The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

by Una McCormack

  We both began to laugh. My mother—that was where I had gotten the stubborn streak! I could imagine her, listening to the visiting admiral, nodding politely as he spoke, and then saying: No. This is how it is.

  “Between you and Reg Barclay, we have had some great allies back home.”

  “I’ve heard from Owen about the Redoubtable Reg. I might invite him here for dinner.”

  “From what I gather about him, he won’t accept!”

  “Well, let’s not talk about Reg Barclay. Are you all right, Katy? Have you been looking after yourself?”

  “Yes, Mom, fruits and vegetables at every meal.”

  I saw her eyes drift past me to where Seven was standing. “I’m sorry about Mark.”

  I brushed it aside. “Water under the bridge.”

  “Hmm.” She didn’t look convinced (I’m not sure I sounded convincing), but this wasn’t something to discuss on a line like this. “Your sister sends her love. Yianem too, and the girls. They want to speak to you next time around. The new one is very excited to speak to the famous family member! She’s mad about Starfleet.”

  Amelia: the latest addition to their family. I laughed. Sounded like she was a Janeway through and through—and she was, as you shall learn. “Three months,” I said. “I hope they can all hold out that long!”

  “All of us will be here. Oh, Katy. I’m so glad to speak to you again!”

  “Me too, Mom.”

  Behind me, quietly, Seven said, “Thirty seconds, Captain.”

  “Not long enough,” said Mom. “Well, Katy, hurry home. We have the lamp lit, guiding you home.”

  “Get the coffee pot on, for God’s sake,” I begged her, trying to sound cheerful. “I’m desperate for a decent cup of coffee!”

  “I’ll get your grandfather on it.”

  “Ten seconds, Captain,” said Seven.

  “Goodbye, Katy! We’ll speak soon!”

  “Goodbye, Mom,” I said.

  And then she was gone. I took a moment or two to collect myself and turned to see Seven contemplating me.

  “Are you… all right, Captain?” she said.

  “I’m fine, Seven.” I took a deep breath. “You must have seen a lot of this now. Is there anyone back in the Alpha Quadrant that you’re planning to speak to?”

  “My father had a sister,” she said, doubtfully.

  “Try her,” I said. “It might be worth it.”

  And I believe that she did. I’m not sure I can imagine how this conversation must have gone: her aunt would remember little Annika, no more than six years old. Seven of Nine was no longer that little girl. I hoped the aunt had the sense and the grace to accept her on her own terms, and not wish to have Annika back. I believe they began to communicate regularly; at least, I didn’t hear of anyone accepting Seven’s slots in the rotation. I wondered whether she would get in touch with her, once we were home.

  This was a tumultuous time for us all: I often passed people in the corridor having a quiet cry. We had all been starved for conversations with our loved ones. The letters had been like field rations in comparison with being able to speak to them face to face, in real time. All of us were changed, of course: Harry Kim was no longer the fresh-faced new ensign who had left his clarinet at home. (I had a very nice letter from his mother about how grateful she was that I had looked out for her boy. I didn’t mention this to Harry, although I did play up those night shifts, when he had been in command of the ship, for her benefit.) Even those of us with very close family ties were finding our feet again after seven years. And other relationships were starting over completely. I know that Tom always had B’Elanna with him when he spoke to his mother and father, as if to insist that this was who he was now, and that his father needed to get to know him on these terms. B’Elanna in turn had made tentative contact once again with her estranged father. How hard, to try to rebuild that relationship under these conditions! To be able to speak only every few weeks, and then for no more than a few minutes at a time! But B’Elanna was tenacious, and once she put her mind to something, she stuck to it, and she had decided that this relationship was plainly worth salvaging.

