"What we tell our grandparents" for Distracted. pg13
Title: What we tell our grandparents.
Fandom: Enterprise.
For the: Entficathon.
Written at the request of: distracted
Prompt: “E2: why didn’t Malcolm marry? (can’t kill him or have him be gay)”
Author: Keenir.
Summary: The reason Malcolm didn’t marry in that time loop, as relayed to us by himself and one of his students.
Author’s note: While the phrase “children of the mind” usually refers to Artificial Intelligences, I see no reason why it cannot also refer to adopted aliens…particularly given these circumstances.
Rating: PG-13
Author’s note: Watching ‘e2,’ I thought their summary of the intervening years was rather pat…too pat, too simplistic. Almost like it was an idealized form of their history, omitting the less palatable events.
…and then Mainea showed up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
E2: 105 Years Ago:
It was a full year since the Enterprise had gone into the past by accident.
Game start. Have the Knight leap over the pawns.
In answer, one pawn marches forward two spaces.
Knight advances some more, sidling and angling its way towards the opposing King.
A second pawn advances, this one by only one space, just enough to free the Bishop.
“Ensign, if you’ll excuse us, I need to have a word with my Lieutenant,” Captain Archer said.
Ensign Cutler started to rise, but stopped when Malcolm shook his head. “We‘re in the middle of something, Captain,” and opened a window for his Rook. Nevermind that I resigned already, and he knows it.
“The two of you have been playing that game for over a week now. I need to know when you’ll get back to work.”
“If that was all you wanted, you’d have sent someone in your stead.” Malcolm didn’t look up from the board. “Besides which, we both tendered our resignations.”
As Elizabeth Cutler marched out the pawn diagonal to her Rook, Archer said, “And if I don’t accept them?”
“I’ve already led one revolt, Captain,” Malcolm said, letting the facts speak for themselves.
“That was a mutiny.”
“For which I was pardoned.”
“Because I need you at your post.”
“No,” Cutler said.
“What?” Archer asked.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You need a Vulcan to remember to destroy the Xindi Probe, and you need slaves to keep Enterprise from falling apart between now and then.”
“Nobody here is a slave.”
“I seem to recall you saying that we can’t deviate from what SubCommander T’Pol laid out for everyone - every suggestion for a side-trip anyone suggested, was shot down.”
Insistent, “Our crew are not slaves,” Archer said as the Rook positioned itself alongside the pawn.
“It’s bad form to argue nomeclature,” Malcolm said, amused. “Particularly with an entamologist. But what would you call it, then, Captain? Just ask Travis - a generation ship goes somewhere; it doesn’t sit and wait for a century to pass, target one thing, blow that thing up - and then do nothing.
“Yet that’s exactly what you’ve asked of us,” Malcolm said.
“After the Probe is destroyed -”
“What?” Malcolm interrupted. “After it’s destroyed, we can all go on our merry ways? How many children will be born on Enterprise, knowing only that they have to prepare for the Probe? How many generations will dedicate their lives to this task? And what will happen when that modus vivendi is gone?”
As the years progressed, this would become known as “the Problem.”
“History will repeat,” Cutler said, three words that reminded Archer of the murders and suicides aboard Enterprise in the initial month after they’d ended up in the past. “I won’t have a child when that’s the only future open for him.”
“Nor I,” Malcolm agreed, moving a pawn from his Queen’s personal space. “And a number of others in the crew feel the same way. Such as Chef.”
“What -?” Archer said.
“We tried a palace revolt, Captain. Now we’re going for passive resistance.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
E1: Present Day:
Lt. Malcolm Reed answered his door, and took a step back, reflexively getting away from the jellyfish standing at his door.
“Malcolm Reed.”
“Yes, that’s me,” Malcolm said.
“I know,” the jellyfish said, raising a glass-clear, glass-delicate arm, the three-fingered tip waved to him. “I clambered from my Enterprise to this Enterprise to see you.”
“Why?” Hoshi said I had no children, so what are you to me?
“Because you have-and-will rescue me. I am still eternally grateful.”
~~
Both of them in his quarters, Mainea sprawled out on the bed as only a colony-creature can. “My name, father, is Mainea Reed.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Nice try, but I’ve already checked your ship’s logs. I didn’t have any descendants.”
“The logs list only biological progeny, not children of the mind or students. I am of the Harrak.”
“The source of the Warp 6.9-capable engines?”
“Yes; they were my price of admission. You and Elizabeth Cutler negotiated well for my continued existence on Enterprise.”
“Why would we have turned you away?”
“I am a mobile, a piece of a greater whole back on the other Enterprise. As a mobile, I am a piece capable of moving around on my own. My original piece - my ancestress - was a defender, and looked like nothing more than the business end of a jellyfish far more than I do - though she had tiny fingers to manage the weapons system of the ship she’d come from.”
