One day, we had a visitor at our camp. An elderly Vulcan woman in a hover chair floated toward me, escorted by several aides. Though she was much older, I recognized her immediately.
“You are not dead,” T’Pau said.
“No ma’am,” I said. I don’t know how she heard that I was on the planet, but when she did, she obviously felt a need come see me. For what purpose, I couldn’t even guess.
“You disrespected our traditions,” T’Pau said.
“I did not mean to,” I said. I suppose I could’ve blamed McCoy for what happened at Spock’s wedding, but that didn’t seem logical. “I apologize if that was the result.”
“It was,” T’Pau said. We stood in silence for a long moment. I knew there was nothing more to say. She then looked at me. “You have increased your weight. It is not healthful.” She then turned and floated away with her entourage.
Did she come all that way to tell me I had gotten fat?
“The Federation Council has finished their deliberations,” Sarek said. It was about three months after we’d arrived, and upon hearing that the council was going to try us in absentia, Sarek had gone to Earth to speak in our defense. He was on the viewscreen of the Klingon bird-of-prey. McCoy and I spoke to him from the bridge, which Scotty and his team were almost finished refitting for human operation.
“You have all been found guilty of nine violations of Starfleet regulations,” Sarek said, “which carry a combined penalty of sixteen years in a penal colony.” I had no idea if our work on the Klingon vessel would gain us any leniency, or if that sentence had already taken that into account.
“In addition,” Sarek went on, “the Klingons have threatened war if you are not executed.”
“Everybody or just me?” I said.
“Just you,” he said.
Even my time among the Vulcans had not tempered my rage against the Klingons. I was hoping to bump into them again. I could have easily killed some more.
Sarek asked what we intended to do. Prison waited for all of us. I suppose we could’ve taken the bird-of-prey and become pirates on the run.
But the truth was we wanted to go home, whatever the consequences. We couldn’t hide on Vulcan forever.
On the day we left, Saavik came to see me. She was staying behind. The rumor was she was pregnant. I wondered whether it was David’s, but it seemed inappropriate to ask.
“Sir, I have not had the opportunity to tell you about your son. David died most bravely. He saved Spock. He saved us all. I thought you should know.” I nodded. I don’t know if it was a comfort. He died a hero, but like many parents, I think I would’ve preferred if he’d been a coward and lived.
After Saavik left, Spock came on board. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d been back. He had been undergoing a reeducation and seemed a kind of childlike version of himself. But he was just as brilliant and just as loyal. He was coming with us to offer testimony in our defense. We, and the entire population of Earth, were lucky he decided to do that.
“Save yourselves … avoid the planet Earth at all costs.” It was Federation president Hiram Roth, sending a planetary distress call. A mysterious probe had come into Earth orbit and had sent transmissions that were ionizing the atmosphere, blocking out the sun, and had caused all power systems to fail. We were in the bird-of-prey, approaching the Sol System, when we received the message. It was dire; Earth would die.
I had to do something, but it was hard for me to believe that we’d make a difference in our little alien ship, when all of Starfleet had been paralyzed. But we were the only ones who had Spock.
He listened to the probe’s transmissions and determined that they were meant for something that lived underwater. The life-forms were trying to communicate with humpback whales, a species that had long been extinct on Earth.
If we got close to the probe, our power would fail too. So, the only way to talk to the probe was to find some humpback whales.
I told Spock to start computations for time warp. It had been almost 20 years since we’d attempted time travel in a ship. We were in a different kind of vessel, but the theory was the same. We would “slingshot” around Earth’s sun, and it would send us back in time. I was on a mission to save my world.
“Watch where you’re going, you dumbass!”
San Francisco in the 1980s was a lot different than it was in the 2280s: loud, polluted, angry, but also intense, energetic, and more colorful. The person who called me a “dumbass” had almost just run me over with his automobile, yet somehow blamed me for it.
Spock had chosen the era based on accessibility of humpback whales as well as available power; the Klingon ship wasn’t built for time travel, and going back in time had already weakened the reactor. So fixing the ship became part of our mission.
Finding the humpbacks ended up being relatively easy; they were at the Cetacean Institute outside the city. Spock and I went to investigate, while the others dealt with building a whale tank in the bird-of-prey and making sure our engines had the power necessary for the return trip.
Walking the streets of San Francisco with Spock brought back a lot of memories, especially of our trip to 1930. Stuck in the primitive past, we had a mission to save the future. It took me out of the darkness I’d experienced recently, and I had my best friend and companion back at my side.
And, just like in 1930, we met an angel who would help us.
Her name was Gillian Taylor. She was the guardian of the two whales in captivity at the Cetacean Institute. She was a guide and a scientist, young, pretty, and passionate about whales. The whales, named George and Gracie, were male and female, which fit in perfectly with our plan to repopulate them in the future. I assumed they were named for great leaders of the time, but I never found out.*
Spock and I had a lot more trouble seeming like we belonged in this era than we did in the 1930s. We looked out of place and a little incompetent. This ended up having the unintentional effect of gaining Gillian’s sympathy.
