The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (5 page)

“Holy crap,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I read about it,” Tom said. “These cargo ships used to be run by families who learned all sorts of facts about these ships. Some of them called this ‘the sweet spot.’ Try it!”

I grasped the railing and pushed. At first I was just pushing up my own weight, and then suddenly I was weightless and moving through the air. I tumbled end over end. I actually hit Tom and we fell to the “floor,” which was actually the ceiling. It was amazing.

“Let’s do it again!”

Both of us lost in laughter, we then pushed off together and landed on the catwalk. We kept going back and forth, laughing, yelling, almost missing the catwalk a couple of times, until finally a security guard found us and dragged us back to our quarters. We spent a lot of the next two months sneaking off to this area. Eventually, I became interested in why it was happening, and I sought out a crew member who explained it to me. It was my first experience trying to understand life in outer space, and the relationship between humans and their spacecraft. It also taught me a valuable lesson on the inherent risks involved in space travel, as on one of these excursions I got careless; I missed the catwalk and landed on the cargo bay floor, breaking my wrist.

While my wrist healed, I ended up spending a lot of time with Tom’s parents. They were very loving and attentive to him, and treated me like I was a member of their family. They made sure I was taken care of, and that I kept up with my studies. Barbara, a physician, always asked me lots of questions about my interests and was on me constantly about whether I was getting enough to eat. She was small, probably just over five feet tall, but she had a quiet intensity that somehow gave her authority over the three larger males in her care. She stood in great contrast to her husband, a boisterous raconteur who thrived on attention. (Rod, much to his wife’s chagrin, taught Tom and me poker on that trip, where I learned more about his ability to bluff. No real money exchanged hands, but it was still instructive.) Rod was skilled in modern construction and was very excited about joining the colony, and though my mother had been on Tarsus IV for years, it wasn’t until this trip that I learned about its history.

Humans settled Tarsus IV in the 22nd century after the Romulan War. Most of the settlers were veterans of the conflict who, with their families, purposely picked a planet on the other side of the Galaxy from the Romulans and the Klingons. Their goal was a society devoted to peace. So, although many of them had served on ships as soldiers, they devoted themselves to a scientifically constructed technocracy. The government was built on completely practical notions of what the individuals in the society needed and what they in turn could provide. For a century the colony had flourished as one of the most successful examples of human achievement in the Galaxy. At 13 I don’t know if I fully understood the accomplishment of the people who built this world, but looking back it makes what would happen there that much more tragic.

We arrived at Tarsus IV on schedule, and the Leightons and I were among the first people to be taken down to the planet. As the pilot took the shuttle below the cloud cover, I could see huge tracts of barren, rocky land. Then in the distance there was a strip of green, and we came in on a landing field outside a small city. When we stepped off the shuttle onto my first foreign planet, I was surprised at what I saw: blue skies, rolling hills, grass, and trees. My first exposure to a Class-M planet; it wasn’t foreign at all. It could easily have been mistaken for Southern California.

The spaceport was only a few kilometers outside the main town. I could see the dense sprawl of buildings, none higher than four stories. It had the feel of a late-19th-century European city, dense but not quite modern. I was trying to take it all in, when I was startled by someone calling my name.

“Jim!” I turned. It was my mother. Because of the limits of communication while in transit, I hadn’t heard from her in the months since I left Earth. I had gotten so caught up with space travel and landing on a new world I’d actually forgotten about her.

She ran toward me, a giant smile on her face. She’d gotten older since I’d seen her last; in my mind she was still the young, vibrant woman who lifted me up in her arms when I was little. Now, because I’d grown, she seemed small to me. It was a difficult adjustment; she strode like a beautiful colossus in my imagination and now she was only slightly taller than me. She squeezed me in a warm hug. I could feel her tremble as she fought back tears. I felt the eyes of everyone around us as she embraced me, and though as a child I’d missed this affection, in this moment I could not return it. She felt my awkwardness and stepped back. We were almost on the same eye level.

“You’ve gotten so big,” she said. Whether intentionally or not, that was one of the last things she said to me before she left Earth. Now, unlike then, I heard the regret in her voice. We stood in uneasy silence for a long moment; then the Leightons stepped in and introduced themselves to her. Barbara said some things about what a nice young man I was. Mom wasn’t particularly warm to them; she seemed uncomfortable, anxious to get me away.

“Come on, Jim, let’s go home.”

I could see Rod was a little put off by her attitude, but Barbara placed a gentle hand on his forearm. Barbara said they’d see me later, she was sure, and I said goodbye and thanked them. Mom helped me with my luggage, and we headed off to a waiting hover car, a simple vehicle with four seats and an open trunk. She drove it herself into the main city.

As we glided through the streets, Mom gave me a tour. She seemed very self-conscious talking to me, and I frankly wasn’t doing anything to help put her at ease. She filled the time by explaining the colony to me.

“There are 12 boulevards that radiate out from the city center,” she said, as we entered the outer perimeter. The boulevard we were on was surrounded on both sides by buildings no more than three stories in height, and they looked to be made of brick and stone. It all seemed very old to me.

“All the buildings except the ones of the original settlement are made of indigenous materials,” she said. I sat there quietly. “You know what indigenous means?”

“Yes,” I said. I was being purposely curt. Since seeing her, I had felt an unexpected surge of anger, and it was overwhelming me.

