The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

by Una McCormack

  Chief among my concerns throughout the voyage was to find ways to shorten our journey, and I set this as one of engineering’s main goals. I sure as hell didn’t want to be arriving back in the Alpha Quadrant in time to celebrate my centenary, and neither did anyone else. Projects like this served a multiple purpose: they kept the crew busy; they kept us focused on our main goal and kept alive hope and belief that we might achieve it; and, damn it, there was also the possibility that they might even work! Just like that glider I had built, all those years ago, from pieces of string and globs of porridge. Those prisoners of war held in the castle who had built the first one had been given hope by this project. (And I never forgot that, although they never got to try it, that damn glider flew.)

  We integrated all kinds of tech during this period and worked on all kinds of projects. I’d say the Delta Flyer was by far our most successful (although I often thought sadly about how such a flyer, with its capacity to operate in multiple environments, was the kind of ship on which my father had died). I know that the subject of the technological advances we made in flight technology is one that often came up on my return, with questions about Borg tech and wormholes and time travel and even breaking the maximum warp barrier. Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? Breaking the warp barrier. Nobody could possibly believe it. You know, a lot of what we did here is classified, and so for all of your asking questions about that, let me fall back on official secrets. I guess you’ll know—in a hundred years’ time. As for some of the other rumors flying around: there are a lot of crazy stories about what we encountered on our way home, or things that happened to us. I’d say you shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Hell, I was there, and I can’t believe some of it.

  As well as Mark, I missed my family dreadfully. I wrote many letters to them over the years. I wrote to Mom, and I went through agonies on her account too. Having already lost her husband, what must she be feeling now, having to come to terms with the loss of a daughter? I tried to comfort her, tell her that I was doing just fine, and that I was coming home as quickly as I could. I wrote to Phoebe and Yianem, my sisters old and new. I confided in them how often I felt despair at the vastness of the distance between us and home, and how often I felt that I wasn’t up to this task: an experienced officer, yes, but a new captain, learning on the job. I wrote about how much I feared that Mark would give up and move on. I hoped they were looking out for him; taking care of him—I knew they would. These were perhaps my most honest letters. I could never keep secrets from my sister. I wrote to my nieces too (and tried to imagine how they were changing): chatty stories about the curious things we had seen; an adventure tale for children that I hoped my mother might appreciate too. I wrote to the grandparents, of course, and, every new year, I wrote a big newsy letter to the whole family. I tried to focus on the positive aspects of our journey home: the strange encounters; the camaraderie of the crew, as we pulled together; the various exploits of Neelix, the Doctor, Naomi Wildman. (Let’s leave aside the time I had to break the news about Shannon O’Donnel to poor Aunt Martha. At least I got to practice in this letter before dealing with the real thing.)

  One letter that I wrote from the early days I recall very well, imagining how my family would have laughed and groaned on reading it, recalling, as it did, the infamous “Year of Amelia,” and my childhood obsession with her. I made this letter fun, lighthearted, imagining the family reading it together and laughing that Katy’s stubborn streak proved so strong that she went all that way just to stalk her childhood heroine. I started with the mystery of the ancient SOS signal, and then the amazement of discovering—of all things—a Lockheed Model 10 Electra… Then realizing we had solved one of the greatest mysteries in human aviation history, and that I was about to meet my idol… They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but to my relief Amelia Earhart was willing to trust us, ordering her navigator to cooperate with us. She proved willing to believe the tall tale that we told her: that she had been taken by aliens, and was now living a long way from home, and many centuries in the future. I was not disappointed at how open-minded she proved to me. I was not disappointed in her at all. What an honor, to be able to show her my ship! To let her see that a woman in command was no longer considered an exception, but how the future would be.

