The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

by Una McCormack

  I will not dwell on the decision that I made. I am, to this day, unsure about it. The Doctor would not perform the procedure, and therefore I took it upon myself. Tuvix died, and Tuvok and Neelix lived. Later that evening, Tuvok came to my quarters.

  “An interesting decision, Captain,” he said.

  “What can I say, Tuvok? You know, just before we set out to look for the Val Jean, I told T’Pel that I would do everything in my power to bring you home.”

  “But at the cost of another man’s life?”

  “Tuvok,” I said, “remember Pandey’s classes at the Academy?”

  “The Ethics of Command. Of course.”

  “Do you remember the session on the trolley problem?”

  “The clash between utilitarian and deontological ethics,” he said.

  “Only you would phrase it that way,” I replied, with a wry smile. “Yes, whether an action should be judged by its consequences, or according to a set of moral principles.”

  Pandey set us this thought problem, a well-known one in moral philosophy. A runaway trolley is heading toward five incapacitated people, and you are left with a choice: reroute the trolley, which will save those five people, but kill one other person, or else let the trolley take its course, and save that one life at the cost of those five. What is the ethical action? You know, we argued that problem back and forth for a couple of hours. I guess I never thought that I would have to answer it so directly.

  “On the one hand, I had Tuvix, a single life,” I said. “On the other, I had you and Neelix—two lives, established, with people who loved them and who were grieving for them. You know, Tuvix had your tactical skills, and he was at least as good a chef as Neelix. But you had families, Tuvok. People that I knew, people that I had met. Could I have faced them, knowing that I could have saved your life, and not done it?”

  He sat for a while before replying. “The logical choice, certainly,” he said. “Although I myself would have hesitated.”

  Maybe there is no answer. I made my choice. Can I live with it?

  I will learn to live with it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  YEARS OF HELL—2373–2374

  WE ENTERED OUR THIRD YEAR IN THE DELTA QUADRANT acclimatizing to our situation, but with the growing and sinking thought that we were indeed out here for the long haul. Day by day, week by week, our life seemed to alternate between shipboard routines and sudden, explosive encounters with the worlds and species that we met. Starfleet protocols went a long way to stabilizing our life on board ship, and my decision to enforce these was vindicated when even a few former Maquis confessed to me that these routines helped them along the way. I could see that B’Elanna, for example, for all her frustrations, was flourishing on Voyager: her technical expertise and creativity were vastly appreciated, and by no means taken for granted. Those of us who watched the crew carefully—by which I mean myself and Chakotay—did not miss the growing closeness of B’Elanna and Tom Paris. Chakotay explained how the attraction had been clear to him when the two had met during their time in the Maquis, although Tom’s capture had prevented it progressing further. Still, it was a situation worth watching. Close relationships gave comfort to the crew but, if there were breakups, then there was the potential for resentment, which could cause excessive disruption within a crew so small. Either Tom would persuade B’Elanna that he was a good bet, or she would decide to eat him alive. Neither Chakotay nor I could call it.

  I began to give serious thought to what it might mean, if we did indeed take seventy years to reach home. The crew would age; we would need people to look after us, never mind continue the ship on its journey. How would families work on board ship? How would we teach the children, care for them, bring them up? I watched Samantha Wildman closely, and how the crew supported her, and wondered how we might scale this up, when the time came. I know that others were thinking the same: we had been en route for two years now and were likely to be in the same condition for the foreseeable future. Perhaps this was how the rest of our lives would be. The urge to create stability in this transitory situation seemed catching: many of the crew, in this third year, seemed to commit to longer-standing relationships. Besides, we all knew each other very well. We were used to each other and, perhaps, more forgiving of each other. Even the Doctor experimented with a home life: an exploration of his humanity that became a tragedy when his simulated daughter died. I would not wish this on anyone, not even someone made of photons. The Doctor loved his little girl, Belle, as much as any person had loved their child, and he grieved her loss. A first, true encounter with the vicissitudes of life. It is to our Doctor’s credit that he did not abandon his experiment at this point but continued to risk change and growth.

  Some of us, however, were not prepared to leave the past behind, or could not. For Harry Kim, as an example, giving up on his beloved Libby would clearly be an admission that he would not get home, and Harry was never going to do this. He coped with life on Voyager by insisting that it was a temporary interruption to his real life, that one day he would go home, and see his parents, and pick up with Libby where they had left off. I know that Tom Paris tried to make him accept some of the realities of our situation and consider at least going on a few dates. Not the most tactful advice, but Tom Paris was proving to have a kind streak that had not been allowed to flourish in the past. You saw it with how he looked after Harry; in how he tried to take care of B’Elanna. Chakotay too frequently expressed surprise at how Tom was maturing. I had always thought that all he needed was a chance: to get out and prove himself. The Maquis must have seemed like this to him; of course, it went disastrously wrong. But now another chance had come, and Tom seemed to be pulling himself together.

