She took a long sip of tea to fortify her, then set the cup back down on the coffee table. “After Nomad, they invited me to return home, offered to help me remember. But I… I couldn’t. I experienced all these emotions when I thought about them… about these people who were strangers to me.”
Chekov answered slowly. “Because your episodic memory was lost, but not your deeper, conditioned responses such as emotions.”
Uhura nodded. “It was terribly confusing. More—it was frightening. Rather than facing all that, it was easier to start over and build a new life with my crewmates.” She reached out and touched both men’s hands. “You were all I knew. Everything I remembered was aboard the Enterprise, with all of you around me. So you became my comfort zone. I came to think of you all as my family.”
She leaned back, lowering her head. “But in the process, I neglected my birth family. I sent polite acknowledgments of their letters, their invitations, their pleas. I said I’d come home when it became feasible, and then I kept putting it off. Eventually the requests tapered off. They must feel that I’ve… moved on without them.
“After all that… after turning my back on them when they offered to help me… now I have to go back to them and ask for their help. And it’s because of the very thing that created the rift, that took their close, loving daughter and sister away from them and created this… stranger in her place.”
She blinked away tears, and Sulu and Chekov both came around to flank her on the couch, their hands on her shoulders. “Hey,” Sulu said. “I can guarantee they won’t see you that way.”
“How? How can you possibly know?”
He grinned. “I’m a dad now, remember? A year ago, I didn’t know Demora existed. Now it feels like she’s always been part of me.
“That’s how family works, Nyota. No matter how long you’re apart, no matter what comes between you, that connection is always there. And a parent’s sense of responsibility for their child never goes away.”
“Besides,” Chekov added, “I know that your mother is a kind, compassionate, and understanding woman.”
“I didn’t think you’d met her.”
“I have met you. Think about it, Nyota. Nomad may have taken away your learning, your experiences—but what remained was who you are at the core. Who you were born to be. And that is a kind, compassionate, and understanding woman. That wasn’t learned—it’s genetic.”
Sulu tilted his head. “I’m not sure it works quite that way. I mean, she retained her ingrained skills. Plus it could’ve come from her father’s side.”
“Stop analyzing. I’m trying to be comforting.”
Uhura laughed. “And you’re both doing a fine job—in your ways.”
Neither one of them was a master at this, yet she still drew strength from their willingness to help. As imperfect as it was, she realized, the connection helped. Would reconnecting with her biological family really be that different? She feared the parts that would be awkward and difficult, but didn’t those go hand in hand with the more fulfilling aspects of family?
Well, sister, she told herself, there’s only one way to find out.
Chapter Ten
Nairobi, United States of Africa
Returning to her childhood home felt to Nyota Uhura like visiting an alien planet.
She could have beamed directly to her mother’s residence—indeed, she should have, given that this was fairly urgent Starfleet business. However, she had chosen to beam to the local transporter depot and take in the city for a bit, both to delay the inevitable and to see if it sparked any memories. Nairobi was certainly a stimulating environment, a multispecies melting pot of Federation cultures almost as rich as San Francisco or Paris. The Green City in the Sun had always been a place where cultures blended, for better or worse—from its turbulent early decades as an anchor of British colonialism to its post-independence role as a center of tourism and trade. True to its nickname, it was an interface between civilization and nature as well, directly abutting one of Africa’s largest nature preserves and blessed with an abundance of parks interspersed among its towering skyscrapers, its elegant museums and churches and mosques, and its colorful shops and restaurants. Many cities on Earth were like that now, but Nairobi had been one of the first.
Still, none of it sparked any recognition in Uhura, any memory of herself as a part of this environment. There was an occasional, subliminal sense of familiarity, but far from bringing comfort, it unnerved her. To someone with eidetic memory, the inability to know why something evoked an emotional response was disturbing.
If just the city did that to her, what would it be like going home?
