FIC: Like the Stars, Like Your Destiny (1/5)
Like the Stars, Like Your Destiny
Part 1 of 5
Title: Like the Stars, Like Your Destiny
Author: anodyna
Characters/Pairings: Nyota Uhura, Spock/Uhura, Gaila, Spock Prime & ensemble
Rating: R for sensuality and Vulcan poetry references
Warnings: Vulcan poetry references!
Summary: Nyota Uhura has always been drawn to things that resist her understanding. Finding out she's lived her entire life in an alternate reality is a mystery she's not sure she can solve. Sleeplessness and self-examination ensue.
Sometimes at night Nyota Uhura lies awake and thinks about alternate realities.
This time it's a dream that wakes her, and she opens her eyes to the dim of the ship's artificial night. For a moment she doesn't know where she is; her mind is still half in the world of the dream. Then she comes back to herself. She's on the Enterprise. These are Spock's quarters.
Nyota dozed off before Spock returned from his shift but he's there now, lying beside her in his familiar posture of sleep. Her eyes sweep the room and she smiles to herself at the evidence of his efforts not to wake her: the second teacup left next to hers on the table, his uniform draped haphazardly over the chair, and the clear ten inches of space he left between them when he finally slipped into bed beside her.
Nyota sees his intention as clearly as if he'd spoken it to her, but in sleep his body will do what it will. One hand at least has disobeyed his orders, reached out across those ten inches to rest lightly in hers, an unconscious gesture of affection.
Spock sleeps so little, it's a rare pleasure for her to watch him. With her eyes she traces the familiar lines of his face--the expressive brows, the dark lashes fanned against his cheek, the sharp line of his nose and the soft bow of his mouth. Awake he is always thinking, always with his keen expression and quick, focused movements. Asleep he loses that intensity; it drops away from him and is replaced by something that fills her with an almost painful tenderness.
It's so tempting to wake him. Nyota imagines herself reaching out and touching his face, tracing his ear with her fingers, brushing her thumb against his lips. If she does it long enough, eventually he will wake, coming out of his deep sleep like a diver returning to the surface. But she won't. If he's sleeping it's because he needs it, and she can wait.
She checks the timescreen beside the bed: 0216 hours. Midway through artificial night, and the room is almost perfectly silent; the soundproofing of the officer's quarters is one of the great engineering marvels of the Enterprise. Only the stars moving slowly past the window and the faraway vibration of the engines remind her that she is on a starship, not in some quiet Terran hotel.
Nyota could, if she wished, bring the holovid screen down over the window and complete the illusion of Terran night. But space is too new for her, this adventure too long-awaited for her to retreat from any part of it now. In any case it feels wrong to pretend at Terran night in Spock's quarters; it should be Vulcan night, she thinks. And for now the loss of Vulcan is too fresh for such a reminder to be welcome.
"Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum is disrupted, our destinies have changed."
As soon as Spock said it, she understood it to be true. And not only from that moment: for decades before things had been changing, beginning with the Narada's attack on the USS Kelvin and radiating outward from that event, ripples of cause and effect leading they know not where.
She wants to know. Alternate reality is an anomaly, and Nyota Uhura specializes in anomalies. She turns it over again in her mind, replaying it like a subspace transmission, waiting for the static to resolve into meaning.
It's clear, at least, where it begins: Twenty-five years ago, with the Narada tearing through a hole in space-time and destroying the Kelvin. That moment is the first point of concentrated change, like a dark drop of blood blooming in water. And like blood in water there is a moment when everything is suspended: those die who would not have died, those who survive are altered, the history of a moment is rewritten. Then the whole thing begins to spiral apart. Long tendrils of effect and aftereffect form and unfurl. They spread and break and grow indistinct, until they are absorbed into time and become untraceable.
Logically, Nyota knows it can't be otherwise; that the nature of alternate reality is to be imperceptible to those who are experiencing it. For them--for her--there is no "alternate." There is only what is, only "reality." Still, she tries.
Hikaru Sulu's parents met because of the Kelvin. His father escaped the disaster in a shuttle that was picked up by the USS Cavanaugh, where Sulu's mother was a medic. If not for the attack on the Kelvin, that meeting wouldn't have happened. And yet, Sulu existed in the original timeline. He'd still been born; his parents had still met, just some other way. Maybe at Spacedock, maybe at a party. Whatever change there was, it wasn't great enough to prevent Hikaru Sulu from being where he needed to be--where they needed him to be--when the Narada returned.
