Crucible: Kirk (13 page)

(2271/2276)

In the parkland outside Mojave, California, Jim Kirk peered at the other version of himself and wondered which one of them had gone mad. His wounded double had suggested a plan to prevent the converging temporal loop by using the Guardian of Forever in the year 2293, despite that the mysterious artifact had been annihilated in 2270 when Korax had crashed his battle cruiser into it. “Yes,” Kirk said, agreeing with his bloodied counterpart about the flaw in the plan. “The Klingons.”

“I'm hoping it won't matter,” said the other Kirk.

“Hoping?”
Kirk said, uncomfortable with the idea of leaving anything to chance. But then his alter ego explained why he believed that his plan would work, despite—perhaps even because of—Korax's final destructive act. It would require an action, the success of which could not be guaranteed, but Kirk also felt confident that it could be achieved. If not, then there would be one other possibility for success, though it would be arduous and risky. Of course, all of this posed a risk.

“So where do I begin?” he asked. “How do I leave the nexus?”

“Here,” the other Kirk said, and he held out his arm as though ushering Kirk into a room.

Kirk looked to where his counterpart motioned, and there he saw not the spires and edifices of Mojave, but a dim, open plain. Above, a sunless sky provided only the faint illumination of the stars. He peered about and saw only a flat, empty expanse stretching away in every direction. It took him a moment, but then he recognized their location: one of the artificial worlds of the Otevrel.

He gazed over at the other Kirk and noticed him bathed in the yellow glow of the old self-contained life support belts. Glancing down, he saw a similar radiance about his own body, one of the belts encircling his own waist. He knew that by the time the
Enterprise
had encountered the Otevrel, the life support belts had fallen out of use in Starfleet because of health concerns, but then he had already learned well that what had occurred in the real, physical universe often did not get reproduced precisely in the nexus.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

The other Kirk shrugged. “This seems to be the place from which you or I can leave the nexus,” he said. “I'm sure it doesn't have to be this place, but this is what my mind conjured up when I first intended to depart.”

Kirk nodded. That explanation made no more or less sense than anything else within this timeless, unreal domain. “So where should I begin?” he asked. “And when?”

“You remember the historical research done on the Guardian's world, the efforts made to identify the origin of the time vortex,” the other Kirk said. Though he had offered a statement of fact rather than asking a question, his tone invited a response.

“Yes,” he said. The scientists had discovered that, at least according to the record provided by the Guardian, the planet on which it had stood had existed, essentially without change, since almost the beginning of the universe. The Guardian's own genesis had remained unknown, though, since the vortex had never shown the period of time in which it had initially appeared on the planet.

“And you recall the first words the Guardian uttered when we discovered it,” the other Kirk said.

“Yes,” he said. “‘Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question.'”

“That's where you're going,” the other Kirk said. “That's
when
you're going.”

“You're talking billions of years ago,” Kirk said.

“Yes,” the other Kirk said. “Otherwise you would contradict what the Guardian said, and thereby alter history.”

Kirk nodded slowly. He understood. “How do I do it?” he asked.

“I think you just need to imagine when and where you want to go.”

Kirk did. He envisioned the time vortex, thought as best he could about the age before Earth's sun had ignited in space. He turned to his left, away from his counterpart, and suddenly a gleaming white light began to shine before him, as though growing out of the nexus itself. The black sky, the white specks of the stars, the steel gray of the Otevrel world, all blurred and paled. Kirk stepped forward, and the field of white enfolded him. For a subjectively immeasurable span of time, he could see nothing, could hear nothing, could sense nothing. Even the feel of his own body vanished, as though he existed only as thought. He wanted to run but had no legs, wanted to scream but had no voice—

Under Twilight Brooding Dim

Before Sol Burned Hot in Space

Beneath the leaden sky, the land looked different than it would five billion years from now, but only marginally so. Several new—
Or old,
Kirk corrected himself—rock formations climbed from the rugged soil, while others he had once seen here had yet to take shape. This long ago, a number of fissures had not opened in the ground, though some looked to him as though they would remain essentially unaltered in the millennia to come. In the distance, where he and Spock and the rest of the
Enterprise
landing party had observed archeological ruins during their initial visit here, Kirk now saw nothing.

The Guardian of Forever appeared completely unchanged. The sepia-toned ring stood on edge a dozen or so meters ahead of Kirk, the irregularly flowing shape perhaps two and a half times his height and looking just as it had on the day he'd first set eyes on it. The scientists and historians who had studied the enigmatic artifact had reported its seemingly fixed nature even across eons, but Kirk had no idea how that could be possible.
Doesn't everything change with time?
he asked himself, and then he supposed that his question had its own answer embedded within it: time. The Guardian clearly had a significant measure of control over time in a fundamental way, a control that could be readily witnessed, but that had yet to be explained.

