The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway

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The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway Page 8

by Una McCormack


  Without doubt, my favorite experiences on board the Al-Batani at this time were when I had the privilege to observe first-contact scenarios. Surely this, at heart, is why we all joined Starfleet: to seek out not only new worlds, but new life; to learn from these encounters and thereby enrich ourselves and our own civilization, by ever increasing our knowledge and our diversity of experience. Let me note that, as such a junior officer, I was only ever allowed to observe, and then in circumstances in which we were plainly dealing with a friendly species. There were other, more complicated situations at which a probationary officer was not allowed even to be present, and these were tantalizing, since they were the cases which posed the most interesting questions of intercultural and interspecies communication. I longed to participate more actively in these meetings, and I envied my superiors their direct involvement, but protocol demanded that such delicate encounters were handled by experienced officers. (And I certainly wasn’t intending to breach protocol again in a hurry.) But I read every single report of these encounters several times over, and I must have annoyed the hell out of my superior officers, demanding they recount every contact down to the very last detail. I looked forward desperately to the day when, as a captain, the privilege would be mine. And when that day finally came it was indeed my privilege to participate in these encounters (though I might wish I hadn’t had to go so damn far to have them).

  It strikes me as ironic that I ended up giving many junior officers on Voyager their first experience of first contact well before they would have ever been permitted involvement back in the Alpha Quadrant. But if material resources were thin on the ground in the Delta Quadrant, then so too were human resources. All we had was what we brought with us. Tacit knowledge, experience: these things were at a premium, and to bring my ship home again, I had to accelerate my junior officers, ask them to take on challenges well ahead of schedule. It remains a great source of pride that these young people invariably stepped up to the challenge. I surely could not have asked for a better crew.

  * * *

  At the end of my first year on the Al-Batani, I joined Lieutenant Commander Kristopher and Captain Paris for my end-of-probation meeting. We had a full and frank discussion of my year on board ship (I even managed to laugh about my encounter with Tuvok). They commented on my tendency to take on slightly too much (although they had to admit they hadn’t seen any effect on my performance so far), and encouraged me to consider strategies for conserving my emotional and physical resources as I took on more duties and seniority. Overall, I had to be pleased with my first appraisal:

  “Practical and solution-orientated, hard-working and personable, Ensign Janeway’s doggedness gets the job done, and only sometimes translates into stubbornness. A highly committed junior officer, who inspires trust and respect from both peers and senior officers, she is well on track for command.”

  Not the flashiest of reports, I’ll grant you, but who wants to burn out in a flash? I was working hard to curb my stubborn streak and turn it into something productive, and I was remembering that hard work could be overdone, and downtime was necessary. The report duly went back to Starfleet Command, and I got a holomessage from Dad the next day. He sent me an image of a glider soaring over the Grand Canyon: That’s my girl, Katy. Keep flying.

  The Al-Batani had taken on half a dozen new ensigns at the time I joined, and Captain Paris held a cocktail party to celebrate the end of our probation. This was the occasion where I met a young man who was going to feature significantly in later years. At twelve years old, Thomas Eugene Paris was energetic, full of mischief—and clearly already a source of some exasperation for his more straight-down-the-line father. I often wonder where Tom got his high spirits from: Owen was so steady, so upright, and his wife, Julia, very grand and sophisticated. It might simply be that Tom had found getting into scrapes was a good way of attracting his father’s attention… although it was invariably not the kind of attention he might have preferred. At this party, I noticed how bored Tom was looking, and I had a sense that some trouble was about to ensue. I had a word in Kristopher’s ear, and we marched him off down to the holodeck where we ran flight simulations for him for an hour, and got him back to the party in time for the speeches—none of us missed, and the youngest of us in a very good mood from getting to play pilot all afternoon. I don’t know if Tom remembers this—there must have been a lot of tedious cocktail parties over the years—but I’ve been keeping a close eye on you from an early age, Tom, and I didn’t miss a trick.

  * * *

  Altogether, I decided to count my first year in Starfleet a success. But events were about to hit me that I hadn’t prepared for and couldn’t have predicted. I was about to suffer the first serious blow of my life.

  Around the time that I entered the Academy, my father had been assigned to oversee a number of projects which were aimed at designing new flight technologies for use against Cardassian warships. He had, after all, been a test pilot at the start of his Starfleet career, only retiring from this role when he married and had young children. The details were hush-hush, of course, and I am not sure of the extent to which my mother and sister were aware of the details of his work during this period, but I had an inkling of the kind of thing that he was doing. Nevertheless, he and I never discussed it. Perhaps if we had, I would have known that his involvement was more hands-on than I would ever have guessed. I knew that by this stage he was spending substantial periods of time at the Utopia Planitia shipyards; what I did not know—what none of us in the family knew—was how often he went along on test flights, and that in fact he had started flying again.

  I don’t know my father’s reasoning behind this. Perhaps he was unwilling to ask pilots to take risks that he himself wasn’t willing to take. Perhaps now that Phoebe and I were grown-ups and established, he wanted to get back to what he always thought was his real work, the work that he had given up when Phoebe was born. I don’t know what was in his mind, and of course I never had the chance to ask. It’s the question I most want to ask him: Dad, what the hell were you thinking?