Ah.
Mainea told Malcolm the complete history of the time-tossed Enterprise, including the things that the Archers and the Tuckers weren’t telling everyone…
Told him that when the crew had been told they’d become stranded in the past, and that none of them would be going home - ever - there were several suicides and two murders. And, some argued, why bother incarcerating the guilty ones, when the entire crew were already imprisoned by any definition. At least a dozen retreated to the holodeck, rejecting reality. Others quit their jobs, spending all their time in one pursuit or another: drinking, gluttony, and several members of the crew got pregnant (“why bother being careful?”)
And then, out of the crew that hadn’t joined in any of the aforementioned things, there was the Mutiny.
It wasn’t over whether or not to return to Earth. It was, instead, over whether the entire ship should dedicate itself solely to the task of waiting for the day when the Xindi Probe could be destroyed. The present Tuckers would see that day, her Malcolm, as leader of the mutineers, had said, but everyone else would be long dead, with our descendants awaiting the Day of Attack with religious fervor. “We refuse,” her Malcolm had informed Captain Archer. “We will not be your ghazis.” A ghazi, the shock troops for several empires in Earth’s past; troops whose sole purpose were to keep the enemies from rushing in and gutting the empire.
“It was into this environment, months later, that the Enterprise happened across my escape pod.”
“Yours?” Malcolm asked.
“Colonial memory - a few of my mother’s organs are still in me.” Forestalling an analogy that was one of her father Malcolm Reed’s favorites, she raised her mother’s hand, which was second from the front. “No, your father still has his own eyes; I have my mother’s hand,” waggling it, “and bladder.”
“I see,” Malcolm said. “And how did we get along, your mother and I?”
Voice full of admiration, “You kept her from death, you and Elizabeth Cutler,” Mainea said. “You encouraged her to rebuild into a new self. In lean times, you both gave her your rations. You both taught her and learned from her.”
Elizabeth? Malcolm thought, and asked as much.
“There were some who said you and she were married. You both were not. You simply played chess regularly and shared duties in teaching and raising my mother.”
Well, I always did think she was pretty and smart…I guess things didn’t (don’t) turn out well with her and Phlox, if she and I are an item. “That’s good to know. And did you ever find more of your people?”
“No.” One word. One tone. One note.
~~~
A Little Earlier on that day:
One of the MACOs saw it first: a bundle of balloons slowly creeping across the room linking the two Enterprises. He raised his weapon, thinking to get rid of whatever pest that was, before it could make a nest in this Enterprise. No matter what the year or how far the ocean, every ship has rats.
Karen Archer grabbed his rifle and wrenched it from his hands with an ease that made him uneasy.
“Miss -” he said.
“That is our chef!” she snapped at him. And our senior weapons operator. Looking up, she added, “Sorry ‘bout that, Mainea.”
In response, the chef blew a series of sweet musical notes.
“Sorry,” the MACO said, and got the same response. To Karen, the MACO asked, “So where’s your great-grandfather?”
“Inside,” she replied. “Someone wanted to talk to him.”
While they chatted, the chef Mainea continued on her way into and through the younger Enterprise. Up one corridor and down another, always keeping to the ceiling - it was always safer there then underfoot.
~~~~~~~~~~~
E2: Forty Years after entering the past:
Elizabeth Cutler was lying down, Malcolm and Mainea at her bedside as her breath grew thready. “It was a good run,” she said, smiling.
“Fantastic,” Malcolm agreed.
“Now, Malcolm, people will talk,” she teased.
“Let them. We know the truth.“
“That we do. Now, whether we reincarnate or undergo a transmigration of souls, you still owe me another game.”
“Gladly, friend.”
“Friend!” Cutler said, embracing the word. A word Phlox and some others aboard ship didn’t know the meaning of. Looking at the rope-and-balloon alien covering her quarters’ ceiling, “Find the answer, Mainea,” she said.
“I will,” Mainea said.
“Promise?” Cutler asked.
Mainea reached down and gripped her hand. “I promise. All of me promises: the problem shall be solved.”
~~~~~~~~~~
E2: Present Day:
As they struggled to keep the marauding ships off the back of their ancestors’ Enterprise, a silent note appeared on Karen Archer’s personal screen. Message from Mainea, it read.
I don’t really have time, friend, Karen thought to herself, but didn’t toggle the button that would prevent the uploading of the message.
I have the answer to the Problem. The answer is to surrender. To avoid the entire question of what to do after the ancestors’ Enterprise gets through.
Conflict avoidance is conflict resolution. Karen Archer nodded, and removed her hands from the controls, accepting what would come.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The End