieutenant's chest to hold him down. "What a fortuitous coincidence!"
"We came to see Malcom," said the captain, glancing uneasily at the patient.
"What are you doing? I thought we couldn't talk to him?"
"The doctor had an idea. He said all the speech parts of Malcolm's brain actually do work, sir, so it must be something in the muscle coordination parts, so we should be able to understand him if we ran his syntax through the translator and compensated for the muscle defects," said Hoshi, stepping up beside the bed.
"In laymen's terms, that's it exactly," said Phlox, "although the actual process is somewhat more complicated-"
"That's good, doc," said Trip, hastily interjecting before the doctor could go on.
"So he understands every word we're saying?" asked the captain. "Malcolm, can you tell us anything about what happened to you?"
"Oh, gods, save me from this damnable place," was the only answer. "Albion, your servant implores you, please, please, please..."
"That's all we seem to be able to get out of him," said Hoshi, shaking her head. "I don't understand it, it's like he's a different person."
Trip suddenly swore out loud and snatched the padd from Archer's hand, running through the pages until he found the part with the alien symbols on it. "Do you recognize this?" he asked, holding the page in front of Malcolm's eyes.
He was rewarded by a startled look as the lieutenant glanced quickly back and forth between the padd and Tucker's face. "How did you get this?" he asked, sounding considerably less agitated. "Demons cannot write in the script of the Sadhraf!" Meaning, probably, that we aren't demons, thought Trip.
"I have my ways," said Trip. "I bet you know just how to write this way..."
"Of course I do!" he snapped.
"Of course you do," repeated Trip. "Yes, you would... Tobin."
Malcolm's eyes widened. "How do you know my name? Who are you?"
"My name is Trip Tucker," Trip told him. "I bet you're a heap confused right now." He ignored the open mouths and amazed looks on the faces around him. "I bet I'd be too, if I were switched into a body of some alien I'd never seen before."
"The ritual," said Malcolm. Or Tobin, to be accurate, Trip corrected himself. "I have communed with the gods and they have seen fit to remove me from my place on my world."
"Yeah," said Trip. "Does that have anything to do with a big shiny crystal in a big shiny cave, maybe?"
"You have seen the caves of the Sadhraf?" said Tobin, gasping. "How did you get past the guards?" He sounded like a child, almost; Trip doubted he would be an adult at all if he were in his proper body. "I wasn't even allowed to see them until my initiation!"
"Well, kid," said Trip, "there weren't any guards when we visited them. If you promise to be good I'll take off the straps and tell ya what's going on." Not, he thought, that I'm entirely sure myself. I guess my hunch was right on the money, though."
"You promise you are not demons?" replied Tobin plaintively. Trip nearly shuddered hearing how young he sounded, speaking from Malcolm's body.
"I promise we aren't," he said.
"Then I will abide by your leadership, Master Trip Tucker," said Tobin. "Please take these off me."
The doctor moved forward and clicked the straps off of the edges of the bed, and Tobin jumped up, grasping the edge of the bed. "I bet you're hungry," said Trip.
"Have you got any duf'ot'ld?" asked Tobin eagerly. Trip offered him a shoulder, noting that he seemed a little unsteady on his legs, and shook his head.
"Cook's got a pretty big repertoire, but I don't think he knows how to make that. Maybe we can find some pecan pie, though," he said, leading the man towards the door. He caught the doctor's eye and raised a questioning eyebrow.
"Go ahead, Mr. Tucker," said Phlox, sounding rather dazed.
"Pecan pie? That sounds ghastly," said Tobin as they headed toward the door.
Trip snorted as the doors slid shut on Sickbay. "Oh, kid, you got a lot to learn."
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"Is anyone else completely clueless as to what just happened here?" asked Archer as soon as the doors swung shut. He sat down heavily on the biobed that Malcolm had just vacated. "So now Malcolm's name is what?"
"Tobin," said Hoshi.