Then there was Jim Kirk. Of all the survivors of the Kelvin, his life was the most obviously altered. This Jim Kirk had grown up without his father, and what had that done? Nyota tries to imagine the little boy Jim, with a mother traumatized by grief, not knowing his father and probably not understanding why he wasn't there. To a small child his father's decision to sacrifice himself to save others might feel like abandonment instead. Jim grew up reckless and angry, unsure of his place in the world--and he almost didn't make it, period, let alone make it to Starfleet.
But then--he did. Something tipped things back, and was that how it worked? Did the time continuum find ways to right itself that they don't comprehend? Or is it just as simple as this: That they are who they are; that within each of them there is something essential that cannot be altered. That maybe it's not the continuum that rights itself. Maybe it's them.
Nyota pictures the night she and Jim met at the Shipyard Bar. It was a fluke, an accident, but it changed something--his life at least, probably hers too. She ticks it off in her mind: If she'd been ten minutes later arriving; if her Romulan morphology project hadn't been so successful that she felt like celebrating; if Jim had hit on some other girl first, or gotten beat up by locals instead of Starfleet Cadets; if Captain Pike hadn't intervened. So many ifs, and if you take away any one, the outcome would change. And even though Nyota knows, logically, that any event looks like a chain of wild coincidence when you start considering alternatives, in this case she really wonders. She thinks about all those circumstances rushing together, hurtling toward Jim Kirk like space debris being sucked into a gravity well.
It doesn't feel accidental. It feels like fate.
The timescreen blinks 0237. She could lie here all night, she thinks, and every night after, and never exhaust her curiosity about what's happened, or stop wondering what's ahead. She cannot know the future; she's accepted this in theory. It's only the knowledge that time has been disrupted--that one future for them has already happened--that has turned this perfectly ordinary fact into a provocation.
Nyota has always been drawn to things that resist her understanding: difficult languages, alien cultures, space and subspace and the universe in all its complexity. She loves a good mystery. It's what led her to Xenolinguistics and brought her to Starfleet. It drives who she is, and who she loves.
Her life has become part of the mystery now. And maybe her destiny didn't come for her all at once like Jim Kirk's did, but she doesn't mind. She thinks it began arriving a long time ago. She sees her past in her mind like a great bundle of threads, each one a little choice, a step this way and not that, a moment that changed something. They still keep spinning, and Nyota keeps gathering them together. Somehow from these threads, she thinks, the fabric of her destiny will be made.
She's in the mood for thinking anyway, and she has all night.
****
Nyota's gift for language is apparent before she is even three years old.
It starts at home, around her family's table, where visitors from the university gather to discuss her mother's work. They come from all Terran regions and sometimes from other worlds, and they speak in ways Nyota has never heard before. When the other children are sent to bed, she lingers to listen, making herself invisible behind her mother's chair.
Everything Nyota hears she stores up in her mind, saving words and phrases so she can ask her mother later to explain them. And mostly her mother does, leaving out certain parts that are too hard for a little girl to understand--things about politics, and violence, and war. Eventually even these words become understandable to Nyota, and she doesn't need her mother's translations anymore.
When, at eight, Nyota expresses an interest in becoming more proficient in Standard, her aunt Hadiya presents her with a series of books: the popular adventures of Anouk Ashmai, a young woman in Starfleet. Nyota embraces them eagerly, beginning with the first volume, Anouk Ashmai: Starfleet Cadet. Then the next four, in rapid succession: Anouk Ashmai: Her First Voyage; Anouk Ashmai: Starfleet Investigator; Anouk Ashmai Beyond the Galaxy; and Nyota's favorite, Anouk Ashmai: Destiny in the Stars.
It's love at first reading for Nyota. Anouk Ashmai is brave and kind, smart and attractive, and solves mysteries in space. Nyota begins to wonder if perhaps there are mysteries around her own home she can solve. While waiting for one to appear, she contents herself with practicing Anouk's elegant Standard phrasing and careful manners. She begins to look at the stars differently, imagining Anouk Ashmai traveling among them on her latest Starfleet assignment.
