This story is one of thousands submitted to Pocket Books' annual Strange New Worlds Star Trek short story contest. I hated that it didn't make the final cut because I was rather proud of it at the time. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was by far the most ambitious of the Star Trek films. The "final frontier" was, after all, the search for God. The film fell somewhat short of its lofty ambitions, but I felt like it deserved a second glance anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

~Tim Wise

The Final Frontier Revisited

Admiral Leonard H. McCoy of Starfleet Medical was going home. The mission to Rhiza had been a logistical nightmare. The weather was beautiful and the people were friendly, but they were the most disorganized bunch he had ever met. Sorting out their medical database had been worse than untangling fishing line. His colleagues had teased him about "suffering on Rhiza." If they had only known.

The sight of Earth sitting peacefully in space with its cities glowing in the shadows of the night side grew more dear to McCoy every time he returned to it. At his age, he never knew when he would be seeing it for the last time, but there was no point in worrying about that, was there? The shuttle glided smoothly down into the blue of Earth's atmosphere while Spacedock shrunk back and transformed itself into a star that McCoy could still see when he stepped out of the spaceport into the chilly December night and found himself in Macon, Georgia. The city was all lit up for Christmas.

As he glided through the familiar streets in a rented aircar, McCoy gazed out at the decorated windows of department stores, trees hung with brightly glowing strands of light, holographic displays. The big theaters were hosting live performances of the Nutcracker Suite, A Christmas Carol, Handel's Messiah, and other holiday classics. The brightly glowing canyons of the inner city receded and McCoy found himself in the suburbs surrounded by snug, brightly-lit homes and well-manicured lawns. Gas lamps burned beneath oak trees that had been growing since before the first orbital launch. Some of the houses dated back well before the founding of the United Planets, the United Earth, or even the United Nations. They had been retrofitted with indoor plumbing, modern climate controls, lighting, and roofing materials, of course. Rotted wood has been replaced with replicated wood substitutes that didn't rot. That seemed disquieting to McCoy somehow, like the feeling he got when he stepped out of the transporter and wondered if he was really himself or a copy.

The plantation home that the McCoy/Sanders family had owned for more than three centuries was decorated with the best of them. McCoy loved the old place. When he was a boy, the home had been the residence of his Great Aunt Letitia, the grande dame of the McCoy clan. Now it belonged to his great great nephew Ian and his family. The big, white house with its grand oaks and majestic columns was virtually untouched by time. Returning to the place always made McCoy feel young again. When you're over a hundred and twenty years old, McCoy had told his friends, that's a rare feeling. McCoy smiled when he saw the Christmas tree glowing in the front window. Nancy, Ian's wife, was a graphic artist who designed the window displays for some of Macon's finest department stores, but she knew how to make the place look inviting and not gaudy.

McCoy walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Curtains parted. The fresh, young face of Saralinda Sanders, Ian and Nancy's oldest, appeared in the window. McCoy smiled. She had always been one of his favorites. Pretty as a picture and smart as a whip. The door unlatched,
swung open.

"Sara!" McCoy said. "Well, how are ya, darlin'?"

They hugged as they always did and he walked in. He saw the piano, the staircase, the grandfather clock, and the chandelier. There had been changes, but the place was still much as it had always been. He looked at the pictures on the wall, at the members of his extended family. His
daughter Joanna was there. She didn't get home much. One of his great nieces had married a Vulcan boy. A young cousin's family had adopted a little green Orion girl who was cute as a button and generally spoiled rotten by every member of the family. Times had changed for the McCoys-and the Sanders, Alexanders, Garcias, and T'haris who had merged into the clan
over the years.

"So where's the rest of the family?" McCoy asked. He was pulling off his coat.

"They all went to the candlelight service," Sara told him.

"I should have known," McCoy said. "That's a bit of a family tradition. I hope you didn't stay behind on my account."

