Open Writing

Montana/Wyoming territory.

James T. Kirk stood on the edge of a sheer drop overlooking the crystal blue of Bighorn Lake and breathed deeply of the clear mountain air. Gazing away to the southeast, he drank in the splendor of the Bighorn Mountains of what had once been northeastern Wyoming. His hand moved to his side, and he activated the anti-grav pack he carried there, then stepped out into empty space.

As always, he felt a momentary lurch, an instant of trepidation as the antigrav unit compensated for his mass and he stood, literally, on empty space. His old friend, Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy always said that defying nature in this way was anything but natural, and Kirk had long shared the doctor’s abhorrence of anything that so jarred his senses.

He also felt the same way about transporters, although he had concealed his feelings on that score for more than thirty years. Now, however, there was no one from whom he had to hide his emotions anymore. The burden of command had been lifted (taken) from him, and there was no longer any need to maintain the façade of unruffled calm so vital to any leader. Nevertheless, it was hard to break the habits of a lifetime; although Kirk was, at the moment, alone, still he did not relax his demeanor.

Bones always said my main trouble was I didn’t know how to relax, how to have a good time, thought Kirk, as he looked down between his feet at the canyon floor far below. Well, maybe he was right. All I do know is I’ve never felt comfortable around a lot of people, or in crowds. I prefer being alone, which is why I’ve always known I’ll die alone. Maybe today, he thought, looking down again. Maybe the anti-grav pack will fail. Or maybe I’ll have a sudden attack of the what-the-hells and switch it off myself. Now would be as good a time as any.

No, that won’t work, he thought derisively. I’ll just get rescued by Spock, who’ll appear out of nowhere, and then I’ll have to endure a lecture by McCoy on the evils of irresponsibility. And then we’ll end up eating bourbon and beans and singing round a campfire....Kirk pushed the thoughts away, and was left wondering at the uncharacteristically morbid slant his mind had taken.

Hanging seven hundred feet above the floor of the valley, Kirk was somewhat surprised at these maudlin thoughts. It was not in his nature to dwell on such things, preferring instead to move on, always looking to the future, never the past. With an irritated shake of his head, he activated the miniature impulse unit in his backpack and set off towards the westering sun, moving away from the lake and crossing the old Wyoming/Montana border.
Try as he might to achieve mental detachment and just enjoy the ride, Kirk’s thoughts kept churning as he watched the land pass beneath him. He had changed a great deal since the day, as a nervous Acting Ensign Kirk, he had stepped aboard his first starship and reported for duty. That first ship had begun a journey that, for him, had lasted almost fifty years, and which had brought him, finally, to this place and time.

He looked down again and saw the thin line of Sege Creek winding down to meet the Shoshone, as it wove its way through Buffalo Bill Park. Kirk checked his chronometer and calculated he had time to head down the Bighorn Basin as far as Casper, and still get back home before dark.

Home, he thought, drifting through wisps of cloud above the majestic grandeur of what used to be known as the Big Sky country. At some level, he knew that he had chosen the big house, with its many rooms, in contrast to all the years spent in the confining atmosphere of a starship, but was it really home? As the crow flew, it was not all that far from his actual birthplace in Iowa, and he knew he had chosen this place for his retirement in order to remove himself as far as possible from the influence of Star Fleet.

He felt a momentary flicker of disquiet, of wrongness, at that notion. Was that him? Was that really how he should react to being taken off the active list after all these years? Almost as if, in a fit of pique, he had taken his bat and ball and gone home? He looked about him again as the miniature impulse unit powered him across the sky. The mountain scenery was beautiful, the calm was peaceful and tranquil, and he was experiencing the closest thing to free flight that man was ever likely to achieve.

So, what was wrong?

One obvious answer presented itself immediately, as it had many times before: boredom. He knew the thing he missed, of course, and he had fought against the feeling, tried hard to accept his inactivity, his retirement. Action man, he snorted sardonically to himself. The great Admiral James T. Kirk, Star Fleet (Retired). Still, he had kept himself in shape, and the old bones weren’t carrying the carcass around with any more difficulty than they had of old. And in his mind, he was still thirty-four years old, the young and daring Captain Kirk, flashing to and fro, making the galaxy safe in the name of The Federation.

Again, he felt the flicker of resentment against his former employers. Star Fleet rigidly enforced their rule demanding mandatory age sixty-five retirement, unless you were prepared to undergo rejuvenation therapy, something that Kirk had steadfastly refused to do. Damned ridiculous! he thought. I am a starship captain, one of the most experienced they have, he thought, and here I am, rotting away in the boondocks.