She took me out to dinner for something called a “large mushroom with pepperoni.” I also had a drink, which was remarkably similar to Tellarite beer.
During the meal, she revealed to me that she worried that the whales were going to be released into the ocean and be killed by whalers. I told her I could take the whales somewhere they would never be hunted.
“Where can you take them?” she asked. She was hopeful.
I was hinting around, and finally just came out and told her I was from the future. I somehow didn’t worry that revealing it would change history. Given her reaction, I was right not to be concerned.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me to begin with? Why all the coy disguises?”
I didn’t have to be concerned, because she clearly didn’t believe me. I was frustrated because I needed her help to take the whales, and it initially didn’t look like I was going to get it.
Later that night, I was back aboard the bird-of-prey. Gillian had dropped me off, with the food I’d ordered. It was in a square box and had an intoxicating smell. Spock and I opened it. There was a disc inside made of bread, with pieces of meat and vegetables mixed on top with cheese.
“This is a pizza,” Spock said. I had heard of it. It looked delicious, but given what T’Pau had said to me, I decided to forgo it. Spock couldn’t eat it because it had meat, so Scotty ate most of it.
I didn’t know what we were going to do; without Gillian’s help, I didn’t think we’d find the whales.
The bird-of-prey sat in Golden Gate Park, but the cloaking device was activated, so it was transparent. Gillian was “banging” on the invisible hull the next morning. She must have seen me beam inside the night before, and this led her to begin to consider the possibility that we were telling the truth. She found herself in a quandary: believe someone she thought was crazy, or let her whales be hunted and killed. She decided on the former, and with her help, we rescued George and Gracie, beaming them into our ship to take to the 23rd century.
<
br /> She didn’t want to stay in her own time. And I didn’t care. This time, I got to take the angel from the past home with me.
“Because of certain mitigating circumstances, all charges but one are summarily dismissed,” President Roth said. I stood with Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu in front of the Federation Council. The “mitigating circumstance” was that we saved the planet.
We dropped the whales off in San Francisco Bay, and they immediately started talking to the probe. And the probe left, just like that. And everything was fixed.
The remaining charge was disobeying orders, which they directed solely at me. They could kick me out of Starfleet for that. I thought of myself as a civilian again; I hadn’t been able to make it work before, and now I was even older. I was scared at the prospect; the idea of prison seemed easier.
“James T. Kirk,” Roth said. “It is the judgment of this council that you be reduced in rank to captain, and that as a consequence of your new rank, you be given the duties for which you have repeatedly demonstrated unswerving ability. The command of a starship.” I smiled. I was completing the cycle again, going back to a ship after getting a promotion. Starfleet had decided to enable me.
I went to find Gillian. I was excited at the prospect of showing her my world. But I had barely said hello and she was already saying goodbye.
She was already assigned to a science vessel and was anxious to get started. She was a lot younger than I was; she really didn’t need me in this world. She could make it on her own. She kissed me and ran off. I smiled and thought about Edith. I felt like I’d just rewritten some history: a young, selfless woman who saw the future but didn’t belong to her time was now in a place where she could shine. A hole in me had filled.
I went back with my family. We went up to our new ship. The travel pod approached. It had been a Constitution-class ship called the Ti-Ho, but they had renamed it the Enterprise. We had come home for the last time.
* * *
* EDITOR’S NOTE: The whales appear to have been named for comedian George Burns and his partner and wife, Gracie Allen, although it is unclear what their relationship was to marine biology.
CHAPTER 12
“I THINK YOU GOT DRUSILLA PREGNANT,” McCoy said.
“There’s no proof—” I said.
“Yes there is. We’re looking at it,” he said.
“Shhh!” said a stranger sitting behind us.
We were in a cinema, on Planet IV of System 892, watching people on the screen playing, well, us, the crew of the Enterprise. It was a strange experience; the actors on the screen vaguely resembled me, Spock, and McCoy. The movie got a lot of the details about Starfleet and the Federation right, which seemed impossible. Spock’s doppelganger even had pointed ears and slanted eyebrows.
The world we were on was a startling example of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planet Development.*
We had originally visited the planet almost 30 years before and found a Roman Empire that had survived into the 20th century, finally struggling with the spread of Christianity. My landing party and I barely escaped with our lives, and the planet was marked “off-limits” by Starfleet. Enough time had passed, and it was determined by someone in the Admiralty (a young admiral named John Van Robbins whom I’d never met) that we should take another look at it to determine if there’d been any residual contamination from our visit.
We entered orbit and monitored their radio and television transmissions. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. With knowledge of the society, I decided a landing party in disguise was worth the risk. McCoy, Chekov, and I donned clothing roughly corresponding to the Earth year 1990, and we beamed down to a midsize city.
Rome had not fallen, though the current emperor had allowed Christianity to flourish; it was already the dominant religion of the empire. We saw several examples of Christian churches nestled between homes and businesses, and religious iconography was prevalent. We gathered what information we could and were preparing to beam back to the ship, when McCoy noticed an advertisement on the side of a public transportation vehicle with an internal combustion engine that I believed was called a “bus.” We barely got to read it before the bus pulled away from us, but among the images on it, there was a clear photo of a Vulcan. I turned to Chekov.