  For myself, I was not prepared to give up on my old life. Men like Mark Johnson don’t come along every day. My chief regret was that I had not accepted that first proposal when it was made. We could have had a few years of married life behind us. I have wondered, sometimes, whether that might have made a difference to how things worked out, but some things can’t be changed, and you can’t live in the past. For now, I wrote my letters to him, confided in him as if he were there, and hoped beyond hope that I would see him again. There was no question of my starting a relationship with a member of my crew: as captain, I could not risk this and hope to keep the necessary distance upon which rank and, thus, authority depend. Yes, it was lonely; sometimes it was extremely lonely. Chakotay was my rock when it came to my fears about our journey home, or my worries about individual crew members. We established a long-standing routine of a weekly supper together, a time when we could both relax and put aside, if only for a few hours, the burden of our senior rank.

  But it was Kes who came closest to becoming a confidante for Kate, rather than Captain, Janeway. The conversation that we had when she thought that Neelix was lost had created a closeness and warmth between us that I found a great consolation. Even if I rarely discussed with her how I felt, I knew that someone on board Voyager had seen this side of me and understood. Her growing psionic powers no doubt gave her increased sensitivity, and, of course, the fact that she was not Starfleet helped. But besides her gifts, there was an inherent gentleness and wisdom to Kes, a calmness about her, that inspired trust. I was grateful for her quiet and steady support. We were always conscious, with Kes, of her abbreviated life span in comparison to the rest of us, and that every moment was precious. As it turned out, we lost her sooner even than we anticipated, but not in the way that we expected.

  Triggered by our encounter with Species 8472, her psionic abilities began to outstrip what her body could bear, and even began to threaten the ship itself. Kes made the decision to leave. I begged her to stay with us, to hold out until the Doctor had a cure for her condition, but she wanted to go, to find out where her powers could take her. Before she left, she sent us forward through space more than nine thousand light-years, past Borg territory, taking nearly ten years off our journey. A gift indeed. Her departure was a great blow f
or Neelix, even if their relationship had already concluded. It was noticeable how from this point on he began to spend more time with the Wildmans. Naomi, with her accelerated growth from her Ktarian heritage, was starting to want playmates rather than carers, and Neelix was ready and willing to fill this need. I imagine it gave him solace too. (Kes warned us, in her last days, about a species named the Krenim: one reason why we elected to avoid entering their space. I often wonder what might have happened had we chosen to go there.)

  The urge to create a family seemed to be endemic, as I learned when we once again encountered the Q Continuum. Motherhood had certainly not been on my agenda at that moment in my life, and even more certainly I had not contemplated that Q would father any child of mine. Nor is there any timeline in which I would ever contemplate this. I was more interested—if alarmed—to learn that our previous encounter with the Continuum had brought about significant changes (there’s a reason the Prime Directive exists), although this had, after all, been Quinn’s intention when he asked us to help him die. No longer a dead-end track, the Continuum was now on the verge of civil war, which Q was trying to prevent by bringing a child into existence. I sympathized with his purposes, having seen the plight of his faction; but it’s his damn methods, as ever, that I take exception to. Never has a woman been so wretchedly wooed. Fortunately, he moved on quickly enough—and I acquired a godson. I guess I’ve mentored all kinds of people across the years.

  * * *

  No person has challenged me on such a fundamental level as Seven of Nine. Nobody has made me reflect so deeply upon the nature of selfhood, on our responsibilities to ourselves and to each other, as she has over the years. Living alongside Seven of Nine was not always comfortable, particularly in the early days, but I must surely count coming to know her, watching her grow and change, as one of the most rewarding experience of my life. For this all to emerge from an encounter with the Borg is all the more satisfying. No other species, in their cruelty and conformity, in their pursuit of uniform collectivity over infinite diversity in infinite combinations, stands so much in opposition to my own culture and mores. As we approached Borg space, we identified a narrow band through which we hoped we might pass without being detected. We dubbed this the Northwest Passage, and, as we drew closer, we detected fifteen Borg cubes heading our way. I am sure we all believed this was the end… and the cubes went past us, and then registered as destroyed. What the hell could destroy fifteen Borg cubes? This, we learned, after sending an away team to one of the cubes, was Species 8472, which, as we discovered from the Borg logs, had defeated them many times before. Before we beamed back, Harry Kim was struck and infected by one of the aliens, and rushed back to sickbay, where the Doctor was able to modify a Borg nanoprobe and cure him.

  My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Perhaps, I thought, we could strike up an alliance with the Borg, using the Doctor’s cure for the infection as bargaining power. My crew were not convinced of the wisdom of this—but we came up with no other alternatives, and took Voyager to a Borg world, offering an alliance. An attack by Species 8472 persuaded the Borg to take my offer seriously and sent a representative drone to communicate with us. This was my first encounter with Seven of Nine.

  My account, from hereon, necessarily relies on others, since I was badly injured when Species 8472’s bioships attacked us. Before I was sedated, I made Chakotay promise to continue working with the Borg. I gather that what happened next was that Seven of Nine, learning that millions of Borg had been killed in the middle of the sector, asked Chakotay to take Voyager to help, and he refused, on the grounds that this would take us too far off our course home. His intention was to leave the Borg behind for others to collect them, but Seven circumvented this plan by opening a spatial rift. When I was able to take back command, it was to learn that all the drones apart from Seven of Nine were dead, and that Voyager was stranded in fluidic space. I resumed work with Seven of Nine to develop a weapon to defeat the bioships, and she returned Voyager from fluidic space. We defeated the alien fleet, only for Seven of Nine to turn on us and attempt to assimilate Voyager. We knocked her out using a neural relay and resumed our course. When she awoke, she was severed from the Collective, and in our care.