Kirk glided aimlessly for a while, plagued by nagging, conflicting thoughts. Why did I allow this to happen, he thought. Surely, there was something that could have been done, some sort of accommodation that could have been reached, short of being sculpted into a younger version of myself? Maybe I could have done something, he thought. Taken a desk for a while, allowed myself to be kicked upstairs to an admin position. I did it before, and still ended up back in the captain’s chair of the old Enterprise.

Thinking of his old ship brought on, as it always did, a bout of morose introspection, and Kirk physically shook himself to throw it off. Two old crocks, him and his ship, their usefulness at an end, put out to pasture and ready for the scrap heap. And mixing clichés, as Spock would no doubt remind me, he thought. What did happen that last day? He searched his memory, but details of the actual day he retired, the day he had left Star Fleet headquarters for the last time, were hazy and unclear. The brass had given him a reception and send-off, culminating in his promotion to Admiral for the second time, and then he had just.....gone home, he supposed. Back to the small but elegant apartment overlooking San Francisco bay. Then what? Hung up his uniform? Locked his medals away in a glass case, to be admired by the occasional visitor who would always seem in a hurry to leave, to be somewhere else?

Either he was going stir-crazy, and losing his memory, or he was older than he thought, but his recollection of the day he retired was dim. With a feeling of mild dismay, he realized he even had trouble sometimes recalling what he had done yesterday, or in the past week. Maybe I am getting old, he thought. With an effort, he shook himself out of the fugue into which he seemed to have fallen. He would head for home and look up the information in his personal log, and refresh his memory. It’s the sameness, he told himself, the monotonous regularity of every day holding the same lack of promise. Well, I’ll put a stop to that right now, he thought.

He began to slow the unit, preparatory to turning about, and was startled when his communicator beeped. A call was waiting for him back at the house. Reacting immediately, Kirk punched the impulse unit up to maximum and swung back to the north, retracing his course. His home computer was programmed to contact him only in an emergency; clearly, it had decided that whatever information it had received fell into that category. Kirk felt the wind in his face, in his hair, rushing past him, and he willed the propulsion unit to go faster.

As he flew, he now saw nothing of the view laid out beneath him. Typically, he could not think of anything that would constitute an emergency other than a call from Star Fleet; no other possibility even entered his mind. He had been at the house above the lake, with its spectacular views, for three years now, longer than he had ever spent in any one place since his days at the Academy. Whatever the call meant, it would at least mean a change from the normal view. And the way he felt right now, the way he had been feeling for three years, any change would be welcome.

For no matter its magnificence, for James Kirk, the same view would always pall.

*

Thirty minutes later, Kirk looked up from the videophone in his study, the light from the screen unable to eclipse the light that had begun to shine in his eyes. He turned off the machine and sat back in his chair. My God, he thought, can this be real? To come like this, just when I was praying for something to happen, out of the blue?

Kirk swiveled his chair around from the desk and sat for several minutes, gazing out of the large picture window at the majestic mountain vista, seeing nothing. A small part of him, deep down somewhere, felt a tug of disquiet, but it was instantly submerged by the euphoria of having his prayers answered, of the promise of action.
Finally, he stirred, activating the ’phone again, and prepared to make the first of many personal calls.
Kirk’s house is built on a promontory, high above Bighorn Lake. It is a large house, meant for many more than one, yet James Kirk lives there alone. That he lives there at all is by virtue of his mandatory retirement or, as they put it, standing down, from Star Fleet three years previously, at age sixty-five.

Kirk has eschewed the rejuvenation techniques that have been so much refined in the last twenty years; he feels, with some justification, that he is in the prime of his life, and has no need for any artificial enhancement. But Star Fleet has its regulations, and among the most rigidly enforced is the sixty-five year rule.

No exceptions, Jim, they said. Take a load off, go fishing, take up golf; take it easy, they said. You’ve earned it, they said.

Crap, thought Kirk then, and crap he thinks now, as he begins making his calls. They are calls he promised himself he would make some day, even though, at the time, he had had no idea how he would keep that promise.
Something would turn up, he had told himself. Something would come along that required his particular skills, something that only he could deal with, and then Star Fleet would have to come to him. Something that would see him back where he belonged, in the captain’s chair of a Federation starship.

Something would turn up, he had said.

And now, something had.

*
Loch Ness, Scotland.

Montgomery Scott, Captain of Engineering, Star Fleet (ret.), heaved on the anchor line and muttered a particularly choice Gaelic curse. The boat on which he had spent much of his retirement pension, and which was supposed to represent his new-found freedom, was turning out to be more of a liability than an asset.

