Strange New Worlds 2016 (36 page)

“Are you a fast reader?”

“No, but we’ve got seventy years.”

Tuvok took the opportunity to interject. “I have always understood the theme as this:
‘Love each other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love
for each other.’ ”

Chakotay smirked in amusement. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Tuvok. Did you teach
literary criticism at the Academy?”

“I taught many things.”

Janeway chuckled. “Well, you’ve made my point. You can’t have that kind of love without
real trust.”

Chakotay was uncertain if he agreed with the literary interpretation, but he didn’t
care much at the moment. He agreed with the sentiment in any case.

“I supoose if Mister Suder were with us,” Tuvok added, “he would point out that his
intent was to use violence as a shortcut to building that trust.”

“Well, Tuvok, it’s a good thing both of our crews started this voyage with the same
belief: Doing the right thing is more important than taking shortcuts.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, gentlemen. However we got here, we’re where we need to be. Let’s keep building
on that. Dismissed.”

Tuvok sat in his quarters, where he had been meditating on the newly revealed history
of the troubled crewman who had become his unintended protégé. He inspected Suder’s
orchid. Tuvok had chosen to care for it personally, at least for now.

He took a moment to apply a gentle mist to the leaves. It was astonishing how with
such little care the orchid was already showing signs of recovery. Tuvok had considered
clipping the stem or removing the wilting petals, but now he began to suspect this
may not be necessary. It didn’t need drastic measures in order to heal itself. It
would just need consistent, gentle care.

Sometimes in building strength, a little gentleness was all that was needed.

L
IFE
A
MONG THE
P
OST
-I
NDUSTRIAL
B
ARBARIANS

John Coffren

I
WASN
’
T ALWAYS PARANOID
.
Thirty years of pacing up and down this three-kilometer stretch has left me terribly
alone. Even among the daily throng that flooded Hermosa Avenue to purchase trinkets
from vendors or expose themselves to near-lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, I
was unnoticed and unwanted.

All my worldly possessions traveled with me inside this cart that I pushed along palm
tree–laden paths. The two-by-four and hockey stick near the front were my only defense
against the predatory humans. They slunk about with sullen looks and sharp eyes and
considered the merciless beating of an old man a momentary distraction from the boring
tedium that was their life.

Quasi-Cardassian totalitarians patrolled this beach too and looked for any excuse
to unsheathe their wooden batons and strike me in places that left no mark or abrasion
on my skin, but had me reeling in pain for days.

I tried to avoid them.

The rest of the population paraded about half-naked and totally consumed with their
own unimportant lives. They resisted any social interaction by ignoring me. If eye
contact was made, they quickly dismissed it by looking away or through me. Besides,
they were in love with their first-generation communicators. Wait until the true potential
of their mobile phones was unlocked. All these zombies will never put them down.

Why did I even try to save these ingrates? Most of them will die in the big quake
fifty years from now. Sadly enough, I went on trying because I failed these miserable
simians and took their future away from them. My mission became my life’s work. I
posted signs, warnings of the coming apocalypse. They showed their gratitude by incarcerating
me in jails and mental institutions. And when they called me captain, it was only
to mock me.

I carried a keepsake on my person, because if I left it back in the alley these greedy
people would steal it just as surely as they’ve stolen nearly everything else I brought
with me to this wretched century. Underneath my dirty gray overcoat and pinned to
my threadbare brown vest was a relic from a lost era: my combadge.

The burgundy and blue, my command uniform, lay neatly folded inside a plastic bag
near the bottom of the cart. I cut quite a handsome figure in it back in the day.
It would look ridiculous hanging off my bony frame now.

My clothes and combadge were my only possessions when I initiated an emergency beam
out over the High Sierras thirty years ago. I had no choice. The impact would have
killed me. And Henry Starling would have gladly stepped over my lifeless body to unlock
the technological secrets of my timeship.

