“Time bends,” the Guardian said cryptically. “The end is but the beginning.”
“What does that mean?” Kirk asked, but he knew better than to expect a straightforward answer-or any answer at all. When indeed the Guardian said nothing, Kirk turned and paced away from it. His boots scraped noisily along the hard terrain, and now he felt the chill movement of the air. It struck him that he had no protective garments, no clothing whatsoever beyond that which he wore right now. He had no shelter in this desolate place, no food, no water. In order to achieve his goals, he would therefore have only so much time-But of course he had access to time. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Guardian. If Kirk needed anything at all, it waited for him just on the other side of the vortex. He had only to call up a time and place, and then leap to it.
Virtually any time and place, Kirk thought. The researchers had found few limitations on what they could observe of the past beyond the time surrounding the actual origin of the Guardian. That means that it must be possible to access the moments when the Gr’oth had plummeted to the surface of this world. Persuading the Guardian of the reality of that event might or might not be critical in securing its compliance, but back in the nexus, the other Kirk had believed attempting to do so to be the right choice. Kirk himself had agreed. And maybe the Guardian can convince itself of its own demise, he thought.
Kirk turned and headed back to the Guardian. When he reached it, he said, “I wish to see tomorrow.” He knew that in the accounts that he had read of the research done at the Guardian, no mention had ever been made of the vortex displaying future events or allowing anybody to travel forward through time. He and the other Kirk had been aware that it might not be possible to find a direct route through the Guardian to 2293 or 2371-or in this case, to 2270, the year when the Gr’oth had slammed into the planet. He chose to see if being more specific in his request would make a difference.
“Guardian,” he said, “I wish to see the thirteenth day of June in the Earth year twenty-two seventy.” Once again, Kirk received no response, and so he decided to try an indirect path to the event. “I wish to see yesterday.”
Still nothing.
For an instant, panic gripped Kirk. He had expected that the Guardian might be either unwilling or unable to present the future to him, but he had no reason to think that it would not replay the past. It had done so before. In his previous trips here, it had shown him the history of humanity on Earth, the dawn of Orion civilization, and a recent day on the planet Vulcan.
Now, though, the vortex stood empty.
“‘Since before your sun burned hot in space,’” Kirk said to himself, quoting the Guardian. “‘Since before your race was born.’” When Kirk had exited the nexus, he had come five billion years into the past-or at least he had wanted to do so. He assumed for the moment that he had, despite having no real means of confirming that fact. But if he had arrived here that long ago, then Earth’s sun had yet to form in the cold reaches of space, and the evolution of humanity lay even further ahead in the future than that. Kirk had asked to see yesterday, but for human beings, right now, at this moment, today did not exist. With no today, how can there be a yesterday? Kirk thought. Have I come too far into the past to make use of the Guardian? He wondered too if he had inadvertently condemned himself to living his final days on this barren world, while at the same time being unable to do anything to prevent the destruction caused by the converging temporal loop.
But today exists for me, Kirk told himself. And so does yesterday. Once more, he would shift from the general to the specific. “Guardian, I wish to see my yesterday.”
“Behold,” it said. “A gateway to your own past, if you wish.”
A white mist spilled down from the top of the wide, roughly circular opening through the center of the Guardian’s ring. Then images began to form: Kirk’s mother giving birth, his brother Sam holding him as an infant, Kirk sleeping in a crib. This had been one of the ways in which the historians had learned to refine their requests of the Guardian. If it showed a thousand images of a ten-thousand-year epoch, it would present just ten scenes per century, making it difficult to view or navigate to particular points in time with much precision. Observing the course of a single life, though, because of its relative brevity, allowed for greater granularity: a thousand images displayed of Kirk’s sixty-year life would produce one scene for every three weeks he’d lived. The numbers worked out differently than that, and the Guardian didn’t always show moments spaced evenly apart, but the principle remained that you could see far more detail of a single life through the vortex than you could of a longer period.
Kirk continued to watch as his existence unfolded before him. He smiled when he saw himself tottering across the family living room and into Sam’s waiting arms, perhaps taking his first steps, but he also felt a deep melancholy as well; Sam had been gone now for almost half of Kirk’s life. Similar emotions played through his mind as his mother and father appeared, as his grandfather did, his uncle, all of them lost for so long at this point.
He closed his eyes when the colony on Tarsus IV materialized. At the age of thirteen, Kirk had been living there when the food supply had been all but wiped out by an exotic fungus. Governor Kodos had seized full power and declared martial law, then executed four thousand colonists in a horribly misguided and ultimately unnecessary attempt to save the other four thousand.
Kirk watched with interest, though, as he sped through Starfleet Academy. He saw himself as a young officer aboard the Republic, and then later, aboard the Farragut. Aboard the Enterprise, he saw Spock and Bones and Scotty.
And then the Guardian of Forever appeared. And then New York City in 1930. And then Edith.
Kirk turned away. He could not bear to see her. It occurred to him briefly that he could simply step through the time vortex and rejoin his beloved, save her from the traffic accident that had taken her from him—
But he had already made the decision once to sacrifice his own desires to preserve history. How could he in good conscience abandon that now? He had come here with a greater purpose than his own happiness, and he would see that effort through.
When Kirk peered back at the Guardian, he saw himself in gangster clothing on Sigma Iotia II. He fought the Kelvans as they commandeered the Enterprise, ferried the Dohlman of Elas to her arranged marriage on Troyius. He spoke with High Priestess Natira on Yonada, argued with the insane Captain Garth on Elba II, observed a glommer devouring a tribble.
As the period of the Klingon attack on the Einstein station approached, Kirk said, “Guardian, do you perceive yourself with the times that these images present?”
“I see all,” it said, a pronouncement startling for its lack of ambiguity.
Kirk thought for a moment how best to phrase what he would say next. “Then you will see the time when you will cease to exist,” he said. “I propose that you can avoid such an end by moving yourself through time.”
“All that will be, has already been,” the Guardian said inscrutably. “All that has been, will be.”
“Does that mean that you have already escaped the destruction caused by the starship?” Kirk asked. He did not anticipate a direct answer, but he wanted as much as possible to try to divine the Guardian’s intent, as well as any movement it might have made through time. When it did not reply to his question, he said, “In my lifetime, a temporal phenomenon has devastated a section of the galaxy between the years twenty-two ninety-three and twenty-three seventy-one, with a corresponding loss of life. I wish to prevent that from occurring.”