As usual, the electronics were playing up again and, as usual, it was Muggins who would have to fix them. Why he’d ever bought this piece of floating jetsam….Och, that’s right, he thought; now I remember. He straightened suddenly as the offending weight at last came reluctantly over the side. It was for me retirement, he thought, that’s why I did it. I’m supposed to be enjoyin’ meself, he thought, as he turned and walked tiredly into the main cabin and switched on the lights against the fading of the long Scottish twilight. Then he walked back out onto the deck to watch the fading of the day.

Here at the southern end of Loch Ness, he observed, those twilights lasted a long time; the light was soft, and the land was bonny at this time of year. But Scotty had never been one to dwell on sentiment; a place had to have more going for it than nice scenery, even if it was the place of your birth. His actual birthplace was some fifty klicks up the loch, at Inverness, but if he went there more than a half-dozen times a year, it would be unusual.

The problem, and it had taken him these past three years to admit it to himself, was that the hands and brain that had once directed the almost unimaginable power of a starship were just not content to be messing around in boats. That which he had thought was all he had wanted had turned out to be wearyingly dull.

Something he had never thought would happen to him had, in fact, come to pass. He had become, in just three short years, bored with the life of a retired Star Fleet officer. Three years ago, he had thought he had wanted nothing more than to live out his days here, in the place of his ancestors. He had his boat, which he had also thought he had always wanted, and the small but comfortable, self-contained cottage at this end of the loch. His pension, plus all he had managed to save and invest despite the cost of the boat (which, given that he had spent more time in space than anywhere else, was considerable) allowed him more than sufficient credit to ensure he lived very well, and was able to enjoy the kind of life he had always hoped would be his, in his own twilight.

Now, it seemed, that life was a sham, a fiction, a shallow lie he had been conditioned to believe in since boyhood. Even now, at the end of the twenty-third century, there were still parts of Scotland that were, if not actually poor, then at least depressed, with the cracks showing through the veneer of this brave new world. Seeing this reality, Montgomery Scott had come to a grim realization: this was not the way he wanted to spend the rest of his life, slowly fading away like an old soldier. Nor was this the place in which he wanted to do it; neither to live, nor to die.

Thoughts of his mortality had been intruding on his normally stoic nature more and more of late. Scotty did not mind this as such; he was not afraid of death itself, but rather the manner of one’s dying. And after all he had seen, the places he had been and all that he had done, to vegetate like this was…. Well, it was just a little more than he could bear.

Scotty stood on the gently bobbing deck of the vessel for a few minutes, watching the sun slowly disappear behind the hills of the western Highlands and thinking his melancholy thoughts as the sky darkened. Then, with a sigh, he turned and walked back into the cabin. He decided to have a few drams to lighten his mood, and was in the act of uncorking the bottle of special single malt when his communicator started beeping. For a moment, standing in the small but comfortable salon of the boat, he did not register what the sound was. He carried the small device, a souvenir of his Star Fleet days, with him all the time, much the same as he had once carried a communicator, but now mostly out of habit. It took several seconds for him to realize what was happening; there was a call for him, a call important enough to activate the communicator.

Like many of his race, especially older retirees, Scotty cherished his privacy; consequently, there were not many calls he considered important enough to interrupt him like this. There was the King, of course, bonny King Charlie himself, up there in Edinburgh castle, should he ever feel the need to call on so lowly a personage as Montgomery Scott. Then there was the scotch whiskey distillery he had an interest in, and there was Star Fleet Command, and there was….

Heart beating faster than was probably good for him, Scotty moved his portly bulk out of the salon, around the boat, secured the anchor and entered the pilot’s cabin, powering up the vessel and pointing it towards home. If the fey feeling in his bones was accurate, then the call was one he had long hoped for, waited for. More than from his old employers, more even than whiskey.

Or his King.

*

Peach Grove, Mississippi.

Leonard McCoy smiled with a cheery good humor that he did not feel as he ushered the day’s last patient from his surgery. Then he deactivated the auto-receptionist and retired to the small office at the rear of the small suite of rooms on Main Street. He slumped despondently into the single chair behind the desk, pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from one of the drawers, and poured himself a generous shot.

He took a large swallow, then a smaller one and looked at the clock on the wall, an antique timepiece with a sweep second hand. Not much point in going home yet, he thought. Mrs. Willoughby wouldn’t have his supper ready at the boarding house on Elm Street until six o’clock, and it was only just past five. Still, he reminded himself, here in the sleepy south, we eat early and go to bed the same way.

