But before we encountered Khan on that fateful training flight, it had seemed a period in our lives, had come to an end. I know Captain Kirk had felt that way. “The Peter Principle,” he had told me once, when I visited him at the Academy. “A twentieth-century philosopher defined it perfectly. ‘In a hierarchy individuals tend to rise to their level of incompetence.’”
I had disagreed, of course. There was so much James Kirk could teach recruits, but he had disagreed. “I’m a starship captain, not a schoolteacher. I belong out there,” he said, gesturing toward the skies.
I couldn’t argue with that, but I felt sad, too. At the time I never dared hope we’d all be together again. Starfleet just isn’t that nice. Winning teams do get broken up, if there’s a reason. Our reason was the end of voyage. I suppose the Powers That Be thought they were being nice to us, giving us easier duty. And it is true on some ships that tensions build, relationships undergo strain, and tempers flare.
Oh, to be sure, some of us from the old ship were still out in starships. Still out there on the line. But the “chemistry” in the Enterprise had been so special. We had gone where no man had gone before. Space is the final frontier.
So, sensing that was the end of an era, I succumbed to pressure and dictated my autobiography. I felt a little foolish doing it, it seemed so egotistical, but yet I did want the stories told—the ones Starfleet authorized us to tell, that is—and to tell of Kirk, Spock, and the others. I was proud, so proud, to have been a part of that team.
I wasn’t the only one to write something. Many biographies and autobiographies were done, histories of space exploration were written. Some were highly colorful, and some were highly inaccurate, too! That was another reason for me to write: to set the stories down correctly.
So, toward the end of that first week back home, just before my little sister went reluctantly back to school, I appeared at one of the Dangerous Visions bookstores in Nairobi to autograph copies. Little sister Uaekundu was bursting with pride. I kept hearing her tell strangers, “That’s my sister.”
I have never understood autographing. I suppose it shows that the owner of the book was close enough to “greatness” or something. I don’t mean to insult those people. It is flattering to be asked, to be considered important enough to be asked, but I don’t really understand what having an autograph proves.
I was asked the kind of questions I often get asked—“Is it all true?” and “What is Mister Spock really like?”—but with one added question: “Who is Jomo Murambi?” I had dedicated the book to him, and now I found it very sad that a valiant officer, who had given his life for his country, was remembered by his nation only as a dedication in a book.
That’s something else. For over five hundred years a “book” was a physical thing, paper pages with printing on them, then metal foil pages. Now a “book” was electrons in a microchip, and my “autograph” was electronically added on a terminal in the bookshop, printed under a moving image taken as I spoke the autograph.
In many ways these are better books, at least physically. They won’t deteriorate or age. Authors can include still pictures, moving images, frozen frames, charts, maps, animation, whatever they want. I had gotten permission to reproduce crucial events recorded by the Enterprise’s visual log. It hadn’t been easy, for Starfleet is a closed—mouth organization about some things. But I had gotten to know Lee Friedrich in the Public Information Office and he had convinced his superiors the publicity would be good for Starfleet. I had been told that recruitment did rise shortly after the “book” was released, especially among women, and most especially in the United States of Africa.
In any case, I was sitting at the terminal autographing away, and I finished with one fan and turned to take the next microchip from the next in line. I saw a man’s hand, wide and strong, holding out the chip. I glanced up, and my heart stopped.
He was tall, dark, and not exactly handsome. He seemed rough-hewn, almost unfinished, yet … strong, and, as I was to realize later, perfect for him. He wore a plain dark shalmar jumpsuit that emphasized his broad shoulders and slim waist. I guess something showed on my face, because his smile broke across his face like a sunrise.
“Hello, Nyota,” he said.
I blinked. “Uh, hello,” I said politely, carefully masking my confusion. This man disturbed me greatly and I couldn’t understand why.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked.
“Wait, I … there’s something …” My eyes widened and my mouth dropped open as I recognized in the grown man the lean teenager of my youth. “Oh, my. Is it you, Somabula?”
His grin was my answer. Impulsively I jumped up and hugged him, then kissed him on the cheek. “Let me look at you,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. “A long time since that skinny little girl came to Kenya Park.”
I laughed. “I was never skinny. Slender, perhaps.”
I looked at him fondly. It had been so long before. The memories rushed back. Kenya Park was my favorite place in the galaxy. They had restored it to its nineteenth-century beauty. There were lodges, yes, but you arrived by silent ground vehicles, not by plunging out of the sky and frightening the animals. Aircraft were, indeed, forbidden to pass over at less than 85,000 feet. It had become a paradise again. The herds had been built back up, painstakingly, carefully, Poachers were dealt with severely. My own father had moved there, to take up residence in a restored kraal of our ancestors, to live out his retirement years in what many would consider extreme primitive conditions, which only showed their ignorance.
Somabula had been an apprentice Ranger then, a tall and somber guardian of the ecology. I had a crush on him all those summers of my youth. Year after year, when I visited there, I had always wanted to go past his station, to camp nearby. I had thought he had never noticed me, at least never noticed me until I was sixteen, anyway.
