The Kobayashi Maru Page 15

  "Doctor Kobrine is the best in the world," Sulu insisted, wanting to speak before Poppy got too far—wanting to make him understand. "If he says you should do it, then you should! It's better than nothing."

  Tetsuo squeezed his great-grandson's hands and smiled. "I'm not so sure about that anymore."

  Panic swam counterclockwise to sorrow. "Why are you telling me this, Poppy?" Sulu demanded urgently. "What is it you're trying to say?"

  "I'm trying to say," Tetsuo said gently, "that one-hundred-and-three is older than God ever meant people to be. Giving you something like a grade four glioma is His way of telling you to hurry it up—give the next generation a crack at the world." He reached up to touch his great-grandson's face. "I wanted you to understand why I told Doctor Kobrine to stop the treatments, because I know no one else ever will."

  Sulu's stomach twisted in silent despair. "You can't stop the treatments …"

  "I already have."

  "No, Poppy!" He pulled away, out of the old man's reach, out of his grasp. "Don't you realize what'll happen? Don't you understand what you've done?"

  "I've gained a month, maybe two, of feeling happy, healthy, and alive before I die," Tetsuo told him. "Whatever comes after that…" He shrugged. "Maybe nobody really knows. But it doesn't frighten me anymore."

  Sulu felt tears wringing out of his ragged emotions. "You're giving up!" he accused, furious. "You're going to desert me just because you're afraid to—"

  "No," Tetsuo interrupted sternly, "I'm not afraid. Not of dying. Not like this, at least. I'm afraid of dying badly, son. I'm afraid that if I wait…" Pain glittered in his stone-black eyes. "I have loved my life! I loved your great-grandmother. I loved all the children we had together, and all their children, and all theirs. I loved boating, and the ocean, and the way my face felt after the salt and wind dried it all shiny like the sand. I loved the animals at the gardens, and those plants you used to bring home all the time…" His voice trailed off into a gentle laugh. His eyes focused again, and he sighed. "I want to say goodbye to all that while we're still on speaking terms. If I stay, I'm afraid I'll learn to hate living…then I'd really have nothing to live for after all."

  Sulu stared at his great-grandfather, ashamed of the cold tears on his cheeks, ashamed that shedding those tears should make him so afraid. "Doctor Kobrine will stop you."

  "He won't," Tetsuo said with certainty. "I've thought a long time about this. And I've been folding cranes." He displayed the half-done crane, shiny purple in the afternoon light.

  Sulu slapped the paper construct out of his hand. "I don't care about your damn cranes!" he cried, his voice choking on the pain gathered in his throat. "I care about you, Poppy! You said you'd come when I graduated! You said—"

  "I'm sorry. But it has to be done—it has to be this way." Sulu jerked away when Tetsuo reached up to touch him. Lonely disappointment flashed through the old man's eyes. "I thought you, of all people, would understand."

  "Well, I don't!" Sulu grated. "And I never will! How could you want to die? How could you want to leave me…!" He felt more tears rush to the surface, and turned away before his great-grandfather's gentle sorrow could make him cry. "Just go home and die if you want to!" he shouted. "Don't try to make me justify it for you!"

  When he broke and ran for the bunkard, he didn't know if he wanted Tetsuo to stop him or let him go. As it was, his great-grandfather said nothing.

  It was that image of Tetsuo, standing abandoned and small in the middle of the windy quad, that Sulu would remember for the rest of his days.

  "Ugh!" Sulu threw himself onto his bunk, not caring enough about the mud and pitch and detritus on his uniform to bother stripping out of his clothes. "I can't believe anybody actually lives in those mountains!" he moaned to the cadet in the next bunk over. "What did they say? Two and half million people in one of the smaller cultural centers alone?"

  His companion's uniform and equipment were as filthy and sweat-soaked as Sulu's; he displayed the same lack of concern for his bed's welfare as he stretched out on his own bunk. Cadets all throughout the bunkard were engaged in similar pursuits.

  "I feel like I haven't slept in weeks," Sulu replied. "After two months of midnight drills and six A.M. breakfast calls, you'd think I'd be used to this."

  The cadet's only reply was a loud snore.