Nyota's mother is less delighted with Anouk Ashmai. "I don't know why you chose those books for her," Nyota hears her mother saying to her aunt one day in the kitchen. "Why can't Nyota learn Standard from medical texts, like we did?"
"Like you did, Bina," her aunt replies mildly. "I learned Standard from reading love poetry." There is a pause and the sound of clinking glasses. "You may recall there was a certain professor involved..." Her aunt's voice disappears as she closes the kitchen door, ending Nyota's eavesdropping.
Nyota masters Standard long before she tires of reading about Anouk Ashmai. She carries the little PADD where the books are stored everywhere, in case she finds herself with free time and nothing to do. More than once her mother catches her reading at night, betrayed by the glow of the viewscreen under her bedroom door.
Nyota is sitting on the veranda reading the 21st volume in the series, Anouk Ashmai and the Mount Seleya Mystery, when her brother comes around the corner of the house. "What's next," he teases, taking all three steps in one jump, "'Anouk Ashmai Reads the Dictionary for Fun'?"
Her sister runs past laughing. "More like, 'Anouk Ashmai: Perpetual Virgin'!"
"Reading the dictionary is fun!" Nyota shouts after them, not because she is stung but because her brother likes it when she pretends to be.
"Anyway I think Anouk and the Admiral like each other," she adds, to herself.
****
The summer she is thirteen, Nyota discovers the holovid library at her mother's university. She loves its cool, dark viewing rooms--so different from the glaring heat of the summer day outside--and even more what the library has inside it. All of history, culture, language and literature can be found there, available to her at the touch of a screen. For a girl of Nyota's relentless curiosity, it's heaven.
For three months Nyota spends her free afternoons there. She sits rapt in the dark viewing room as holovids unfold around her, playing out past events, making her feel as if she were there. She begins with Terran history, but her interests quickly evolve and multiply. She immerses herself in space travel, history of Federation planets, alien life forms, great moments in interplanetary diplomacy--and her secret passion, Starfleet. Secret, because Nyota senses her mother would not approve.
In the quiet darkness of the viewing rooms, her mother's approval is not required. So Nyota indulges herself, devouring the library's offerings on the origins and history of Starfleet. She watches everything, from vids so old they're two-dimensional to full-surround simulations of starships that haven't been launched yet. She travels to the surfaces of every Federation planet, from icy Andor to desert Vulcan, learns their histories and cultures, and hears their languages spoken. It's fascinating, like the adventures of Anouk Ashmai but with less flowery language and more real dirt and action.
The holovid library is Nyota's home away from home for a whole school year before she makes her greatest discovery yet: The library houses Starfleet Archives. These are not the polished, edited reenactments she is used to. The Archives are raw data, just as it was collected: recorded transmissions and flight plans; reports on subspace anomalies; scientific data and ship's manifests. And holovids too, but from actual incidents. Many are complete ship's recordings, with captain's logs and visuals, showing missions of all kinds and all degrees of success. Others are just fragments--broken pieces, half-erased, accounts stitched together from the testimony of witnesses and survivors. In some cases, where a mission had gone horribly wrong, the visual is gone and all that's left is sound.
It's natural that Nyota is drawn to these parts of the archive. She's been looking for mysteries her whole life so far, and here are real mysteries, real voices from the outer reaches of space. She wonders, with all the self-confidence of fourteen, if she might hear something in the recordings that no one has before. A clue maybe, that would reveal itself only to her.
This is how Nyota Uhura finds the Kelvin. Not in her Academy textbooks or in the dissertation she would read four years later in preparation for meeting Captain Pike, but in the darkness of a holovid library, on a spring afternoon when she is fourteen years old. She sits frozen in the darkness as the recording uncurls around her, and listens to the death of a ship.
She never tells her mother.
Two months later, Nyota begins studying Romulan.
****
"Nyota, I conclude you do not understand your mother's objections to your interest in Starfleet."
Aunt Hadiya stands politely before her, waiting for Nyota to look up from the book she is pretending to read. Nyota has come to sit under the shade tree in the garden to escape another argument with her mother. Her aunt, it seems, prefers to continue the discussion. Nyota lowers her book and her aunt takes the seat beside her.