He had taken me on marking tours. Well, me and some of my schoolmates. We had implanted biological “labels” in the tusks of young elephants, to aid in tracing the ivory later should it be poached. The tracers had become a harmless part of the entire tusk, impossible to remove. Once he had allowed me to help him in fixing a broken leg on a young mammoth, one of the fifth generation cloned from the cells of the ancient creatures found in Arctic ice.
Now here he was. The years dropped away, and we were under the great trees again. The elephant herd was not far off, led by Bruce, my own name for my special elephantine friend. And there, I had gotten my first kiss. My first real kiss, I mean.
He had seemed so much older then, almost four years my senior, grownup and mature. We had written during that winter, then I went off to school and the visits to the Park grew less frequent and sometimes I missed him, and Jomo had come along, then Starfleet and all the rest.
“Somabula,” I said.
“Uh, there are other people waiting, Commander,” the bookstore owner whispered discreetly.
“Wait for me?” I asked, and Somabula nodded. I took his chip and set it aside and finished with the others. For the first time ever, I was glad there were only a few customers left. Then I spoke something into his copy and we went to lunch.
I asked about Elayne, Bruce’s mate, and Baso, Limpopo, Logengula, Selous, and Gandang, the other elephants. And Boris, Ivan, and Natasha, the mammoths. I found that Mzilikazi, the Chief of the Park Rangers, had retired and Somabula was First Assistant to Jonathan Mukusi, the new Chief Ranger. With questions that were perhaps none to artful I found that Somabula had been married, fathered two sons, but that his wife had been killed in a shuttle crash on Zanzibar four years before.
“Come to the Park,” he suggested, and I nodded.
“I was going up to see my father and…” I’m afraid I blushed. “I wonder if you might have time for me.”
He just grinned. Sometimes men can be so egotistical!
• • •
Personal Log Supplementary
There are times when I wonder why I keep a log. Habit,
I suppose. All those years of log-keeping in starships. They had come in handy when I wrote my book, of course, but there are times when I think they are just too egotistical. As if people would be interested in what I have to say! But when I dictate, I am not really thinking about others ever reading this.
You know how you sometimes have to explain something to someone else? Maybe you think you know all about a subject, but when you go to actually verbalizing it, you find you have made a number of unwanted assumptions, assumed certain facts or ideas to be true, and generally have not actually thought it all out. That’s why I do these log entries. To figure out my life.
I remember being interviewed by a UBC reporter when we came home from that first long trip on the Enterprise. The questions she asked showed what a tremendous gap there was between the reality of Starfleet and space exploration and the public perception of it. She thought there was nothing out there but terrible bug-eyed monsters, rapacious Klingons, and treacherous Romulans. That we lived shoulder to shoulder as in twentieth-century submarines, and that the discipline aboard starships was not unlike being under Captain Bligh of the H.M.S. Bounty.
Wrong.
In explaining to her the realities, I had looked at my own life from a different angle. I had seen how “glamorous” it looked, how dangerous and exciting. Yet I could never make her understand the satisfaction of teamwork and accomplishment, of meeting challenges that quite literally have never been encountered before in the history of man. I couldn’t make her understand how great was my respect for my crewmates—not only Captain Kirk and Commander Spock, or McCoy, Sulu, Scott, Chekov, Doctor Chapel, but the engineers and specialists, the ordinary spacemen and women, the cadets and yeomen. Dedicated, concerned, involved—all these were words that seemed to bounce right of her.
She saw the crew of the Enterprise as a combination of military adventurers and pirates, as exploiters and conquerors.
“You don’t conquer space,” I had said. “You learn it. Nature is not something you defeat; you learn to live with it.” But she had this preconceived idea, a romantic and also insulting idea, of how we were, what we did, and why we did it.
There are people who are—to use a spaceman’s term—“mud-ballers.” It’s not that the mud-ballers are afraid—though that can be true as well-—but that they are blinded. They live as they live and seek not, see not, beyond their limited vision. They are the ones that strip the forest, gut the earth, foul the seas because they cannot see, in their own lifetime, what they have done to Mother Earth. They think to seek knowledge beyond a practical application of science to technology is some kind of aberration, a sickness. To go where no man has gone before is madness to them.
People like this can never understand that each bit of knowledge we gain is a step toward understanding not only Nature, but ourselves as well, for we cannot separate ourselves from Nature. In that interview I truly realized for the first time what a different sort we of Starfleet are. In some ways we are closer to those in the Klingon space fleet than to certain of our own race, those who have never looked at the night sky and truly wondered.
• • •
Personal Log, Supplemental
When I went to Kenya Park, it all came back. The vast, rolling veldt, the trees and animals, and that feeling—which I had felt only on other planets—that here the hand of man had not spoiled things. It was an illusion, of course. It was the hand of man that had, against great opposition as far back as the nineteenth century, restored Kenya to its “original” state, and it had taken years and donations from all over the world, and from colonies of Earth as well.