  Sulu closed his own eyes, relishing the decadent feel of relaxation. After a week and a half on the other side of the North American continent, Sulu welcomed even San Francisco's damp, chilly autumn. They'd been dropped in ten degrees centigrade weather in the northern Allegheny Mountains and instructed to make their way to a predetermined base "as soon as you can." They'd had sufficient gear and food to keep them alive (Sulu had hoped), but it was a white-haired, smart-mouthed boy from upstate New York who saved them all. He reckoned directions by the stars better than anyone Sulu had ever seen; they reached their destination in record time, losing only a backpack and a sleeping tent in the process. Sulu, as commander of the excursion, was distinctly pleased.

  He was also exhausted. Classes, duties, and drills demanded more time and energy than Sulu would have believed he possessed two months ago, and this trek through the Alleghenies was only the last on a long list. He took inspiration and stamina from every available source—invigorating conversations, newly formed friendships, frequent naps and frequent meals—but his greatest source of strength was his family. Communications from home—especially from Poppy—had formed the underpinnings of his endurance. He hadn't realized how much he would miss that support until it ceased.

  Tetsuo had called twice after their argument on the quad. Sulu responded to neither recorded message, but the second made him silently cry himself to sleep. "I feel wonderful," Poppy had told him. "I feel free. If I can't make you understand why it has to be this way, at least be happy for me…I love you so much."

  The worst part of it was that Sulu thought perhaps he did understand. His life and activity were always so important to Tetsuo; the same things were important to Sulu, as well. He couldn't imagine his own life without Starfleet, without windsailing, without fencing…But if he admitted to himself (and to Tetsuo) that there was dignity in choosing the time to die, it might seem as though he condoned it. And he didn't want Tetsuo to go.

  Sulu rolled over roughly, uttering a guttural sound of frustration. The unhappy thoughts slipped to the back of his mind, following a route well-worn after two months of dismissal. He tried studiously to will himself to sleep before any more thinking could occur.

  He didn't know how long he'd been dozing before someone jounced his bed. "Mail call! Rise and shine."

  Sulu struggled into a sitting position, feeling as though he'd been bound up in cotton like a mummy. He held out a hand for the message tape the other cadet presented to him. "Oh…uh, thanks…" he muttered fuzzily.

  But the mail carrier was already awakening the next cadet in line. "Mail call!"

  Sulu squinted at the message's origin through a yawn. When he saw the California transmit code, the last of his tattered haze of sleep dashed away. He scrambled to his feet.

  Sunside—as Sulu and the other cadets eventually discovered—was the recreation area for off-duty cadets. No one had ever discovered a reason for the enigmatic name, but, with time, no one seemed to care anymore, either. Along with the chairs, tables, and food services stations, Sunside also sported seven reader terminals.

  The terminals were deserted now. Sulu slipped into the closest booth; no doubt everyone in this bloc was still recovering from the wild and frigid Alleghenies.

  His name, rank, and serial number appeared, followed by a return transmit code that he didn't immediately recognize. He sat back in the padded seat and waited to see who was the originator.

  Arthur Kobrine's face appeared on the screen, backed by a room Sulu didn't recognize, and accompanied by voices Sulu had never heard. All hope inside him paused, but he couldn't bear to banish it just yet.

  "Cadet Sulu," Kobrine said,
his voice low and strangely roughened. "I…They said you were gone on maneuvers. I hope those went well. I only wish I …I wish you were here, son. I'd rather tell you this, not some machine…"

  Kobrine glanced over his shoulder anxiously, his eyes following something beyond Sulu's ability to see. When he turned back, his eyes were sad. "Your great-grandfather died today, son. I tried to call you, but they said you were gone. I didn't want to leave a message…a lot of messages for you to find when you got back…He was only sick for the last week, only really sick for the last few hours…He was really happy, son. And he missed you. He said to tell you…" Kobrine dropped his gaze, scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "He said to tell you he loved you," he finally finished miserably. "That he always had and always would…He left a bunch of those paper cranes you and he used to make all the time. A thousand of them, he said …He said you'd understand…" Someone interrupted him again from behind; Doctor Kobrine nodded an acknowledgment, then raised his sad face again. "I have to go. I'm sorry I had to tell you like this. Call me at the hospital, if you'd like. I'm so sorry, son…" The transmission ended on a white corridor wall while a distant intercom called Doctor Kobrine away to care for some patient who was still among the living.

