Joseph had also been transformed, and Kirk blinked back weary tears.
The harsh masculinity Norinda had brought forth in his child had softened. Joseph was himself again, neither one gender nor the other. His ridges, his ears, all the marks of distinction that had echoed the myriad species of his genetic makeup, had also blurred, until there was nothing more to point to, to call out a difference.
The thought came to Kirk unbidden-an ancient wisdom revealed: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Never had he understood that more than at this moment.
A perfect being… he thought in wonder.
NO, the voice answered him.
JUST A BEING.
Norinda’s voice was petulant, defensive. “You can’t win this time!”
Her body began to change again, taking on its formless bulk of black cubes, black sand, primordial matter in constant motion.
This time…? Kirk thought. How long had this battle been raging? How many times had these foes met?
Norinda had become a waving mass of writhing tendrils snaking through the air, darting at Joseph, seeking to draw him into her embrace.
But Joseph stood unflinching, spread his arms to her as if to offer no resistance.
As if in the face of her love, he offered love in return.
Kirk saw the combat tricorder on Joseph’s wrist-he had made himself the target for Starfleet’s new weapon, though Kirk didn’t understand how his son could have known of that plan.
Then Joseph began to glow.
For a moment, just a moment, Kirk felt unreasoning fear.
Then he recognized the spectrum of that energy his son produced, that his son was part of.
Picard fumbled for his own tricorder, took readings as the purple light from Joseph filled the huge room.
“Density… negative,” Picard read from the tricorder’s small display. He changed a setting. “Radiation negative…”
Kirk didn’t need a tricorder to know what the last reading would reveal. Neither did Picard.
“Energy negative,” they said together.
Joseph was light.
Norinda was darkness.
Kirk knew he witnessed a battle that was older by far than his first encounter with the Totality, older by far than Earth itself.
“The galactic barrier…” Picard said.
Kirk understood. “Built as a defense… four billion years ago, when only one species lived in this galaxy.”
BEGONE FROM HERE, the voice said.
“Never!” Norinda cried in defiance.
Her tendrils flickered hungrily toward Joseph, but exploded into inky mist at each contact with the energy that surrounded him.
Joseph’s form could be seen no longer. He blazed with the same energy that fueled the galactic barrier-the same energy Kirk had seen on the first mission to take him past the boundaries of Earth’s frontiers and for the first time to truly go where no one had gone before.
Kirk held up his hand to cover his eyes, but that light could still be seen.
Then Kirk realized that even as his child achieved victory, he himself had lost.
Even the simple act of holding up his hand was impossible.
Strength melted from him. His arm fell to his side. He could no longer sit up. He stretched out on the dark floor, each breath more difficult than the one before, knowing that soon he’d draw his last.
It was time for him to die.
And then… he saw Jean-Luc on the floor beside him, also gasping for air.
“Jean-Luc,” Kirk said, “you’ve got to hold on.”
“I will,” Picard replied as if puzzled by Kirk’s concern. “The gravity increase will only last a few seconds.”
“Gravity increase?”
“The Enterprise and the Belle Reve must’ve finally locked on to the combat tricorder. We’re in a projected gravity field.”
If Kirk had had the strength, he would have laughed.
Picard gave his friend a questioning look. “What… did you think you were dying?”
Kirk gazed up at the rich purple light that filled the command center, a glorious light, he realized, that had followed him all through his career.
“Not today,” he said. “Never today.”
And then the light intensified beyond anything Kirk had experienced before, erasing all the Norindas, filling him, his vision and his heart, becoming a radiance so bright and pure he knew that even Teilani might see it, and know that their love still survived.
“Teilani,” Kirk whispered as the light took him, “we won….”
38
AFTERMATH
Most of the abductees returned from Norinda’s dark realm. Exactly how, no one could say. But the colonists of Delta Vega, once an old mining station, awoke the morning after the events on Vulcan to find almost a thousand newcomers standing in confusion in the fields and forests surrounding their colony’s Central City.
Starfleet Command came to the conclusion that Delta Vega had been chosen to receive the abductees because, in the Alpha Quadrant at least, it was the closest Class-M planet to the galaxy’s edge and thus to the galactic barrier. Though this assumption implied that some intelligence had done the choosing, Starfleet did not address the issue. At least, not in their public analysis.
With reports of other abductees being returned to the Klingons and the Romulans, researchers were now expecting, over the decades and centuries ahead, to hear similar stories from cultures with whom the Federation had yet to make first contact.
