The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (27 page)

I told Spock we couldn’t do it, that having 72 genetically engineered wedding guests was too big a risk. He countered that Khan had already offered to wait until we arrived at Ceti Alpha V, and that his followers could be beamed down to the planet. The only people required at the wedding were he and McGivers. I felt it had to be some sort of trick, but Spock didn’t agree.

“I have given it a fair amount of consideration, Captain,” he said. “Khan is a primitive man from a primitive time. He may take some comfort in ancient Sikh rituals.”

“Wait,” I said. “He wants a Sikh wedding?”

Spock was ready for this, too. He had assigned Ensign Chekov to research the customs for such a ritual, in the event I approved it. But the whole thing seemed unbelievable. I had to question Khan myself, so I went back to my quarters and communicated with him through the viewscreen on my desk.

“Khan, forgive me, but is this a joke?”

“I think you have known me long enough, Captain, to appreciate I have no sense of humor.” He had me there. “I do not know what my situation will be once we arrive on that planet, and I want Marla to have the honor of being my wife from the moment we set foot on that new world. We are going to conquer it together.”

“Then I guess … we’re going to have a wedding.”

We arrived at Ceti Alpha V. I had the cargo pods brought down to the surface, then had Khan’s people beamed down, leaving only Khan and McGivers on board. I put on my dress uniform again and went to the chapel. Khan and McGivers sat on pillows that Ensign Chekov had procured from Lieutenant Uhura’s quarters. The only guests, also on pillows, were Spock and McCoy. Five security guards lined the walls. I came in and sat on the one empty pillow, obviously reserved for me.

It was as close to a traditional Sikh wedding as we could approximate; Chekov gently prodded me through the ceremonies of the “Anand Karaj,” which translates into “Blissful Union.” The bride and groom announced their love for each other and detailed their roles in the equal partnership. It managed to be both quaint and progressive. The tradition ended with the groom taking the bride away from her own family, which in this situation had its own significance.

We escorted them to the transporter room, and as they stepped on the pad I saw a happy, contented, proud couple. Even Khan was not going to be denied marital bliss. I beamed them down.

“So you’re telling me,” Matt Decker said, “it was all an illusion.”

I was in the conference room aboard Decker’s ship, the
U.S.S. Constellation.
A few days before, war had been declared between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. It had lasted for two days (and hence became known as the Two-Day War). I had been at the center of it, knew the most about it, so Commodore Decker, who was commander of the main force that was about to face off against the Klingons before the war was abruptly cut short, wanted a debrief. Admiral Nogura was also present via subspace and stared at us through the viewscreen in the center of the table.

“Not exactly an illusion,” I said. “I should probably start from the beginning.” I could see the doubt in Decker’s expression, and I couldn’t blame him. It had been a difficult truth to accept. When war had been declared the
Enterprise
had been sent to Organia, a centrally located Class-M world, to secure an agreement with the local populace for Starfleet to use the planet as a base of operations. We’d found a primitive people who didn’t seem impressed with us, or the coming danger. They refused our help, and shortly thereafter the Klingons arrived.

Spock and I were stuck on the planet, in disguise, surrounded by hundreds of Klingon soldiers. All I could think about was Axanar. I was about to watch an innocent, peaceful society shattered by a Klingon occupation. The military governor, Kor, was everything I’d come to loathe about his species: arrogant, ruthless, proud of his society’s glorification of war. It gave him a disgusting sense of entitlement that legitimized his atrocities on the weak.

But the Organians weren’t powerless innocents. They only gave the illusion of being humanoid, and were in fact beings of pure energy, many millions of years more advanced than us. They put a stop to our war, deactivated our ships in space and our weapons on the ground. I was initially infuriated; I thought of myself as a man of peace, but my hatred for the Klingons had blinded me. I wanted a war, and the Organians weren’t going to let me have my way. Because I had dealt directly with them, I had more time to accept the situation; after I finished my report to Decker, I could see he hadn’t.

“We can’t just let these beings tell us what to do,” he said. Decker was having the struggle I’d just experienced, facing that humanity wasn’t the most advanced civilization in the Galaxy, that we weren’t even close. “We’re not going to just sit by helplessly—”

“The Klingons are as helpless as we are,” I said. They’d handed both the president of the Federation and the Klingon Chancellor a finished treaty, with an implied threat they’d disable our ships wherever they were if either side violated it.

“They’ll figure some way out of this,” Decker said. “We have to assume we’re still at war and go forward with our plans. I could drop the bundle on Qo’noS
*
in two days …” This last comment was directed at Nogura, who held up his hand and shook his head. It was clear that Decker was referencing something that I wasn’t cleared for. Nogura told Decker they had their orders, that the president of the Federation Council, the Andorian Bormenus, told Starfleet Command that we would abide by the treaty. Decker didn’t look happy, and I wondered whether he would ever accept the situation.

And I also wondered what “the bundle” was.

But there would be no war, at least not for a while. It was the third war I’d been a part of stopping since taking command of the
Enterprise
. I felt I was making a difference; I was a part of history.

I was soon going to have to figure out how to save it.

*
EDITOR’S NOTE:
It has been a generally accepted theory that the “magnetic space storm” the
Valiant
encountered was in fact an unstable wormhole that the scientists on the ship were unfamiliar with.