I went to the village where my father lived, and it was like stepping back in time. At the Park entrances we are given a choice of clothing to wear. One choice is a kind of elegant flowing white robe, which is timeless … and you are totally ignored. You don’t exist. You cannot intrude. You are unseen, or so is the custom. It is the height of rudeness to wear the white robe and to force yourself on anyone.
But it is disconcerting at first. You can walk into a hut, observe a family at its most intimate and private moments, and not be “seen” at all. People will literally walk into you or over you, and pretend to have stumbled. I’ve tried the white robe, but I much prefer the second choice, that of the native garb of the area.
Dressed in that manner, you are not only “seen” but you are involved, whether you are black, white, or Oriental. (Non-human races must use white robes.) You are taken as you are, for whoever you are, and greeted as a real person. “I see you, Nyota,” my father said, giving me the traditional welcome. I was seen, I was acknowledged, I existed. I embraced my father.
In his hut I saw the pottery he was making. It was lovely, but bore only a token appearance to the traditional pottery of the area.
“If we freeze our culture,” he said, “we become relics, cultural fossils.” He gestured at the huts around the square. “This is as it was when the white man came. What I have done is acknowledge the existence of the whites, and incorporate their presence into my designs.”
I thought of the old sculptures in Bali that showed men in western hats, in early automobiles, bearing weapons and tools contemporary to the times. This, I realized, is what my father had done.
“Every culture progresses, or dies,” he said. “The Aztecs changed with the invasion of the Spanish, but changed in a way that almost obliterated their culture. We here are trying a second time, to not be overwhelmed by the invaders, but to accommodate them, as the Chinese did with every invading horde. They absorbed them and took from them what they wanted. Canada, that province of United North America when it was independent, had an enlightened policy with the Eskimos, to preserve as best they could their culture and art, untouched as much as possible by commercial greed.”
I left my father after two days and took a dusty ride to where Somabula was stationed.
• • •
Personal Log, Supplemental
It’s been a while since I put an entry in the log, but I’ve been busy. My, is that an understatement!
Somabula was glad to see me, and he had set up a field trip into a pretty isolated stretch of the Park. I know many people think of the Park as part veldt and part impenetrable Tarzanesque jungle, but the “jungle” part is mostly exaggerated. Still, there are places where the growth is thick and the ground shadowed from high trees reaching toward the sun.
It’s Park policy to keep certain areas undisturbed, even by tourists, with only infrequent visits by Park Rangers to monitor the area. I suspect Somabula had “opened” up one of those areas just for me. So what we headed into had not been visited even by a Ranger for over a year, and not by tourists for almost ten. They want to let the animals “settle in” and be undisturbed, and I agree.
It was just Somabula and me. We took a silent ground vehicle to the perimeter of the restricted zone, then hiked in. At once I fell under the thrall of the primitive jungle. Birds, small animals, flowers, the distant roar of a lion—all combined to throw me back to my youth. In my youth such an experience always made me travel back in time to some undefined period hundreds of years before, when there was no technology more advanced than a spear. Perhaps it was an anticipation of that feeling that had made me leave behind my off-duty phaser, my communicator, everything of contemporary times. Both of us dressed in versions of eighteenth-century native clothing, and we carried only knives, and Somabula a spear.
Yes, I know, both romantic and foolish. We cannot go back and even if I could—for real, that is—I probably wouldn’t. Those times are romantic, but the world was filled with ignorance, disease, slavery, death, and plague.
Neither of us was prepared for the bright blue slash of a beam that narrowly missed Somabula and brought crashing down a young tree. A limb knocked Somabula unconscious, and branches threw me into the underbrush.
I lay for a moment, stunned, not quite understanding what had happened. A blue beam? A phaser blast! Someone haul tried to kill us!
&
nbsp; I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. Not here, not in the paradise of my youth.
I heard a thrashing in the underbrush on the other side of a gully, on the hillside where the deadly beam had originated. I squirmed around and looked at Somabula and thought he was dead. There was blood on his head, and I couldn’t see any sign of his breathing. I tried to crawl closer, but I heard the movement in the brush again. I crawled quickly into the shelter behind the great trunk of a tree and drew my knife, a poor weapon against a phaser.
I used the cover of a fern to look back toward the severed tree and saw something I thought I would never see on Earth! A Klingon!
There was no mistaking him. The swarthy skin, the black and maroon clothing, the dully gleaming scarf of rank, the Klingon hand weapon, the dark and deadly eyes.
I shrank back out of sight and tried to think. What was a Klingon doing here? Were there more of them? What were they up to?
As I thought, I realized no Klingon could go unreported in any of the civilized parts of Terra; but on the other hand, what could one, or even several, do in the loneliness of Kenya Park? How they got here was of less importance than what. They could have bribed or hidden aboard a freighter, then stolen away in the night to this remote spot.
But what were they planning?
My first thought was to report all of this to Captain Kirk. I cursed myself for not having retained my communicator, if for no other reason than to report any medical emergency. But no, I had to “go native” in the extreme.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Short Stories Page 4