The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

by Una McCormack

  Well, I am here to tell you that I was not sold on the idea of The Baby: not one little bit. I was a bright kid, and I think I guessed what the score would be. Everyone would be fussing around the new arrival; nobody would want to play any longer with Katy. And when the darned thing arrived… Well, this was no playmate, was it? A tiny red screeching thing—Jeez! What a con! A noisy, troublesome, demanding con!

  “Here you are, Kathryn,” Mommy said, holding the creature in her arms. “Meet your baby sister. Little Phoebe.”

  I eyed the new scrap of life suspiciously. “Mommy,” I said, “can we swap it for a puppy?”

  I have never been allowed to forget this. But I did get the puppy: Jess, a border collie of such perfection that even now I get a tear in my eye thinking about her. She came to me at ten weeks old, a warm little bundle of energy and love, and Grandpa helped me train her. We were devoted to each other. Jess trotted everywhere with me, and she snuck into my room at nights, despite stern warnings from Grandpa that spoiling her would ruin her as a working dog. (It never did.) In the holopictures that we have of that time, we are always together, and I loved her with all my heart. But in some ways, I knew that Jess was a consolation prize, and that with Phoebe’s arrival, I had lost some little part of Mommy. My beautiful and elusive mother, always the first object of my devotion, was now shared. I was not wholly the center of her life any longer, and never could be again.

  * * *

  This was my early childhood. We were a very happy, close-knit family, in which two little girls basked in the love of their various devoted adults and were encouraged to follow their own paths. Phoebe soon showed the artistic bent that rivaled even my mother’s, permanently smudged with paints and modeling clays. My mother, around the time of Phoebe’s arrival, started to grow roses, firstly for pleasure, but increasingly she became very competitive. This was most unlike my mother, although, as in all her endeavors, she excelled. There is a rose named after each one of her daughters. I recall one morning, not long after The Baby landed, when I was outside helping her, proud in my little blue overalls and my tiny spade and glad to be spending time with Mommy, when a man walked past the gate and stopped to watch me work. Mom came over to say hello, and he nodded at me and said, “Nice to see a boy helping his mom.”

  A boy?! This was intolerable. This was not to be permitted. By all accounts I gave that man the fiercest of stares— skewered him, as my mother tells it—and delivered the memorable putdown, “Katy not boy! Katy girl!”

  “I’ve never seen a man move so fast,” Mom said. “She more or less ran him out of town.” I loved it when she told this story. I basked in the glow that came to her eye. Mommy was proud of me, and that was everything.

  Let me describe my mother as she was in these years. A free spirit—but quiet, solitary. Still waters ran very deep in my mother; it was as if some kind of spirit of the natural world had been temporarily caught in a mortal body. By the sea, she would surely have been a selkie; here on the plains she was a genie of the river, perhaps, or of the lakes, some kind of spirit drawn to live among us ordinary mortals. She was outdoors as much as she could be—in the garden, or else working on the long porch at the back of the house. She had a shed which she used as a studio in bad weather, but rain did not daunt her and, in fact, often she would go out to meet it, walking around the farm and coming home drenched, her eyes shining. She was sweet-natured, funny, often absent in that way that very creative people can be, and endlessly creative with her two small children. Need it be said that I adored her?

  People often ask me what it was like, having a writer of children’s books as a mother. Truth be told, both Phoebe and I took it largely for granted. She had so many stories she wanted to share! Phoebe leaned toward fantasy: Wonderland, of course; later, she loved Meg Murry’s journeys through the universe by means of the tesseract, Binti’s career at Oomza Uni, Awinita Foster’s slipstream adventures along the shining way. I tended toward more realistic stories: the Melendy children making a new home in the countryside, exploring the land and the people around them; Omakayas and her family of the Birchbark House, growing up near Lake Superior; Cassie Logan’s struggles under Jim Crow; the stories of Mildred Jones and her friends, rebuilding the post-atomic world in the 2080s. Even my beloved Dorothy Gale was in many ways a practical child, focused on returning to her home at least as much as on the marvels she encountered.

  There was one case I recall when Mommy did share her stories with us, and that was when she was invited to write for the well-known children’s holoprogram, The Adventures of Flotter. I think it was a new direction for her—she hadn’t written for holos before, although many followed afterward— but she was naturally drawn to a river creature. She was keen, too, to try out her ideas. Well, I loved them! Mommy had a flair for story, and an eye for detail. What a wonderful world that was: a truly magical space, a first encounter, for most children, of the possibilities of the holosuite: part play, part drama, all imagination. At first, this was something that only Mommy and I did: Phoebe was deemed still a little young even for the gentle perils of the Forest of Forever. Mommy and I wandered through the Forest with Flotter and Trevis, and built parts of the world together. It wasn’t long before Phoebe wanted to take part though, and I have to confess I wasn’t happy about that. But I swear, Phoebe, that flood was an accident.