McCoy swallowed more whiskey and topped up his glass, gazing out the windows at the picturesque street scene. The magnolia trees were in bloom, and their blossoms littered the street. McCoy sat thinking, as he did more and more often of late, of his life, past and present. As always, the comparison did not stand scrutiny. He had seen and done amazing things, and here he was, wasting away in good old Asshole, Mississippi.
Too old to serve on a starship, am I? He snorted and sipped. That collective bunch of morons known as the Star Fleet Retirement Board wouldn’t know manure if they stepped in it. All of his knowledge, his experience, was going to waste while he dispensed pills to little old ladies, and struggled daily to find new excuses not to speak at their bridge club or floral society meetings.

McCoy sat back in his chair and looked around the room. What had he to show for half a lifetime’s work and, yes, dammit, dedication? A few plaques on the wall, a couple of commendations from Star Fleet, and holocubes of his shipmates; Spock, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura…. and Jim.

Jim Kirk, his friend, whom he had only seen once since their forced retirement. All right, he admitted grudgingly, so neither of them was big on sentiment, but he had thought they would have stayed in closer touch than this. After twenty-seven years, barely a postcard at birthdays and Christmas, not even a call to chew the fat, see how he was. Well, two could play that game, he thought. And so they had, for three years.

Two seconds before the videophone beeped, McCoy felt a wave of premonition wash over him. Later, he would still find it difficult to describe the feeling, part joy, part dread, that had raised the small hairs on the back of his neck, but as he reached for the ON switch, he knew exactly who was calling.

*

At about the same time, three Star Fleet captains received similar calls, and each reacted in similar ways, albeit in their own personal styles.

Captain Hikaru Sulu, the most senior of the three, was at Star Base One while his ship, the USS Excelsior, was undergoing a re-fit following a three-year mission to previously unexplored regions of the galaxy. Kirk’s former helmsman responded to the call with his customary calm and efficiency. He informed his superiors of the priority orders attached to the call, turned his ship over to his exec, and left on the first available shuttle for earth, and his hometown, San Francisco.

*

Captain Pavel Andreievitch Chekov was three days out from earth when he received his call on a secure subspace frequency aboard his ship, the USS Gorbachev. He took the call alone, in his quarters; when he emerged, his crew remarked to each other that they had never seen the skipper looking so excited, so alive. So happy.
Chekov stayed on the bridge just long enough to order speed increased to warp six, then turned the ship over to his first officer and retired to his cabin, where he remained for the rest of the trip.

*

Meanwhile, back on earth at Star Fleet Academy, Captain Nkolo Uhura was informed of the call awaiting her by one of her students. She attached no special significance to it; as chief communications training officer, she received many calls, and was kept busy by her crowded schedule.

She had considered herself probably fortunate to get this posting; with it came the automatic rank of captain, which was the main reason she had accepted it. However, if she were to examine her feelings more closely, she might have found some resentment. Sulu and Chekov, her former shipmates, both had their own commands, and while she and the Asian had joined Star Fleet at roughly the same time, she had been a Lieutenant when the Russian had been posted to the Enterprise as an Ensign.

Oh well, she sighed, as she made her way to her office on the tenth floor where the call was being re-routed, we can’t have everything we want, I suppose. The Star Fleet hierarchy was still largely male-dominated; there were a few women in top jobs, but only a handful. Promotion came slowly enough to men in these peaceful times; women had to wait even longer, although Uhura was working on that as the female officers’ conduit to the top brass.

Anyway, this posting was not the be-all and end-all for her. She wanted nothing more than to get into space again, and that was something else she was working on although, she had to admit, without much success. Increasingly often lately, she had found herself thinking of the “good old days” on board the Enterprise, and of the good friends she had known then. And especially one in particular….

Don’t start, she warned herself. They’re all either retired or scattered all over the galaxy, and he probably doesn’t give you a moment’s thought from one year to the next.

Nevertheless, she quickened her step, albeit unconsciously, as she approached her office. They had said the call was urgent, top priority. For a reason she could not explain, her heart began to beat a little faster, and a trembling anticipation started in her fingers.

What’s this? she thought. Déjà vu? Or perhaps the old African ancestral traits of prescience coming out in my old age?

Uhura snorted derisively as she reached her office and entered. Probably some inept young male instructor unable to control his female students, she thought, as she dropped lightly into her chair and activated the ’phone.

Ten minutes later, she sat back in the chair, her heart hammering. Then she composed herself, informed her admiral that she was on her way upstairs to see him, and stood up, smoothing her uniform as she did so. Her dark eyes were sparkling, and her ebony skin was flushed; she hadn’t felt this way in years. In one decisive movement, she came out from behind her desk and headed for the turbolifts.

***