As she walked the streets, Uhura noticed others’ eyes following her, reacting to her Starfleet uniform. She was not the only Starfleet officer in town, to be sure, and she wore dark glasses against the bright tropical sun; yet the crew of the Enterprise had become well-known in the years since V’Ger, and the Nairobians were presumably aware of their native daughter within that crew. But was that all she saw in their eyes? Or could some of them be old friends surprised to see her home after so long—wondering why her own gaze brushed past them with no recognition?
The more she contemplated that, the more she realized what a mistake it had been to waste time like this. If she had to face this kind of discomfort, she should at least do it in private, to limit the variables.
M’Umbha Uhura’s home was located, not coincidentally, in a residential tower overlooking Uhuru Park, one of the city’s oldest and most prominent public spaces, next to the central business district and near the University of Nairobi, where M’Umbha’s current husband taught. Uhuru—“Freedom” in Swahili—was a popular name in East Africa, though a Western-influenced ancestor of the Uhuras had chosen to “soften” the final vowel a few generations back. Perhaps this had been meant to make them stand out from the crowd, but M’Umbha had chosen to take a dwelling near their namesake park despite that. Had that been out of pride, Nyota wondered, or a legal advocate’s appreciation for the ideal the name embodied? Or did it reflect her sense of humor? She wished she could remember.
When the door to the Uhura apartment began to open, Nyota wondered for a moment if she would even recognize her own mother. They had exchanged brief, often tense correspondence on occasion since Nomad, but no more than a cordial, distant acknowledgment for the past several years. Still, she knew immediately that the woman standing in the doorway was her mother, for she looked the way Nyota imagined—or hoped—that she would look in thirty years. M’Umbha was a lean, regal woman in a brightly patterned kanga dress, with a cloud of silvery-white hair framing her striking, large-eyed features.
Those dark eyes glistened with tears, and before Nyota could react, she found herself in the older woman’s embrace. “Oh, binti yangu! Nyota! Welcome home!”
After a moment’s hesitation, she relaxed into the embrace and returned it. She had no right to close herself off to this freely offered love just because her memory of it was gone. That absence was artificial, imposed by a heartless, half-alien machine. M’Umbha’s experience of their bond was the true one, and she should defer to it if she could.
Besides, being called “my daughter” gave her a sense of attachment she hadn’t known she’d been missing.
M’Umbha led Nyota inside the spacious apartment, but the commander hesitated at the sound of activity and male voices from the kitchen. “I… I thought it would be just the two of us,” she said.
“Oh, I know, dear, but Omar insisted on preparing a feast for the occasion. This is the first time he’s actually had a chance to meet you! And as for Malcolm, well, he insisted on beaming in from Kampala. You know how stubborn he can—” She broke off, kneading her hands in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. That just slipped out.”
“I understand. It’s not your—”
“Well, there you are.” A tall, mature man with a neatly trimmed, subtly graying beard, dressed in modern attire that would not be out of place in San Fran
cisco or Utopia Planitia, leaned against the frame of the kitchen door. “The great Starfleet hero finally deigns to grace us with her presence.”
“Malcolm, don’t start,” M’Umbha chided. “You know what your sister has been through.”
“Is she? My sister? Or have we let a stranger into our home? She’s certainly treated us that way.” Doctor Malcolm Uhura held Nyota’s gaze, coolly scrutinizing her reaction. “At least until she needed something from us.”
“Come on, Malcolm, no getting out of your work,” came a deeper voice from the kitchen. “Don’t let the sukuma wiki get mushy. It’s almost ready.”
“Yes, Dad.” Malcolm rolled his eyes and went back into the kitchen.
Once her brother was out of the way, Nyota could see the older man who had spoken, a rotund, gray-haired gentleman with a medium-brown complexion, wearing a light-hued dashiki and a cylindrical kofia hat. “Hello, Nyota,” he called through the door as he bustled around the stove. “I’m Omar Ghalib, your stepfather. I hope you don’t mind that I’m too busy to greet you properly, but dinner will be ready shortly.”