  Many people have told me how much they loved Flotter as a child (I think the only person I have encountered who didn’t was a former CMO of the Enterprise, who called it ‘that damn tree nonsense’), and many of them recall specific adventures that my mother wrote, such as the encounter with the fireflies, and the pebble house by the river. It was a delight to see the young captain’s assistant on Voyager, the inimitable Naomi Wildman, take to the stories so much; yet another generation enchanted by them. So when people ask what it was like having a children’s writer as a mother—well, here you are! But some part of my mother—a crucial part—remained forever elusive, out of reach. As a child, you try to bridge that gap; perhaps the definition of adulthood is accepting that some of the gap between you and your parents might well be forever unbridgeable.

  Aged seven, and always eager to win her approval, I leapt at my mother’s suggestion that I take ballet classes. Let me be the first to say that ballet did not play to my strengths. I was a strong and energetic child, and had a certain amount of athleticism, but not the kind that makes a prima ballerina. What I lacked in natural skill, however, I made up for in enthusiasm and hard work. My “Dying Swan” has become a family legend. I grasped at the time that it wasn’t entirely for the right reasons, and I realized that if I were ever to become a star of the stage, it would be for comedy rather than tragedy. I kept up my dancing lessons for many years—less ballet and more ballroom and character dances—and I even picked up a bronze medal once for my Charleston, but let’s just say that if ever I needed a new career, this wouldn’t be the skillset I’d draw on. Phoebe refused point blank to learn ballet, and for this I am eternally grateful, since I’m pretty sure she would have been superb, outclassing me artistically once again.

  Both Phoebe and I spent a lot of time out in the garden, not least because my mother—who felt such a strong connection to this place—encouraged us in this. I have to confess that I didn’t appreciate this much as a kid: I’d rather have been building a model airplane, but Mom wanted it, so Mom got it. One summer, when I was nine and Phoebe six, Mom decided that we were old enough to look after our own little plots of land. She told us that if we cultivated them, we could choose where to visit next time Dad was back home. This was a big deal for us, to be given such a responsibility in Mom’s beloved garden. I dutifully turned the earth and planted vegetables, many hours of solid back-breaking labor. Phoebe—clever girl—threw seeds in the air and told Mom she was growing a meadow. Given the hours she spent there, lying on her stomach staring at the flowers that bloomed, and the insects and wildlife that came to her wild garden, and the careful drawings that she made of the
m, Mom had to admit that she had kept her side of the bargain. We made biryani from the vegetables I’d grown and Grandma’s special recipe, and we made postcards from the pictures that Phoebe had drawn. I earned my trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and Phoebe her trip to the Van Gogh Museum. Boy, though, did I envy Phoebe her smarts!

  Daddy, on his arrival home, was not the outraged ally that I had expected. When I told him the story, brimming over with indignation at Phoebe’s cheating, he laughed out loud. “Work smarter, Katy, not harder!” he said. Not bad advice, and advice I took to heart—I am aware that sometimes I can be a little rigid in my thinking (not allowing deviations from Starfleet uniform regulations when you’re seventy years’ flight away from the nearest Starfleet base, for example), and I do try my best not to get overly set in my ways. I must say, however—since it is possible that some Starfleet cadets may well be reading this memoir—that hard work never did me any harm and those rules kept us together during some tough times.

  I still have one of the postcards that Phoebe made. It shows Dodecatheon meadia, a type of primrose, native to our part of America, known more commonly as the shooting star. It’s beautiful work for a six-year-old: she has captured the nodding petals with a sharp eye and painted them a delicate shade of lavender. Granny-in-town showed her how to imbue the card with the scent of the flower it depicted; this being Granny-in-town’s work, it sure lasted. Phoebe and I joked about it, but the day came when I was grateful for Granny-in-town’s skill.

  Because that card went everywhere with me. It went to Starfleet Academy, and then onto the Al-Batani, and the Billings. And naturally it came with me on Voyager, and therefore all the way to the Delta Quadrant, and back again. I had it tucked away in my desk for safekeeping, but I brought it out very often, when I was alone and feeling bereft, and I would just catch the very last of the scent (it had mostly gone by the third or fourth year of our journey). Often, I would flip it over to read the message my sister had written. Just before I left for the Academy, she dug the card out, and wrote: “To my big sister Katy, may she always shoot for the stars.” Those words kept me going through many a long dark night among unfamiliar stars, looking for the one that would lead me home to my beloved family: to Phoebe, to the grandparents in the country, and the grandparents in town, and, most of all, to Mom.

  * * *

  Given that this account is about my early years, it’s perhaps natural that I have written a great deal about my mother, but now let me tell you about my father. He was, after all, the great hero of my early life. Edward Janeway was Starfleet to the core: a first-rate cadet who became an officer of distinction, and who earned rapid promotion until, shortly before I went to high school, he became a vice admiral. As a child, like many who enter Starfleet, he had looked to the stars: he was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, and he loved to fly. He began as a test pilot in his early Starfleet career, although, after Phoebe’s arrival, listened to my mother’s concerns about his safety, and agreed to move toward command posts. This, naturally, took him away a great deal, often to Starfleet Command, which wasn’t so bad, as we could follow him there during school holidays for a week or so. But more often than not he was away from Earth entirely. Children accept what they are given, and both Phoebe and I accepted that Daddy would be away for long periods of time. Still, we didn’t have to like it. Since Daddy was incapable of doing anything wrong, we needed to have someone else to blame —and blame fell squarely on the shoulders of the Cardassians.