"You're right, I don't understand," she says. "My mother works for peace and an end to violence. Starfleet is a humanitarian and peacekeeping armada. The goals are the same."
Hadiya smiles at her niece's carefully phrased argument. It is clear Nyota has been preparing to say it for some time. She looks up into the leaves of the tree and chooses her own words carefully. "Nyota, you know many things for such a young girl. I will tell you something you don't know. I will tell you why your mother is afraid for you to join Starfleet."
At the word "afraid," Nyota goes still. She glances at her aunt in surprise, but Hadiya does not appear to notice. She continues to look up at the leaves as if she is reading something there.
"When Bina and I were new doctors, just out of medical school, there was a terrible disaster. A starship was destroyed, far out on the edge of Federation space." Hadiya does not react to Nyota's intake of breath, but her eyes shift to the horizon and she frowns. "They brought survivors to our hospital. But their injuries were so terrible, like nothing we had ever seen. Burns that never stopped burning. Flesh that died without healing until a limb was gone. No one knew what weapons could do these things, or where they had come from. We felt we were living a nightmare each day."
Nyota is speechless. She has never heard of this; it is like a thread in her mother's life has been torn away and she is only now seeing the hole it left behind. "What--what did you do?" she asks, her voice barely audible.
Her aunt smiles, a smile that is neither happy nor sad. "We went on. We healed who we could, we gathered our strength, and we continued our work. For me, that work has been medicine. For Bina, it became something else. She chose to work toward securing peace between worlds, so that future generations will not know that horror. But now you, Nyota--"
"I wish to join Starfleet, and she fears for my safety. That I will be injured. Or killed. Or worse." Nyota expects to feel afraid herself as she says the words, and is surprised to find she does not.
"Yes, exactly. Your mother is a brave person, braver than almost anyone I know, but you are her child. She looks at you, nearly grown up, and sees the helpless baby she carried. She remembers the broken bodies of the injured and in her mind, it's you. She knows it is isn't logical. You are a strong young woman with a strong mind. You can weight the risks of your choices for yourself. Your mother is only holding on to the hope that you will choose another path than Starfleet."
Nyota is silent for a few minutes, absorbing her aunt's words. The air around them is full of sound: the rustling of the leaves in the tree, bees humming in the flowers, the distant whine of a hovercar; and farthest away the voices of the younger children, counting off in some game of their own invention. To Nyota it seems as if all of Terra is sending her a message, if only she can translate its meaning. Finally, she turns to her aunt.
"Thank you for telling me. I understand my mother's fears. But Starfleet is my only choice." She pauses for a moment; then adds, quietly as if her mother might overhear, "I believe it is my destiny."
Hadiya laughs her quiet laugh, like a breath of steam escaping from a kettle. She stands up to brush off her skirt, and turns to Nyota with the same happy-sad smile as before. "Nyota, of all the people I know, you're the first one I would choose if I were in charge of giving out destinies." Then her face turns serious. "If you're really determined to join Starfleet, you will not let anyone's doubts interfere with your plans. You will simply work harder, and keep choosing the path that leads where you want to go. If you do this, if you do it bravely, eventually even your mother will accept that your choice is the right one."
Nyota takes a deep breath, and feels herself exhilarated. "I will, Aunt."
"I know you will, Nyota," her aunt replies. "I've never doubted you."
****
In Anouk Ashmai: Her Journey Begins, when Anouk left her parents to go join Starfleet, her father hugged her tearfully. "Anouk," he said, "I could not have parted with you for anything less than the whole universe."
When Nyota Uhura boards the transport that will take her to Starfleet Academy, her mother says, "Nyota, I hope you know what you're doing. Remember you can always work in your aunt's clinic if you change your mind."
Nyota watches out the window as the transport pulls away and her mother and aunt grow smaller and smaller on the platform. "I could not have parted with you for anything less than the whole universe," she whispers to their tiny figures. She turns around in her seat and draws a deep, calming breath. Then she says it again, in Kiswahili this time. Then in Arabic, French, Mandarin, Urdu, two dialects of Romulan (one much better than the other but she'll practice), and Andorian so terrible that an Andorian sitting on the other side of the transport looks over and crinkles his antenna in disapproval.
