The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway
Page 6
That short break was tinged with sadness, however, as we said goodbye to my lovely Jess. She was old now—fifteen—and she slept most of the time. When I walked through the door, she lifted her head and thumped her tail at me, saying “hello,” and I had one more week with my old companion, sitting with her in the sunshine as I read and rested, and she lay beside me. I think she was waiting for me to come home again, because one morning, a week after I arrived, she didn’t wake up. I cried a great deal, and together Mom and Phoebe and I buried her in the garden, near the roses. My lovely Jess. I knew that given that I was heading into Starfleet, I would be taking posts onboard ship that were going to keep me away for long periods of time. I was not likely to get another dog for many, many years, and I knew the next one would have to be special. I was right there. Saying farewell to Jess felt at the time like the end of childhood for me.
Then it was time to say goodbye to the old homestead once again. I had an internship that summer in the office of Councilor T’Lan (don’t get too excited: mostly it was answering correspondence, although I did get some insight into the ongoing Bajoran refugee crisis); also a group of us were going hiking through the Andes. (My parents said, “Aren’t you supposed to be having a rest?”) And then, before I knew it, I was back at the Academy for my second year. More of the same—only more of it. Much more. More work, more exams, more coffee, and more fun, as much as I could possibly fit in between everything else. Time in the garden, decompressing, simply being among the roses. More and more complex equations, more and more complex command scenarios. They say about the Academy that the individual moments—as you’re trying to get a piece of written work done, or you’re fretting about a forthcoming test—pass extremely slowly, but that the months fly by. It’s true. Before I knew it, the second year and the second summer were over, and I was heading back for the second half of my Academy career. It struck all of us, heading back for our third year, that we were on the downward slope.
In the third year at the Academy, the nature of your studies alters somewhat. The number of large lecture classes gets fewer and fewer, and the barrage of in-class tests and end-of-semester exams reduces. Instead, you find yourself in smaller seminar groups and, if you’re on the command track, as I was, you do more and more practice scenarios. I did not fail to notice how many of these involved encounters with Cardassian ships. By this point, the border conflicts that we now call the Federation–Cardassian War were well established and showed no sign of slowing down. Our tutors were preparing us for this conflict. There were some practical additions, for example, field medicine and surgery courses. I have certainly used these in my later career (not to mention the memory-training techniques we were taught in H’ohk’s physiology classes). This background rumble of potential conflict was something we were all keenly aware of, and I recall numerous late-night conversations among friends, as we pondered what it might be like on the battlefield.
Life was full, and busy, and we were far enough away from graduating to be able to put aside our worries for a little while. By this point, I felt that I had the right balance, combining studies and my social life, and keeping at or near the top of my classes, getting downtime in the gardens. As long as nothing happened to disrupt my equilibrium…
Naturally, this was the moment I chose to fall in love.
* * *
What can I say? I was still only nineteen years old; gregarious, yes, but I was still very inexperienced when it came to romance. I concealed my tender heart beneath an outgoing demeanor and being part of the gang. I think it was inevitable that when I fell in love, I fell hard.
Let’s leave names behind; that wouldn’t be appropriate. Suffice to say that the object of my admiration was what Granny-in-town would call “a fine figure of a man”; a rugged sort who exuded physical confidence. I thought he was gorgeous. He was a friend of a friend of a friend who came along to the Night Owl one afternoon and found himself sitting next to me. We talked about the Grand Canyon and worked through the equations for our advanced spatial engineering class (he was taking the same course, but in a different seminar group). We agreed to meet for dinner later that week. After that, we were inseparable.
I grasped fairly quickly that Nexa was ambivalent toward him, and I have to say that I was not pleased. My first serious beau; surely my best friend should be delighted for me? About three weeks into the relationship, I remember a very unhappy conversation—no, let’s call it what it was, an outright argument— between me and Nexa. She said she didn’t trust him; I told her she was jealous that he was taking up all my time. It’s hard to come back from that one, and things became briefly frosty between us. After a few days, we tentatively made up (you can’t live in a shared room with a cold war, and, besides, she was my friend), but I could see that as long as I was with my beau, she was not going to be happy.
I had no intention of giving up this one. He made me feel desirable, and that was not something that Kate Janeway had felt much in her life so far. I was outgoing, a good sport, active, and more than a little tomboyish. Boys were friends, not lovers. I was beside myself with joy that I had attracted someone like this—and that made Nexa’s reaction even more upsetting. But I was eager for him to meet my family, and I invited him home for a few days during the winter break. That was another huge disappointment.
The whole family was there: my father had leave, and Phoebe had managed to get back from Trill, where she was on a graduate arts fellowship that year. I was so excited to introduce my boyfriend to them. Oh dear. It was plain within a couple of hours that they did not like him, my father most of all. Oh, he made polite conversation—friendly conversation too; this was a young cadet, after all—but I could tell. After his visit was over, and he went back to his own family, I confronted my father.
