“Well, when he gets back,” Edith said, “I’ll have to ask him about you…perhaps about what you were like as a boy.”

“Whatever he tells you, don’t believe it,” Kirk joked, despite the impossibility of such a meeting ever occurring. “They’ll just be the musings of a man jealous of his younger brother.”

“Oh, I see,” Edith said. “And what reason does Sam have to be jealous of you?”

Kirk felt the smile on his lips fade as he stared up into the darkness where he knew Edith’s face to be. “For one thing, because I have you.” He knew that this relationship with Edith would end, that it must end, and yet in this isolated time with her, none of that mattered. “The entire universe should envy me because I have you in my life.” Even though his time with her would end up measured merely in days, he still believed that.

“You are very sweet, Mister Kirk,” Edith whispered. Again, he felt her lips touch his. They kissed slowly, passionately.

When at last their lips parted, Kirk said, “I love you.”

“And I love you,” Edith responded.

Kirk’s heart had never been so full, and even though he knew that it never would be again, right now, he didn’t care. If he could freeze time, preserve this moment in amber, he would, but he ignored the fact that he couldn’t. He threw himself wholly into this instant, opened himself up to experience every trace of emotion within him.

“Edith,” he said, loving even the sound of her name. He pulled her down on top of him, and once more, they moved together in the darkness of her room. He wished the night would last forever.

NINE

(2271/2276)

In the parkland outside Mojave, California, Jim Kirk peered at the other version of himself and wondered which one of them had gone mad. His wounded double had suggested a plan to prevent the converging temporal loop by using the Guardian of Forever in the year 2293, despite that the mysterious artifact had been annihilated in 2270 when Korax had crashed his battle cruiser into it. “Yes,” Kirk said, agreeing with his bloodied counterpart about the flaw in the plan. “The Klingons.”

“I’m hoping it won’t matter,” said the other Kirk.

“Hoping?” Kirk said, uncomfortable with the idea of leaving anything to chance. But then his alter ego explained why he believed that his plan would work, despite-perhaps even because of-Korax’s final destructive act. It would require an action, the success of which could not be guaranteed, but Kirk also felt confident that it could be achieved. If not, then there would be one other possibility for success, though it would be arduous and risky. Of course, all of this posed a risk.

“So where do I begin?” he asked. “How do I leave the nexus?”

“Here,” the other Kirk said, and he held out his arm as though ushering Kirk into a room.

Kirk looked to where his counterpart motioned, and there he saw not the spires and edifices of Mojave, but a dim, open plain. Above, a sunless sky provided only the faint illumination of the stars. He peered about and saw only a flat, empty expanse stretching away in every direction. It took him a moment, but then he recognized their location: one of the artificial worlds of the Otevrel.

He gazed over at the other Kirk and noticed him bathed in the yellow glow of the old self-contained life support belts. Glancing down, he saw a similar radiance about his own body, one of the belts encircling his own waist. He knew that by the time the Enterprise had encountered the Otevrel, the life support belts had fallen out of use in Starfleet because of health concerns, but then he had already learned well that what had occurred in the real, physical universe often did not get reproduced precisely in the nexus.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

The other Kirk shrugged. “This seems to be the place from which you or I can leave the nexus,” he said. “I’m sure it doesn’t have to be this place, but this is what my mind conjured up when I first intended to depart.”

Kirk nodded. That explanation made no more or less sense than anything else within this timeless, unreal domain. “So where should I begin?” he asked. “And when?”

“You remember the historical research done on the Guardian’s world, the efforts made to identify the origin of the time vortex,” the other Kirk said. Though he had offered a statement of fact rather than asking a question, his tone invited a response.

“Yes,” he said. The scientists had discovered that, at least according to the record provided by the Guardian, the planet on which it had stood had existed, essentially without change, since almost the beginning of the universe. The Guardian’s own genesis had remained unknown, though, since the vortex had never shown the period of time in which it had initially appeared on the planet.

“And you recall the first words the Guardian uttered when we discovered it,” the other Kirk said.

“Yes,” he said. “‘Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question.’”

“That’s where you’re going,” the other Kirk said. “That’s when you’re going.”

“You’re talking billions of years ago,” Kirk said.

“Yes,” the other Kirk said. “Otherwise you would contradict what the Guardian said, and thereby alter history.”

Kirk nodded slowly. He understood. “How do I do it?” he asked.

“I think you just need to imagine when and where you want to go.”

Kirk did. He envisioned the time vortex, thought as best he could about the age before Earth’s sun had ignited in space. He turned to his left, away from his counterpart, and suddenly a gleaming white light began to shine before him, as though growing out of the nexus itself. The black sky, the white specks of the stars, the steel gray of the Otevrel world, all blurred and paled. Kirk stepped forward, and the field of white enfolded him. For a subjectively immeasurable span of time, he could see nothing, could hear nothing, could sense nothing. Even the feel of his own body vanished, as though he existed only as thought. He wanted to run but had no legs, wanted to scream but had no voice-II

Under Twilight Brooding Dim

Onward led the road again

Through the sad uncolored plain

Under twilight brooding dim,

And along the utmost rim

Wall and rampart risen to sight

Cast a shadow not of night,

And beyond them seemed to glow

Bonfires lighted long ago.

And my dark conductor broke

Silence at my side and spoke,

Saying, “You conjecture well:

Yonder is the gate of hell.”

- A. E. Housman,

“Hell Gate”

TEN

Before Sol Burned Hot in Space

Beneath the leaden sky, the land looked different than it would five billion years from now, but only marginally so. Several new-Or old, Kirk corrected himself-rock formations climbed from the rugged soil, while others he had once seen here had yet to take shape. This long ago, a number of fissures had not opened in the ground, though some looked to him as though they would remain essentially unaltered in the millennia to come. In the distance, where he and Spock and the rest of the Enterprise landing party had observed archeological ruins during their initial visit here, Kirk now saw nothing.

The Guardian of Forever appeared completely unchanged. The sepia-toned ring stood on edge a dozen or so meters ahead of Kirk, the irregularly flowing shape perhaps two and a half times his height and looking just as it had on the day he’d first set eyes on it. The scientists and historians who had studied the enigmatic artifact had reported its seemingly fixed nature even across eons, but Kirk had no idea how that could be possible. Doesn’t everything change with time? he asked himself, and then he supposed that his question had its own answer embedded within it: time. The Guardian clearly had a significant measure of control over time in a fundamental way, a control that could be readily witnessed, but that had yet to be explained.