The boulevard, simply labeled 12th Street, converged with all the boulevards in the center square. This was the site of the original settlement, and the buildings here, while in fact the oldest, looked the newest. Arranged to establish a town square, they were made from prefabricated materials designed to weather harsh environments. The square was quite large, and we drove through it and continued on to the other side of town. My mother tried to fill in as much information as she could, then asked me for details of my trip. I gave her mostly one-word answers. She was struggling to connect, and I was making sure she failed.

She pulled the hover car over near a redbrick two-story building. We got out and she led me inside to a first-floor apartment. It was simple, clean, and quaint. She had indulged in the ancient tradition of putting photographs on the wall; Sam and I were everywhere I looked, at every age. I didn’t even remember some of the pictures being taken. She showed me to my room, which had a small bed, dresser, and its own window that looked out onto the street.

“I know it’s not much,” she said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Let me help you unpack.”

“I can handle it.”

“Okay,” she said. There was a chime that I assumed was a doorbell. Mom left my room to head to the front door. I didn’t follow, but stood and watched as she opened it. On the other side was a short, bald man in some kind of uniform coveralls. He had a badge and held a tablet with a stylus. He had a friendly, open demeanor.

“Hey Winona,” he said. “Just checking to make sure you got your son okay.”

“Thanks, Peter,” she said. “Yes, it went fine.”

“So I’ll change the occupancy on your unit,” he said, marking the tablet. “Can I meet him?”

“Sure,” she said. “Jim?”

I pretended I hadn’t been listening and came out after she called a second time.

“Jim, this is Peter Osterlund. He’s an officer in the colony’s security section.”

“Nice to meet you, son,” he said. “Now, Winona, you’ll have him examined by medical—”

“In less than 24 hours, yes,” she said.

“Okay, great,” he said, finishing on the tablet. “See you soon!” And with that he was gone.

“What was that all about?”

“The colony keeps highly detailed records of its inhabitants. It allows for very specific planning regarding the use of resources. There are computer models that use our genetic makeup to determine accurate predictions of our consumption of food, water, medicine, everything. Even down to the wear and tear on the pavement of the sidewalks.”

“Why?”

“Well, Jim, we’re pretty far away from Earth and the rest of the Federation,” she said. “This planet doesn’t have an abundant supply of resources, so careful planning is necessary. We’re self-sustaining, but just barely.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What?”

“Why does anyone want to live here?” My tone reflected a harshness that was out of proportion to the question; it belied a subtext of resentment that I’m not sure even I was aware of.

“Well, one might see it as a challenge,” she said. “You can have an impact out here that you can’t on Earth. But that might not be a good enough reason.” I may not have been aware of my resentment, but she certainly was.

Despite the initial awkwardness with my mother, it didn’t take me long before I felt at home on Tarsus IV. I went to school during the day, and afterward I usually hung around with Tom Leighton. Though we were quite different boys we had formed a bond during the journey that continued. I spent a lot of time at his dwelling, which my mother initially was reticent about. Even so, she still did her best to make a home for me; she cooked us dinner every night, and though she worked a five-day week, on her free days she would take me on excursions outside of the town. The planet’s small strip of arable land had been part of a limited, primitive terraforming by the original settlers; the rest of the world was what I had seen when I first arrived—rocky, unforgiving terrain. Mom, however, was an avid rock climber, and it was during this period that she taught me how to do it. It’s something I still indulge in even to this day.

Mom’s job on Tarsus involved research on xenobiology, the various life that was indigenous to the planet, as well as those that may have been extraterrestrial in origin. These extraterrestrial forms found their way through meteorites and asteroids that entered the atmosphere. It was one of these forms of life that ended up causing all the difficulties.

One day I came home from school to find Mom hurriedly going through some files on her computer. She seemed distraught.

“Jim, I’m going to have to go back to the lab,” she said. “I’ve called the Leightons. You can sleep there tonight.” Mom was usually restrained about all the time I spent at the Leightons’, so the fact that she was facilitating the sleepover told me something was seriously wrong.

“Is there anything the matter?”

She turned and looked at me. I could see her trying to figure out whether to tell me what she knew.

“It’s nothing to worry about now,” she said. She then got up and gave me a kiss. “Come on, pack an overnight bag and I’ll take you over to the Leightons’ while I head back to work.”

As we drove to the Leightons’ I noticed that there was a sense of panic in the people we passed: worried looks, alarmed conversations, many of them running. At the Leightons’, Mom said goodbye and I went inside. Barbara wasn’t home, but Rod was there, and he wasn’t his usual jovial self. He told me where I could find Tom, who was in his room reading.

“You know what’s going on?” I said.

“Yeah, something to do with the food,” Tom said. “Dad knows someone in the agriculture department who said it’s really bad.”

As history would show, that turned out to be an understatement. An alien fungus had attacked the food supply. It wasn’t indigenous to Tarsus IV; the fungi lay dormant in the planet’s soil for thousands of years. When a species of Earth squash was introduced into the colony’s crops, it somehow caused the fungi to become active. Spores were carried in the air to every food and water storage and production facility. By the time emergency procedures were implemented, all the planet’s food production capability had been decimated; half the food and water supply had been wiped out. The officials estimated that the food would run out a full month before relief could arrive. Casualties were estimated at 60 percent of the planet’s population.

Tarsus IV was populated by rational technocrats, so the initial reaction wasn’t nearly as panicked as it might have been on other worlds. The government was not elected; the officials were chosen based on their specific skills to carry out specific duties. The governor at the time, Arnold Kodos, was selected for his abilities to deal with the bureaucratic management of the colony. His own personal views therefore were not required to carry out his work, as he made his judgments based on computer modeling, using the detailed information about the resources available to him. It was assumed by the population that the crisis they faced would be handled in a similar manner.