  Cardassians were the great ogres of our childhood, as I suspect they were for many of our generation, and given that the ongoing border skirmishes of the ’40s and ’50s eventually led to full-scale conflict, one perhaps can be sympathetic to that opinion. Much has changed since the Dominion War, of course, but to my sister and me the Cardassians—these aggressive, seemingly monstrous aliens—were also the entire reason that Daddy was so often away from home. It took me a long time to recognize the root of my hostility toward the Cardassians, and even longer to shake this off and reach a better understanding of them.

  A little context is surely helpful here. First contact between the Federation and the Cardassians was many years in the past, but from the start of the twenty-fourth century, the Cardassian Union had become markedly more aggressive in its imperial ambitions, most notably its expansion into Bajor during the 2310s. We know now that conditions on Cardassia Prime were becoming increasingly difficult: intensive industrial farming on an already dry world was leading rapidly to soil exhaustion. The Cardassians were on the hunt for the resources of other worlds; this expansion led, ultimately, to the formal annexation of Bajor in 2328 (eight years before my birth). For my father, moving up the ranks, Cardassian ambitions and incursions into Federation space were his chief source of concern, as they would continue to be the concern of his daughter years later, at the start of her career. Starfleet Command, at the time, was chiefly trying to prevent the outbreak of full-scale war, while at the same time protecting our border worlds, and supporting the Bajorans without violating our principles of nonintervention. At this age, before high school, these issues meant little to me, but they created the condition of my father’s continuing absences, shaping my early years and providing the backdrop for my own eventual decision to enter Starfleet.

  When Daddy was at home, Mommy was happy, and when Mommy was happy, we could all be happy. Like everything else that he did, Daddy approached fatherhood with dedication, bringing his fullest attention to the task. He might not have been there all the time, but when he was, he was there completely. I see now how he must have been awake until the early hours of the morning to get through reports and messages before turning his complete attention to his girls. And when he was with us—oh, the fun we had! He combined the authority of a father with the mischief of an uncle, the curiosity of a child, and the instinct for guidance of a born teacher. Do I sound as if I idolized him? Well, of course I did. He was my wonderful Daddy, Starfleet captain and all-around hero. More and more, I wanted to be the apple of his eye.

  Whenever he was home, he would devise some new project or excursion for the whole family. He would take us all camping—making sure we knew how to live in the wild, be self-sufficient, show us how to forage and find fresh water. He encouraged Phoebe in her interest in the natural world and helped me to understand what to look for, too, and why I should care about the environment around me. He saw that my eyes turned upward, and on inkblot nights beneath the heavens, he taught me the names of constellations. My first voyages into the stars, with him. Phoebe learned them too: he realized that that mythological names captured her imagination. We learned the name of Mars in different languages, some still living, some long lost. Mars, Huoxing, Nergal, Wahram… This, I realized, was a kind of different world that I could get behind: not made-up fantasy worlds, but real planets that I might visit one day. And indeed Daddy took us to Mars, when Phoebe got to high school.

  Here’s a typical project of Daddy’s, from when I was about eight years old. He decided that what our farm lacked was a telescope. Well, of course! He was Starfleet, after all, he said. He always had to be keeping an eye on things, even when he was on leave. So we made one. The whole Janeway-Williams clan got together and built the darned thing. And not some small instrument, but the kind of telescope that would have been the envy of an Edwardian gentleman. Granny-in-town was brought on board, of course, this being something of a specialty for her, and I think she was pivotal in replicating the parts we needed. Granddad-in-town came in handy too, bringing along a couple of graduate students to help renovate the old pig shed that was to be the telescope’s new home. Grandpa made them work for their supper: sawing and hammering, fetching and carrying. I hope they got extra credit for this, those kids; what a flagrant abuse of power!

  We girls oversaw the process from start to finish: the tooling of the parts, the grinding of the lenses, the construction of the outhouse, the assembly of the device itself. Good lord, it was magical—no, better than
that. It was science. There was no mystique to this, no trick. This was something that could be built, crafted, made—and yet once it was assembled, it could show the beauty and majesty, the awe-inducing grandeur, of the stars. Out on the porch, Mom lay out long sheets of black paper, and together she and Phoebe and I created star charts. At last we were done, and we went out late one night—well past our bedtimes—and Daddy showed us the stars. I spent many nights in there, learning the names of the constellations, much later than perhaps my parents realized, sneaking past their room to my own bed, head full of the wonder of space.

  On my ninth birthday, Dad took me over to the local flying club, and took me up in a little plane. The thrill of this. At last I was in flight! We were up for about twenty minutes, and Dad flew us over the land that I knew so well. I saw my home, all these places that I knew intimately and up close—our farm, Grandpa and Grandma’s farm, our school, the road to the city—but from up above, like a map, but real. This little trip changed my perspective on the world entirely. Earth was never going to be enough for me now.