  * * *

  The rock upon which Sulu laid was bone-eating cold, smoothed by centuries of interplay with the ocean and by the feathery green plants that clung to it for support. Foliage draped in limp tendrils across muscles, stones, and mollusks to bob in the moonlit tidal pools like weary undines; Sulu felt them, cool and moist, beneath his stomach as he stared across the glassy sea. Like the kelp, ebb tide found the young cadet without the strength to stand.

  The ocean seemed his only respite after Doctor Kobrine's horrible message. Sulu left Sunside without bothering to take the tape from the reader. Stopping in the bunkard only long enough to slide a bulky box out from its place in his locker, he walked away from the bunkard, the quad, and the Academy without speaking to another living soul.

  The box cut into his chest now, pinned between his pain-racked body and the cold, kelp-wrapped rock. Sulu had emptied the contents of the box into the retreating tide; the last of the thumb-sized cranes floated beyond the limits of his sight over an hour ago. Silver, white, transparent, rainbow, blue… He'd folded them out of any material that fell into his hands. While high in the Alleghenies, he'd folded more than a dozen out of the scarlet-and-white protective strips on their rations. He'd folded them against the growing numbers he knew his great-grandfather collected—folded in desperate need of a miracle now that science and love had failed him—folded six-hundred-and-forty-four before Poppy finished his one thousandth and ended the silent race. Now, the evening breeze blew the little cranes out to sea like six hundred vanished souls, leaving only Sulu and an empty container behind.

  It was moonless and full dark before Sulu was able to rouse himself and stand. He felt stiff, and sick, and tired—partly a legacy of the cold rock he'd been hugging, partly the emotional vacancy that ate at his heart like a dying fire. He walked with cottony, uncaring steps, up the jagged embankment, across the long green concourse, down the quiet, starlit streets. He deposited the box into a refuse container as he passed.

  The Academy quad was warm and well-lit upon his return. Moving into the almost-daylight, something like embarrassment stirred in Sulu and made him brush ineffectually at the front of his singlet. A few pieces of kelp dislodged to fall wetly to the stones at his feet. Sulu wished he'd thought about his appearance before stretching out on the rock, but he couldn't truthfully say he'd thought about anything except somehow freeing the cranes he'd tried to contain. At that time, that had seemed so terribly important.

  As he stepped through the student entrance, the guard on duty nodded a reserved, "Good evening." Sulu returned the greeting, but didn't pause; he heard the ensign open an intercom panel just before he passed into the hall.

  Coan waited against the wall outside the bunkard.

  "Good evening, Commodore."

  Even her dark eyes looked cold in the subdued light.

  "Congratulations," she said quietly. "You've just accrued a batch of demerits that'll take three years to undo."

  Tears welled up inside him again, and he did everything he could to keep them out of his voice. "I know, sir…I'm sorry."

  "Save your 'sorry's for your parents," she countered. The disappointment and anger on her face hurt far worse than her words. "This is command school. I don't give a damn what you apologize for—I give a damn what you do!" She pushed away from the wall with a rough, angry movement, and started down the hall. "Go in and get to bed. We're running a scenario tomorrow that you're going to need your sleep for."

  "…thank you, sir…" He'd spoken so softly, he doubted she had heard. Even if she had, he felt sure she wouldn't care.

  "…including responding to computer-generated incidents such as any starship captain is apt to encounter," Coan continued, ceasing her pacing of the lecture hall to sit on the edge of the raised platform. "The commander of the U.S.S. Exeter—your ship for the course of this scenario—was chosen by our all-wise, all-knowing computer earlier this morning." She angled her chin upward to meet Sulu's gaze from all the way down the long hall. He didn't know if he should be horrified or flattered. "Are you ready to take your post, Captain Sulu?"

  Everyone turned to look at him—some to smile, some to stare. Sulu only shook his head dumbly and said, "I don't want to be the captain."