  Of course, there was a very good reason for this. Our lovebirds had married at the start of our seventh year: I must say that was a typically outlandish proposal. They were participating in a race, on board the Delta Flyer, and the flyer’s warp core had been sabotaged. I gather they thought they had about ten seconds to live when Tom popped the question. This was… very like Tom, shall we say. But he’d meant it, and they married—and before we had all got used to having this married couple in our midst, B’Elanna discovered she was pregnant. The Doctor warned us there might be emotional outbursts. Several people joked (not entirely kindly, I think; I put a stop to this) that they weren’t sure how we would tell. In fact, this was a very difficult time for B’Elanna. It has been my observation that pregnancy, and imminent parenthood, make people reflect on their relationships with their own parents. I guess this is in part because they don’t want to make the same mistakes—and they’re worried that they won’t avoid them. But at the same time, people seem to want to reconnect; they want their child to know where they came from, to know their grandparents.

  For B’Elanna, this time was marked by a real coming-to-terms with what it had meant for her to be half Klingon. When she and Tom saw that their little girl was going to have the distinctive facial ridges, many unhappy childhood memories came back to her. Kids can be ghastly, after all; they’ll always find something to pick on, and B’Elanna’s physical differences had attracted some teasing. Worse than that, she believed that it was the Klingon part of her that had driven her father away. These emotions naturally surfaced now; she must have feared that history would repeat itself with her own daughter and husband. (As if Tom would leave her: the man was besotted with her. He’d stuck beside her through thick and thin.) She asked the Doctor to perform genetic resequencing to delete her fetus’s Klingon genes and make her more fully human in appearance. The Doctor initially refused to perform such a drastic procedure on the grounds that it was not medically justified, but then later seemed to think that it was not just necessary but urgent. Tom, however, had his suspicions, and these turned out to be warranted: B’Elanna had tampered with the Doctor’s program to get the diagnosis that she wanted. We stopped the procedure just in time.

  I know that B’Elanna was, once she had taken a little time to think through what was happening, filled with remorse at interfering with the Doctor’s programming. However, she had the means to make good. Ever since her pregnancy had been—I hesitate to say announced; broadcast was more like it—she and Tom had been plagued with offers from people who wanted to be godparents. (I know pregnant women often complain about finding themselves communal property: poor B’Elanna had this dialed up to the nth degree. Everyone on Voyager was invested in this child.) But there was only once choice after these events. I gather the Doctor takes his responsibilities in this respect extremely seriously.

  Again, I must reflect on how I had never predicted the extent to which our ship would become so concerned with the nurturing of children. That last year or so, they seemed to take up more and more of our time. Not just our Naomi, whom we all loved very much. Not just our communal investment in Tom and B’Elanna’s baby. Not just our Borg children, of whom we were so proud while they were with us, not least Icheb, who remained and was proving to be a most responsible, thoughtful, and careful young man. On top of all this, I found ourselves charged with looking after a recalcitrant, undisciplined, and annoying adolescent: the offspring of Q, Q Junior, unceremoniously dumped on us by his hapless father.

  If ever an apple had not fallen far from the tree… Junior had no sense of the consequences of his actions. He caused havoc on the ship, even stripped of his powers, stealing the Delta Flyer and running into trouble with a Chokuzan vessel (or so we thought). His actions put Icheb’s life in danger, and it was only then that we saw a glimpse of understanding from Junior: conf
ronted again with the Chokuzans, he admitted that the events were down to him, and asked them to help Icheb. Of course, this was all revealed to be a situation generated by his father to teach his son a lesson. Games after games; always the same with the Q. After all the trouble those wretched Q caused us, you think they might have had the decency to send us home. No chance of that: Q provided information that took a few years off the trip, Junior gave me some roses, and with that I had to be content. I understand that I am the Starfleet captain with the most varied experience of the Q Continuum. All I can say is that I would happily have passed on this honor…

  * * *

  There were many other ramifications of our increased contact with the Alpha Quadrant. Speaking for myself, regular contact with Starfleet Command had both pros and cons. Knowing that I was now able to speak to colleagues and superiors, to get advice and support, was a great help to me. I received regular messages from both Owen Paris and Parvati Pandey and their reflections on matters that were troubling me. Being able to share the burden of the command was a real relief. There were downsides, however. I have an independent streak at the best of times, and, for more than six years I had, in effect, been answerable to nobody. The chain of command had been severed—and now it was back. There were significant downsides arising from this, which came into sharp focus during our mission to locate the lost Friendship 1 probe, which our superiors believed to be close to our current position.