Nyota smiled at his easy acceptance, a relief after her brother’s cold treatment. “That’s fine, Omar, thank you. It smells delicious. Nyama choma and ugali?”
“With pilau rice and matoke for dessert. It’s your first time home in so long, we thought you might like something traditional.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“Ah, so do you, my dear. You have your mother’s euphonious tones. They were what drew me to her in the first place.” As M’Umbha moved past Nyota into the kitchen, Omar’s eyes roved up and down his wife’s figure and his smile widened. “Many other things followed.” The couple shared a lascivious laugh, making Malcolm wince in embarrassment. Nyota found it adorable—and wondered if she should regret that detachment from childhood baggage.
While Nyota had urgent questions to pursue concerning the vacuum flares, she felt it would be inconsiderate not to ask after her hosts’—rather, her family’s current affairs. M’Umbha was easily drawn into a discussion of her work with the elephants; Nyota supposed her obvious passion for the subject was what made her a good advocate for their interests. It seemed she had been involved in a lively dispute with a Federation Council committee insisting that the Prime Directive should prohibit any active social work or medical care among the elephants, as that would constitute interference in their natural development. M’Umbha had countered that in a case where humans had already interfered with an alien culture—as they had with elephants to devastating effect over millennia—they had an obligation to take an active role in correcting the harm they had done. She had cited a number of Starfleet missions as precedents, including the Enterprise’s interventions on Iotia and Ekos.
The mention of Professor John Gill’s twisted experiment with fascism on Ekos left Omar shaking his head. As a fellow historian, he said, he was bewildered that a once-respected scholar of Earth history had embraced such an easily discredited fringe interpretation of the so-called “efficiency” of the Nazi regime, or had believed that it could be divorced from its hateful, genocidal aspects, as if those had been a peripheral element instead of the central driver of the entire ideology. Then he laughed and, apologizing for bringing the mood down, shifted into an amusing anecdote about a Rigelian student whose glitchy translator had led her to mistake a history assignment about the Mauryan Empire for one about a “Martian Empire,” leading her to produce a thoroughly researched, highly revisionist essay on the wrong era of history altogether.
Malcolm ate in sullen silence at first, but Omar eventually drew him into a conversation about his research in interspecies medicine at Makerere University Hospital. Her older brother spoke of his ongoing studies into the symbiotic biology of the Pandronian biosphere, which he believed could point the way to new methods of organ transplantation or limb replacement. It was the first time Nyota had seen him brighten all afternoon.
Taking in the mood, M’Umbha smiled. “Well, this is lovely. What a shame Samara’s dance troupe is off-world—we could’ve had the whole family together again.”
To hide her embarrassment at failing to ask after her younger sister, Nyota took a sip of chai and said, “Well, this is just a lovely meal, Omar. I don’t think I’ve ever had nyama choma this good.”
M’Umbha dropped her fork, and a silence fell over the table. “It… it’s your mother’s recipe, dear,” Omar demurred.
Being at a loss for words was another novel experience for Nyota. “I… oh, I… I suppose that must be why it seems so right. I should have…”
“No,” M’Umbha said. “No, it’s all right.” She forced a smile. “It’s a pleasure to get to see you discover it all over again, binti.” She cleared her throat. “Well, we’ve been monopolizing the conversation too long. I know you came here in search of help with your problem. You believe these space storms popping up all over are connected to you somehow?”
“That’s right.” She went on to spell out the basics of the situation and the connection she’d found to her own music. “We think I must have been conducting some sort of ongoing communications research, but for some reason, I told no one in Starfleet about it. Yet according to everyone I spoke to, if I had told anyone, it would be…” She lowered her head. “My family.”
“Yes,” M’Umbha said, following suit. “You used to share everything with us.”
“I… I’m sure I did. So if there’s anything you can remember that could help—”
“This is outrageous,” Malcolm interrupted. “You don’t owe this… this stranger anything, Mama. Twelve years ago, she forgot us, and she was fine with doing so.”