“Not good enough for your darling daughter, hey, Dad?”
He didn’t rise to my bait. “Katy, this is your life, and I’m not going to interfere.”
I was furious. “Dad! That’s not an answer!”
“I’m not going to dictate who you should and shouldn’t see,” he said. “But no. I don’t like him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a taker, Kathryn. He won’t give you what you need. He won’t give anyone what they need.”
Just on departure he had given me a beautiful pendant. I showed this to my father. “How can you say that?”
“Oh, sure, he’ll be good with gifts. He certainly puts on a good show.”
“Dad, that’s not fair—”
“But he’s a taker. You’ve spent half your holiday helping him with his coursework—”
“I don’t mind!”
“Well, you should. He’s the kind of ensign that I would get off my ship as quickly as possible. He’s the kind of ensign that I wouldn’t put anywhere except behind a desk. I wouldn’t put my life in his hands.”
I stalked out of the room. I took my woes to Phoebe, but I could see that even my beloved sister was finding it hard to be supportive. “You know Dad,” she said, rather lamely.
I was shocked. “You don’t like him either, do you?”
She struggled to find the right words. “It’s not me that has to like him, Kate.”
What was the right response to this familial ambivalence? Naturally I dug in my heels. I went back to the Academy after the break determined to stick with this relationship through thick and thin, and I would make it a huge success. That would show them! We spent most of that year together, living in each other’s pockets, and if I found that I was doing more and more of his advanced engineering papers and seeing much less of my friends, I didn’t admit this to myself.
Six months to the day after our first meeting, we went out for dinner, traveling all the way to Paris. It was very romantic. A violinist came past, and my beau brought out a ring. A ruby.
Like a fool, I said, “Hey, anyone would think you were about to ask me to marry you!” I burst out laughing. I stopped when I realized he wasn’t joining in.
I listened to him talk and I drank my glass of wine. I felt like someone waking up from a dream; not a nightmare, that wouldn’t be fair, because he really was very handsome, and we really did have a good time, most of the time.
“What do you say, Kit?” He always called me that. I don’t know where he’d got it from. Suddenly it struck me as deeply annoying.
I put down my wine glass. “Here’s an idea,” I said. “You put your career on hold, and when I have my command, you can get back to your career.”
Oh, his face. He was outraged. He opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, I had stood up. I leaned over the table to kiss his cheek, for old times’ sake, and I said, “Thank you. It’s been fun.” And I left and walked back through the streets of Paris to the nearest transporter, and I was back in my room at the Academy within the hour and talking to Phoebe over the comm.
“You’ll never guess what just happened to me,” I said.
“I hope you shoved that ruby where the sun doesn’t shine,” she said, when I told her. A huge cheer for my sister, my best ally. Talking it through with her that night, I realized I wasn’t as upset about the whole thing as I thought I might be. I guess I’d known on some level that my friends and my family were right, and that this wasn’t going anywhere. I won’t deny it took a while to bounce back from the whole business: my confidence took a blow, and I found it hard to trust for a while afterward. But at least I had the good sense to get away when I did, and I’d only wasted six months. I could have wasted years. I could have wasted my career. The next morning, I caught up with Nexa, told her what had happened, and said sorry.
“Oh, Kate! There’s nothing to apologize for! He was very handsome!”
Yes, he was; but he really wasn’t right for me.
There’s a side note to this which I should mention; after my conversation with my sister, and with her encouragement, I finally got around to doing what all my female friends and relatives did at some point: I had some eggs frozen. Well, a girl has got to think ahead, hasn’t she?
* * *
My third-year grades took only a small hit from this distraction, I am very glad to say, and I was not outside of the tenth percentile, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I came back to my final year intent on getting as close to the top as possible. Our fourth and final year continued the smaller group seminars, role shadowing, and holodeck scenarios of the year before, as well as a significant amount of outdoor training. We were also assigned a mentor, and I was beyond lucky to find myself come under the wise protection of Admiral Parvati Pandey. In my final term, Pandey invited me along to her Ethics of Command sessions. If she gave you this invitation you took it: it was a sign that you were being taken very seriously for command. That final term was crammed, but whatever else you had on, you found the time to go along to these discussions.
We were a small group, half a dozen of us, and the meetings took place at Pandey’s home, in a large office whose huge windows looked over her beautiful garden. A lot of that final year at the Academy passed so quickly—cadets are conscious that the clock is now ticking—but those sessions remain strong in my memory. We grappled with questions of honor, integrity, loyalty, candor; how to know when an order was a bad order; what to do about that. We talked about respecting the ethics of other civilizations while upholding our own values of diversity and openness. We discussed the ethics of war; how to comport yourself in a combat zone; how to command in a combat zone. We talked about the trolley problem, and the principle of utility, and means and ends. I am grateful to Parvati Pandey for this space she gave us as we shifted from the protected world of the Academy to the real world of ship life. After I had my turn on the Kobayashi Maru, Pandey came to me and praised me for my grace under fire. “Don’t forget this, Kathryn,” she said. “This is a lesson about courage in the face of overwhelming odds.”