She already knows she will never change her mind.
****
Continue to Part 2
Part 1 of 5
Title: Like the Stars, Like Your Destiny
Author: anodyna
Characters/Pairings: Nyota Uhura, Spock/Uhura, Gaila, Spock Prime & ensemble
Rating: R for sensuality and Vulcan poetry references
Warnings: Vulcan poetry references!
Summary: Nyota Uhura has always been drawn to things that resist her understanding. Finding out she's lived her entire life in an alternate reality is a mystery she's not sure she can solve. Sleeplessness and self-examination ensue.
Sometimes at night Nyota Uhura lies awake and thinks about alternate realities.
This time it's a dream that wakes her, and she opens her eyes to the dim of the ship's artificial night. For a moment she doesn't know where she is; her mind is still half in the world of the dream. Then she comes back to herself. She's on the Enterprise. These are Spock's quarters.
Nyota dozed off before Spock returned from his shift but he's there now, lying beside her in his familiar posture of sleep. Her eyes sweep the room and she smiles to herself at the evidence of his efforts not to wake her: the second teacup left next to hers on the table, his uniform draped haphazardly over the chair, and the clear ten inches of space he left between them when he finally slipped into bed beside her.
Nyota sees his intention as clearly as if he'd spoken it to her, but in sleep his body will do what it will. One hand at least has disobeyed his orders, reached out across those ten inches to rest lightly in hers, an unconscious gesture of affection.
Spock sleeps so little, it's a rare pleasure for her to watch him. With her eyes she traces the familiar lines of his face--the expressive brows, the dark lashes fanned against his cheek, the sharp line of his nose and the soft bow of his mouth. Awake he is always thinking, always with his keen expression and quick, focused movements. Asleep he loses that intensity; it drops away from him and is replaced by something that fills her with an almost painful tenderness.
It's so tempting to wake him. Nyota imagines herself reaching out and touching his face, tracing his ear with her fingers, brushing her thumb against his lips. If she does it long enough, eventually he will wake, coming out of his deep sleep like a diver returning to the surface. But she won't. If he's sleeping it's because he needs it, and she can wait.
She checks the timescreen beside the bed: 0216 hours. Midway through artificial night, and the room is almost perfectly silent; the soundproofing of the officer's quarters is one of the great engineering marvels of the Enterprise. Only the stars moving slowly past the window and the faraway vibration of the engines remind her that she is on a starship, not in some quiet Terran hotel.
Nyota could, if she wished, bring the holovid screen down over the window and complete the illusion of Terran night. But space is too new for her, this adventure too long-awaited for her to retreat from any part of it now. In any case it feels wrong to pretend at Terran night in Spock's quarters; it should be Vulcan night, she thinks. And for now the loss of Vulcan is too fresh for such a reminder to be welcome.
"Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum is disrupted, our destinies have changed."
As soon as Spock said it, she understood it to be true. And not only from that moment: for decades before things had been changing, beginning with the Narada's attack on the USS Kelvin and radiating outward from that event, ripples of cause and effect leading they know not where.
She wants to know. Alternate reality is an anomaly, and Nyota Uhura specializes in anomalies. She turns it over again in her mind, replaying it like a subspace transmission, waiting for the static to resolve into meaning.
It's clear, at least, where it begins: Twenty-five years ago, with the Narada tearing through a hole in space-time and destroying the Kelvin. That moment is the first point of concentrated change, like a dark drop of blood blooming in water. And like blood in water there is a moment when everything is suspended: those die who would not have died, those who survive are altered, the history of a moment is rewritten. Then the whole thing begins to spiral apart. Long tendrils of effect and aftereffect form and unfurl. They spread and break and grow indistinct, until they are absorbed into time and become untraceable.
Logically, Nyota knows it can't be otherwise; that the nature of alternate reality is to be imperceptible to those who are experiencing it. For them--for her--there is no "alternate." There is only what is, only "reality." Still, she tries.
Hikaru Sulu's parents met because of the Kelvin. His father escaped the disaster in a shuttle that was picked up by the USS Cavanaugh, where Sulu's mother was a medic. If not for the attack on the Kelvin, that meeting wouldn't have happened. And yet, Sulu existed in the original timeline. He'd still been born; his parents had still met, just some other way. Maybe at Spacedock, maybe at a party. Whatever change there was, it wasn't great enough to prevent Hikaru Sulu from being where he needed to be--where they needed him to be--when the Narada returned.
