The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (2 page)

“A lie is a very poor way to say hello,” she said. “It isn’t that cold.” Her light blue eyes carried a disdainful expression that immediately held sway over me. I knew at that moment either my lies were going to have to be a lot better, or that I was going to have to tell her the truth, as much of the truth as I could.

And I wanted to. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to hide anything from her. And I would shortly learn that Spock’s river analogy was true, and she was where it led. Because of her, I would literally save history. And I would also regret it for the rest of my life.

WHEN MY MOTHER LEFT EARTH
for a job on another planet, she said she’d be back often, and since I was nine, I took her at her word. The idea that a grown-up would not tell me the truth was beyond my experience.

I was with her and my dad on the front porch of our farm. The sun was setting and a few fireflies were out. You could see for miles; in the distance dark clouds let loose a bolt of lightning. My brother, Sam, was inside, lost in a book on his reader. Sam was twelve; he was always reading lately.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” she said.

“Why do you have to go?”

My mother crouched down and met me eye-to-eye. She told me how important it was for her to go, and that it didn’t mean she didn’t love me. She had gotten a job as part of a colony on a planet called Tarsus IV. She said ships went back and forth all the time. I looked up at my dad, who was looking away. He watched the storm in the distance.

“When will you be back?”

“It’ll be a few months,” she said. “I’ll definitely be back in time for your birthday.”

“You don’t know that,” Dad snapped angrily. It was the first time he’d spoken since we had walked outside. I looked at him again, but he was still watching the storm.

“I’ll be here,” she said, still looking at me, determined to make it feel true. She then hugged me and lifted me up in her arms, making a big show of my weight. “God, you’re so big. C’mon, let’s get some dessert.”

She looked over at Dad, then looked down. I desperately wanted him to make eye contact with her, and I could feel that Mom did too. But he wouldn’t.

The next morning she was gone, taking my idea of home with her.

Up to then I’d had a wonderful boyhood, filled with dogs, campfires, birthdays, horseback riding, snowball fights, and plenty of friends. Just like the Earth of today, there was no poverty or war or deprivation. My parents would talk about the problems in the Galaxy, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Sometimes I’d look up in the sky and my brother would point out to me the satellites or a shuttle taking off, but that’s as close as my mind got to outer space. Close to home felt perfect.

We lived on a farm near Riverside, Iowa, on a piece of property that had about 200 hectares of crops. We grew soybeans and corn, had chickens for eggs and cattle for milk and cheese. As far back as I can remember we were up at 4 a.m. every day to feed the chickens and milk the cows. Most of the caring of the crops was handled by automated machinery, but my father still insisted we get out in the fields for planting and harvesting. Though we were in no way dependent on the farm for our livelihood, my father still thought it important to understand the work involved in living off our land.

The house was four bedrooms, two floors, brick and wood. It was built using authentic materials and was a perfect copy of the house that had stood on the property for over 100 years in the 19th and 20th centuries. The property had belonged to seven generations of Kirks; it was family legend that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Franklin Kirk, purchased the farm in 1843 from Isaac Cody, who was the father of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
*
My ancestors in the modern era let caretakers manage it, until my grandparents moved back there when they retired. My father, George Kirk, also always had a strong desire to live there.

He had grown up as one of the original “Starfleet brats”; his father, Tiberius Kirk, was already in his twenties when Starfleet Academy was founded, and though he applied, he wasn’t accepted. Still wanting to get out into space, Tiberius signed on in ordnance and supply, eventually serving on several of the then-new starbases. He met and married my paternal grandmother, Brunhilde Ann Milano, a nurse, on Starbase 8. My father was born there on December 13, 2206.

In those days, a child’s life on a starbase was pretty spartan; there weren’t a lot of families living on them, and the facilities were very limited. It was truly life on the frontier, and my father dreamed of getting back to see Earth, a dream that wouldn’t be fulfilled until he arrived for his first day at Starfleet Academy. It was my grandfather’s hope that his son would go to the academy, and admission had gotten even more competitive. But after rescuing five men after an explosion on the loading dock of Starbase 8, Tiberius was awarded the Starfleet Medal of Honor. And though my grandfather was still an enlisted man, the children of Medal of Honor winners are always given high priority during the admissions process.

My father graduated fifth in his class from the academy and, after serving a year as an instructor, was assigned to the
U.S.S. Los Angeles
(where he served with future captain Robert April). He was quickly promoted and eventually took the post of first officer aboard the
U.S.S. Kelvin
, when the previous first officer, Richard Robau, was promoted to captain. Over the course of six years he had moved up the ranks at record speed. If his career had continued, he might have been one of the youngest captains in the history of Starfleet, but his personal life led him in a different direction.