The
Aeon
had been badly damaged in the Delta Quadrant. When full phasers failed,
Voyager
emitted a high-energy polaron pulse to overload my subatomic disruptor. If those
fools had only turned off the deflector pulse, I could have saved the future. Janeway
couldn’t see past the prow of her ship. One hundred and fifty lives for untold billions
seemed a fair exchange to her.

She never saw the debris: remains of her own ship, a section of the secondary hull,
floating amidst the smashed rubble of the Sol star system. She was already dead. Better
for my century that she, her crew, and ship perish in the cold, lonely reaches of
the Delta Quadrant than in our crowded solar system.

Tough decisions come with rank. Once near the Horsehead Nebula, I vaporized a subwarp
transport ship that carried five hundred colonists en route to a new homeworld on
Cestus III. Among them, a temporal agent of the Na’Kuhl, who would start a genocidal
war that would cost billions of lives and create political instability in that sector
for centuries. Our records were sketchy. I accessed a fragment of a passenger list,
and armed with that knowledge I carried out my orders.

The timestream is littered with scheming aliens: Romulans, Vorgons, and Krenim to
name a few, who must be dealt with swiftly and severely. They must be separated from
dangerous artifacts like the Guardian of Forever, the Tox Uthat, and chroniton torpedoes.

There was no room for half measures or a crisis of conscience.

This mission was booby-trapped with so many improbabilities: a twenty-fourth-century
starship crippling a twenty-ninth-century timeship, a Neanderthal repairing and flying
a Model 86, and the one man sent to save a world ends up destroying it.

I should have powered up weapons inside the temporal rift where
Voyager
’s sensors couldn’t penetrate and come out firing. I should have realized a warp core
implosion can’t obliterate a star system, but an uncalibrated temporal matrix can
and did. A leads to B leads to C leads to A.

An unexpected outcome left me stranded in the past with no hope of rescue. In Janeway’s
time, Federation crews lost in the past harbored no dreams of returning to their timeline
and were instructed to stay out of history’s way. In my time, the Temporal Integrity
Commission scanned the timestream for anomalies including marooned captains.

But there was no one left in my future to come looking for me or to find me rooting
around in waste receptacles for my next meal. Maybe it was better this way. Still,
I carried the foreknowledge that my stolen timeship will cause the future’s end. Being
stranded in this post-industrial hell seemed a light sentence for such a terrible
crime.

Castaways from any age must eventually abandon the shoreline and seek shelter inland.
An abandoned cargo container that still housed the husk of one of their internal-combustion
vehicles became my makeshift home. My crooked spine came from one night too many spent
on that yellow sofa with missing cushions. A shredded orange-and-white parachute did
a poor job of keeping me dry during rainstorms. Heaps of refuse—tires, hubcaps, trash
cans, and crates—piled up next to towering brick walls that soared dozens of meters
overhead. I’ve scrawled on these walls painted warnings, predictions:

THE END IS COMING

THE END OF THE FUTURE

APOCALYPSE

THERE WILL BE NO TOMORROWS.

My warnings went unheeded by these hedonists. I might as well have screamed in Klingon
for all the good it did me and them. Sometimes I found myself screaming over missing
pencils or that thief Starling’s latest philanthropic gesture. They usually ignored
me. Occasionally, they reported me to the local authorities.

When night fell and the stars came out, I forgot about my current plight and dreamed
of my past, the future. Most of my dreams were of the confident young man I was who
captained a ship that could open vistas in the pulse-flows of time.

I’ve traveled backward to zero, to marvel at the birth of the universe in all its
fiery, wonderful glory, and forward five hundred years beyond my own time to record
sights at the limits of human comprehension. I’ve witnessed the nightmare of the Alpha
Quadrant overrun by Dominion forces and reviewed holorecords of an invasion plan into
Earth’s past made by hostile interdimensional beings from fluidic space. I’ve defused
temporal disruptors and navigated the Briar Patch at hyper-impulse speeds.

