Worlds in Collision (76 page)

“Attention all crew. Attention all crew. The
U.S.S. Enterprise,
as flagship for the Starfleet Relief Operation to Talin…” Kirk felt the hair on his neck bristle. He heard small gasps from the people in the room who also understood what Uhura had just said. This collection of ships had been given a name. The Starfleet Relief Operation to Talin. Uhura didn't have to read the rest. It was official.

“…has just received this subspace communiqué from Nogura, Admiral, Starfleet Command: Effective this stardate, Earth, the findings of Starfleet's board of inquiry into the incident at Talin IV are rescinded. In addition, with remorse, Starfleet offers full and official apologies to—” The transporter room resounded with applause. Kirk felt hands slapping at his back. He struggled to hear the rest of what Uhura read. He had been waiting so long to hear it.

“Also, in accordance with Starfleet Command Regulations, General Order One, Talin IV is hereby recognized as a planet whose normal development has been subject to extraplanetary interference and thus is excused from the Prime Directive of Noninterference.” The ship seemed to shake with the roar of the cheers which joined the continuing applause echoing through her. Uhura's voice was almost lost amid the tumult.

“Therefore, all Starfleet personnel are requested to take whatever action may be deemed necessary to repair the damage caused by such interference. Furthermore, in recognition of the General Council's ruling to admit Talin to the United Federation of Planets, all Federation citizens are likewise urged—”

It was no use. Her voice was completely drowned out. Kirk's ears rang. McCoy had cupped his hands to his mouth and was shouting deafening huzzahs. Kirk caught Spock's eye and saw his science officer smile, just fleetingly, and before anyone else could notice.

Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the joyous ovation quietened. It was not replaced by a return to the conversation and the activity which had preceded it. There was only silence. For a moment Kirk was puzzled. But only for a moment.

“Captain,” Spock said, “the crew awaits your orders.”

McCoy put his hand to Kirk's arm. “Now you really are back, Jim.”

Without hesitation, Captain James T. Kirk stepped onto the transporter platform and faced his crew. He nodded to Kyle, standing ready at the transporter console, and gave his crew the order they waited for.

“Energize,” he said.

The shimmering veil of transporter energy fell from Kirk's eyes and he gazed onto a city of the dead.

The air of Talin was thick with the stench of rot and smoke. A sea breeze blew up from the distant ocean where he could see foul purple waves crash against a beach of blackened wood and the skeletons of sea creatures that had washed ashore. Even the shafts of weak sunlight which cut through the overcast skies seemed gray and dull.

Kirk stepped forward onto the ash of the shattered world that had briefly borne his name. Before him was what the sensors had determined was the largest gathering of still-functioning, uncocooned survivors on the planet. Its population numbered less than four hundred.

An old Talin female was the first to see him as he took another step in the ash. She had one arm. Her bibcloth hung in tatters. Kirk could see her bones move beneath her cracked and bleeding skin.

The female cried out weakly, a harsh discordant shriek. Behind her, other Talin slowly emerged from the rubble they had made into shelters. A few hundred meters away, he saw the long shapes of soot-darkened cocoons stacked like firewood. Respectfully gathered for a better day which no Talin could believe would ever come.

But Kirk was there to make that day a reality. He looked all around him at the desolation and destruction. He saw the blasted stumps of buildings, shattered girders, fields of blackened crops.

And it was all a mistake. It had all occurred because there were still too many mysteries, still too many unknowns. But Kirk knew, at least, that
this
would not happen again. The Federation would learn. It would know what to look for next time. Other worlds would be saved by the painful lessons of Talin IV. The Federation would learn and from that knowledge, grow stronger.

A dozen Talin had gathered before him now. They pointed at him in wonder. Some covered their eyes, afraid to look at his alien form. Others reached out with trembling limbs, but were too frightened to come closer.

Kirk heard another transporter chime swell. He heard the gasp of awe from the crowd before him. More Talin were coming from the ruins. Some dropped to their knees as the golden light played upon them.

There were new footsteps behind him. Kirk glanced over his shoulder to see Spock and McCoy coming toward him, already opening their tricorders. A wall of medical supplies had also appeared, still shimmering.

He heard another cry from the Talin as the air filled with the pulsed harmonics of multiple transporter chimes. All around them the air danced with shimmering columns of luminous energy. And from each apparition came another human, or another gift of supplies.

Chekov stepped forward with Sulu and Uhura. Scott appeared with a pallet of machinery that could draw water from the air. Next, M'Benga, Chapel, Palamas. Everyone had returned to Talin.