My mother, born Winona Davis, was also from a spacegoing family; her father, James Ogaleesha Davis (his middle name, as befit his heritage, was Native American Sioux, although I never did find out what it meant
*
), was in the first graduating class of Starfleet Academy; his wife, Wendy Felson, was in the third. My maternal grandfather was an engineer, my maternal grandmother a physician, and their daughter, my mother, attended the academy and decided she wanted to be an astrobiologist. She was four years younger than my father, and had him as an instructor in her Introduction to Federation History class.

“There were strict rules about students ‘fraternizing’ with instructors,” she told me, “and once I met your father, I wanted to break all of them.”

It is hard to know how many of the rules they actually broke, as a son usually doesn’t delve into those topics with his parents. However, when my father received his posting to the
Los Angeles
, the ship was still three months away from returning to Earth, so he asked for a short leave from his duties as an instructor, and immediately proposed to my mother.

“Most people assumed we’d made a terrible mistake,” my mom said, “but it was impossible for us to see a possible downside then. We were crazy in love.” And then, suddenly, the
Los Angeles
arrived, and my dad was off.

My mom was still in the academy and said she secretly hoped that they’d be posted together. It was over a year before she saw him next, and then almost two years after that, she graduated. She was not, however, posted to the same ship as Dad. Shortly after my mother was posted to the
U.S.S. Patton
, she discovered she was pregnant.

“Your father was aboard the
Los Angeles
then,” she told me, “and by the time the subspace message reached him I was already in my second trimester.”

Mom’s Starfleet career came to an abrupt halt; she took a leave of absence, moving in with my dad’s parents on Earth (her parents had passed away several years earlier) on the family farm. My brother, George Samuel, named for my father, was born on August 17, 2230.

The maximum amount of time my mother could stay away from Starfleet without resigning her commission was two years. For that period, she and my father were apart. She stayed on the farm and raised George with her in-laws, while she also continued her studies and completed a doctorate in astrobiology.

“It was a good time to be with George Jr.,” she said, “but I missed George Sr. This was not what I expected my life to be. My own mother had resigned her commission when she had me. She had raised my brother and me by herself since Dad was off in space. I was determined not to be a single parent, yet here I found myself doing just that.”

She told me she felt conflicted about leaving her two-year-old son. “Your grandparents were energetic and attentive, which made the decision a little easier, but I couldn’t get past the idea that I was abandoning my baby.”

Dad also missed Mom, and when the two years were up, he pulled whatever strings he could to get her posted to the
Kelvin
, where he was now the first officer. Unfortunately, soon after she arrived, she discovered she was pregnant again, this time with me.

My dad said Captain Robau was furious; even if regulations had allowed children aboard a ship, he wasn’t a commander who would’ve wanted it. However, that wasn’t really the impetus for Dad’s impending decision. Shortly after determining that my mother was pregnant, Dad received word that his father, Tiberius, had passed away.

“It was a strange ‘circle of life’ kind of moment,” my dad told me. “Though I’d grown up in space, my father had been with me the whole time. Now that he was gone, I realized I barely knew my first son, and I had a second child on the way. I wasn’t going to let your mom go home and raise our children by herself.” So he resigned his commission.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the decision Dad made and how it affected me. I have told many people that my father leaving Starfleet inspired my own career, to complete the career he didn’t get to finish. Though that is partially true, the rest of the story is a lot more complicated.

I was born on March 22, 2233, to a complete family: I grew up in a house with two parents, an older brother, and a grandmother. It was my own slice of heaven. I was protected, lived in a clean, safe world. But it was a façade; I just wasn’t sophisticated enough to see through it.

As I look back now, I can see that my parents were not happy. They didn’t fight, they didn’t even disagree openly, but the moments of warmth between them were rare. Mom worked hard around the house, but the work itself wasn’t what she wanted to do. I have a lot of memories of those times finding my mother off in a corner reading. My father was attentive to her, but not overly affectionate. He had strong ideas of what he wanted life on the farm to be like, and he got a lot of confirmation for this from his mother, Brunhilde, who still lived with us. Grandma Hilde had lived her whole life on the frontier of other worlds, and my memory of her was as a hardscrabble, somewhat unforgiving individual. My mother never saw herself as living on a farm, so she didn’t argue with how they wanted to do things, but the situation took its toll. Eventually, she decided to pursue her career again.

“It wasn’t what I wanted,” my father told me much later, “but I wanted her to be happy.”

“Sam, can I come in?” I said. (I was the only one who called my brother by his middle name. I don’t know how it started, but I kept calling him Sam well into adulthood.) I was standing outside of Sam’s bedroom. He was lying on his stomach reading. It had been only a few weeks after my mother departed. It had been very quiet around the house. My father had kept up our routines of school, chores, homework. My grandmother was looking after our meals and clothing, and we were all pretending like nothing had changed.