Some abductees were still unaccounted for. As Spock had said, some of the personalities he encountered in the realm of dark matter apparently accepted the invitation to go deeper within the Totality. None of those people had yet returned, the captain and crew of the U.S.S. Monitor among them. They were explorers, so perhaps their decision was understandable.
Initial follow-up reports suggested that perhaps as many as four hundred Starfleet personnel had been replaced by projections. But more than five thousand replacements occurred on Vulcan. Strategists were arguing vehemently over why Vulcan had been singled out by the Totality for such extensive infiltration. The majority view was that the Totality, in its blind faith in its mission, had decided that logic alone would encourage Vulcans to accept their invitation.
Not one Vulcan did. Each of that world’s abductees returned.
There was interest also in what happened when the Enterprise and the Belle Reve succeeded in their gravity attack on Shi’Kahr: When Norinda was reabsorbed and vanished, every other projection, whether in Starfleet or other agencies, dissolved. For a few months, at least, Starfleet intended to continue random gravity increases on starships and starbases, just to be sure no new projections attempted to infiltrate. However, there was reason to believe the Totality could never again attack: Readings from hundreds of subspace observatories confirmed that the galactic barrier had undergone a dramatic change in just a matter of days, becoming stronger than ever before, as if it had somehow been recharged. Quick calculations indicated that the increased negative-energy range of the barrier was enough to prevent the opening of any new portals to the dark-matter realm.
Privately, Starfleet Command was beginning to consider the barrier in a new light. Rather than a navigational nuisance that kept Starfleet vessels in, it was seen as a welcome phenomenon that kept something out.
While Starfleet’s public report did not address the issue of how the recharging of the barrier might have occurred, a small handful of Starfleet personnel, active and retired, felt they knew the answer.
A month after the events on Vulcan, the group gathered in a small clearing on an ocean world named Chal. In the clearing was a half-built cabin, an old tree stump still buried in the ground, and a simple grave marked with a polished stone and the dedication plaque from a starship called Enterprise.
A new marker had been added near the grave. It was inscribed in four languages: Standard, Vulcan, Klingon, and Romulan. There was no body beneath it
because no body had been found, and neither did anyone expect to find one.
In one of those languages, the marker read simply:
JOSEPH SAMUEL T’KOL T’LAN KIRK OF CHAL
WITH LOVE
For those who knew, it was memorial enough.
Epilogue
Palimpsest
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE NCC-1701-E
STARDATE 58582.5
The yellow lines of the graviton grid grew faintly luminescent as the light dimmed in the holodeck. Usually, Kirk was impatient with holographic reconstructions; why relive something of the past when there was so much of the present and the future still to experience?
But McCoy had convinced him that this reconstruction was worth his time. As had Jean-Luc.
The doctor and the captain both stood with Kirk now, as did Doctor Crusher, Spock and Scott, Admiral Janeway, and the holographic doctor.
The black walls and floor and ceiling of the holodeck remained unchanged, marked only by the glowing grid, no artificial backdrop required for what it was to display.
And then the reconstruction took shape. A humanoid figure. Female. Clothed in a simple white robe. Her scalp hairless, her features vaguely unformed, yet somehow complete.
Kirk glanced at Jean-Luc, saw his friend smile in recognition. This was a reconstruction he knew well.
“You are wondering who we are,” the humanoid began. The voice was artificial, Kirk knew. In its original form, it spoke in the language of whatever computer system it found itself in, so it could be understood by any suitably advanced species. “Why we have done this; how it has come that I stand before you, the image of a being from so long ago.”
For all that he had heard about this message, Kirk was still surprised by the clarity of it, and by the understatement: “so long ago.”
The humanoid continued. “Life evolved on my planet before all others in this part of the galaxy. We left our world, explored the stars, and found none like ourselves.
“We were alone.
“Our civilization thrived for ages. But what is the life of one race, compared to the vast stretches of cosmic time? We knew that someday we would be gone, and that nothing of us would survive. So we left you.”
Picard had told Kirk the story, how twelve years ago a human archaeologist had put enough of the puzzle pieces together that Picard had been unable to resist completing it.
The end result had been a momentous chase across the quadrant, vying with Cardassians, Romulans, and Klingons to be the first to uncover this message from what was now called, by some, the Progenitor race.
“Our scientists seeded the primordial oceans of many worlds,” the humanoid said, “where life was in its infancy. These seed codes directed your evolution toward a physical form resembling ours-this body you see before you. Which is, of course, shaped as yours is shaped. For you are the end result. The seed codes also contained this message, which we scattered in fragments on many different worlds.”