Then, from the crowd of Talin adults, staring, pointing, shaking, not daring to believe that what they saw might be real, one female child stepped forward. Her skin was green and caked with mud, but her yellow eyes were clear and penetrating.

Alone among the Talin, she stepped up to Kirk unafraid.

Kirk twisted the dial on the small silver wand of his translator. He spoke into it for the child.

“My name is James Kirk,” he said. “Captain of the
Starship Enterprise.”

He waited as the translator repeated his words in the whistles and whispers of Talin.

The child's eyes widened. She looked up to the sky, past the clouds, as if they were no longer there. She whispered one word back to Kirk. The translator spoke it to him.

“Starship.”

Tears fell from the child's eyes. She turned back to her people and shouted the word to them, pointing to the skies, to the stars that waited there.

“Starship. Starship.” The translator said the word as each Talin spoke it.

The child came closer to Kirk. She lifted her arms to him and he saw then in her eyes what he had seen in the eyes of a woman long ago on Earth, what he had seen in the eyes of a Tellarite child in an asteroid only weeks ago.

Kirk took the child's hands in his and lifted her up close to him, knowing that the beginnings and the endings of things were sometimes one and the same.

But this time, he knew, it would be a beginning.

“It's all right,” Kirk said. “Let me help.”

The ship surrounds him and bears him through space, and protected by her, he sleeps.

And dreams of Iowa.

He is a young boy. He runs with his dog through fields of grain, full of the smells of things growing, and of life.

At night, he feels his father's hand, rough in his, as they walk into those fields.

The boy looks up and gasps to see the sky so black, the stars so brilliant. His father names them, magic to the boy's ears, to his eyes, to his heart, to something within him that he does not yet understand.

“Rigel,” his father says. “Aldebaran, Antares.”

“Yes,” the boy says. He has never heard them before but he is certain that he knows them all. The names continue, the grain is forgotten. His mother waits in the house nearby, lights blazing through windows brilliant as the stars.

But the boy looks up. “I want to go there,” he says, reaching out to them. His father's face is uplifted, too, feeling the heat of a thousand suns, seen and unseen, known and unknown.

The boy is five years old and he feels a pain in his chest with the weight of millennia, as if the whole species had moved forward to this one instant, to this one person, driving him on.

“I have to go there,” the boy says. “I know,” his father answers. He reaches down and lifts the boy high, holding him to his chest with love, holding him to look up, just that little bit closer to the stars in his father's arms. “And you will, Jimmy, you will.”

The boy's heart beats faster. “I will,” he whispers, clutching his father, afraid of the dark and the cold of night and the distance from the house, but hungry to see more. The challenge, the promise, the love he feels. All cast in him in that one night when first he looked up and knew where his destiny lay.

That night his house surrounds the boy and bears him through the darkness, and protected by her, he sleeps.

And dreams of stars.

We are gratefully indebted to the real Salman Nensi, whose enthusiastic friendship and encouragement, as well as the generous loan of his
Star Trek
collection and valuable comments and research, have made this a better book.

As writers, we thank
Star Trek
editor Dave Stern for his guidance and most importantly, patience. As readers, we also thank him for keeping the
Star Trek
universe alive in such an entertaining and faithful collection of books.

As viewers, we are also grateful to Greg and Michael Hall and everyone at Videophile for their generosity in keeping us supplied with
all
the episodes.

Mira Romaine and Memory Alpha first appeared in the original television series episode “The Lights of Zetar,” written by Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis. Mira Romaine was played by Jan Shutan. Some of the other
Star Trek
writers whose contributions we have specifically made reference to in this book include Gene L. Coon, Diane Duane, Brad Ferguson, D. C. Fontana, John M. Ford, David Gerrold, Vonda N. McIntyre, Peter Morwood, Marc Okrand, Theodore Sturgeon, Lawrence N. Wolfe, and, of course, Gene Roddenberry.

We are deeply indebted to our editors, Dave Stern and Kevin Ryan, for their support, encouragement and, most important, patience.

Once again, our “historian,” Sal Nensi, has worked hard at Memory Prime to help keep our facts and references straight, and we are grateful for his fast and detailed assistance, and his friendship.

We are also grateful to Carole, Mario, and Peter, for kindly introducing us to
Star Trek
Toronto in particular and
Trek
fandom in general.

In the almost quarter century [1990] that Gene Roddenberry's
Star Trek
has been in existence, a great number of writers have contributed to its canon. We have drawn on the work of many of these writers and thank them all for the entertainment and inspiration they have provided.

The character of Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas, the ship's A&A officer, first appeared in the television episode “Who Mourns for Adonais,” written by Gilbert Ralston. Palamas was played by Leslie Parrish. An older but not wiser Lieutenant Styles first appeared as captain of the
Excelsior
in the movie
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,
written by Harve Bennett. Styles was played by James B. Sikking.