"Tobin," repeated the captain. "What the hell? I seem to be saying that a lot today."
"Trip said switched bodies, sir," Hoshi said. "Does that mean that Malcolm is in Tobin's body, wherever that is?"
"I guess so. Whenever that is. The book's two thousand and some years old."
"This is medically impossible," said Phlox, still sounding dazed. "I can't even begin to think how it could have happened."
"Maybe we should ignore that for a while," said Archer, "and just try to figure out how to fix it. Hoshi, I want you and T'Pol to go over every bit of data you found from that cave. I'll keep reading this." He held up the padd. Hoshi looked disappointed, but she nodded and left Sickbay.
"I believe I'll go over my scans, too, Captain," said Phlox, and disappeared into the other room, eyes nearly glazed over. Archer caught the words, "...how could this be..." and some muffled Denobulan. He leaned back on the biobed and thumbed back to the beginning, skipping the parts he'd already read when Tucker first showed him the book and its mysterious text.
"Today Mayla took me out of the house and led me around the gardens. I fear
I am rather clumsy in this new body. The legs don't work quite the way I want
them to. She walked around and pointed at things and told me their names.
Tree is jaku, grass is tut, wall is rand, and there are a lot more that I cannot
remember well enough to try spelling them. I wish Hoshi and the Universal
Translator were here. Me mucking around at my own pace is terrible. I'll
never understand them.
"I have figured out one thing, though; I am sure that I am on the same planet.
I can't grasp how we missed a whole big manor (they seem to be working on a
feudal type of system) but I can see the same mountains in the distance,
almost the same formations (I think it's just because of the distance), and
the one big moon in the sky is the same too. I think if I can get away from
them I'll go towards the mountains, because I believe that I remember how to
get to where we left the shuttlepod. It's a slim hope, but maybe some
members of the crew will still be there, looking for me. I doubt they'll
recognize me, because I look so different, but I'll speak English to them and
maybe they will be able to understand it.
"There's another thing I can't understand: how did they manage to genetically alter me this much? And who did it? Unless these people have a lot of technology I haven't seen, they couldn't have done it. I've been thinking about that constantly. I don't know how long I was unconscious after I went into those caves. The first few days I was so weak and tired that I couldn't even get up. Then Mayla and Kodeeya wouldn't let me do anything. It was six days before they even gave me this journal. So I've been here eight days, because I didn't write anything yesterday. I suppose I should try to date it, but I can't figure out how long I was asleep, so I'll just use how many days I've been here. So...day eight. End log, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed of the Starfleet starship Enterprise. Bloody hell."
"He hasn't figured it out yet," said Archer to the empty air around him. "He doesn't know he's twenty-six thousand years in the past." He skimmed the next part, finding mostly descriptions of plans to get away from the ever watchful Mayla and Kodeeya and then descriptions of the plans' failures. Evidently Malcolm had met his match.
"Date: thirty-three days on this planet. I keep telling them my name is Malcolm and they don't believe me. Mayla just says, Malcolm? Your name is not Malcolm. I try to ask them about strange people coming from the sky and they say that I am crazy. I can't explain it better than that, because I don't know the words for alien and starship. That's assuming, of course, that they have words like that.
"What if I am crazy? There's absolutely nothing to prove that I was ever
Malcolm Reed beyond my own assurances. And those begin to fail. I can write
in a language that seems as natural as breathing to me. But if I'm crazy,
then of course I'd be able to understand my own writing because I'd think it
were real even if it is only chickenscratch. What if it is just chickenscratch?
Maybe I am Tobin Marat, like they keep telling me. Marat, that means north
wind, that's what Mayla says. Maybe the wind blew all the real memories out
of my head, and I, Malcolm Reed, am only a figment of Tobin Marat's
imagination.
"Bloody hell."
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Okay, spring break next week, so I'll be able to write more, hopefully, and
post more often. Please review and tell me what you think.