Such talk was considered lunacy by these fools and earned me a syringe full of primitive
pharmaceuticals and a padded cell. Gentle remonstrations from damn social workers
was the only solace to be found. They advised me to see their doctors. Doctors, what
a laugh. Their counselors lacked empathic powers or even formal training. The medics
of these dark ages couldn’t even cure a cold, repair neural pathways, or regenerate
damaged tissue. I might as well have danced around some ceremonial fire on one of
the stone-age planets in the Taurus system.

This was all her fault. But sooner or later I knew she’d show up.

Kathryn Janeway lived long enough to fulfill a promise made to her crew. She got them
home, four hundred years too early. I mistook her for a local dressed all in white.
After my anger subsided, I welcomed her affectionately, calling her “dear.” The thought
of returning with her to
Voyager
and leaving this miserable backwater era crossed my mind. I could have constructed
an interplexing time beacon in one of the ship’s cargo bays using technology she never
knew existed or even guessed at its awesome potential. I would have had to work fast,
though. She destroyed her ship and crew before and was prepared to do so again.

I’ve learned to accept my fate, my role in this tragedy. Janeway couldn’t. And by
failing to accept it, she was doomed to repeat the same mistake over and over and
over again. Causality loops work with such flawless certainty.

I didn’t expect any visitors after Janeway and Chakotay.

The cycle of causality had one final turn left to make.

A sound I hadn’t heard in decades and a voice I heard every day interrupted my fitful
sleep. I stood straight up, amazed by how lifelike my dream was. Until I heard that
sound wide awake.

My hand dove inside my jacket and ruffled my frumpy clothes. A single chirp broke
the silence for a third time. Incredulously, I looked at the combadge I held in my
hand, recently plucked free of my greasy vest. My dry mouth seemed incapable of forming
a response. Slowly, I whispered, “Who the hell is this?”

“Captain Braxton of the
Timeship Relativity
.”
The strange voice didn’t belong to me. It sounded automated, stripped of any inflection,
vitality, life.

Suddenly, I realized that my latest blunder had called on me.

I’d underestimated the resourceful Captain Janeway again. Somehow she managed to stop
Starling, this time without sacrificing her ship and crew, and broke the cycle of
causality. She succeeded where I failed and rescued the future.

“What do you want?” I asked. “And this had better not be another one of my hallucinations.”

“We need your help. Get over to the Chronowerx Industries building on East Third Street
and Route one-oh-one and retrieve or destroy the HyperPro PC prototype.”

I burst out laughing. Even mad, I still had a sense of humor.

“You want me to break into Starling’s building and steal a museum piece. Why?”

“That museum piece, as you call it, has twenty-ninth-century code hidden in twentieth
-century machine text. And there are a pair of criminals en route to your location
attempting to steal the device. If they successfully return to their century with
the personal computer, it will cause a temporal incursion and power shift that will
prove disastrous for the Federation.”

I stroked my matted gray beard and thought for a moment before I spoke, a practice
I all but abandoned in this century.

“Why don’t you send a member of your crew?” I said.

“I’m doing one better. I’m sending the captain.”
He paused a moment before continuing.
“You haven’t forgotten about the dangers of time travel? Life in the twentieth century
hasn’t dulled your mind that much, has it? Sensory aphasia ring a bell? Look at this
problem from the big chair. Why risk a crew member when we already have an agent in
the field? Don’t you want to do more than scribble warnings on pieces of cardboard
and tape them to lamp posts all over town?”

“You’ve been monitoring my activities.”

“Of course,”
he said.

“Why didn’t you rescue me instead of leaving me to rot for thirty years?”

“From my perspective, I just got here.
Tempus fugit
. And I know you, quite literally, like I know myself. You know what I’m saying is
true. You want to save lives. You want to make a difference and you can do that again.”

He was reminding me of my duty. I would have done the same if our roles were reversed.
But he didn’t have thirty years of life experience in this zinc-plated vacuum-tubed
culture. I did.