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2246. Mombasa, Kenya. Uhura Family Estate.
Nyota lies with her head on Atiya’s lap under the shade of the tamarind tree. Haki is out in the mid-afternoon sun, playing fetch with Jelani, the family dog. She and Atiya are joking and laughing as her older sister absentmindedly twirls her fingers through Nyota’s hair.
“I’m starving!” Nyota exclaims. “It’s not fair that the first year I have to participate, Ramadan falls on the longest days of the year!”
“You know what’s no fair?” Haki calls, kicking the soccer-ball towards them and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “Halili gets to go to the Nairobi satellite base with Baba at the end of the summer, and I have to stay behind!”
“She earned it. If you’d studied for your tests instead of playing soccer with your friends, you’d get to go too!” Atiya laughingly responds, chucking the soccer ball at Haki’s head.
The fifteen-year old catches the ball easily and shrugs in response, his grin rueful. “That’s… true.”
“Look!” Nyota points up at a small grey figure moving in the branches high above them. “Even the monkeys are eating. I never thought I’d be jealous of a tumbili.” Her stomach grumbles pitifully in agreement.
“You look like a monkey,” Haki teases.
“You smell like one,” she shoots back. A sudden thump startles her into sitting up, the rapid motion making Atiya’s fingers snarl in her hair. A beige tamarind pod has fallen and split open to reveal the red-brown fruit. “Look how ripe they are!” she says mournfully, poking at the casing.
Atiya stands up, brushing dry leaves and grass off her skirt. “If they’re falling right into our hands, that means we’re meant to have them, right? It’s not going to do any harm.” She toes her shoes off and plants her feet on the rough bark of the tree, boosting herself up a couple of feet to reach the ripest tamarind pods. She tosses one to Haki and one to Nyota before plucking one for herself. Jelani is sniffing around the fallen fruit, his speckled tail wagging.
Nyota pulls open the pod, then pauses, her fingers inches from the juicy fruit. “But, won’t Mama be mad?” she asks apprehensively.
“If you don’t tell her, she won’t know, you scaredy-cat.” Haki says. “Are you gonna tell her?”
“I’m not a scaredy-cat! And I’m not a tattletale!” she protests, biting into one of the forbidden fruits. The sweetly sour tang floods her mouth and slides coolly down her throat.
Haki makes his voice high and whiny. “Mama, Haki went to the movies instead of doing his work! Mama, Haki said a bad word! Mama, Haki stole my dessert! Mama, Haki’s being mean to me!”
“I don’t say those things!”
“Yes, you do,” Atiya says, her mouth full. “But it’s okay, because you’re the baby of the family.”
Nyota feels her lips forming a pout, and stuffs another refreshing fruit in her mouth. She’s not a baby, she’s almost thirteen!
For an hour they gorge themselves on the tamarind fruits, fingers and faces becoming sticky with sweet juice. The ground by the tree is littered with discarded shells and pits. The slam of a screen door alerts them to the mess they’ve made. The figure is distant, but she is wearing a headscarf, so it must be Faiza or their mother, and either will be angry about the tamarinds.
“Quick,” hisses Haki, “Throw the pods in the bushes.”
They hurry to dispose of the incriminating evidence, stifling nervous giggles, but their mirth changes to silence in an instant when they catch sight of their mother’s face. Nyota has never seen her mother look so upset, not even on the day she found out that the only one who kept her headscarf on at school was Faiza and Marjani declared she was an atheist.
Guilt turns the tamarinds in her stomach to lead, and Nyota prepares herself to apologize. She should have known that their mother would find out if they broke fast. Her mother nears, her sandals slapping against her feet with every hurried step, and Nyota opens her mouth, but before she can say anything her mother sweeps them up in a hug.
“My little darlings,” she says. “You know I love you so much, don’t you?”
“Mama, what’s the matter?”
She strokes their faces, looking at them intently. “I love you so much.”
Atiya presses her hands over their mother’s. “We love you too. What’s wrong?”
Mama takes a deep breath. “There’s been a disaster on Tarsus IV.”
Haki looks stricken. “Our cousins? Aunt and Uncle?”
She shakes her head. “They didn’t make it.”
“What?” Nyota asks, shocked, her mind still sitting on a branch in the tamarind tree.
“I know, love, I know,” her mother strokes her hair. “Come inside.”
She follows her mother inside, numbly. The newscast is on the big screen in the library and Nyota reads the scrolling headlines with horror. “Famine Sparks Genocide on Tarsus IV Colony; Starfleet Response: Too Little, Too Late” “Two-Month Old Distress Call Ignored” “Genocidal Governor Employs Eugenics Theory” “Kodos the Executioner: Did Starfleet Overlook Critical Warning Signs?”
“…for staying with us the next hour,” comes the voice of the newscaster as Atiya turns up the volume. “Back to our main story, the disaster on Tarsus IV. We don’t have any concrete numbers yet, but by all accounts the death toll continues to rise, some reports placing it over fifty percent of the colony’s population. Starfleet has informed us that for security reasons, relatives of survivors and victims are being contacted privately about the status of their loved ones.