  I may have devoted more than a few pages of this letter to my encounter with her before remembering to finish up the story: of how humans, back in the 1930s, had been abducted by aliens, and brought to this world, only to establish what was now a human colony. More than a hundred thousand of them, across three cities, all thriving. Humans can be resilient in this way. Since I was writing this letter with the nieces in mind, I glossed over some of the less pleasant aspects of the tale: how the Briori had used these kidnapped humans as slave labor, and how brutal their later rebellion must have been. You don’t lightly win freedom from slavery, as human history attests over and over again. But here was this human civilization, light-years away from home, flourishing, and ready to welcome us with open arms.

  That offer brought about a tough decision, not just for me, but for all of the crew. Here was an established human colony in the Delta Quadrant. Here we could end our journey; we could settle, put down roots, lead what would clearly be happy lives among our own kind. I won’t deny that the temptation to remain was strong: hell, I could have been Amelia Earhart’s next-door neighbor! But the truth is, I never did waver. I was committed to going home. But while that was my decision, I had to let each member of the crew choose for themselves. I had, in effect, forced them into the Delta Quadrant when I made the choice to destroy the Caretaker’s array, and it seemed only fair to give each person a chance to make this decision. This was a worrying time: I simply had no idea what each person might decide. Remember that we had been traveling for over a year by this point, only a tiny fraction of the voyage that still lay ahead of us. I would not have blamed anyone for wanting to stay behind, particularly those crew members who had been part of the Maquis, and could not be sure of the reception they would get back in the Alpha Quadrant. The problem was that if enough of them decided to cut their losses and stay, I would no longer be able to crew Voyager. The decision would be made for us.

  I don’t know whether there were behind-the-scenes discussions between the ex-Maquis crew members, and I’ve never asked. If there were, I suspect Chakotay of having a hand in them, and persuading people that they should trust me to look after them in the event of our return to the Alpha Quadrant. In any case, nobody opted to stay. This was a deeply significant moment for me: my first confirmation that all the work we had done to bind our crew together into a coherent, supportive community, bent toward a common goal, was working. I was hugely heartened by the fact that everyone was committed to our voyage home. I felt that I could enter the next stage of our journey with renewed confidence that we could make it; that we could hold together, and travel together, and one day come home together. I did want Amelia Earhart to come with us, though; boy, did I ever! Can you imagine? The wonders she would have seen on Voyager alone, never mind on the journey! I remember that conversation vividly, the note of yearning in her voice at the thought of flying in our ship. But the pull of the settlement was too strong. In my letter to my family, I jokily described my failure to persuade her to come along as the greatest disappointment of my life. Surely, I wrote, we would have been the best of friends! I am still convinced of this. But it remains a source of great joy to me that I met her—my great childhood heroine. What an honor to be the one to solve this great mystery. For me to be the one to learn the fate of Amelia Earhart!

  This temptation to give up, to simply accept that we were now denizens of the Delta Quadrant and to make a home there, was very strong in the early years. On one occasion, it seemed to have been forced upon me and my first officer. On an away trip, we both caught a virus that would kill us if we left the environment in which we had contracted it. We suspected from our encounters with the Vidiians, a species in the Delta Quadrant who h
ad advanced medical technologies, that they would most likely have a cure. However, the reason for the Vidiians’ expertise in this respect was that the species suffered from a pandemic, the Phage. This horrible disease, which was slowly destroying their species, had led the Vidiians to take terrible actions against other species with whom they came into contact, harvesting their organs to save their own people. I forbade contact with them. As ever, I weighed the balance of the needs of the many against the needs of the few, and it was plain to me that the danger to the rest of the crew from a species of organ harvesters took precedence over the needs of myself and Chakotay. It seemed that, for a while, at least, my journey home was at a standstill. I put Tuvok in command of Voyager, and, in my final order as captain, instructed him to continue the journey home to the Alpha Quadrant. Under no circumstances, I said, was he to contact the Vidiians on our behalf.

