“What Aylim did was an aberration,” Timor says. “It has never been repeated. And as long as we have Aylim to hold up as an example, we need never mourn another Guardian.”
I swallow hard. “I understand,” I respond.
Timor goes on in a heartfelt tone. “But for all his foolishness, we must not condemn Aylim. What he did, he did out of—”
“Concern for the symbiont,” I blurt out, wishing to show him how well I comprehend Aylim’s plight.
Timor smiles wistfully at me, his face dappled with reflected light. “No, Rantic Lan. Not out of concern. Out of love.”
The story of Aylim and the symbiont Marh serves as a powerful reminder to the Guardians. The Guardian life is a life of total devotion to duty, a life that is set apart not only from other members of Trill society, but from the symbionts as well.
GUARDIAN OF FOREVER
AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A PUZZLE
Although the Guardian was discovered in 2267, Starfleet has only recently handed over responsibility of maintaining the site to the Office of Temporal Investigations. Long considered a “backwater outpost for recruits with no future,” the new site managers, Dulmer and Lucsly, insist that they are too busy to comment.
Their names are Dulmer and Lucsly. They work for the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations. Even here on the surface of a barren planet where the air smells like rust, they wear dark, tailored suits.
Dulmer is short and spare with blunt features, thinning blond hair, and a perpetual scowl. He looks suspicious of everything. Lucsly is tall and dour, with a long face, dark hair combed back off his forehead, and a narrow, aristocratic nose. He has a padd in his hand.
“You’re the reporter,” Dulmer notes, squinting as the wind blows some sparkling mineral dust at him.
I do my best to look friendly. “That’s right.”
Before I can offer the man my hand, he heads for a cleft in the jumble of blue and purple crags that surrounds us. Lucsly waits until I fall in behind Dulmer. Then he follows as well.
“I hope you don’t take this lightly,” he says in a cultured voice.
I glance at him over my shoulder. “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“Good,” says Lucsly, jotting something down on his padd. “We hate it when people take temporal phenomena lightly.”
A moment later, we emerge from the rocky cleft and I see a sprawling array of ancient gray ruins. Broken columns, cracked arches, and time-worn blocks of stone cover the landscape all the way to the horizon.
In the middle of them, dominating them, stands a rough-hewn, irregularly shaped stone doughnut about three meters in diameter. Even without a tricorder, I can feel it pulsating with power … just the way I was told I would.
I turn to Dulmer. “The Guardian?”
“The Guardian,” he confirms gravely.
Five years ago, when the Federation Council declassified them, I began an in-depth study of the logs of Captain James T. Kirk.
Kirk, who commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise on and off for nearly thirty years in the latter half of the twenty-third century, was one of my boyhood heroes. I couldn’t wait to hear his adventures on other worlds described in his own words.
To my disappointment, I found that the logs made available to me had some holes in them. When I inquired, I was told that they had been purged of “security-sensitive” data. What was left was interesting, certainly, but hardly the deep insight into Kirk that I was looking for.
It occurred to me that Kirk’s colleagues might have had a few interesting things to say about him. I examined their logs as well, but ran into the same problem—gaps in the really good stuff. Again, I was told that information had been withheld for the sake of Federation security.
Could I petition to have this data restored? I asked. The council told me I could ask for certain pieces of information to be declassified—but my success would depend on the specificity of my request.
Typical bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, I thought. Before I could be allowed to learn about something, I would have to have some knowledge of it.
Nonetheless, I delved into the logs all over again, Kirk’s as well as his officers’, hoping for a shred of information that would give me an excuse to ask for more. To my surprise and delight, I found something.
It wasn’t much—just a passing reference in one of Hikaru Sulu’s personal logs. As a botany enthusiast, he liked to come up with strange and exotic names for the hybrids he created.
When Sulu crossbred a Klingon fireblossom with a Benzite dream-of-darkness, he called it an “Edith Keeler”—and gave it to his captain as a gift. His hope, he said, was that it would give Kirk “some comfort.”
The Guardian seems to be waiting for something. For me, I think.
“Can I speak to it?” I ask Dulmer, removing my padd from the pocket of my jacket.
The blond man squints at me. “That was the deal under the Freedom of Information Act.” Nonetheless, he doesn’t look very happy about it.
I walk up to the stone portal, through which I can see what looks like a Greek temple on a distant hill, and speak over the hooting of the wind. I feel strange. I’ve never interviewed a hunk of rock before.
On the other hand, I’m not insensible to the magnitude of the opportunity. I can only imagine the euphoria ancient archaeologists might have experienced if they could have conversed with the bones they unearthed.
“What are you?” I ask the Guardian.
“I am the Guardian of Forever,” the portal replies in a deep, remarkably resonant voice. As it answers, it glows with a weird silver light.
Like a kid who’s just been transported for the first time, I can’t help smiling a little. “Are you a machine?” I ask. “Or a living being?”
“I am both and neither,” the Guardian informs me.
“What’s your objective?” I ask.
“I am my own beginning, my own ending,” it says.