“The events of this tragedy will surely be examined more closely in the days and weeks to come as details are filled in, but it appears that the emanemos crop was infected by a malicious strain of bacteria, which proved fatal on ingestion. Eradicating the bacteria wiped out the majority of the colony’s food supply, which led the governor of the colony to make the drastic decision to kill a portion of the population in order to ensure the survival of the rest until the arrival of Starfleet.
“Shockingly, it has come out that Starfleet was notified of the worsening conditions on Tarsus over a month before they mobilized to go to the aid of the imperiled colony. For more on the inefficiency of Starfleet’s emergency response system, we turn to senior correspondent Grant Binder. Grant, what problems should we be aware of?”
“Thanks, Ehylen. The first thing we need to remember is that this is a failure not only of Starfleet’s emergency response, but also of their administrative procedures. Starfleet is responsible for the supervision and management of all colonies. The situation on Tarsus IV reveals a lot about their administrative practices—they’re pretty much non-existent. Starfleet farms out the majority of the governorships of these colonies to independently wealthy Federation civilians as a source of revenue, and follows up with only the most cursory of check-ins.”
“And now we’re feeling the consequences. The scale of the tragedy on Tarsus IV is horrifying.”
“Certainly.” The anchors shake their heads at each other with solemnly professional expressions.
“The second thing we have to remember is that the offices in charge of administering colonies are also severely under-funded. The Kelvin disaster brought about a large shift in Starfleet priorities—the extensive militarization of the exploratory fleet has diverted funding from many other important Starfleet functions, such as colony oversight and non-military emergency response. In fact, the largest recipient of funding in the wake of the Kelvin disaster was Starfleet’s Intelligence Agency.”
“And they’ve been shaken by a series of high profile failures recently, most notably the Eta scandal. It really calls into question the wisdom of our funding priorities--“
“Turn it off,” commands Mama, her eyes dry again. “They don’t care anything about people’s lives.”
“I don’t understand,” Nyota hears herself say. “They killed Aunt and Uncle? And all our cousins?”
“Yes.”
“But, why?”
“I don’t know,” her mother sighs. “I don’t know.” Nyota’s mind whirls with guilt and sadness and relief and more guilt at the relief. She remembers how two years ago she screamed and begged and pleaded to be allowed to go to Tarsus with her relatives.
Nyota was ten, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do in life. She was already fluent in seven Terran languages and one non-human language, and when she grew up, she was going to be the first xenolinguist to crack the Igari code stone and perfect the Universal Translator. Right now, however, what she wanted more than anything was to learn xenolinguistics in the classroom of Hoshi Sato.
And if Hoshi Sato only taught on Tarsus IV, then that’s where Nyota had to go. She could see her future hanging star bright in the skies above her. Unfortunately, her parents didn’t see it the same way.
“Hoshi Sato lives there! The colony has one of the best schools in practically the whole galaxy!” she had informed her parents over and over. “Besides, the cousins live there! Why can’t I stay with them? You’re being so unfair!”
“It’s too far away, Nyota, and you’re too young.”
“I’m not too young, I’m almost eleven! Lily just left for school in America, and she’s still ten! Besides, it’s only like, a month at warp six! I could learn so much!”
“No,” her father rapped out. “I’m not having this discussion with you again. You are not going to Tarsus IV, no matter who lives there, or where your friends are going to school.”
“You just don’t want me to do anything that I want to do,” she muttered angrily, wishing the swinging door of the kitchen could slam.
Her father’s voice rang out down the hall behind her. “Nyota. Come back.”
“What?” she asked curtly, turning around and glaring. He took her by the hand and sat her back down at the kitchen table.
“I want you to become whatever you dream of. Your mother and I know you’re going to do great things, Nyota. But we don’t want to lose you before we have to. Choose any program on Earth—if you get in, we’ll pay the tuition. But don’t ask us to send you off-planet. You’re our surly little baby girl, and we’d miss you too much.”
She scowled. “I’m not surly!”
“Could have fooled me,” he teased, white teeth flashing as he smiled infectiously at her until she couldn’t keep her frown anymore.
She doesn’t think even her father could make her smile right now.
They sit at the kitchen table without speaking a word until the silence is broken by the call to evening prayer. “Come pray with me,” her mother says to them, and for the first time in over a year, Nyota doesn’t resent the walk to the mosque or the scarf she must don there or the time it takes to pray. Kneeling on a mat next to her mother and her sisters and her neighbors, she finds something soothing about the ritual words and actions, something comfortable about knowing that everyone around her is doing the same thing.
When she returns home, Nyota follows the news obsessively, reading every article about Tarsus that she can find. She is devastated when the obituary of Hoshi Sato appears on her news-feed and she cries for hours when she first sees a picture of a starved survivor of the genocide, guilt wracking her body and twisting her stomach. She doesn’t complain about Ramadan again. It has taken on new significance in her mind—no longer is it just a facet of a religion that is more her mother’s than her own. It has become a memorial, an act of remembrance, a way to honor her cousins and her aunt and her uncle.
It isn’t enough.
The memory of that day follows her—the day she learns that bad things can happen to good people and sometimes there isn’t anyone who can stop it. She graduates from university as valedictorian of her class with full scholarship offers from the top five xenolinguistics PhD programs in the solar system. She joins Starfleet instead because a long time ago, she swore that as long as she could breathe, she would never stand by and do nothing.