New York City, 1935
His first son was born in a walk-up on Nostrand Avenue at four in the morning on the ninth of April, during a thunderstorm, and Kirk was not there, because he was on a night hatch at Pier 14 unloading Brazilian coffee, and by the time the message reached him and he ran the nine blocks in the rain it was over and the baby was asleep.
Edith was sitting up against the pillows with her hair stuck to her forehead and an expression of enormous, exhausted, entirely private satisfaction, and when he came through the door soaking wet with his cap in his hand she looked at him and said:
"Well. He has your ridiculous chin."
He could not speak.
He had commanded a starship. He had faced boarding parties, and watched a world burn from orbit, and made the kind of decisions a man makes at 0300 with nine seconds left, and had made them cleanly, and had never once frozen.
He stood in the doorway of a rented bedroom in Brooklyn in 1935 and could not move and could not speak.
"Jim," she said, more gently. "Come and look at your son."
* *
They called him Samuel, for a brother who would not be born for three hundred and eighty years, whom Kirk would never see again, and who was, in the strictest possible sense, at that moment both dead and not yet conceived.
He wrote the name in the front of a ledger that night, in a small furious hand.
Samuel George Kirk. 9 April 1935.
And underneath it, because he could not help it, because he was who he was:
He is real.
* *
He sat up with the baby that night, because Edith could not, and because there was nobody else.
He sat in a chair by the window in the dark with a six-hour-old infant on his shoulder, and the storm went over, and the rain stopped, and the sky over Brooklyn went from black to gray to a kind of dirty pearl, and the child slept.
And James Kirk sat in the dark and did the arithmetic.
He will be six in 1941. He will be seventeen in 1952 and there will be a war on in Korea and he will want to go. He will be twenty-seven in 1962 and if the missiles fly he will be in this city and I will be able to do nothing at all. He will be thirty-four in 1969 and men will walk on the moon and he will watch it on a television and I will be sitting next to him and I will not be able to tell him what it means. He will be sixty-five in the year 2000. And he will die, probably, somewhere around 2020. And he will be dust for two hundred and forty years before I am born.
He shifted the child's weight, very carefully, and the child made a small sound and did not wake.
And in three hundred and thirty-two years a woman will hand me a personnel file on the bridge of a starship, and I will not know, and I will never know, that the officer whose name is on it is not descended from this boy. Because none of this is going to be in it. None of it.
He looked down at his son.
"You are real," he said, out loud, in an empty room, at half past five in the morning.
And then, because there was no one to hear him, and because he had not said it out loud in five years, and because he had reached, that night, some final wall inside himself and gone through it:
"My name is James Tiberius Kirk," he said, to a sleeping infant, in a rented room in Brooklyn in 1935. "I was born in Riverside, Iowa, in the year two thousand two hundred and thirty-three. I commanded the starship Enterprise. I had four hundred and thirty people under my hand and I knew every one of their names."
The baby breathed.
"And this is my son," said Kirk. "And he is real. And that is the whole of the report."
He sat there until the sun came up.