That’s interesting. “Do you mean you created yourself?” I ask the Guardian. “Or that, in time, you’ll come to destroy yourself? Or maybe both?”
There’s a brief pause. “I am incapable of answering in terms your primitive mind can grasp.”
Dulmer and Lucsly look vaguely satisfied at the difficulty I’m having. But then, they don’t know where I’m going in my conversation with the Guardian.
Taking careful notes on my padd, I plunge on.
Edith Keeler.
As I said, I had gone over Kirk’s logs pretty thoroughly. I knew the name of every crewperson who ever served under him—and none of them were named Edith Keeler.
A friend, then? A lover? A relative? These were all possibilities. The only way to find out for sure was to search the press corps database.
To my surprise, there weren’t any Edith Keelers in the twenty-third century. The last one, it seemed, was a “social worker” who lived way back in 1930, long before Earth launched its first space probe. She had died in a car accident.
What kind of connection could there have been between a twentieth-century woman and Captain Kirk? Or was Sulu referring to an entirely different Edith Keeler, one who was somehow not listed in the database?
I could have taken the name to the Federation Council, but I didn’t think this was the kind of puzzle they could solve. So I contacted one of the few people alive who might have known what Sulu meant.
A short time later, I found myself speaking across a subspace link with the elderly but keen-eyed Admiral Leonard McCoy.
Dust swirls around my feet. “I would like to see the past of the planet Earth,” I tell the Guardian.
“Behold,” it says.
A moment later, the opening in the rock mists over and I see images begin to flitter behind it. There’s a musty smell in the air, though there’s precious little water in this planet’s atmosphere. As the mist clears, the images become more vivid, more lifelike.
I see slender, bronze-skinned men waging war with clumsy iron swords and iron-plated s
hields. I see scantily clad slaves hauling blocks of stone up wooden ramps to build great pyramids. I see senators in robes and sandals arguing the fate of their empire in a proud, open forum.
The images change so quickly, I can’t absorb much in the way of details. I could ask the Guardian to slow down, but I know it won’t accommodate me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Dulmer and Lucsly watching, ready to pounce in case I decide to take advantage of what the Guardian is offering me—participatory access to the past. But I just stand there, taking in the wonder of it.
Its function is every bit as puzzling as its form; the sentient time portal that calls itself the Guardian of Forever stands alone amidst the ruins of a forgotten civilization. For a glimmer of a moment it replays a fragment of Earth’s history—the first steps Homo sapiens took upon another world, and toward the exploration of the stars.
McCoy knew who Edith Keeler was. He knew only too well.
With a healthy disregard for red tape, he told me how the Enterprise encountered a pattern of time displacement waves and traced it to the Guardian. He also told me how he, the ship’s doctor, accidentally injected himself with a hypospray full of cordrazine. Caught up in a paranoid delusion, he beamed himself down to the Guardian’s planet.
Kirk and a security team followed—and found the Guardian. It was Spock, Kirk’s first officer, who determined that the thing was a million years old. It was Spock too who recognized the Guardian for what it was—a means of accessing other periods in time.
In the meantime, the cordrazine-crazed McCoy leaped through the Guardian into Earth’s past-more specifically, Earth in the 1930s, where he saved the life of one Edith Keeler.
Unfortunately, that single act twisted history as we know it, obliterating the events that led to the creation of the Federation and the existence of a Starship Enterprise. Kirk and his landing party found themselves stranded in a pocket of timelessness, with no past and no future.
In an attempt to set things right, Kirk and Spock went after McCoy. Kirk eventually restored the timeline by preventing the doctor from rescuing Keeler—but only after the captain had fallen in love with the woman.
Spitting out Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, the Guardian assured them that their place in time was secure again. But it wasn’t finished. It had a proposition. “Many such journeys are possible,” it informed Kirk. “Let me be your gateway.”
The captain wisely declined the offer, according to McCoy’s account. But the fact that it was made at all raised some questions in my mind.
Armed with something specific to petition for, I went to the Federation Council. To my delight, they granted my request for an interview with the Guardian.
Gazing into the Guardian’s maw, I watch the fiery launch of the Apollo XI spacecraft that was the first to deposit human life on Earth’s moon.
A second later, in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, the armies of Khan Noonien Singh exchange bursts of gunfire with the forces of another genetic superman. By the harsh light of bonfires, riots tear apart a Sanctuary District in San Francisco. Vulcans emerging from an interstellar craft draw a motley crowd of post-World War III humans.
It all passes before my eyes. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century.
Interestingly, the Guardian isn’t consistently showing me the events I expect to see—the events you and I have come to think of as turning points in man’s development. But I don’t think it’s displaying random occurrences either. It’s just that its perspective is an alien one.
In any case, I haven’t come here simply to put the Guardian through its paces. Hard as it is for me to believe, I have even bigger fish to fry. “Thank you,” I tell the time portal, “but I’d like to ask another question.”
The Guardian mists over again and the musty smell returns. A moment later, the historical images cease. “I am listening,” the Guardian tells me with an unmistakable note of eagerness in its voice.
In the hundred years or more since Kirk’s Enterprise discovered it, the Guardian must have been presented with a great many questions. It’s good to know it isn’t tired of answering them.