Then there was Jim Kirk. Of all the survivors of the Kelvin, his life was the most obviously altered. This Jim Kirk had grown up without his father, and what had that done? Nyota tries to imagine the little boy Jim, with a mother traumatized by grief, not knowing his father and probably not understanding why he wasn't there. To a small child his father's decision to sacrifice himself to save others might feel like abandonment instead. Jim grew up reckless and angry, unsure of his place in the world--and he almost didn't make it, period, let alone make it to Starfleet.
But then--he did. Something tipped things back, and was that how it worked? Did the time continuum find ways to right itself that they don't comprehend? Or is it just as simple as this: That they are who they are; that within each of them there is something essential that cannot be altered. That maybe it's not the continuum that rights itself. Maybe it's them.
Nyota pictures the night she and Jim met at the Shipyard Bar. It was a fluke, an accident, but it changed something--his life at least, probably hers too. She ticks it off in her mind: If she'd been ten minutes later arriving; if her Romulan morphology project hadn't been so successful that she felt like celebrating; if Jim had hit on some other girl first, or gotten beat up by locals instead of Starfleet Cadets; if Captain Pike hadn't intervened. So many ifs, and if you take away any one, the outcome would change. And even though Nyota knows, logically, that any event looks like a chain of wild coincidence when you start considering alternatives, in this case she really wonders. She thinks about all those circumstances rushing together, hurtling toward Jim Kirk like space debris being sucked into a gravity well.
It doesn't feel accidental. It feels like fate.
The timescreen blinks 0237. She could lie here all night, she thinks, and every night after, and never exhaust her curiosity about what's happened, or stop wondering what's ahead. She cannot know the future; she's accepted this in theory. It's only the knowledge that time has been disrupted--that one future for them has already happened--that has turned this perfectly ordinary fact into a provocation.
Nyota has always been drawn to things that resist her understanding: difficult languages, alien cultures, space and subspace and the universe in all its complexity. She loves a good mystery. It's what led her to Xenolinguistics and brought her to Starfleet. It drives who she is, and who she loves.
Her life has become part of the mystery now. And maybe her destiny didn't come for her all at once like Jim Kirk's did, but she doesn't mind. She thinks it began arriving a long time ago. She sees her past in her mind like a great bundle of threads, each one a little choice, a step this way and not that, a moment that changed something. They still keep spinning, and Nyota keeps gathering them together. Somehow from these threads, she thinks, the fabric of her destiny will be made.
She's in the mood for thinking anyway, and she has all night.
****
Nyota's gift for language is apparent before she is even three years old.
It starts at home, around her family's table, where visitors from the university gather to discuss her mother's work. They come from all Terran regions and sometimes from other worlds, and they speak in ways Nyota has never heard before. When the other children are sent to bed, she lingers to listen, making herself invisible behind her mother's chair.
Everything Nyota hears she stores up in her mind, saving words and phrases so she can ask her mother later to explain them. And mostly her mother does, leaving out certain parts that are too hard for a little girl to understand--things about politics, and violence, and war. Eventually even these words become understandable to Nyota, and she doesn't need her mother's translations anymore.
When, at eight, Nyota expresses an interest in becoming more proficient in Standard, her aunt Hadiya presents her with a series of books: the popular adventures of Anouk Ashmai, a young woman in Starfleet. Nyota embraces them eagerly, beginning with the first volume, Anouk Ashmai: Starfleet Cadet. Then the next four, in rapid succession: Anouk Ashmai: Her First Voyage; Anouk Ashmai: Starfleet Investigator; Anouk Ashmai Beyond the Galaxy; and Nyota's favorite, Anouk Ashmai: Destiny in the Stars.
It's love at first reading for Nyota. Anouk Ashmai is brave and kind, smart and attractive, and solves mysteries in space. Nyota begins to wonder if perhaps there are mysteries around her own home she can solve. While waiting for one to appear, she contents herself with practicing Anouk's elegant Standard phrasing and careful manners. She begins to look at the stars differently, imagining Anouk Ashmai traveling among them on her latest Starfleet assignment.