  I remember receiving the news of his death vividly. I’ll never forget it. Traumatic experiences burn themselves into your neurons, don’t they? I was on duty on the bridge. The XO, Shulie Weiss, was in the captain’s chair, and we were all surprised when the captain appeared and went to have a quiet word with her. Then Weiss called over to me and asked me to go with the captain. I followed Captain Paris into his ready room, wondering what the hell I’d done wrong and whether I was about to get in trouble for a late-night gambling session with the other ensigns… I was already preparing my defense: we hadn’t made any noise and we hadn’t stayed up that late… Everyone had been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the following morning… But of course, this was nothing to do with that.

  “Please sit down, Kathryn,” the captain said.

  I knew from the use of my first name that this was something else, something truly serious and not simply a quiet word about the high spirits of some of his junior officers.

  “Is something the matter, sir?”

  For a moment, I saw that he was lost for words. He pressed his fingertips against his temple. “It’s about your father. It’s about Ted. Kathryn, I am so sorry to have to tell you this—”

  “Injured?” I think I already knew this wasn’t the case.

  “I’m so sorry, Kathryn. He’s been killed.”

  A whooshing sound rushed through my head; there was a ringing in my ears. My eyes went strange: black patches in front of my field of vision.

  “Kathryn! Kathryn!”

  I became aware of Captain Paris’s voice, somewhat distant and muffled.

  “Here, drink this.”

  He had found some whisky (we can always lay our hands on it from somewhere in dire need—and my need was dire), and he put the glass up to my mouth and made me drink. That helped restore me to some kind of equilibrium; sufficient to be able to ask a few questions and listen to what he was saying to me. There
had been an accident, it transpired, out on Tau Ceti Prime… At first, I struggled to understand: An accident? What in God’s name had he been doing all the way out there? What had taken him from the shipyards on Mars? I listened to the captain, talking clearly, and began to piece things together. Here’s what happened.

  Cardassian activity along the border had, in recent months, been focused on Etaris IV, a disputed world that had great strategic significance in securing supply lines between two Cardassian border systems. Starfleet had no intention of letting that happen. These barren rocks that we fight over! Etaris IV was a dead piece of ice in the middle of nowhere! Still, that was the battleground that the Cardassians had chosen, and Starfleet had no choice but to meet them there. As a result, Starfleet had been testing a ship that could operate under lower-than-average temperatures without giving off heat signatures that would allow the Cardassians to trace it. The ship needed to be able to fly not only in orbit above Etaris IV, but also within the atmosphere and, ideally, be able to dip below water. This meant it needed to be able to work beneath the ice that covered most of the planet’s surface. A prototype had come off the production line at Utopia Planitia, and now was being tested under the polar ice cap on Tau Ceti Prime, where conditions came closest to the surface of Etaris IV. They had six successful runs, shifting from orbit, to atmosphere, then under the ice for over an hour, then back again. On the seventh run, my father decided to see for himself how well it was operating. That was when the damn thing broke down. Full systems failure. After a hellish couple of days, they got the ship back up again, but by that time the three-person crew was dead. Including my dad.

  I had nightmares about his final moments for many years after. I have still not read the full report, in case the reality was worse than what I could imagine. Had they died on impact? Or had they lasted a while, as their air ran out? Had they escaped the ship, only to drown beneath the ice? Had they faced fire? I did not want to know. But all these images were burned into my brain; no wonder, when I was traveling home on Voyager, that an alien found that these were a potent means to convince me that I too had died. More than anything in life— more even, perhaps, than wanting to get home to the Alpha Quadrant—I longed to see my father again. No wonder I was nearly persuaded of the truth that I was dead and had joined him in the afterlife. No wonder I was so nearly fooled.

  * * *

  I went directly home. Captain Paris told me to take as long as it took. By this, I assumed that he meant for as long as my family needed me. As it turned out, I was the one who needed the break.

  The funeral was hard. Not just because Mom was so grief-stricken, and yet being so brave, but because there were so many people… Our quiet little home in the country, our haven, suddenly became the focal point for hundreds of people, all of whom wanted to pay their respects, many of whom were Starfleet top brass… I honestly don’t know how Mom kept on going throughout that day. I know how much I was struggling; I know how much Phoebe was struggling. To have to listen to people tell you, over and over again, how brave he was, how well respected, how many people he had served with and supported and encouraged… Trying to find a “thank you” to everyone who took the time to come and speak to us… As the day went on, we came up with a system—the widow and the two daughters—one of us coming forward to be the point of first contact for well-wishers; another one moving in to take over when that person began to flag… All the grandparents were there too; Granny-and Granddad-in-town distraught at the death of their boy… God, it was hellish. I think what made it worst of all was that all this grief and sorrow had come to what had been such a happy home. The picture I have painted of my childhood may seem to make it too idyllic, but I was lucky and blessed in my early life. This was the first real tragedy I ever faced. I talked to more admirals and captains and councilors and ambassadors that day than I think I have in the whole time afterward. But do you know which conversations hit hardest? The ones with our neighbors. It turned out that whenever Dad was home, he never missed a meeting with the local astronomical society. I knew he was a member—he’d taken us there when we were small—but I didn’t know how active he’d tried to be for a man so often away from home. They put out a newsletter every two months, and it turned out he always wrote something, however small; sometimes just a letter, sometimes as much as an article. That short but heartfelt conversation with the secretary and the president of that little society of enthusiasts was the closest that I came to breaking down completely that day. My father was a busy man, an important man, with lots of responsibilities as the border situation got worse, and still he had found the time to stay in touch with them. At heart, he remained the little boy who had looked up at the stars and wanted to fly among them.