"No," she said. She took his coat, hung it on a wooden rack. "Actually I had a fight with Mom. I told her the service was a primitive tribal ritual left over from a less advanced time."

McCoy laughed out loud.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Oh," McCoy said. "I was just thinking about how some of those ladies at the First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia would react if you told them they were primative and tribal. I'd give a plug nickel to see that."

He laughed again. She laughed along with him that time. "Have you got any coffee around here? Just plain old Southern coffee. Nothing Bolian, Klingon, or Andorian."

"I'll replicate some," she said.

"Dear Lord, no," he said. "That's even worse."

She smiled.

"I'll see if Mom's got a can of the real thing," she said. They walked into the kitchen and she looked through the cabinets until she found a can. She dug out a coffee pot, washed it off, and filled it with coffee. When it began to brew, the kitchen filled with the aroma of brewing coffee.

"Smell that," McCoy said. "Ya don't get that with a replicator."

A few minutes later they were sitting around a huge table heaped with covered dishes.

"You just finished your first semester of college, didn't you?" McCoy said.

"Yes, sir," Sara told him.

"I guess that explains how you know so much all of a sudden," he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I was just thinking about some of the arguments I had with my father after I came home from Old Miss that first time," he said.

"But don't you think the idea of gods is something left over from our tribal past?" Sara asked him. There was an earnestness in that intense, young face that McCoy couldn't laugh at. This child was hungry for truth and as sincere as they came. He loved her dearly. McCoy took a sip of
coffee, thought for a while.

"I've asked that same question a lot over the years," he said. "Like you, I was brought up here in the deep South. My granddaddy was a Baptist preacher, so we heard all about God and the devil the whole time I was growing up. When I was a young man, I guess it embarrassed me a little, but there's things I've seen and heard over the years that keep bringing me back here to Macon and the things Granddad used to tell us."

"Like what?"

"It's kind of ironic," he said, "but the time we met the Greek god Apollo on Pollux (he pronounced it "pole axe") IV, that kind of got me to thinking. We all thought those old stories were myths, but here was Apollo, big as life, right out of the storybooks. I was always sorry about the way that one ended. I wasn't ready to herd goats for the rest of my life, but I wish we hadn't had to fight with him. Anyway, though, that encounter got me to thinking. If the old Greek stories had turned out to be true after all, who knew what else we might run into?

"Then there was that time we ran into Jack the Ripper on Argelius," he said. "I think I told you about that one too."

She nodded.

"Well, I'll tell ya," he said. "That thing may not have been a devil in the biblical sense, but it sure did act like one. It possessed people and made 'em do evil things, fed on fear and hate. We beat the thing, but I can't believe it was the only one of its kind out there in the universe. Sometimes I still lie awake at night and wonder how much of the violence and insanity we run into is caused by beings like old Redjack, and I wonder what would happen if a bunch of them ever got together. I just hope to God they don't reproduce very fast." He looked out the window into the cold Georgia night and felt a shiver.

"Then there was that run-in we had with that spoiled brat Trelane. Here was a being with enough power to move a planet around, and he was only a child. I'd hate to think about how powerful he'd be as an adult. Probably not too far from a supreme being in terms of sheer muscle, but still pretty human as far as willfulness, pride, and temper tantrums. I'd like to think there's a real God that's above all that, but all the powerful beings we ran into were still pretty human. The Organians and Metrons were better than most, I guess. The Thasians weren't all that bad either, but I always thought they were a bit on the creepy side. Lately, though I keep coming back to that crazy adventure we had on Nimbus III. Did I ever tell you about that one?"

"I'm not sure," she said. She was lying of course. She, like the rest of the children in the family, had heard all of Uncle Leonard's stories at least a hundred times. She enjoyed them, though. There was a comforting familiarity about hearing those legends repeated year after year.

