by Judith
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.”
Epilogue
The Dream of Stars
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.
Acknowledgments
For Memory Prime
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.
For Prime Directive
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
A Look Inside
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 Tre
k 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. An
d 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.
KD: Back then, I think that if it wasn’t for Franz Joseph and Bjo, a lot of writers might have been lost.
JRS: Yes.
GRS: Yes, I remember our putting in things like the length of the nacelles and all of those fun details. But we heard, “No, no, we know what a nacelle looks like. Take out the measurements. You don’t have to be that precise.”
KD: Did your sitting down as fans with these characters in your hands for the first time prompt you to write things for your favorite ones?
JRS: No, we treated them as our favorite ensemble, really.
GRS: Any scene with Spock, Kirk, and McCoy, that’s just gold. You could sit and write that all day. They’re so well-defined, so it’s always fun to put them together.
JRS: That’s a favorite. You can just hear their voices in their heads. Now, what was trickier was stepping outside the characters we had seen on screen to create new races, but not spending too much time doing that or getting too caught up in the “guest stars.” That’s something I think a lot of first-time Star Trek writers have found. If you approach it like a fan, thinking there is something that would be fun to do with a character, or thinking about creating a certain kind of person you run the risk of spending too much time creating your own series within Star Trek. That was something we were quite aware of. We did realize how much we were relying on what we had seen, how easy it was to write the comfortable scenes because we knew that everybody knew what someone looked like or sounded like. In a way, a lot of groundwork had been done for us. Actually, this was a good thing for us to start with as a shared novel.
KD: Rather than one of you having to explain to the other any nuance of an original character that you’re trying to put forward, in this case, when Judy writes, “Damn it, Jim,” Gar can hear it and know what you’re getting at.