**
To this day, there is no widely accepted scientific explanation for the origin of the field of negative energy that completely surrounds the Galaxy.

*
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Captain Kirk’s instincts were correct. Shortly before publication of this work, Starfleet declassified a trove of documents from the Romulan War revealing, for the first time, that Starfleet Command and the leaders of Earth were aware of the Vulcan-Romulan connection during the war and kept it a secret to protect the Vulcan-Earth relationship.

*
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Pronounced like the English word “Kronos,” this is the Klingon Homeworld.

THE ANGEL WHO CAME DOWN THE STAIRS
of the basement immediately saw to our needs and gave Spock and me a job.

“Fifteen cents an hour for ten hours a day,” she said. “What are your names?”

“Mine’s Jim Kirk,” I said. “He’s … Spock.” What I knew of America in this period of the 1930s was a general lack in interest or education of the public in other cultures. I figured Spock would pass as some generalized Asian.

“I’m Edith Keeler. You can start by cleaning up down here,” she said, and headed back upstairs. I really didn’t want her to go.

“Miss,” I said. “Where are we?”

“You’re in the 21st Street Mission,” she said. It had a religious ring to it. I found myself hoping she wasn’t a nun.

“Do you run this place?”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Kirk.” She left us to the messy basement. Spock and I immediately got to work cleaning it up. This is not where I expected to find myself a week ago, when the
Enterprise
was patrolling the [REDACTED] sector, and we’d started getting the strange readings on the chronometers. Spock had noticed that, every few hours, they were “skipping” a millisecond. He traced the source to an unknown particle wave, and the
Enterprise
tracked it back to its source: a planet, in the star system [REDACTED], over [REDACTED] light-years from the nearest world of the Federation.
*

As we approached the strange old world, the particle wave’s effect became much stronger, and the
Enterprise
was buffeted by what Spock described as “ripples in time.” One of these ripples caused McCoy to accidentally inject himself with the dangerous stimulant Cordrazine. He left the ship a raving madman; Spock and I took a landing party down to the surface to find him.

On the world, a relic of a long-dead civilization, what could only be described as a glowing donut three meters in diameter announced:

“I am the Guardian of Forever.”

A time portal. Without even asking, it showed us Earth’s past in the hole of the donut. McCoy, before we could stop him, leaped into the portal.

We lost contact with the
Enterprise
immediately. McCoy had somehow changed the past. Spock and I then used the portal to follow him back in time in the hopes of stopping further damage. We couldn’t be exact in our calculations; we only knew we arrived sometime before McCoy. We didn’t know how much time we had.

For now, we had to clean a basement. The tools we had to work with were primitive and inefficient; the brooms were old and constructed of straw. They pushed the dirt on the floor around, but left residue behind. There was also a lot of irreparable furniture and other refuse that didn’t look worth saving.

“Assuming a seven-day workweek,” Spock said, “ten dollars and fifty cents a week for each of us in ancient U.S. currency.” I had no idea how much money that was, relative to the time we were in. Spock pointed out that it wasn’t necessarily the limit of our earning potential, as it left 14 hours in a 24-hour cycle to find other gainful employment. I was incredulous.

“We need to sleep,” I said.

“I do not need to sleep,” Spock said.

I couldn’t argue with that, but said we wouldn’t have time to find any work if we didn’t figure out how to clean the basement. Spock suggested a phaser locked on a minimal disintegration setting would allow us to dispense with the dirt without harming the structure. This struck me as cheating.

“I was unaware that we were engaged in a competition,” Spock said. I reconsidered all the work we had to do, and decided the time stream wouldn’t mind if we took a shortcut.

“Set your phaser. I’ll watch the door,” I said.

Even with the help of our 23rd-century tools, it still took a couple of hours to clean the room. As we were finishing, the smell of cooking wafted down to us. It was a combination of meat and onions, which I found intoxicating. I realized we’d not eaten in hours, so I hurried us to finish, and we went upstairs to the mission.

It was a small place with a kitchen, a cafeteria-style eating area with an upright piano, another room with about 15 cots with a common bathroom and shower. The smell of the food became stronger, but it was now mixed with the other powerful scents of coffee, rotting wood, and body odor.

The dining area was filled with bearded, raggedy men in frayed, soiled clothes, many with a glassy-eyed hopelessness. They stood in line for a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, and a hunk of bread. Spock and I did the same, and we sat down among them. I was starting to feel as hopeless as those around me. If I couldn’t stop McCoy, would this world ever change? Is this where I would spend the rest of my days?

And then Edith Keeler got up to speak. She spoke of the years to come, weirdly prescient on the subject of space travel, and about the people of the future who would solve the problems of hunger and disease.

“Prepare for tomorrow,” she said. “Get ready, don’t give up. You can’t control the hardship, but you can control its effect. The hunger might not abate, but the sadness is yours. The cold bites through your blanket, but you don’t need to let the hopelessness in with it. It is your decision what kind of person you will be, how you will respond to the challenges you face.

Keep your promises, forgo your grudges, apologize when necessary, speak your love, and speak it again.” It was as if she was talking to me, telling me to trust in myself. I found her calming and captivating. I looked around the room and could see I wasn’t the only one. She was giving these people life. Afterward she came and found me.