"Well," McCoy said. "The whole thing sounded insane from the get-go. Seems some wild-eyed radical in a robe-why do they always wear robes?-had mobilized an army of sad, pathetic desert rats on this out-of-the way planet called Nimbus III. Somehow this guy had put them in touch with
their inner pain or some such durn thing, and convinced them that he had a direct line to God who had given him a treasure map to heaven. The fact that the maniac was a Vulcan and Spock's half-brother to boot made the whole scenario even more bizarre." He took a sip of coffee.

"We'd just gotten a new Enterprise, the Enterprise-A. It was a beautiful thing, like a gleaming white sculpture in space. It had all these fine touchtronic controls and super-enhanced sensors, and this nautical looking observation deck with an old style ship's wheel. Only problem was they'd rushed it through refit so fast the doors didn't even open right.

"So this sorry excuse for a ship, with James T. Kirk in the center seat, came swooping in to save the day like always. The rest of us always seemed to hang on for dear life while he chased his nose for adventure across the galaxy at warp speeds. He scared the living hades out of us, but truth to tell, we wouldn't have missed it because we knew he was one of those living legends that only comes along once in every generation. I guess James Kirk was a kind of wild-eyed prophet in his own right, and we were his faithful band of true believers. Maybe that's why so many of us put our own careers aside to throw in with him all those times. Or maybe we did it because we all loved each other-and him-like a family, and we couldn't stand to see it end.

"Anyway, we landed in this place called Paradise City-a walled fortress in the middle of a desert-and duked it out with this army of aliens. Jim Kirk even got himself mauled by this tiger woman. Nobody ever believes that part of the story when I tell it, but I swear it's true. We came bursting in there with phasers and Sybok, this crazy Vulcan prophet, started crying about how he never wanted any bloodshed. He should have thought about that before he took over a planet.

"Well, by the time it was all over, old Sybok the Vulcan had taken over the Enterprise and had it shooting across the galaxy in search of God Almighty and some place he called Sha Ka Ree. Before it was over, we'd all joined up with him. Even Jim Kirk decided to let him finish his search. Maybe the pointy-eared joker was crazy or maybe knew what he was talking about after all, but he kept claiming God was just around the corner, and that we'd miss out if we didn't go along with him.

"Anyway, we ended up finding this Class M planet sitting all by itself right in the boiling heart of the galaxy. The place where we found it was like a peaceful spot in the eye of a hurricane. We took a shuttle and went down. The place was pretty, green, and lush. The shuttle set down in the middle of this valley with tall mountains on every side. We got out and all of a sudden, these big, jagged shards of curved rock started shooting up out of the ground around us. They joined in the middle like the ribs of Jonah's whale and swallowed us all whole. Right then a giant face appeared to us in this swirling column of energy, and I felt every hair on my body standing at attention. I thought all about the stories Granddaddy had told us about Moses on Mount Sinai, Ezekiel's visions by the river, and John on the island of Patmos seeing the Revelation. I thought, 'My God, it's God! Granddaddy was right!' And God kept telling us how proud he was of us, and how glad he was we had come. I kept thinking about how excited I ought to be to really be meeting almighty God. I was right up there with those prophets, for crying out loud. But the whole thing just felt wrong somehow. Instead of feeling like Moses in the Exodus, I was starting to feel more like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,' and all that.

"Then Jim Kirk asks him what God needs with a starship. It kind of annoyed me when he asked it, you know. Didn't he have any respect? After all, this was supposed to be God. Then the thing zapped him across the room, and that little uneasy voice inside me went all the way to red alert. This wasn't any God I'd ever learned about in Sunday School. We'd been had!

"The saddest thing about it all was that old Sybok the Vulcan prophet had been taken right along with the rest of us. To his credit though, he stepped right up and distracted that bogus God long enough for the Enterprise to fire a couple of shots at it and for the rest of us to run for the hills. I've always felt bad about leaving old Sybok behind, but the part that really broke my heart was the look on his face when he realized he'd been duped. The thing turned itself into an image of Sybok and told him he'd been worshipping his own reflection. I've seen a lot of people do
that over the years, baby.