Kirk remembered discovering the Guardian. From the moment that the mysterious entity had confirmed its nature as a gateway through time and space, Kirk's imagination had been sparked. He'd found the idea of stepping into the past and losing himself in another world tantalizing and compelling.

And then he had done just that, chasing McCoy into Earth's twentieth century. Kirk and Spock had restored the timeline that Bones had accidentally altered. After they had reset events to avoid a Nazi victory in World War II, the Guardian had returned the three of them to their own time.
It will be as though none of you had gone,
the Guardian had said of a successful attempt to repair the damage done to history, but that hadn't been the case. Time had indeed resumed its shape, but the experience had changed the rest of Kirk's life.

He hated this place. Coming here had led him to his one chance for true happiness, but then that chance had been stolen back from him in the cruelest way. Even when he'd next visited this nearly empty world, the wonder and potential of the Guardian had been eclipsed by the effortlessness with which its use could bring about unexpected and lethal changes to the universe. On the third and final occasion when Kirk had approached this planet, he hadn't made it to the surface, but had led the
Enterprise
crew into a deadly battle with the Klingons that had caused hundreds of deaths and very nearly his own.

Despite all of that, though, he had come here now seeking the Guardian's aid. Kirk wanted to use the time vortex for a positive, useful end while avoiding any repercussions, any modifications to the timeline. The best chance he had of accomplishing all of that would depend not only on his own abilities and actions, but on the will of the Guardian itself. The situation put Kirk in mind of tales belonging to the literary subgenre of protagonists attempting to forge a deal with the devil.

“Guardian,” he said, pacing forward to stand directly in front of it. “Do you remember me?”

It offered no response. Kirk recalled that, during his preparations for his second visit to this place, he had read through the documentation of the researchers who'd worked here. The reports had stated that the Guardian did not reply to every question asked of it, and also that it sometimes spoke without being addressed in any way. More than that, the researchers had noted, just as Spock had, that much of what it said came “couched in riddles.”

“Guardian,” Kirk said again. “Are you machine or being?” This had been one of the first questions he'd asked when he and the
Enterprise
landing party had initially encountered the Guardian. It had responded by claiming to be both machine and being, and neither machine nor being.

Now, though, it remained silent. Kirk decided to attempt to engage it by way of a different tack, at the same time addressing an important issue. “Guardian, do you know when your existence will end?”

“I am my own beginning, my own ending,”
it said, its deep voice booming and full even in the open space. Synchronized with its words, different portions of the ring glowed from within.

“No, you are not,” Kirk asserted, though he made an effort to keep any hint of defiance or hostility from his tone. “You are not your own ending. I know this because, in the future, I witnessed your destruction.” He waited for a reply. When none came, he opted to continue. “I saw a starship plunge from space and through the atmosphere of this—”

“I am the Guardian of Forever,”
the vortex proclaimed.
“I am the union and the intersection of all moments and all places. I am what was and what will be. Through me is eternity kept.”

“How can you possess eternity when you are not yourself eternal?” Kirk asked. “Five billion years from now, a starship commander will intentionally crash his vessel on this world, on this very spot. A powerful detonation will result, creating a massive crater and vaporizing both the ship and you.”

Again, Kirk waited. He heard the howl of the wind, though about him, the air remained still. Through the center of the Guardian, in the distance, he saw dirt kicking up and blowing across the land. Finally, he went on. “I tell you this for your own sake,” he said. “I tell you this so that you will be able to avoid the end that I have seen. If you do not listen to me, if you do nothing, you will cease to exist.”

“Time bends,”
the Guardian said cryptically.
“The end is but the beginning.”

“What does that mean?” Kirk asked, but he knew better than to expect a straightforward answer—or any answer at all. When indeed the Guardian said nothing, Kirk turned and paced away from it. His boots scraped noisily along the hard terrain, and now he felt the chill movement of the air. It struck him that he had no protective garments, no clothing whatsoever beyond that which he wore right now. He had no shelter in this desolate place, no food, no water. In order to achieve his goals, he would therefore have only so much time—

But of course he had access to time. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Guardian. If Kirk needed anything at all, it waited for him just on the other side of the vortex. He had only to call up a time and place, and then leap to it.

Virtually
any
time and place,
Kirk thought. The researchers had found few limitations on what they could observe of the past beyond the time surrounding the actual origin of the Guardian.
That means that it must be possible to access the moments when the
Gr'oth
had plummeted to the surface of this world.
Persuading the Guardian of the reality of that event might or might not be critical in securing its compliance, but back in the nexus, the other Kirk had believed attempting to do so to be the right choice. Kirk himself had agreed.
And maybe the Guardian can convince itself of its own demise,
he thought.