Kirk knew that just this part of the message had offered a solution to one of the great mysteries of extraterrestrial life that had arisen from Zefram Cochrane’s first voyages of exploration-why nature seemed to favor the humanoid form. In a galaxy where Tholians and Medusans and Horta had all evolved and succeeded as intelligent yet wildly divergent species, why were their forms not echoed on other worlds, while humanoids seemed to have evolved independently on hundreds?
The answer, this message had revealed, was that most if not all humanoid species shared a common origin.
The humanoid was nearing the end of her message. “It was our hope that you would have to come together in cooperation and fellowship in order to activate this message. And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled.
“You are a monument. Not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish. That you, too, would know life, and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other.”
The humanoid paused, and Kirk saw in her face an expression of joy and of sadness.
Joseph’s face.
The weight of his loss struck him anew. But seeing this memory, thinking that this might hold a clue to the mystery and the wonder of Joseph’s existence, he also felt a thrill of happiness.
Joy and sadness both together. Was there anything more human?
Then the humanoid said her final words.
“Remember us….”
She faded then. As if in respect, the lighting in the holodeck remained subdued.
“A message from four billion years ago,” Picard said.
“Just about the time life was showing up on Earth,” McCoy added.
“And the approximate time frame in which the galactic barrier was established,” Spock said.
“Do you really think it’s possible?” Scott asked. “That such a thing could actually be built?”
Janeway kept her gaze on the empty space where the humanoid had been. “What’s always troubled me about this is that they were so incredibly advanced, yet they knew they were dying.” She looked at the others. “How do you know that you’re dying as a species, and yet be unable to take any action to prevent extinction?”
“Unless,” Kirk said, “they knew why they were dying, and that the only defense would take too long to complete.”
The holographic doctor made a show of stroking his chin. “You’re suggesting that the Progenitor race we’ve seen here was attacked by the Totality, and built the galactic barrier to save not themselves, but… their children.”
“That’s what parents do,” Kirk said.
“Unfortunately,” Janeway countered, “there’s not enough evidence to support that theory.”
“I suppose not,” Kirk said. It wasn’t a point to argue.
Janeway started toward the holodeck’s arch. “As fascinating as all this is, I have to get back to Command. Doctor.”
The holographic doctor said his good-byes.
Janeway turned before she passed through the arch. “And Captain Kirk, the new modifications you wanted on the Belle Reve-they’ll be finished tomorrow. We’ve got something we need you to do on Andor. They’ve found something interesting buried in the ice.”
Kirk smiled in acknowledgment, but said nothing.
In time, they had all gone on to their other duties and other lives, until only three remained. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
“So what do you say, gentlemen,” Kirk began. “In the absence of evidence, was everything that happened destiny?”
Spock was unconvinced. “Destiny would imply an intelligence capable of interpreting an almost infinite number of facts in order to predict the likely outcome of events.”
McCoy scowled. “Or just a damn good guesser, Spock. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”
“Or was it just chance?” Kirk asked. “Joseph, Teilani, that Ferengi on Halkan… for that matter, my whole career in Starfleet?”
“You’ve got to admit all those things worked out pretty well,” McCoy said.
“If they hadn’t, Doctor,” Spock added gravely, “then I doubt we’d be gathered here to discuss their advantageous results.”
Kirk thought that over. “So you’re saying things only make sense in hindsight?”
Spock tilted his head in thought. “I’m suggesting you’ve asked a question that cannot be answered.”
“That’s a depressing thought for the day,” McCoy complained.
Kirk smiled, glad of the company of his friends. “Look at it this way, Bones: As long as there’re unanswered questions, there’ll always be something new to find out. Can you think of a better reason to get out of bed in the morning?”
Neither Spock nor McCoy could argue with that.
“So are you going to find out what the admiral has in mind for us next?” McCoy asked.
Kirk grinned, threw his arms around his friends, started walking with them to the arch and all the adventures that still lay ahead.
“Actually,” he said,
“I’ve been working on this new idea….”
He told them all about it on the way back to the Belle Reve.
It was a good one.
And within the hour they were back with Montgomery Scott, where they all belonged.
At warp among the stars. Their mission continuing.
As it always would.
FB2 document info
Document ID: f431c8b0-b1d6-429a-8896-1e2ded980c42
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 27 August 2011
Created using: FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
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Captain's Glory зпвш-9 Page 27