We would also like to acknowledge the work of Vonda N. McIntyre and Shane Johnson. Allan Asherman's
Star Trek Compendium
has been an invaluable reference tool as well.

Of course, none of this would exist without Gene Roddenberry's creative vision of the future as it should be—a grand adventure.

Our thanks to all.

—Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Star Trek—Memory Prime
and

Star Trek—Prime Directive

with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

by Kevin Dilmore

Kevin Dilmore:
I hope this isn't digging too far back for you both, but I'd like to ask about your introduction to writing for
Star Trek.
I understand that
Memory Prime,
the first story in this volume, is your first novel for the line?

Judith Reeves-Stevens:
Yes, and it was the first novel we ever wrote together.

KD:
No kidding? So you had been published separately at that point?

Garfield Reeves-Stevens:
Yes. I had written three sort-of horror/science fiction novels.

JRS:
And I was doing nonfiction and school material.

GRS:
We had just come off of a science and technology textbook series for grades 1, 2, and 3.

JRS:
It was a series we created as an introduction to science and technology. I put it together and then drafted Gar. The two of us wrote it, and tested everything in school with kids from fifty-five countries in grades 1 through 3, and it was pretty humbling.

GRS:
We had spent three years working on that series, and that was the first time we had written together. We traveled across Canada with it—

JRS:
—because it was adopted in every province. And I believe on that book tour we were sponsored in two ways: One by the text publisher, which sponsored me; and two, by Gar's fiction publisher—Gar had written a book about cloning from the Shroud of Turin. It was one of his horror books.

GRS:
Children of the Shroud.

JRS:
And so in the morning, he would be on one television or radio station talking about his horror book, and in the afternoon we would be on another station talking about children's education.

KD:
Now that must have been an interesting tour. What if you had gotten mixed up in front of a class of second-graders?

GRS:
(laughs) “Kids, this is how you clone at home.”

KD:
(laughs) So, did you decide to write together and pitch a
Star Trek
project? Or did someone approach you about
Star Trek
and then you decided to tackle it together? How did this come about?

JRS:
Actually, we were so burned out from dealing with all of the separate ministries of education, and everything was so very, very serious—

GRS:
Writing a textbook to curriculum requirements is almost like writing to a checklist. Requirements were set province by province, and they were all slightly different.

JRS:
And they would review each of our books; there were thirty in the series. Then we would get notes from the curriculum boards, and the whole process exhausted us. Since Gar had written fiction, we thought, Wouldn't it be nice if we wrote a novel together? Gar had never written science fiction—

GRS:
—Not far-future science fiction, anyway—

JRS:
And we both had an interest in it, so we decided we would try writing together.

GRS:
And just about that time, we were in New York visiting friends and
Star Trek IV
[:
The Voyage Home
] came out. We were looking forward to that so much because we had enjoyed the last three. We so wanted to go back into the future…but in
Star Trek IV,
there are only ten minutes or so that take place in the future. And we came out thinking, We don't want to wait another three years!

JRS:
So, when we got back to Toronto, we called down to Simon & Schuster and asked whether they still published
Star Trek
novels.

GRS:
We had gone into a bookstore and had seen a couple sitting on the shelf there.

JRS:
But we didn't know what kind of a
Star Trek
book program they had. We were told they would deal only with published authors. So we sent down the books we'd written and they said, “Fine. Send us an outline.” We had not met a soul in New York. We hadn't seen them and they hadn't seen us.

GRS:
That was in the days of [Pocket Books editors] Dave Stern and Kevin Ryan.

JRS:
So we sent them three outlines. They picked one, and that was
Memory Prime.

KD:
Of the three outlines, do you recall what the others were?

GRS:
Oh, yes. One was a trilogy—

JRS:
—And it involved Klingons, and took place on the homeworld of Klingon. The other was
Timetwist.
This was really interesting because they didn't want to have anything involved with time travel to the future, and we didn't get back to that until we got to a variation of it for
Federation
[the
Star Trek/Star Trek: The Next Generation
crossover novel] and
Millennium
[the
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
trilogy].

KD:
As you spoke, I was wondering whether elements didn't end up in
Millennium.

GRS:
I know they didn't want to do a story with time travel into the future because they were developing
Star Trek: The Next Generation
at the time. They didn't want us to jump that gun. In our outline, we did have a Federation starship of the future with a Klingon on it. But they said no because it was getting into
Next Generation
territory.

KD:
Absolutely. Why have you written a book that could be completely contradicted in the fall of 1987 when the show premiered?