“Malcolm!” M’Umbha protested. “You know that wasn’t her fault.”
“Losing her memory, no. But she chose not to come back to us after, to reclaim what she had lost. After twelve years of choosing to stay away, she doesn’t get to use that robot as an excuse anymore.”
He turned to Nyota. “Mama is doing a good job of hiding it, but you need to know the pain you’ve caused her, coming back here after all these years just for work, for Starfleet. You only come back now that you need some information from us. Not for Mama and Omar’s wedding, not for Samara’s graduation, not even for Babu Uchawi’s funeral!”
She let his anger wash over her, not feeling entitled to challenge it. “I understand your anger, Malcolm. I just hope you can understand how hard it was for me.”
He held her gaze, and she saw a deeper compassion beneath the anger. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through. I worked with a few amnesia cases during my residency, but they were usually partial or temporary. And even then, I could barely imagine how it would feel not to recognize your own loved ones.
“Because when members of this family have gone through pain or loss, we have always turned to one another. When our father, yours and mine and Samara’s, died out in space, you came straight home from the Academy and we grieved together. We helped one another endure the loss, and we helped one another heal from it over time.
“Not that it was easy,” he added. “I tried so hard to talk you out of staying in Starfleet. I was so afraid that we might lose another one of us to space, that Mama might have to grieve all over again. We argued so fiercely. But the things you said about the reasons for your commitment to space, the value of the risks you took… I never admitted it then, but they helped me forgive Baba for going out there and getting himself killed. As hard as it was, Nyota, we worked through it because we were family.
“So when we learned what had happened to you at Maluria, we couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t turn to us, wouldn’t let us help you with that loss. Instead, it felt as if we’d lost you too—and by your own choice.” He shook his head. “That was almost worse than if you’d died. At least I would’ve understood then why you didn’t come back.”
Nyota was weeping now. “I wanted to, brother. I wanted to know what I’d had taken from me. I still remembered what I felt for
you all.” He scoffed. “I did. But what would it have been like for you, to have me come into your home like a stranger and demand you share a relationship with me when I couldn’t give anything back? How could I do that to you? What could I have offered you without my share of the history we once had?”
“You could have offered your presence,” M’Umbha replied proudly. “Your participation. Nyota, you speak of memory as a thing of the past. But memory doesn’t end.” She took Omar’s hand in hers. “When we lost Alhamisi, I felt for a long time that I would have no more joyous memories of my husband. But then I met Omar, and I found I could still build new memories to fill the void.”
M’Umbha took her hand. “You could have been part of those memories, Nyota. We would have been happy to have you. In twelve years, imagine how many new memories you could have formed with us to make up for the ones you lost.”
Nyota looked at her mother’s hand clasping hers, felt her cool, leathery skin… and suddenly she was in another time. Her mother’s face was younger, her hair still black, and Nyota could feel her own hair lying long and straight against her spine. Malcolm paced nearby, lean and beardless, intense with emotion.
“I won’t insist that you give up your dream,” M’Umbha said. “Only you can decide what it’s worth. Just consider everything that’s at stake.”
A flash of the young Malcolm shouting… then Samara wailing, fleeing to her room… Nyota sitting beside her on her bed, cradling the thirteen-year-old, promising that nothing would take her away.
When she came back to her senses, she was breathing hard, gasping. Tears rolled down her cheeks. M’Umbha was rising from her chair, moving closer. “Binti? What is it?”
Her mouth worked, torn between sobbing and grinning. “I remembered something! I…” She broke down, unable to say more.
Malcolm was by her side a second later, checking her pulse. “Breathe, Nyota. Slow, deep breaths.”
Once she had her breathing under control, she took a long sip of cold chai, emptying the cup. Omar took it from her, fingers brushing against hers. “I’ll get you a fresh cup.”
Living Memory Page 14
