The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (43 page)

“Because of certain mitigating circumstances, all charges but one are summarily dismissed,” President Roth said. I stood with Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu in front of the Federation Council. The “mitigating circumstance” was that we saved the planet.

We dropped the whales off in San Francisco Bay, and they immediately started talking to the probe. And the probe left, just like that. And everything was fixed.

The remaining charge was disobeying orders, which they directed solely at me. They could kick me out of Starfleet for that. I thought of myself as a civilian again; I hadn’t been able to make it work before, and now I was even older. I was scared at the prospect; the idea of prison seemed easier.

“James T. Kirk,” Roth said. “It is the judgment of this council that you be reduced in rank to captain, and that as a consequence of your new rank, you be given the duties for which you have repeatedly demonstrated unswerving ability. The command of a starship.” I smiled. I was completing the cycle again, going back to a ship after getting a promotion. Starfleet had decided to enable me.

I went to find Gillian. I was excited at the prospect of showing her my world. But I had barely said hello and she was already saying goodbye.

She was already assigned to a science vessel and was anxious to get started. She was a lot younger than I was; she really didn’t need me in this world. She could make it on her own. She kissed me and ran off. I smiled and thought about Edith. I felt like I’d just rewritten some history: a young, selfless woman who saw the future but didn’t belong to her time was now in a place where she could shine. A hole in me had filled.

I went back with my family. We went up to our new ship. The travel pod approached. It had been a
Constitution
-class ship called the
Ti-Ho
, but they had renamed it the
Enterprise
. We had come home for the last time.

*
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The whales appear to have been named for comedian George Burns and his partner and wife, Gracie Allen, although it is unclear what their relationship was to marine biology.

“I THINK YOU GOT DRUSILLA PREGNANT,”
McCoy said.

“There’s no proof—” I said.

“Yes there is. We’re looking at it,” he said.

“Shhh!” said a stranger sitting behind us.

We were in a cinema, on Planet IV of System 892, watching people on the screen playing, well,
us
, the crew of the
Enterprise
. It was a strange experience; the actors on the screen vaguely resembled me, Spock, and McCoy. The movie got a lot of the details about Starfleet and the Federation right, which seemed impossible. Spock’s doppelganger even had pointed ears and slanted eyebrows.

The world we were on was a startling example of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planet Development.
*

We had originally visited the planet almost 30 years before and found a Roman Empire that had survived into the 20th century, finally struggling with the spread of Christianity. My landing party and I barely escaped with our lives, and the planet was marked “off-limits” by Starfleet. Enough time had passed, and it was determined by someone in the Admiralty (a young admiral named John Van Robbins whom I’d never met) that we should take another look at it to determine if there’d been any residual contamination from our visit.

We entered orbit and monitored their radio and television transmissions. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. With knowledge of the society, I decided a landing party in disguise was worth the risk. McCoy, Chekov, and I donned clothing roughly corresponding to the Earth year 1990, and we beamed down to a midsize city.

Rome had not fallen, though the current emperor had allowed Christianity to flourish; it was already the dominant religion of the empire. We saw several examples of Christian churches nestled between homes and businesses, and religious iconography was prevalent. We gathered what information we could and were preparing to beam back to the ship, when McCoy noticed an advertisement on the side of a public transportation vehicle with an internal combustion engine that I believed was called a “bus.” We barely got to read it before the bus pulled away from us, but among the images on it, there was a clear photo of a Vulcan. I turned to Chekov.

“Did you catch what it said?”

“ ‘The Final Frontier,’ ” Chekov said. “It was a title.”

“I think that’s how they used to advertise movies,” McCoy said.

“Contamination?” Chekov said.

“When we were here the last time, the government had a pretty tight lock on information,” I said. Our mission to this planet back then was to find a missing merchant ship, the
S.S. Beagle.
The ship had been destroyed, but some of the crew of the
Beagle
had survived on the planet and had become part of the Roman society. The movie advertisement suggested we needed to do a little more research.

“Captain,” Chekov said, “we might be able to find something in here.” He indicated a bookstore, Cicero’s Tomes. We went inside and quickly found a section on popular culture. McCoy pulled out a book on the topic.

“
The Making of ‘The Final Frontier
,’ ” I said, reading the cover. The first chapter had a short biography of the filmmaker, whose name was Eugenio. He was born a slave, and from a very young age, his mother, whose name was Drusilla, had told him stories about his father.

“Uh-oh,” McCoy said. He was reading over my shoulder. He recognized the name as well. Drusilla had been a slave to the proconsul who’d captured us on our first visit. She and I had been intimate.

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It wasn’t like I told her anything.”

“I think we should go see the movie,” Chekov said. So we did. (I also bought the book.) When we saw the movie, we noticed that a few people in the audience seemed to be wearing homemade Starfleet uniforms. McCoy had a theory about that.

“Those are fans,” he said. “Dressing up like you.”

Back on the
Enterprise
, we relayed what we found to Spock in the briefing room. The film had gotten a lot right about Starfleet and the Federation, and its portrayal of me, Spock, and McCoy was dead-on. Spock theorized that Drusilla must have been paying more attention when she served the three of us.