  Not the most auspicious introduction of a crew member, but we were responsible for her now, and began the process of restoring her individuality. The Doctor was initially unwilling to operate on her to remove her implants against her wishes, but as she was in no condition to make the decision for herself, I persuaded him that it was a necessary course of action. These operations saved Seven’s life, but they left her in a condition which she did not want: severed irreparably from the Collective, and, not incidentally, hostile toward us. I presented her with information about her past—her name, Annika Hansen, assimilated as a child— but this only enraged her.

  Can you force freedom on someone? Of course not. I believed that Seven of Nine could return to some kind of humanity, but it was plain to us all that the journey was long and hard. She had to learn even the most basic of human actions, which we learn as babies: how to eat, how to chew food. She began to have hallucinations of a raven (it was the name of her parents’ ship, which she was on when they were captured by the Borg). She experienced flashbacks. The Doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. As we learned more about her experiences, that came as no surprise. A small child, captured by Borg, her parents assimilated, hiding away until she herself was taken. I would not willingly imagine such horrors. We could not bring that child back, but we could, I hoped, bring Seven forward, allow her to become fully individual once again. My relationship with Seven was, in these early days, often marked by hostility and tension. At other times, I saw her courage and determination. When we entered a region of space where subatomic radiation from a nearby nebula would have killed us, Seven agreed to remain out of stasis so that we could pass through the space in a matter of weeks, rather than adding a year to our journey to go around it. Who else could have survived this isolation? She risked not only her precarious mental state but her life to save us.

  What can I say? Like a mother, I had given Seven of Nine her life as a human being; like a mother, I could not force her to live that life in the way I chose. Her life was hers to live, and she must make her own choices. But above all, I believed that she could find herself. She was—she remains—unique. She has never failed to exceed my expectations of what she could learn, of how she could come to terms with all that had been done to her, of how she might live beyond the horrors that marked her early years—transcend them, indeed—and become her fullest self.

  There is one situation I recall where her desire for perfection, instilled in her by the Borg, was at odds with the fact of human imperfection. Still, she came the closest that any of us can. Much of this mission remains classified; suffice to say that there are good reasons for this. It is a situation, too, where I hope that I was able to reciprocate in some way the lessons that Seven taught us and warn her that her pursuit of knowledge was leading her into a disastrous mistake. But she did, for a moment—for 3.2 seconds, in fact—see perfection, the alpha and the omega. What can bring us to a more forceful realization of our own frail and finite humanity, than a glimpse of the numinous? I found her on the holodeck, running my Da Vinci simulation, contemplating religious imagery. Contemplating the divine.

  * * *

  The Da Vinci simulation gave me many happy hours over the years, once in unexpected ways. I sometimes think that my time on Voyager made me draw on every single one of my Academy experiences. Under no circumstances, however, did I ever imagine that I would be called upon to build a glider from scratch, and certainly not in the company of the Grandfather of Flight himself. We had come under attack from an unknown species who used their transporter technology to steal weapons and equipment directly from the ship. After tracking our missing goods to a nearby world, Tuvok and I beamed down to discover that the Doctor’s mobile emitter had been one of the items stolen—and that the Leonar
do Da Vinci simulation had been taken too. It was up and running, and Da Vinci was hard at work under a new “patron”—a local trader named Tau, responsible for stealing from our ship. The Master and I escaped by virtue of his technical expertise (with a little guidance from me), and, of course, my ability to land a punch upon our guard. This was a minor incident, I suppose, in our journey home, but one that my adolescent self would have adored. Like meeting Amelia Earhart, I suppose. Our time in the Delta Quadrant was not all bad.

  Other holodeck experiences were significantly bleaker. At this time, we had regular encounters with the Hirogen, a nomadic species whose culture was organized around notions of “the hunt.” Other species, across their hunting grounds, were seen as prey, and we were no exception. A group of Hirogen hijacked Voyager and forced half of us to reenact hologram simulations of ever more violent and vicious hunts, and the rest to act as slave labor, treating their wounded colleagues and turning more and more of the ship over to these sickening games. Many of my memories of this experience are hazy: those of us forced into the simulations were fitted with neural interfaces that made us believe the parts we played were completely real. I still have shards of memory of my life as a Klingon warrior, of the day that Troy was set ablaze, of chasing Black and Tans down the back lanes of Ireland. Most of all I recall the simulation in which myself and others of Voyager’s crew became part of the French Resistance. This simulation expanded so rapidly that the integrity of the ship came under threat, and only the overloading of the hologrid brought the program to an end. It was plain, even to our Hirogen captors, that this was now a zero-sum game. Nobody could win. We had to make a truce. I gave them the ability to create holodeck technology on their own ships, a small price to pay to get them off Voyager.