“Guinan,” Kirk said, “the crew aboard Picard’s Enterprise, were they pulled into the nexus?” He’d seen some of them vanish from the bridge when the bright light of the energy ribbon had touched them.
“Some of them were drawn into the nexus,” Guinan said, “but most were not.”
“Why?” Kirk asked. “Why not all of them?”
“It just depended on who was touched by the energy ribbon first,” she said, “and who was struck by the shock wave.”
Kirk nodded. The luck of the draw, he thought. He could just as easily have been ripped apart by the converging temporal loop as pulled back into the nexus.
But you didn’t die, he told himself. And that meant that he had a responsibility to do everything he could to find a way to undo the destruction that had been wrought on the universe. Many of the crew aboard Picard’s Enterprise had been killed, probably many of those aboard Harriman’s Enterprise as well, not to mention the hundreds of millions on Veridian IV and whatever other worlds had been impacted by the loop. “Guinan,” he said, “Picard left the nexus to go back to Veridian Three in the minutes before Soran launched his weapon. Where can I go?”
“Time has no meaning here,” Guinan said. “You can go anywhere, any time.” She paused, then asked, “But where would you go?”
Kirk looked at Guinan and asked himself the same question: Where would I go? But then he realized that he had asked the wrong question. He needed to determine not where he could go, and not even when, but what he could do.
Turning away from Guinan, Kirk peered out over the magnificent city below. The peal of the bells still drifted upward, a fragile melody that sounded almost as though the notes had been generated from the crystal buildings themselves. Now, though, Kirk stopped listening, stopped even seeing the great city, instead turning all of his senses inward.
After a few minutes, he bade Guinan good-bye.
FOUR
(2267/2276)
Kirk strode purposefully through the corridors of the Enterprise-his Enterprise. On the promontory overlooking the city of Lauresse, he had taken his leave of Guinan. He’d realized that she had come to him in order to help, and he’d told her how much he appreciated it. But as he’d begun to consider what actions he could take to reverse the devastation caused by the shock wave of the converging temporal loop, he’d discovered that he needed to do so alone. Guinan had understood, and she had reminded him that he had all of the nexus-essentially the entirety of his life, real or imagined-in which to find solitude.
When Kirk had reentered the nexus, he hadn’t chosen or participated in the events in which he’d then found himself: meeting Antonia for the first time, escaping the clutches of the proconsul on planet 892-IV, transporting down with a landing party to Gamma Trianguli VI. Prior to that, though, before he’d left the nexus with Picard, he had lived or relived much. Standing with Guinan above her city, he had harked back to those experiences, then turned from her-And stepped out of a turbolift and onto deck seventeen of the Enterprise.
Now, he walked among the crew of his first command, the familiar vibration of the ship telling him that it traveled at warp. Headed aft, he passed Yeoman Atkins and Ensign Nored, Crewman Moody and Lieutenant Leslie, offering each a curt nod. Nostalgia welled up within Kirk, along with the unexpected sentiment that these had been simpler, happier times in his life. He knew that hadn’t been the case, though. He remembered well the weight of responsibility that came with leading a crew, as well as the terrible cost that his position had claimed from him. He had loved Edith as he had loved no other woman, either before or after. For the most part, he had found fulfillment each day that he’d been able to step onto the bridge of the Enterprise or the Enterprise-A as its commanding officer, and he still felt that there had been something special about his first captaincy, but he could not deny the great scar it had placed permanently on his soul.
Kirk reached his destination and proceeded through the pale blue doors, which glided open at his approach. He marched down a short corridor, then turned right through a pair of irregularly shaped hexagonal entryways and onto the empty observation deck. Not wanting to deal with the more intense recollections that it might bring him if he spent time in his quarters, he had opted to come here, to this place he had occasionally visited during his years aboard ship. He’d selected this time, after the crew’s encounter with the Elluvex and before they reached the Pyris system, because he’d recalled having a few days of light duty. He also remembered coming here alone during that period and remaining undisturbed by any of the crew.
To his left, starting a meter or so above the deck and rising to the overhead, a pair of wide ports angled away from the bulkhead, allowing a view directly into the hangar deck. Kirk went to one of the ports and peered down. Situated on the combination turntable and lift at the center of the bay, a shuttlecraft-the Aristarchus, NCC-1701/9-sat ready for flight should it be needed. For just a second, the sight triggered thoughts of Kirk’s piloting drills back at the academy, but he quickly disregarded them. He hadn’t come here to reminisce.
Turning away from the hangar deck, Kirk looked across the narrow observation compartment at the viewports in the outer bulkhead. Through them he saw the stars, many stationary because of the Enterprise’s great distance from them, others seeming to move as the result of parallax. Even by this point in his career, Kirk had visited numerous planetary systems, but the vastness of the galaxy had always provided him new frontiers.
Some of that expanse had been destroyed now, though, and with it, lives lost. Kirk himself had evidently been the source of that destruction, albeit inadvertently. Regardless of his role in the catastrophe, though, he wanted to do something about it.
But it’s even more than that, he thought. Because of his part in what had happened, he might be the only person capable of taking action in these circumstances. Even if somebody outside the nexus could determine precisely what had taken place, what could they possibly do to counteract the damage that had been done?
Based not only upon what Guinan had told him, but also upon his experience with Picard on Veridian Three, Kirk believed that he could exit the nexus at any place and, of even greater import, at any time. More specifically, he could travel into the past, meaning that he could at least theoretically prevent the shock wave from ever occurring. Considering the nature and apparent cause of the converging temporal loop, Kirk reasoned that there could be only two ways of precluding it from developing: either he must stop himself from entering the nexus in 2293 or from exiting it in 2371. By accomplishing either of those goals, he would avert his existence-and that of the substantial set of chronometric particles within his body-at two distinct points in time with a conduit connecting them. Without those requirements, the temporal loop would not converge and the shock wave would not arise.
But if I don’t enter the nexus in twenty-two ninety-three, he thought, then the Enterprise-B and its crew and passengers would be destroyed by the energy ribbon. Kirk supposed that he might be able to travel back in time and find a means of saving the Enterprise without having to be down in the deflector control room, but if he did that, then he would not vanish and be presumed dead. In that case, he would alter the timeline, something he must avoid doing; he had already sacrificed his own happiness to preserve history, and he would not allow time to be changed now.
And there’s another problem, Kirk thought. If he didn’t enter the nexus in the first place, then clearly he would never leave it. That would provide another means of preventing the temporal loop, but if he didn’t leave the nexus to assist Picard on Veridian Three, then Soran would succeed at launching his weapon and the population of two hundred thirty million on Veridian IV would die. The calculus seemed impossible to negotiate.