  It meant a detour, for one thing, when all we wanted to be doing was getting closer to our families and friends, and I had some misgivings about whether the crew would be happy about this. It turned out that the mystique of the missing probe was lure enough— most of us were Starfleet, after all, with curiosity in our blood. The mission itself proved to be distressing, a textbook case in the perils of sharing technology. The probe, equipped with antimatter reactors, had arrived on a world only for the antimatter technologies to be used for purposes of war. By the time we arrived, the world—and its people—were suffering from a nuclear winter, and the local population blamed us for what had happened to them. One of their leaders, Verin, taking our away team hostage, demanded that we help evacuate the population—but this would take us three years, time we could not afford. Here was my problem, then, with taking on missions such as this: we were there as representatives of Starfleet, but we could not operate as if we were Starfleet. Back in the Alpha Quadrant, I could have called in specialist ships. Here, I was operating under orders, but alone.

  As it turned out, we were able to adapt photon torpedoes to explode nanoprobes in the planet’s atmosphere, setting off a chain reaction that not only dissipated the nuclear winter, but neutralized the radiation. But the mission had cost a crewman’s life: Lieutenant Joe Carey, part of the away team, murdered by Verin. I regretted every life lost on Voyager’s journey, but, looking back, this one hits hard. Had we known how close we were to getting home I would have argued against taking on this and any other mission. The priority, after all these years, had to be the safe return of all our crew. The fact that we were now in regular communication with the Alpha Quadrant gave Carey’s death a bitter coda: I had to speak directly to his parents, and explain why their boy was not, after all, able to speak to them. I had some stern conversations with my superiors after this. Yes, we were Starfleet, and back within the chain of command—but the chain of command is a reciprocal relationship. It cuts both ways. We could take orders, but help could not be sent. Starfleet Command needed to remember this. We might be on the other end of the line, but we were still a long way from home.

  * * *

  Our Doctor, now in regular contact with the Alpha Quadrant, characteristically made an immediate impact, electing to use his allotted time to speak to the publishers of his magnum opus, Photons Be Free. I am being a little unfair here on our estimable colleague, since he admitted that this was a first draft and, having received feedback from the rest of the crew, was willing to carry out significant revisions. You may have sampled the earlier version (I understand that a few are still out there), and so you can imagine my thoughts when I first saw Jenkins, captain of the U.S.S. Vortex, murdering a dying man. I do not doubt the Doctor’s sincerity when he said that he did not intend the crew to represent us (although I might have a few things to say about his naivety). What was most wounding was that we couldn’t help but think that this was, in some way, the Doctor’s opinion of each of us. Tom Paris, I know, was very hurt: he had come a long way in the years on board Voyager. Well, Tom is hardly one to disappear and lick his wounds; he came back fighting, reprogramming the holonovel, and showed the Doctor exactly how it felt. This was when the Doctor agreed to revise his tome, realizing at last not only the hurt he had inadvertently caused, but how much damage could be done to our reputations, should the novel be widely circulated.

  Of course, nothing can be straightforward when the Doctor is involved. The situation rapidly escalated, and I found myself involved in a tribunal to judge whether or not our EMH was a person. Imagine having to do this across the distance of thirty thousand light-years, with only a dozen minutes a day to present arguments! His publishers, Broht & Forrester, represented by Ardon Broht himself, were arguing—and this is not to their credit—that since the Doctor was not legally a person, he had no rights over his book. Sometimes I do wonder how some people sleep at night. (They publish the Dixon Hill novels – I shall never read one again.) As ever, when faced with a legal conundrum, I turned to Tuvok, who tried to argue the case that, leaving aside his personhood, the Doctor had to be considered the author of the piece, and therefore had rights as an artist. It seems ludicrous to me that the arbitrator did not simply rule that the Doctor was a person. The legal definition of “artist” even includes that word! But no: it seemed that our arbitrator was not prepared to set a precedent that day and ruled narrowly in the Doctor’s favor as to his rights over his work—but not over his rights as a person. Downright cowardice, in my opinion. What more evidence did we need to provide? The Doctor has exceeded his programming—even his creator, Lewis Zimmerman—admits that. He feels, he loves, he changes—he creates. He is as much a person as any of us—he is more of a person than some people I meet!