“Are you really a Guardian?” I ask.
“I am the Guardian of Forever,” it says.
“What is it you guard?” I wonder aloud.
“I am the Guardian of Forever,” it reiterates stubbornly.
I was afraid of this. But I’m not done yet. “How many times have you been accessed as a time portal?”
“Hundreds of times,” the Guardian tells me.
“In the last century or—”
“That’s classified,” Dulmer snaps, stopping me short.
“Federation security supercedes the rights and privileges of Federation citizens,” Lucsly adds a bit too ominously for my taste. “Regulation twenty-one, section six, paragraph four.”
I accept their position, having been warned in advance that I haven’t got complete carte blanche here. Turning back to the Guardian, I say, “You’ve been accessed hundreds of times?”
“That is correct,” it confirms.
“And on how many of these occasions has the timeline been altered?”
“All but six,” the Guardian replies.
The answer isn’t entirely unexpected, but hearing the words spoken out loud makes my knees weak. If the timeline’s been altered that often …
“Exactly where are you going with this?” asks Dulmer, stepping forward. His steely eyes have narrowed to a fine point.
“Yes,” Lucsly chimes in, “where?”
I shrug. “For someone who’s supposed to be guarding something—a little thing called forever, in this case—the Guardian seems pretty free and easy with the thing it’s guarding.”
The DTI men exchange what appear to be meaningful glances. It’s Lucsly who eventually responds, saying, “The Guardian’s logic is beyond our understanding.”
“No doubt, some of it is,” I concede. “But it manages to communicate with us. That suggests we have a few things in common.”
“What are you getting at?” Dulmer demands.
“Well,” I say, “I’ve been thinking. On one hand, the Guardian must have been designed to protect the time-stream, or it wouldn’t keep referring to itself as a guardian. On the other hand, it invites us to violate the timestream every chance it gets.”
“And?” Lucsly prods.
“And that’s a contradiction.” I tell him. “Unless, of course, the Guardian’s here to preserve the time-stream by facilitating changes in it.”
“Preserve it … by changing it?” Dulmer smiles, but there’s no humor in it. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t it?” I ask. “What if the timestream’s under constant stress? And the only way it can keep from snapping in a big way is by snapping in little ways from time to time?”
“That’s absurd,” says Lucsly. But at the same time, he’s writing something down on his padd.
“Are you finished?” asks Dulmer.
“In a moment,” I tell him. Then I address the Guardian again. “Am I right? Are you preserving the time-stream by permitting it to change?”
“I am the Guardian of Forever,” it insists.
But I’m beginning to understand now. “Of course you are.”
“Time’s up,” says Dulmer in no uncertain terms. As the planet’s metallic dust blows around us, I nod. “If you say so,” I tell the DTI agent.
After all, I’ve gotten what I came for. It occurs to me that if Kirk were still around, he might be proud of me.
At least, it makes me feel good to think so.
ROMULAN RIGHT OF STATEMENT
PARADOX OF VIRTUE
An open air amphitheater that seems to recall the glories of Earth’s ancient Greece is the stage for J’Kor’s “Right of Statement.” Built on a heroic scale, its designers wanted the “…citizens to remember the soaring glories of Romulus.”
J’Kor speaks, with the larger of his planet’s two red-orange
suns at his back, his dark-haired figure throwing a long shadow as it abides in the midst of solar fire.
His words ring out to the limits of the sunset-washed amphitheater, a rough-hewn granite structure about ten meters high and fifty in diameter, and are thrown back at him in a chorus of ghostly echoes. To my naked and unaided human ears, they sound like the lyrics to an especially passionate and plaintive love song.
It’s spring here, the planting season. The air is redolent with the sweet, earthy smell of new life. All around us, seas of blue and yellow blossoms bow under the press of the evening storm winds. Clouds mounting in the east open like colossal scarlet roses against a slowly darkening sky.
For a moment longer, I resist using the universal translator in my borrowed communications badge, preferring to hear J’Kor’s argument the way his judges hear it—in all its heartfelt beauty. Then, so as not to lose the sense of it, I reactivate the translator.
J’Kor, who no longer calls Romulus his home, speaks of his birth province there—a region of dark, smoldering hills and sunset rivers, where the soil was fertile and the fields were bountiful. It’s where he met his wife, he says. It’s where they began their family.
His children were half-grown when some of his neighbors suggested that he go into politics. The praetor for their district had passed away and a replacement was needed. J’Kor reminded them that he had no experience with making laws. Neither had his predecessor, they noted.
So, J’Kor tells us, he went to the capital and represented them in the praetorate. And for a time, he did an excellent job. Everyone told him so. Through hard work and perseverance, he made his district’s needs known and saw them met.
Years passed, says J’Kor. He grew in influence and prestige. He moved his family to the capital and married his daughters to wealthy men. He saw his wife inducted into an honored society.
“Life was good,” he tells the fifty or so of his fellow Romulans who have gathered in the amphitheater to hear him out. “I accomplished great things. My honor shone like the sun.”
Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations Page 8