“Another woman,” Antonia said.

“What?” Kirk couldn’t believe her claim. He had been seeing no one but her, though he now felt a pang of guilt for his errant thought of Edith.

“The stars,” Antonia said.

Kirk shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. Antonia couldn’t possibly know about Edith. Other than Spock and Bones, he didn’t think anybody did. Even when he’d sought counseling after Sam and Aurelan’s deaths, which had immediately followed his loss of Edith, he hadn’t spoken of her to his psychiatrist.

“I think you do understand,” Antonia said. She took a step toward him, but then seemed to consciously stop herself from coming any closer. “Jim, I really have enjoyed being with you. You’re fun and funny, a good companion and an interesting man. Certainly you’ve lived an interesting life.” She paused, then added, “Maybe too interesting.”

“What does that mean?” Kirk wanted to know.

“It means that I don’t want to get too involved with a man who’s eventually going to leave me,” Antonia said. She spoke without anger or bitterness, but with a conviction that suggested she believed her opinion of their future to be fact, not conjecture.

“I have no intention of leaving you,” Kirk said. “Why would you think that I would?”

“Tell me when you were at the window that you weren’t looking at the stars,” she said.

“Honestly, no, I wasn’t,” Kirk said. He recalled comparing in his mind the snowflakes to the pinpoints of light in the sky, but that seemed immaterial. “I was just looking out at the snow.”

“I believe you,” Antonia allowed. “But I have seen you looking at the stars.”

“Well, yes, of course,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”

“Sure, but not in the same way that you do,” she said. “When I look at the stars, all I see is a beautiful night sky. When you look, I can tell that you’re remembering alien worlds you’ve already visited and imagining the exotic places you’ve yet to explore.”

“Antonia,” he said. He started to move toward her, but she held her hand up, and he halted a few steps from her. “Yes, I admit that I can recall the different planets I’ve been to, the strange landscapes I’ve walked, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to leave you.”

“It also doesn’t mean that you’re going to stay,” she noted. “That you won’t decide at some point to go back to Starfleet.”

“I’ve been retired for two and a half years now,” Kirk said. “Why do you think I’m suddenly going to want to return to space? Have I ever given you any indication of that? Other than looking at the stars, which as you said, you do yourself?”

Antonia did not answer immediately, and Kirk suspected that when she did, the future of their relationship-or the lack of a future-would turn on her answer. Finally, she said, “No, you haven’t acted like you want to go back to Starfleet. But when you do look up at the stars, it just seems like we don’t connect.”

“Then that’s my fault,” Kirk told her. “I never meant to make you feel disconnected from me. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“It’s all right,” Antonia said. “I don’t want to change who you are. I like who you are. I just don’t want to be involved in a long-distance, part-time relationship. I’ve had a couple of those in my life and I don’t like them. I want a partner who will be here with me.”

“Antonia,” Kirk said, and this time when he went to her, she didn’t try to stop him. When he reached her, he put his hands on her arms and looked her directly in the eyes. “I’m not asking you to be in a relationship while I board a starship and go running off through the galaxy. I’m asking you to move into my house with me, right here in Idaho.”

“And what happens when you go back to Starfleet?” she asked quietly.

“That’s not going to happen,” he promised her.

“How can I be sure of that?” she asked him. “How can you be sure of that?”

Kirk chuckled. “Next year I’ll have lived half a century,” he said. “I think by now I ought to know myself.”

“You ought to,” Antonia said, peering at him in an almost pleading way. “But do you?”

“Yes,” he told her. “I think I do.”

Antonia nodded, and then she actually smiled. She moved to the side, and Kirk let his hands drop from her arms. She passed him and crossed the room, back over to the window. Holding the curtains open, she looked outside. “I like it when it snows,” she said. “When there’s an accumulation, there’s a surreal quiet, like a thick blanket’s been draped over the land.”

Kirk walked over to Antonia and sent his arms around her midsection, hugging her to him. “I told you that I’ve got a house up in the Canadian Rockies,” he said. “We should go. Lots of snow up there.”

Antonia let the curtains fall back into place and looked back over her shoulder at him. “Are you trying to bribe me to move in with you?” she said, her tone now playful.

“If that’s what it takes,” Kirk said.

She turned in his arms to face him, reaching up and putting her own hands on his shoulders. “Jim, I’m serious about this,” she said. “I like being with you and I can even see us together in the future, but I don’t want to get completely involved only to have that taken away from me.”

“I’m not going back to Starfleet,” Kirk said. “I love you, Antonia.” And he did love her, even if she was not the love of his life—

Once more, he put a quick end to such thoughts.

“I love you too, Jim,” Antonia said. She kissed him, and he kissed her back.

Later, he would try to tell himself that he had never lied to her, not really, because at the time, he really hadn’t planned on going back to Starfleet. But then, that hadn’t been the worst of his lies.

SEVEN

(2271)/2270

Jim Kirk looked at his bloodied counterpart, the city of Mojave in the background, and he found that he couldn’t argue anymore. On a superficial level, on a selfish level, he wanted to remain here in the nexus. He wanted to undo the pain that he had caused Antonia, wanted to find happiness with her.

But the other Kirk had been right. Anything he did here would not be real. More than that, though, even if he could change the past that he had shared with Antonia, even if he could prevent himself from returning to Starfleet, it would make no difference. Starfleet had indeed been his excuse to break off his relationship with Antonia-to compel her to break it off with him-but there had been another reason that he hadn’t been able to stay with her: she wasn’t Edith.

“I’ll go,” Kirk said. “I’ll try to stop the converging temporal loop.”

“Thank you,” the other Kirk said.

He would try to stop the loop, but he also knew that he would need to do more than that. In addition to traveling back in time to attempt to prevent the shock wave, he would also have to ensure that the Enterprise-B still escaped the energy ribbon, and that Picard still managed to stop Soran from wiping out the population of Veridian IV-and he would have to accomplish all of that without altering the timeline. He understood the plan that the other Kirk had devised, but not the logistics of how to accomplish all of it. “When I leave the nexus,” he asked, “how do I reenter it?”

“You don’t,” the other Kirk said. “I only ended up here again by chance.”

“But your plan involves me taking action in twenty-two ninety-three and twenty-three seventy-one,” Kirk said. “If I can only exit the nexus once- “

“You’ll have to use another means to move safely and surreptitiously through time,” the other Kirk said.

“But how?” he asked. He had traveled in time on a number of occasions, most often by employing the light-speed breakaway factor, taking a starship racing at excessive speed toward a star, circling around it deep within its gravity well, and then pulling away from it in a slingshot-like movement. Even if after leaving the nexus Kirk could somehow acquire a vessel powerful and strong enough to achieve such a maneuver, he could hardly do all of that with any realistic expectation of remaining unobserved. The only other means he had used to travel through time-And suddenly he knew what had been planned by his alter ego, who then confirmed it: “The Guardian of Forever.”