Nyota's mother is less delighted with Anouk Ashmai. "I don't know why you chose those books for her," Nyota hears her mother saying to her aunt one day in the kitchen. "Why can't Nyota learn Standard from medical texts, like we did?"
"Like you did, Bina," her aunt replies mildly. "I learned Standard from reading love poetry." There is a pause and the sound of clinking glasses. "You may recall there was a certain professor involved..." Her aunt's voice disappears as she closes the kitchen door, ending Nyota's eavesdropping.
Nyota masters Standard long before she tires of reading about Anouk Ashmai. She carries the little PADD where the books are stored everywhere, in case she finds herself with free time and nothing to do. More than once her mother catches her reading at night, betrayed by the glow of the viewscreen under her bedroom door.
Nyota is sitting on the veranda reading the 21st volume in the series, Anouk Ashmai and the Mount Seleya Mystery, when her brother comes around the corner of the house. "What's next," he teases, taking all three steps in one jump, "'Anouk Ashmai Reads the Dictionary for Fun'?"
Her sister runs past laughing. "More like, 'Anouk Ashmai: Perpetual Virgin'!"
"Reading the dictionary is fun!" Nyota shouts after them, not because she is stung but because her brother likes it when she pretends to be.
"Anyway I think Anouk and the Admiral like each other," she adds, to herself.
****
The summer she is thirteen, Nyota discovers the holovid library at her mother's university. She loves its cool, dark viewing rooms--so different from the glaring heat of the summer day outside--and even more what the library has inside it. All of history, culture, language and literature can be found there, available to her at the touch of a screen. For a girl of Nyota's relentless curiosity, it's heaven.
For three months Nyota spends her free afternoons there. She sits rapt in the dark viewing room as holovids unfold around her, playing out past events, making her feel as if she were there. She begins with Terran history, but her interests quickly evolve and multiply. She immerses herself in space travel, history of Federation planets, alien life forms, great moments in interplanetary diplomacy--and her secret passion, Starfleet. Secret, because Nyota senses her mother would not approve.
In the quiet darkness of the viewing rooms, her mother's approval is not required. So Nyota indulges herself, devouring the library's offerings on the origins and history of Starfleet. She watches everything, from vids so old they're two-dimensional to full-surround simulations of starships that haven't been launched yet. She travels to the surfaces of every Federation planet, from icy Andor to desert Vulcan, learns their histories and cultures, and hears their languages spoken. It's fascinating, like the adventures of Anouk Ashmai but with less flowery language and more real dirt and action.
The holovid library is Nyota's home away from home for a whole school year before she makes her greatest discovery yet: The library houses Starfleet Archives. These are not the polished, edited reenactments she is used to. The Archives are raw data, just as it was collected: recorded transmissions and flight plans; reports on subspace anomalies; scientific data and ship's manifests. And holovids too, but from actual incidents. Many are complete ship's recordings, with captain's logs and visuals, showing missions of all kinds and all degrees of success. Others are just fragments--broken pieces, half-erased, accounts stitched together from the testimony of witnesses and survivors. In some cases, where a mission had gone horribly wrong, the visual is gone and all that's left is sound.
It's natural that Nyota is drawn to these parts of the archive. She's been looking for mysteries her whole life so far, and here are real mysteries, real voices from the outer reaches of space. She wonders, with all the self-confidence of fourteen, if she might hear something in the recordings that no one has before. A clue maybe, that would reveal itself only to her.
This is how Nyota Uhura finds the Kelvin. Not in her Academy textbooks or in the dissertation she would read four years later in preparation for meeting Captain Pike, but in the darkness of a holovid library, on a spring afternoon when she is fourteen years old. She sits frozen in the darkness as the recording uncurls around her, and listens to the death of a ship.
She never tells her mother.
Two months later, Nyota begins studying Romulan.
****
"Nyota, I conclude you do not understand your mother's objections to your interest in Starfleet."
Aunt Hadiya stands politely before her, waiting for Nyota to look up from the book she is pretending to read. Nyota has come to sit under the shade tree in the garden to escape another argument with her mother. Her aunt, it seems, prefers to continue the discussion. Nyota lowers her book and her aunt takes the seat beside her.