  Then Chakotay and I got on with taking stock of our situation. We were both experienced at living in the wild; we both had many years of camping and hiking behind us, as well as our Starfleet survival training, and his time in the Maquis had made him used to rough conditions. We built a shelter; we built, dare I say it, a home. I knew from the outset that Chakotay would have been happy to remain here: there was a stoicism about him that made him capable of accepting his fate, and he is also, at heart, a solitary man happy to spend time in his own company. But I was set on finding a cure. I didn’t care how long it would take. Ten years, twenty: I’d find it, and then we could both leave this world and continue our own journey home. I know that this part of me—always looking ahead to the next adventure—has made me miss a great deal during my life. I sometimes forget to see the gifts and the blessings that are right in front of me. But I can’t change this about myself— and I don’t think I want to. That sense of curiosity, of longing to push myself onward and outward, is so crucial a part of my personality that without it I simply wouldn’t be myself. I knew I wouldn’t be content with the pastoral harmony this world offered me; I guess, like Eve, I would always want to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Then a plasma storm came and destroyed all my work. It looked like I was going to have to be content with staying in the garden of paradise.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t allowed to. Voyager returned with a cure. As Tuvok described it to me later, my crew were not happy with the replacement that I had provided for them, and had insisted on approaching Dr. Danara Pel, with whom we had a good relationship, in order to find a cure for us.

  “It seems,” Tuvok said, rather dryly, “that only Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay are acceptable.”

  Well, that was certainly gratifying, although once I was back on board, I had more than a few things to say to my senior staff about disobeying orders. I had expressly instructed them not to contact the Vidiians, and they had ended up fending off a Vidiian attack. This was one of my least effective group rebukes. The whole time I was talking, Tom Paris had a big self-satisfied grin plastered over his face, and even Tuvok looked about as unrepentant as it’s possible for a Vulcan to be (I have a sneaking suspicion he didn’t enjoy the captain’s seat). I could see B’Elanna beginning to bristle; the words “You could always say ‘thank you’!” were clearly forming on her lips.

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “I would like to thank you for your initiative, and most of all for your loyalty. If I couldn’t spend the next seventy years living in the wild on a paradise planet, then there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than on board Voyager.”

  “Seconded,” said Chakotay, although I wasn’t so sure about that.

  * * *

  The letter writing was a crucial part of how I dealt with the realities of my unusual command. I had the best support that I could hope for from Chakotay and Tuvok, but a captain needs someone outside of her own crew. These letters, together with the occasional ones I wrote to Parvati Pandey and to Owen Paris, reflecting on some decision I had made and imagining their advice, provided me with a version of this external reality check. Of course, I couldn’t send them, never mind expect a response, but I filed them all away, and I treated them as if they had been sent, and I didn’t go back to them at all; I made a point of that. I have only reread them now, writing this memoir, and my heart goes out to Captain Kathryn Janeway in those very early days, thrown into these circumstances on her very first mission. I wish I could go and tell her that everything would turn out all right. I wish I could go and give her some comfort. She had a tough job. It would be good to let her know that all would be well.

  Reading them back now, I see plenty of other encounters that I have long since forgotten. I recall species that we met in those early days that we left behind as we moved on through the Delta Quadrant. As well as the Vidiians, there were the Kazon—I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to either of those. And then I had my first encounter with the Q Continuum: you can be sure that I raided Voyager’s data banks, but nothing could truly have prepared me for the tragicomedy that unfolded. The Q we encountered—he took the name Quinn—was trapped, imprisoned, inside a comet. We released him, whereupon he immediately tried to end his own life. It transpired that Quinn was a being that had thought deeply about the nature of immortality—and wanted it to end. He was not the trickster figure, the fool, that we had assumed, or that we associated with his species. When the other, more familiar Q appeared, wanting to return Quinn to his imprisoned state, Quinn requested Federation asylum. I was duty bound to take it seriously and decided to hold a hearing to consider Quinn’s request.