“I’m pretty sure she only served one of us,” McCoy said, and I gave him an annoyed look. I still wasn’t clear how they had gotten the details of Starfleet and the rest of the Galaxy.

“I think I know the answer to that,” Chekov said. He had the book in front of him turned open to a page at the end. Under a title head called “Credits,” there was a list of people who had been involved in the making of the film. Chekov had done some cross-checking in our data banks. Three of the names listed under “Consultants” matched the names of members of the crew of the
Beagle
.

“So this slave, Eugenio,” I said, “hearing some details from his mother, searches out the surviving members of the
Beagle
, and they fill in the rest.”

“What was the nature of the film?” Spock said.

“This Eugenio was obviously using this film to say something about religion,” Chekov said. “The
Enterprise
went on a mission to the center of the Galaxy to find God.”

“That is not possible,” Spock said. “The center of the Galaxy is a black hole.”

“I thought you were going to say,” McCoy said, “that there’s no such thing as God.”

“I have no evidence on that subject,” Spock said, then brought up the question of whether this constituted a violation of the Prime Directive.

“It’s just a movie, Spock,” McCoy said. “I doubt it will come to anything.” I hoped McCoy was right.

“Do you know Uhura’s 54?” I said to McCoy. We were in my quarters enjoying a drink, as we were wont to do.

“The
Enterprise
now has the oldest senior officers of any ship in the fleet,” McCoy said.

“How do you know that?”

“I looked it up,” he said. “We’ve got three captains. Do we really need three captains?” Scotty had the rank of captain, along with Spock and myself. It was definitely a top-heavy ship, but no one wanted to leave. The last person who’d left was Sulu, who’d finally gotten command of the
Excelsior
three years before.

“We’re doing our jobs, aren’t we?” I said.

“Who’s a little defensive?” he said, with a smirk.

I guess I was. We were on our last legs; our tour was over in four months, and the senior officers and much of the crew had decided to “stand down” and not seek reenlistment. It was just as well. In the last few months our missions had not been vital; we’d become a showpiece. I had a reputation that Starfleet used for security reasons. The Klingons still didn’t like me, because they were also a little scared of me, which frankly pleased me. The work wasn’t arduous, and the ship itself was a lot like us. They phased out the
Baton Rouge
class 40 years before, and now the
Constitution
class had seen her day. The
Excelsior
-class ships were taking over, and there was already one designated for the name “Enterprise” being assembled. They would be decommissioning this ship probably right after we walked off it.

The door chime rang. It was Spock.

“I request an extended leave of absence,” Spock said. “I’m needed on Vulcan.”

“Has it been seven years? You need to get someone pregnant?” McCoy said. He reached for the Saurian brandy but I grabbed the bottle first.

“I’m cutting you off,” I said.

“When Vulcans reach a certain age, Doctor, they are spared the turbulence of the
Pon farr
,” Spock said, then he turned back to me. “I have been requested to return.”

I asked if everything was all right, and Spock said he didn’t know; the reason he was being called back was something of a mystery. So I ordered the helm to set a course for Vulcan and told McCoy we would be down to two captains for a while.

“How will we survive?” he said with a chuckle.

We dropped Spock off at Vulcan and were then soon ordered to Earth. It looked like we would spend our last three months in dry dock. It was strange to think it was all coming to an end. I went back to my old apartment. It overlooked Starfleet Academy, and my mind often wandered back to those days. I felt a specific memory gnawing at me and decided I needed some closure.

On one of my leave days, I took a trip to the New Zealand Penal Settlement. Criminals from all over the planet lived and worked there, under guard, and were given carefully guided lives. It was punishment because it wasn’t freedom, but it wasn’t cruel either. I beamed into an administration building. The clerk behind a desk checked my security clearance and approved my request to visit an inmate. A guard took me out onto the grounds.

There were rolling green hills where inmates worked on a variety of building projects. The guard took me to a technical facility, where inside several men and women labored over an antique computer. One of them immediately recognized me.

Ben Finney was much older and thinner. When he saw me walk in, he immediately excused himself from the group, came over, and quietly said hello. He was not unfriendly, just reserved. I asked him if we could go for a walk. We took a stroll on the lush grounds.

“You’ll be getting out soon,” I said. “Do you have any plans?”

“Jamie and her wife live on Benecia; they’ve offered to let me live there with them.” Ben’s wife, Naomi, had passed away several years before. I didn’t bring her up, but I gathered they had not stayed in touch.

“If there’s anything you need,” I said, “please let me know.” Ben stopped.

“Jim,” he said, “I appreciate you coming. I appreciate your forgiveness. I have a sickness, and it led me to hurt a lot of people. But I guess what I’m saying is, it would be easier if I didn’t see you again.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I just wanted you to know, I don’t think I would’ve been the person I’ve become without your help. I wanted to thank you.”

Ben nodded. I think the pain of his own actions kept him from being able to embrace my appreciation. We shook hands and said goodbye.