“Did you catch what it said?”
“ ‘The Final Frontier,’ ” Chekov said. “It was a title.”
“I think that’s how they used to advertise movies,” McCoy said.
“Contamination?” Chekov said.
“When we were here the last time, the government had a pretty tight lock on information,” I said. Our mission to this planet back then was to find a missing merchant ship, the S.S. Beagle. The ship had been destroyed, but some of the crew of the Beagle had survived on the planet and had become part of the Roman society. The movie advertisement suggested we needed to do a little more research.
“Captain,” Chekov said, “we might be able to find something in here.” He indicated a bookstore, Cicero’s Tomes. We went inside and quickly found a section on popular culture. McCoy pulled out a book on the topic.
“The Making of ‘The Final Frontier,’ ” I said, reading the cover. The first chapter had a short biography of the filmmaker, whose name was Eugenio. He was born a slave, and from a very young age, his mother, whose name was Drusilla, had told him stories about his father.
“Uh-oh,” McCoy said. He was reading over my shoulder. He recognized the name as well. Drusilla had been a slave to the proconsul who’d captured us on our first visit. She and I had been intimate.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It wasn’t like I told her anything.”
“I think we should go see the movie,” Chekov said. So we did. (I also bought the book.) When we saw the movie, we noticed that a few people in the audience seemed to be wearing homemade Starfleet uniforms. McCoy had a theory about that.
“Those are fans,” he said. “Dressing up like you.”
Back on the Enterprise, we relayed what we found to Spock in the briefing room. The film had gotten a lot right about Starfleet and the Federation, and its portrayal of me, Spock, and McCoy was dead-on. Spock theorized that Drusilla must have been paying more attention when she served the three of us.
“I’m pretty sure she only served one of us,” McCoy said, and I gave him an annoyed look. I still wasn’t clear how they had gotten the details of Starfleet and the rest of the Galaxy.
“I think I know the answer to that,” Chekov said. He had the book in front of him turned open to a page at the end. Under a title head called “Credits,” there was a list of people who had been involved in the making of the film. Chekov had done some cross-checking in our data banks. Three of the names listed under “Consultants” matched the names of members of the crew of the Beagle.
“So this slave, Eugenio,” I said, “hearing some details from his mother, searches out the surviving members of the Beagle, and they fill in the rest.”
“What was the nature of the film?” Spock said.
“This Eugenio was obviously using this film to say something about religion,” Chekov said. “The Enterprise went on a mission to the center of the Galaxy to find God.”
“That is not possible,” Spock said. “The center of the Galaxy is a black hole.”
“I thought you were going to say,” McCoy said, “that there’s no such thing as God.”
“I have no evidence on that subject,” Spock said, then brought up the question of whether this constituted a violation of the Prime Directive.
“It’s just a movie, Spock,” McCoy said. “I doubt it will come to anything.” I hoped McCoy was right.
“Do you know Uhura’s 54?” I said to McCoy. We were in my quarters enjoying a drink, as we were wont to do.
“The Enterprise now has the oldest senior officers of any ship in the fleet,” McCoy said.
“How do you know that?”
“I looked it up,” he said. “We’ve got three
captains. Do we really need three captains?” Scotty had the rank of captain, along with Spock and myself. It was definitely a top-heavy ship, but no one wanted to leave. The last person who’d left was Sulu, who’d finally gotten command of the Excelsior three years before.
“We’re doing our jobs, aren’t we?” I said.
“Who’s a little defensive?” he said, with a smirk.
I guess I was. We were on our last legs; our tour was over in four months, and the senior officers and much of the crew had decided to “stand down” and not seek reenlistment. It was just as well. In the last few months our missions had not been vital; we’d become a showpiece. I had a reputation that Starfleet used for security reasons. The Klingons still didn’t like me, because they were also a little scared of me, which frankly pleased me. The work wasn’t arduous, and the ship itself was a lot like us. They phased out the Baton Rouge class 40 years before, and now the Constitution class had seen her day. The Excelsior-class ships were taking over, and there was already one designated for the name “Enterprise” being assembled. They would be decommissioning this ship probably right after we walked off it.
The door chime rang. It was Spock.
“I request an extended leave of absence,” Spock said. “I’m needed on Vulcan.”
“Has it been seven years? You need to get someone pregnant?” McCoy said. He reached for the Saurian brandy but I grabbed the bottle first.
“I’m cutting you off,” I said.
“When Vulcans reach a certain age, Doctor, they are spared the turbulence of the Pon farr,” Spock said, then he turned back to me. “I have been requested to return.”
I asked if everything was all right, and Spock said he didn’t know; the reason he was being called back was something of a mystery. So I ordered the helm to set a course for Vulcan and told McCoy we would be down to two captains for a while.
The Autobiography of James T. Kirk Page 28