  Well, this being the Q Continuum, a variety of most interesting witnesses were called to support Q’s case that Quinn should not be allowed to die. It seems that Quinn had been pivotal at all kinds of moments in human history. But Quinn had his own argument to make, and he showed us what it was like to live as part of the Continuum. What a bleak vision that was. A dusty country road, that only came back to the place where it had started: a run-down gas station and store, a dead end where the inhabitants sat around, almost comatose from boredom. Everything done; everything said. Nobody talking to each other; nobody had in millennia. It truly was a vision of hell. I couldn’t think of anything more dreadful: at least my own road was leading somewhere, took me past marvels and wonders. At least my life still held novelty. But living in the Q Continuum was a road to nowhere—for eternity. Quinn, having shown us this, argued that to condemn him to this unchanging life was cruelty. I was moved by this argument—and, ultimately, it was his life, and he should have the chance to choose what to do with it. I granted his request for asylum. (This was the moment when, poignantly, he chose his name.)

  I had hoped, of course, that the transition to mortality might provide Quinn with sufficient novelty to persuade him that he might explore this new condition, and that this would keep him alive for at least a while longer. This was not to be the case. Q, respecting the other man’s wishes, had given Quinn access to Nogatch hemlock, and he took his own life. I wish this could have turned out differently. There was still so much for Quinn to see and do. But it was not to be.

  These encounters form some of the most memorable aspects of our journey home—and it was part of our mission, to seek out new life. I tried not to forget that in many ways I was lucky to be the captain of the Starfleet ship that had traveled furthest, and that I might, one day, bring information about these places and new species home. But I was fascinated at least as much by watching how my crew responded to our unique challenge. Harry Kim, struggling with homesickness and a first assignment that nobody should receive, not even the Academy’s finest. B’Elanna Torres, trying to put aside her anger and find a way of life that used her passion and her intellect constructively. Tom Paris, who, with seventy thousand light-years between them, was finally able to live outside of his father’s shadow and become his own man. Our Doctor, evolving every day beyond what his programming had ever anticipated. Chakotay, day by day coming back to his old life as a dedicated Starfleet officer. Even Tuvok, perhaps the most collected and stable of us all, h
ad to find a way of living with the exigencies and irrationalities of our situation.

  Damn, though—I wish Amelia had come on board.

  * * *

  There is one series of events that preys on my mind after all these years. I still am not sure that I made the right decision: I’m not sure that there was a right decision to be made. The whole affair started in a most straightforward way: Tuvok and Neelix went down together to investigate an M-class planet which we had encountered and to collect botanical samples which we hoped to be able to use. When they—and the samples—were beamed aboard, we were confronted with a single individual. Investigations showed that the samples they had collected, when demolecularized through the transporter, acted as a symbiogenetic catalyst, merging the DNA of my two crew members into a single being. We had lost two people and replaced them with one.

  Tuvix. He made his presence felt from the outset. He combined the knowledge and capabilities of both men—I had lost neither a chief security officer nor a head chef and morale officer—but I had lost Tuvok, my old friend and mentor, and Kes had lost her Neelix. I know how difficult this time was for her—Tuvix was so like Neelix in many ways, and yet so unlike. I recall the conversation that I had at this time with Kes, who was going through a kind of loss that we had all faced when we were stranded in the Delta Quadrant, not least myself, with the loss of Mark. She had been shocked that Tuvix still retained Neelix’s feelings for her—while, at the same time, still loving T’Pel in the way that Tuvok had. I sympathized: this must have been deeply disconcerting. Tuvix was not Neelix. To his credit—there were many things to his credit—he did not press himself on Kes and gave her the space and the room to deal with what was, to all intents and purposes, a bereavement. And he was, in himself, a good and kind man. He had fine instincts on the bridge. He even cooked well! However, the Doctor found a way to reverse the process, enabling the transporter to separate the DNA of the two men. Most of us wanted this resolution—with one notable exception, Tuvix himself, who wanted to live.