Kirk turned and headed back to the Guardian. When he reached it, he said, “I wish to see tomorrow.” He knew that in the accounts that he had read of the research done at the Guardian, no mention had ever been made of the vortex displaying future events or allowing anybody to travel forward through time. He and the other Kirk had been aware that it might not be possible to find a direct route through the Guardian to 2293 or 2371—or in this case, to 2270, the year when the
Gr'oth
had slammed into the planet. He chose to see if being more specific in his request would make a difference.

“Guardian,” he said, “I wish to see the thirteenth day of June in the Earth year twenty-two seventy.” Once again, Kirk received no response, and so he decided to try an indirect path to the event. “I wish to see yesterday.”

Still nothing.

For an instant, panic gripped Kirk. He had expected that the Guardian might be either unwilling or unable to present the future to him, but he had no reason to think that it would not replay the past. It had done so before. In his previous trips here, it had shown him the history of humanity on Earth, the dawn of Orion civilization, and a recent day on the planet Vulcan.

Now, though, the vortex stood empty.

“‘Since before your sun burned hot in space,'” Kirk said to himself, quoting the Guardian. “‘Since before your race was born.'” When Kirk had exited the nexus, he had come five billion years into the past—or at least he had wanted to do so. He assumed for the moment that he had, despite having no real means of confirming that fact. But if he had arrived here that long ago, then Earth's sun had yet to form in the cold reaches of space, and the evolution of humanity lay even further ahead in the future than that. Kirk had asked to see yesterday, but for human beings, right now, at this moment,
today
did not exist.
With no today, how can there be a yesterday?
Kirk thought.
Have I come too far into the past to make use of the Guardian?
He wondered too if he had inadvertently condemned himself to living his final days on this barren world, while at the same time being unable to do anything to prevent the destruction caused by the converging temporal loop.

But today exists for me,
Kirk told himself.
And so does yesterday.
Once more, he would shift from the general to the specific. “Guardian, I wish to see
my
yesterday.”

“Behold,”
it said.
“A gateway to your own past, if you wish.”

A white mist spilled down from the top of the wide, roughly circular opening through the center of the Guardian's ring. Then images began to form: Kirk's mother giving birth, his brother Sam holding him as an infant, Kirk sleeping in a crib. This had been one of the ways in which the historians had learned to refine their requests of the Guardian. If it showed a thousand images of a ten-thousand-year epoch, it would present just ten scenes per century, making it difficult to view or navigate to particular points in time with much precision. Observing the course of a single life, though, because of its relative brevity, allowed for greater granularity: a thousand images displayed of Kirk's sixty-year life would produce one scene for every three weeks he'd lived. The numbers worked out differently than that, and the Guardian didn't always show moments spaced evenly apart, but the principle remained that you could see far more detail of a single life through the vortex than you could of a longer period.

Kirk continued to watch as his existence unfolded before him. He smiled when he saw himself tottering across the family living room and into Sam's waiting arms, perhaps taking his first steps, but he also felt a deep melancholy as well; Sam had been gone now for almost half of Kirk's life. Similar emotions played through his mind as his mother and father appeared, as his grandfather did, his uncle, all of them lost for so long at this point.

He closed his eyes when the colony on Tarsus IV materialized. At the age of thirteen, Kirk had been living there when the food supply had been all but wiped out by an exotic fungus. Governor Kodos had seized full power and declared martial law, then executed four thousand colonists in a horribly misguided and ultimately unnecessary attempt to save the other four thousand.

Kirk watched with interest, though, as he sped through Starfleet Academy. He saw himself as a young officer aboard the
Republic,
and then later, aboard the
Farragut.
Aboard the
Enterprise,
he saw Spock and Bones and Scotty.

And then the Guardian of Forever appeared. And then New York City in 1930. And then Edith.

Kirk turned away. He could not bear to see her. It occurred to him briefly that he could simply step through the time vortex and rejoin his beloved, save her from the traffic accident that had taken her from him—

But he had already made the decision once to sacrifice his own desires to preserve history. How could he in good conscience abandon that now? He had come here with a greater purpose than his own happiness, and he would see that effort through.

When Kirk peered back at the Guardian, he saw himself in gangster clothing on Sigma Iotia II. He fought the Kelvans as they commandeered the
Enterprise,
ferried the
Dohlman
of Elas to her arranged marriage on Troyius. He spoke with High Priestess Natira on Yonada, argued with the insane Captain Garth on Elba II, observed a glommer devouring a tribble.

As the period of the Klingon attack on the Einstein station approached, Kirk said, “Guardian, do you perceive yourself with the times that these images present?”

“I see all,”
it said, a pronouncement startling for its lack of ambiguity.

Kirk thought for a moment how best to phrase what he would say next. “Then you will see the time when you will cease to exist,” he said. “I propose that you can avoid such an end by moving yourself through time.”