She was a fine teacher. I’d like to think I learned well from her. I’d like to think I made her proud.
* * *
One final memory of my time at the Academy, since I believe this episode has earned its spot in the legends of the place, and that is no mean feat when you consider the people who have passed through there as cadets. There was an informal custom—certainly not a custom sanctioned by the authorities—for the outgoing students to play some kind of grand prank to celebrate their imminent release. After many years of some very inventive young people coming up with ever more baroque ideas, it was our turn to think up something impressive. Flash mobs weren’t our style; sowing wildflower seeds around companels seemed more in the line of a protest than a prank; dyeing the lake pink was an old one and far too easy. The nexus of students who formed to take up this task wanted a challenge. We wanted to do something that would never be forgotten. We succeeded.
I had, for various reasons, been reading about prisoners of war, and the kinds of schemes they came up with not only in their attempts to escape their confinement, but to fill the hours and prevent despair and boredom setting in. Digging a tunnel didn’t seem much in the way of fun, so when our “escape committee” was formed to pull our stunt, I suggested something else. I’d been reading a very detailed account of some prisoners of war who had been held in central Europe, during the last big war of the pre-Atomic Age (the war that ushered in the Atomic Age, in fact). They were prisoners who had a reputation for repeated escape attempts: their captors, in exasperation, decided to lock them all up together—in a huge castle perched up on a cliff, no less! There was some wisdom to this idea—you had them all in one place, for example, where you could keep an eye on them. At the same time, you found that you had put all the most reckless, crackpot, and stubborn eccentrics in one place. They were not going to give up until they had made a home run. Reminds me of Voyager, now that I think about it.
These guys just kept the ideas coming—with limited success, it has to be said, but then the point was to keep everyone busy: themselves, to stave off boredom, and their guards, never entirely able to relax. There were various attempts to get out using disguises: in uniforms stolen from their captors, or else, inevitably, in drag. A smaller man hid himself in a tea chest, and, of course, there were several tunnels. The cliff beneath that castle must have been Swiss cheese by the end of that war. But I had another of their plans in mind. Two of the men held there were pilots, and they decided to build a glider. Once I read about this… Well, what else was my graduating class supposed to do? I put it to the committee, and they looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and then somebody started to laugh, and the next person began to laugh, and I saw in their eyes what I had been thinking: We’ve got it!
We used the plans that those two men had devised, and we decided to use the same tools that they had used. As a matter of principle—and bearing in mind that they somehow had to lay their hands on all this material—we decided not to replicate anything. The rummage shops of downtown San Francisco did good business that year, but do you have any idea how hard it is to find a gramophone spring? As for the prison sheets used to skin the thing, and the ration millet that those men used to seal up the pores of the sheets… Who knew porridge had so many uses?
There were times I thought we weren’t going to be able to do it. As for finding a place where we could hide this thing while we built it… Let’s just say in return for some extra labor, Boothby turned a blind eye on what was happening in one of the larger garden sheds. Eventually, we had it: a two-hundred-and-fort
y-pound, two-seater, high-wing glider. The day before our exam results were due to be announced, and in the dead of night, we hauled the beast across to the library, and up onto the roof. The next morning, as our year group gathered in the main campus square, finding solidarity in each other before learning their individual fates, my copilot and I launched our beautiful machine over their heads, landing it with perfect precision just beside the lake to rapturous applause.
It’s not a final-year prank if you don’t get hauled up before the president of the Academy, and indeed we were, and I took responsibility as the main architect and chief ringleader of the scheme. I looked the president in the eye and said, “And I’m proud of it, ma’am. We’ve shown initiative, technical skill, a substantial amount of guile, and we’ve fitted it all in around exam season. I think our final grades will speak for themselves.”
I could see that she was having a hard time not laughing, and I knew we’d get away with it (more or less), not least because we were leaving campus the following week, and there weren’t that many sanctions they could impose. Besides, we’d excelled ourselves. I’m about as proud of that glider as I am of just about anything else I did at the Academy, and given how often my father told the story afterward, I’m pretty certain he was proud of me too. All this time later, looking back on the whole escapade, I’ll add that our make-do-and-mend approach to sourcing the materials we needed came in damn handy on Voyager.
* * *
I graduated in the top four of my year (that means fourth, of course), and I was grateful for and pleased with this result. The people ahead of me were stellar students: you could see that they were going on to early commands. All three of them were decorated for valor during the Dominion War, although only two of them survived that war. Those two have gone on to great things at Starfleet Command, and one of them is surely in line to become commander-in-chief. Alongside these stars, I was content that I had shone to the very best of my ability. I had done my father and my grandfather proud; most of all, I had done myself proud. There could be no question now that I had not earned my place at the Academy. Now I had to prove myself worthy of Starfleet—and worthy of command.