  There’s a twist in this tale. The original version of the Doctor’s book got loose among a community of EMH Mark Is who had been decommissioned as medics and were working as miners. They read the book as a piece of subversive literature—a call to arms, no less—and put down their tools and went on strike, the first act in what we now call the “photon rights movement.” I wait with considerable interest to see what the Federation lawyers make of this—and I hope they show a little more courage this time.

  There was one more effect of our regular communications with the Alpha Quadrant that is worthy of mentioning, since it brought to the fore an issue which many of us believed resolved, but which I realized, as a result of these events, might need further thought and planning. I refer of course to the old division, which I myself no longer saw, between our Starfleet and our ex-Maquis crew members. These latter suddenly found themselves the victims of unprovoked attacks that left them comatose. It turned out that the attacks came from an entirely external source, albeit using one of my crew. A letter from Tuvok’s son, Sek, sent via data stream, had, it transpired, been tampered with. Underneath the message from Sek there was another message embedded, from a fanatical Bajoran vedek, Teero Anaydis. Teero had worked with the Maquis in counterintelligence but had been forced out after experimenting with mind control. Tuvok, under Teero’s influence, had carried out the attacks, and was struggling to regain control over his own mind. Put in a position where Tuvok had to choose between loyalty to his former Maquis colleagues, now themselves under Teero’s influence, and his loyalty to me, I’m gratified to say that Tuvok chose his captain, and was able to mind-meld with Chakotay and the others to restore them to themselves.

  Reflecting on these events afterward, I was chiefly saddened at how quickly the old suspicions had come back. I was
grateful, however, to have been alerted to the fact that our increased contact with the Alpha Quadrant was causing many of them to worry about what the future held for them, and I held one-to-one conversations with all the crew who had been Maquis. These fears, it turned out, were very real. What was their reception in the Alpha Quadrant going to be? Would they face charges for their activity, even go to prison, as some of their comrades had done? To my mind, the previous half a dozen years had wiped the slate completely clear. But I could see how some back in Starfleet, still sore over the multiple defections, and without my firsthand experience of the courage and loyalty of these people, might think differently. I realized that this was something for which I needed to prepare.

  * * *

  There is an interlude that I want to put down, because, in retrospect, I can see that when it occurred, I was so very close to home, and yet was nearly lost for good. I’ll say this for Quarren labor law: the working conditions and pay were good. It was their recruitment policies that left a great deal to be desired. Their advanced industrial civilization had a chronic labor shortage, and some companies had resorted to a dubious program of systematic forced removal of aliens, giving them new memories along with their new lives. Voyager’s crew— or, at least, some of us, were taken.

  My memories of this time remain intact—I was the same person; I simply didn’t recall my true past life. I found myself a good job, and I found myself a good man, Jaffen. We moved in together. Others of my crew fitted in well too—Seven, inevitably, proved the most adaptable, slotting straight into her new role as efficiency manager at the station where we were working. Others were less successful—a shout-out for Tom Paris, who more or less got himself fired within a few days, and wound up in a bar, making conversation with a lovely woman named B’Elanna…

  I would have stayed there quite happily, but part of our crew had been absent when the Quarrens took us: Chakotay, Neelix, and Kim had been on an away mission, returning to find Voyager empty, only the Emergency Command Hologram on board (I didn’t, after all, regret allowing our Doctor to pursue this research program). Chakotay and Neelix infiltrated the plant, targeting us, and, through our conversations together, bringing our memories back. This rash of “dysphoria syndrome,” among so many people of the same species, who had arrived at the plant at the same time, alerted a young doctor to our plight, and the scandal was brought to the attention of the government. We were able to depart, but not before I had to say goodbye to Jaffen.