"You're right, I don't understand," she says. "My mother works for peace and an end to violence. Starfleet is a humanitarian and peacekeeping armada. The goals are the same."
Hadiya smiles at her niece's carefully phrased argument. It is clear Nyota has been preparing to say it for some time. She looks up into the leaves of the tree and chooses her own words carefully. "Nyota, you know many things for such a young girl. I will tell you something you don't know. I will tell you why your mother is afraid for you to join Starfleet."
At the word "afraid," Nyota goes still. She glances at her aunt in surprise, but Hadiya does not appear to notice. She continues to look up at the leaves as if she is reading something there.
"When Bina and I were new doctors, just out of medical school, there was a terrible disaster. A starship was destroyed, far out on the edge of Federation space." Hadiya does not react to Nyota's intake of breath, but her eyes shift to the horizon and she frowns. "They brought survivors to our hospital. But their injuries were so terrible, like nothing we had ever seen. Burns that never stopped burning. Flesh that died without healing until a limb was gone. No one knew what weapons could do these things, or where they had come from. We felt we were living a nightmare each day."
Nyota is speechless. She has never heard of this; it is like a thread in her mother's life has been torn away and she is only now seeing the hole it left behind. "What--what did you do?" she asks, her voice barely audible.
Her aunt smiles, a smile that is neither happy nor sad. "We went on. We healed who we could, we gathered our strength, and we continued our work. For me, that work has been medicine. For Bina, it became something else. She chose to work toward securing peace between worlds, so that future generations will not know that horror. But now you, Nyota--"
"I wish to join Starfleet, and she fears for my safety. That I will be injured. Or killed. Or worse." Nyota expects to feel afraid herself as she says the words, and is surprised to find she does not.
"Yes, exactly. Your mother is a brave person, braver than almost anyone I know, but you are her child. She looks at you, nearly grown up, and sees the helpless baby she carried. She remembers the broken bodies of the injured and in her mind, it's you. She knows it is isn't logical. You are a strong young woman with a strong mind. You can weight the risks of your choices for yourself. Your mother is only holding on to the hope that you will choose another path than Starfleet."
Nyota is silent for a few minutes, absorbing her aunt's words. The air around them is full of sound: the rustling of the leaves in the tree, bees humming in the flowers, the distant whine of a hovercar; and farthest away the voices of the younger children, counting off in some game of their own invention. To Nyota it seems as if all of Terra is sending her a message, if only she can translate its meaning. Finally, she turns to her aunt.
"Thank you for telling me. I understand my mother's fears. But Starfleet is my only choice." She pauses for a moment; then adds, quietly as if her mother might overhear, "I believe it is my destiny."
Hadiya laughs her quiet laugh, like a breath of steam escaping from a kettle. She stands up to brush off her skirt, and turns to Nyota with the same happy-sad smile as before. "Nyota, of all the people I know, you're the first one I would choose if I were in charge of giving out destinies." Then her face turns serious. "If you're really determined to join Starfleet, you will not let anyone's doubts interfere with your plans. You will simply work harder, and keep choosing the path that leads where you want to go. If you do this, if you do it bravely, eventually even your mother will accept that your choice is the right one."
Nyota takes a deep breath, and feels herself exhilarated. "I will, Aunt."
"I know you will, Nyota," her aunt replies. "I've never doubted you."
****
In Anouk Ashmai: Her Journey Begins, when Anouk left her parents to go join Starfleet, her father hugged her tearfully. "Anouk," he said, "I could not have parted with you for anything less than the whole universe."
When Nyota Uhura boards the transport that will take her to Starfleet Academy, her mother says, "Nyota, I hope you know what you're doing. Remember you can always work in your aunt's clinic if you change your mind."
Nyota watches out the window as the transport pulls away and her mother and aunt grow smaller and smaller on the platform. "I could not have parted with you for anything less than the whole universe," she whispers to their tiny figures. She turns around in her seat and draws a deep, calming breath. Then she says it again, in Kiswahili this time. Then in Arabic, French, Mandarin, Urdu, two dialects of Romulan (one much better than the other but she'll practice), and Andorian so terrible that an Andorian sitting on the other side of the transport looks over and crinkles his antenna in disapproval.
She already knows she will never change her mind.
****
Continue to Part 2