JRS:
Exactly.

GRS:
The Klingon trilogy was a huge idea. Kirk, McCoy, and Spock ended up being court-martialed, and, gosh, did they end up being imprisoned? I know they had to go through a Klingon trial. Hmm…this all sounds familiar. (laughs) It was a big three-parter, but it probably was too ambitious for our first time through, so they settled on what became
Memory Prime.
At first, I think we called it
The Followers.

JRS:
They wanted a stand-alone story.

KD:
Considering the other
Star Trek
books that you have written together,
Memory Prime
seems to me the slimmest volume. So you have not shied away from ambitious projects.

JRS:
And it was hard to do because we had never written fiction together. And it takes a while for two authors to develop a single voice.

KD:
So how did you start developing that voice? I'm assuming that you plotted the story together.

JRS:
Yes. Then, it became a microcosm of everything we have ended up doing together since. We end up passing stuff back and forth to each other so often that by the time it's finished, it's written by a stranger.

GRS:
It accretes like the shell of a nautilus.

KD:
(laughs) I like that, and the analogy makes sense. Gar might write one chapter and send it Judy's way, but you, Judy, might be writing another chapter farther down the story and send it back his way, and in that fashion, you make your way through the manuscript?

GRS:
And whoever has the manuscript last gets her way.

JRS:
(laughs)

KD:
Are there specific favorite things about a story that you gravitate toward? Say, there's a Scotty scene and one of you really wants to write that. Or maybe one of you would rather deal with the parts about an alien subculture?

JRS:
It's a lot of small things. Because we come at a story from different points of view, it works out wonderfully. We will leave holes for the other person to fill.

GRS:
In
Memory Prime,
there was a real conscious effort on our part to give every member of the crew a “moment.”

JRS:
It's like ensemble writing.

GRS:
But we had to cut out Uhura's moment because it came too late in the story. It sort of slowed everything down. It was one of those, as they say, pacing cuts.

KD:
When plotting your first
Star Trek
story, was there anything that each of you really wanted to include?

JRS:
I think the things that have always interested us about
Star Trek
are the things that have not been explained. A television show is always written on the fly. Episodes are written very quickly, so it leaves rich territory for writers to mine in other media.

GRS:
I always remember that it was [former editor] Kevin Ryan's theory about why storytelling was so rich in the original series: It was on the air for only three seasons, and so much of that world and its characters remained unexplored. In
Next Generation
after seven seasons, there weren't a lot of mysteries left.

JRS:
And now that we've come to
Enterprise,
it's pretty tricky finding new stories.

KD:
Especially ones that do not blatantly contradict or ignore what fans know has gone before—or in this case, after. If Picard tells Riker, “You know, Number One, years ago we didn't have such things,” now
Enterprise
is stuck with that.

JRS:
Yes. It's much, much harder working like that. Our starting with a classic story made it much easier because we didn't have that continuity as a burden.

GRS:
And in
Memory Prime,
one of the key things was that, given it was so far in the future, why aren't we seeing artificial intelligence in Starfleet?

JRS:
And that always stuck with us. That's really why we wrote the book. And we loved the fact that we could develop the Pathfinders. We also love working with the big ideas of
Star Trek,
so a big question was “Where was artificial intelligence in the future?” When it came to
Prime Directive,
we loved taking on the big, iconic things about the series, and the Prime Directive certainly is one of them.

KD:
In tackling the issues you wanted to address in
Memory Prime,
was there anything that didn't meet approval?

GRS:
I remember we were asked to change a few things in the outline. I seem to remember we had a team of black-clad ninja Vulcans.

KD:
(laughs) But I like it, though.

GRS:
(laughs) Yeah, it was pretty cool. It's probably something you could do on
Enterprise
but at that time, it didn't fit in with the Vulcans as established in the television series and the movies. So we cut them out. But other than that…

JRS:
We wanted to call the bar The Laughing Vulcan and they wouldn't let us.

GRS:
No, no. We did that. Just not in English.

JRS:
Well, there was something else…

GRS:
Well, there were all the nude scenes.

KD:
(laughs) There's a different venue for that kind of stuff.

GRS:
(laughs) Actually, it was very painless. When the manuscript came back with notes on it from Pocket and Paramount, there were changes but just minor, technical details. At the time, the
Star Trek Encyclopedia
[by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda] didn't exist. There was [Bjo Trimble's
Star Trek
]
Concordance.
And I know we picked up a lot of details about Zefram Cochrane and the Tellarites and the Andorians from such things as the
Spaceflight Chronology
[by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein] and used those sources. There certainly wasn't a huge backdrop of reference material out there.