"Anyway, we ran to the shuttle, but it was fried, so the Enterprise had to beam us away. They were having transporter problems, so Jim insisted on the rest of us beaming up first. He always watched out for us like that. Partly it was because it was a captain's duty, but I think it was more than that. Lord knows Jim Kirk wasn't perfect, but he was always willing to lay down his life for the rest of us at a moment's notice. Maybe that's why we were willing to follow him across the galaxy. Anyway, we'd all beamed aboard, but before we could pull Jim away, the Klingons showed up and shot out the transporters. Jim was left down there on the planet with that thing after him. Frankly I thought it was the last I'd seen of him.

"It just so happened that we had an old Klingon general on board and Spock convinced him to take command of that ship so we could rescue Jim. In no time at all, Spock had beamed him onto that Klingon ship, and we'd all gotten out of there. By that time we'd gone toe-to-toe with death so often, it was starting to seem run-of-the-mill.

"Later on Jim, Spock, and me were standing on the observation deck of the Enterprise looking out into space, and I asked Jim if he reckoned God was still out there somewhere waiting to be found.

"'Not out there, Bones,' he told me. 'In here. The human heart.' He always used the word 'human' in the generic sense. I let it go at the time, but later on I got to thinking about the way he'd said that part about the heart, and it got me to wondering if something had happened to him down on that planet that he wasn't telling me about. Finally I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he said, 'You had to be there.'

"That really--," he paused, shook his head. "Jim and that...durned Spock." McCoy had always tried to keep from cussing in front of the kids, especially the young ladies. "They always
had to be so dad-blasted cryptic about everything. For years I wondered what the rest of the story was. Finally one day we were walking around the grounds of the Starfleet Academy in San Francisco when I asked him about it again. He stood and looked out at the bay for a little bit and finally told me.

"He said he'd been running from that thing for what seemed like hours, and was just too tired to run anymore. The thing had him hemmed inat the face of a cliff, and it looked like Jim's luck had finally run out. He had more lives than a dang tom cat, and he'd used them all up. Right at that moment, Jim said he felt this peace come over him, this feeling that something . . . powerful had been there all along watching the whole thing. Then he got this impression-like a wordless communication-that everything was going to be all right.

Just then the Klingon ship came over the hill. When Jim saw it, he felt this flash of rage because he felt like he'd been lied to. He started cussing at the Klingons, and then someone beamed him out of there.

"'Is that all?' I asked. 'Why didn't you tell me that before?' He shrugged, smiled sheepishly.

"'Because of the question you just asked,' he said. 'You asked me if that was all, and I don't know how to answer that. It was just a feeling, Bones, but it was one of the most incredible things I ever experienced.'

"Less than two months later, Jim was killed aboard the Enterprise-B during a shakedown cruise. All these years, I've thought about what he said. It was just a feeling. It seems like when somebody goes out looking for a showy God with bolts of fire and free-flowing miracles, they always end up finding something like Sybok's monster. Then, when you're not even expecting it, something powerful that you can't quite make out brushes across your heart like a giant shadow and changes your whole life forever.
Maybe it is primitive, baby, and maybe that's because as smart as we think we are with our warp drives and transporters, there are still some mysteries out there that are as far beyond us as they've always been.

"I'll tell you something else though," he looked around at the familiar house with the family pictures, the tree, and the presents. "I've lived to see some pretty awesome things out there in space, but the older I get the more I see the hand of God in things like oak trees, home, family, or a pretty young face. . . ," he reached out and touched her cheek as he said it, "and I think there must be someone good and kind out there making it all possible. Maybe, like Jim said, it's just a feeling. Spock would probably say it's not logical, but I think even he could understand. Or maybe he understands it better than most."

He sat there in silence for a long time.

"The candlelight service is just starting," Sara said. "We might still be able to catch part of it if you want to go."

"'Bout as well," McCoy said. He stood, pushed back his chair. Both of them put on coats and walked, arm in arm, out into the December night.