  As the afternoon wore on, and our guests began to leave, Parvati Pandey, who had known Dad well, came to speak to me. She took both my hands in hers and gave me a steady look. Remember that look? The commander’s look? Checking out the reserves of her junior.

  “How are you, Kathryn?” she said.

  I was frank with her. “I’m… I’m not good, ma’am.”

  “This is going to take time, you know. Grief and shock—it can take a while to bounce back from that.”

  If only it had been grief… I think I would have understood that. Feeling bereft, feeling shocked… But what I couldn’t understand was the violence of my emotions… Pandey must have seen something in my expression; she frowned and said, “What is it, Kathryn?”

  “I… I don’t feel sad, ma’am. I feel… angry.”

  “That’s natural,” she said. “When someone dies suddenly, we often feel angry with them—”

  “Not with him,” I replied softly. “With the Cardassians.”

  She looked at me in surprise. “He was nowhere near the front, Kathryn—”

  “But he was still fighting that war, wasn’t he? Putting himself into danger because he wouldn’t ask people to take risks that he wasn’t ready to take. If they weren’t pushing their luck, forcing us to respond, he wouldn’t have been in that damn flyer—”

  “Kathryn,” she said firmly. “It was an accident. Nobody was to blame. This isn’t productive; it won’t help.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you understand? This won’t help, Kathryn.”

  I let her think she had persuaded me, but she didn’t. I knew who was to blame. And I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  * * *

  That helpless anger: that’s what lays you low. In the days and weeks that followed, I just couldn’t shake off this sense of deep rage that I had. Thoughts kept whirling around my head: angry, vengeful, vicious thoughts. I would lie in bed staring up at the darkness, thinking about what had happened, and how the Cardassians were to blame. I thought about how I could get reassigned, get to the front, start paying them back for all that they had taken from me. And then at the crack of dawn I would fall into a restless sleep, and I would not be able to drag myself out of bed until late the following day. Even when I was awake, I couldn’t settle. I would wander around the house (I didn’t want to be outside), or I would sit in one of the big old armchairs and stare into the garden. I knew my family was worried about me, Mom and Phoebe and all the grandparents. I received a message from Captain Paris, telling me that I’d been granted indefinite leave. I thought, But I didn’t request it… and then fell back onto the bed and into a deep and exhausted sleep. Eventually, I stopped feeling angry. I stopped feeling anything at all.

  Looking back on this gray, lifeless period, I think I understand now what was happening to me. Many people lose parents young—I was still only twenty-two, remember—and aren’t hit so hard. I think my problem was that so far, I’d been able to achieve pretty much everything that I put my mind to. Tennis trophies: sure, I lost them one year, but the following year I came back and won them in style. Getting into the Academy a year early: I’d checked that one off. Graduating near the top of my class: I did that and proved to everyone I was more than just my
father’s daughter. But this—there was nothing I could do. No action of mine, not even if I had brought my revenge fantasies to reality, could have brought Dad back. He was dead, and there was nothing that Ensign Kathryn Janeway could do about that. And that realization—of my own incapacity—was too much to bear.

  If I have ever wanted proof of how much my mother loved me, it was how she cared for me during this time, when her own grief must have been overwhelming. I guess people always thought my father was the strong one— the Starfleet officer, the hero—and perhaps thought my mother’s artistic, homebody personality meant that she was sensitive or easily shaken. But she proved to be the toughest of us all. She must have thought that she and Dad were going to have a long and happy retirement together—like her parents, like his parents—and instead that future was lost. But she gathered herself up, and faced that changed future, and found some strength within her to prop me up as well. Phoebe too—I don’t know what I would have done without her quiet patience. She took a term’s absence from art school; stayed at home; made me get up and go for walks; made me sit with her and sort out photographs. And she faced my sudden outbursts of incoherent rage with equanimity.

  One night, passing her bedroom door, I heard her crying to herself. I tapped on the door and walked in. She was lying on the bed. I went over to her—my baby sister—and wrapped my arms around her and let her cry. That’s when I knew I was coming through the other side of this. I felt something else again, beyond the pendulum swing of dull ache and bitter anger. I felt compassion, the need to look after my sister, the desire to care. Phoebe, you got me through this. I hope I helped you too.

 

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