  Coan's look of disappointed anger from the night before flashed briefly into being again. "Then why are you in command school?"

  "I meant—"

  "I don't care what you meant. You're captain for this scenario. You'll be in total and complete command, even over the line officers who have agreed to help us with this. Remember that, no matter what happens." She stood then, and announced to the class at large, "Be at the simulator deck in twenty minutes. Don't be late! Dismissed."

  Sulu sat, staring down at his hands, as the rest of the class filed out the doors. His heart still ached from yesterday; he lacked the creativity to decide which pair of underwear to choose this morning, much less the quickness required to adequately command a scenario. He knew Coan would feel little sympathy for such sentiments, though; when the last of the class arrived at the simulators, Sulu arrived along with them.

  The bloc was split into seven different groups of varying sizes and composition. Four officers (two commanders and two captains) greeted Sulu's bridge crew at simulator four and assigned them their positions. Sulu settled into the command chair hesitantly, feeling as though he were sitting somewhere he shouldn't and that someone would soon come to chase him away. No one did, though, and the simulator was soon sealed and ready to run.

  Lights, smells, and sounds cocooned Sulu from all sides. He heard status reports from faraway sections of the nonexistent ship, unimportant flippancies over intercom channels, sensors cooing peacefully beneath the more strident computer prompts. It was all so active—so real! His heart awakened, ever so slightly, as though responding to some half-heard clarion; he gripped the arms of the chair for strength.

  "Helmsman," he beckoned, trying for briskness and instead achieving a sort of breathless anxiety. "What is our current heading?"

  The cadet at the helm glanced at the officer manning navigations. Completely in character, the officer only raised an inquiring eyebrow and turned back to her own equations. Nodding, the helmsman reported the heading, then added of his own accord, "That will take us within fifteen point seven parsecs of the Klingon Neutral Zone, sir."

  Sulu was certain that detail would matter. Swinging his chair about, he confronted his executive officer. He drew back slightly in surprise and alarm to see Perez-Salazar seated in the exec's station by the turbolift doors; he didn't know why her presence hadn't registered before. "First Officer Perez-Salazar," he said, recovering, "what is the nature of our mission in this sector?"

  Apparently much more at ease with her position i
n this scenario, she consulted her computer briefly. "Routine scouting," she reported. "We are due to take on supplies at Station F9 in four days."

  "Is F9 on the neutral zone?"

  Perez-Salazar smiled grimly. "If we could cut through the Neutral Zone, we could reach F9 in twelve hours."

  "I see…" Sulu rotated his chair back toward the front, only just remembering to say, "Thank you, Mister Perez-Salazar."

  The helmsman and navigator both looked at him expectantly. Sulu flashed them a confident grin and instructed, "Navigator Janda, plot a course around the Neutral Zone for rendezvous with Station F9. Helmsman, ahead warp three."

  "Course plotted and laid in, sir."

  "Warp three, sir. Aye, aye."

  Sulu settled back in the chair a bit more comfortably. "Very good. Carry on."

  He'd barely had the chance to adjust to his newfound status before the communications officer started in her seat and called, "I'm receiving a transmission…" She touched her earpiece and frowned. "It's very garbled, sir…and it's on the distress channel…"

  Sulu uncrossed his legs and sat forward in his chair. A distress call! This was working up to be an interesting scenario indeed. "Put it on audio."

  The communications officer complied; a broken wall of static filled the tiny bridge. "…Maru, nineteen periods out of…six…" The voice was British, thin with both distance and concern. "…Mayday! Mayday! …neutronic fuel carrier Kobayashi Maru, nineteen…out of Altair…We have struck a gravitic mine…all power, many casualties…"

  "Gravitic mine…?" one of the cadets whispered.

  The captain at navigations nodded bleakly. "I don't know who lays them, I just know they tear the hell out of passenger ships and freighters."

  "They do a good number on starships, too," an engineering cadet added.

  "…hull breach…Do you read?…Mayday! Mayday!…"

  Sulu signaled communications to ready them for reply. "Kobayashi Maru," he declared, "this is U.S.S. Exeter. What is your position?"