New York City, October 1947
Her name was Anna Kosinski. She was seven, she lived on the third floor, and she was, by universal agreement of every adult on Nostrand Avenue, an absolute menace.
She rode a bicycle two sizes too big for her with a fanatical disregard for the concept of braking. She had chalked a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk outside the radio shop and defended it against all comers, including a delivery van. She had once come into the shop and asked Kirk whether the radio could hear her back, and when he said no, she said, "Then how does it know what to say," and he put down his soldering iron and had no answer for four seconds, which was a personal record.
She was Halina Kosinski's granddaughter.
In October of 1947 she began to bruise.
* *
He knew what it was before the doctor did. That was not difficult medicine. He stood in a stairwell on a Tuesday looking at a seven-year-old with bruises she could not account for, and a nosebleed that would not stop, and a pallor that had come up on her in six weeks like a tide.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
In 1947, in the city of New York, the finest hospital on the planet could offer Anna Kosinski a bed, a transfusion, and eight weeks. The survival rate was not low. It was zero. It was one of the very few diseases in the whole grim catalogue of that century about which the medicine of 1947 had nothing to say except a date.
And James Kirk sat in the back of a radio shop with a hot iron going cold in his hand and knew one thing, and did not know a single one of the things that would have made the one thing useful.
He knew that his own century did not lose this child. He knew that somewhere down the long years it stopped being a sentence and became a hard thing that children came through, and grew up, and grew old, and forgot. He did not know how. He was a starship captain and not a physician, and the cure, when it finally came, was not one drug but many, found by people whose names he had never learned, across a span of years he could not have marked on a calendar to save his life. He knew the destination. He did not know one step of the road, nor the year it ended, nor the name of a single soul who walked it.
Someday. Long after her. She had eight weeks.
*
He tried to write it that night, at the workbench, after the shade was down.
He got as far as the salutation. Then he sat with the pen over the paper and reached for the thing he meant to put beneath it, the gift, the one page that would buy a seven-year-old her whole life, and found that there was nothing in his hand. He knew that it could be done. He did not know how it was done. He had no drug to name, and no dose to give, and no man to send it to, and no year to promise. He had a certainty with no cargo in it. He sat for an hour, and in the end he wrote four words, and looked at them a long time. They were: It becomes curable. Wait. And they were true, and they were worth nothing, because he could not say when, or how, or to whom, and any doctor then living who received an unsigned note telling him to wait would go on doing precisely what he was already doing, which was everything he could, against a thing that did not yet have an answer.
He looked at the four words for a long time. Four hours, in the end.
*
He did not know what it changed. That was the entire objection, and it was enough, and he tried all night to get around it and could not.
He had one data point. One. He knew that this timeline held, because he was in it, and it was 1947, and it had held. The Guardian had told him one thing: that a woman must not make an argument in 1936. It had not given him a schedule. It had not told him which of the boards around him were load-bearing.
And there was this, which was worse. He did not truly know that he would be helping at all. He had one data point, and it was himself: he knew this timeline held, because he was standing in it, and it was 1947, and it had held. He did not know which of the boards around him were load-bearing. Change one year, one death, one child who lived who had not lived, and by 1962 there was a different set of human beings alive in different rooms, and thirteen days in October when the whole species stood at the edge, and no way on earth to know whether the thing that had brought it back from that edge was still there in the new arrangement.
Alter the composition of the human race by four hundred thousand people over fifteen years, and you are rolling that dice again.
And Anna Kosinski was seven, and rode a bicycle badly, and had asked him how the radio knew what to say.
*
He burned the four words at four in the morning, in the sink at the back of the shop.
He watched it go, and he did not cry, because he had discovered some years earlier that there is a place past crying and that he lived there now.
Then he opened the black notebook to the next clean line.
195. You had nothing to give her.
He looked at it. He put down the pen and got up and walked around the shop twice. Then he sat back down and wrote, underneath, in handwriting that had gone entirely to pieces:
Her name is Anna. She is seven. I am a coward and I have arithmetic instead of a soul.
*
Anna Kosinski died on the ninth of January, 1948, at Kings County Hospital, and Kirk was there, because her mother had nobody and her grandmother was seventy-one.
He carried the coffin with three other men from the building. It weighed nothing at all. That was the thing he had not been ready for. He had braced for the grief and had not thought about the weight. Four grown men carried a box down four flights of stairs and out to a car in the snow, and one of them had commanded a starship, and it was like carrying an empty crate, and he had to stop on the second landing, and Sam, who was twelve and watching from the door of the apartment, saw his father stop.
He never forgot it. He asked his mother about it once, in 1954, when he was nineteen and angry about everything, and she said, "Your father is carrying something," and he said, "That's not an answer," and Edith Keeler said, "No. It isn't. And it is all you are going to get, and one day you will understand why, and I hope to God you never do."
* *
That night she found him sitting on the floor of the shop with his back against the workbench and the notebook open in his lap.
She read it over his shoulder. All one hundred and ninety-five lines. Every entry, every year, twelve years of a man's handwriting getting worse, in silence, standing behind him in her coat, in the dark, in a shop that smelled of solder.
She read it to the end. Then she sat down on the floor beside him, in her good coat, on the filthy linoleum, and took the notebook out of his hands and closed it.
"You are not a coward," she said.
"Edith."
"You are the bravest man I have ever met, and you have made the worst life I have ever heard of. And I have decided, on the whole, that I would still rather have you than the world."
"That is a terrible thing to say."
"Yes. It is. And I have thought about it very carefully. And I mean it. And I will not be saying it again."
She got up, held out her hand, and pulled him up off the floor of his own shop, a woman of fifty-one pulling a man of fifty-two up off the linoleum with both hands, and they stood there.
"Come home," she said.