Chapter Text
"Interview Alexander."
It had begun as a joke—something Paris had tossed over his shoulder on the way to the turbolift at shift-end. Janeway had been bemoaning the difficulty of keeping up morale in the Delta Quadrant, only to have Paris quip, "Interview Alexander."
"Lieutenant," Janeway had said. Paris had halted with the lift doors open. "WHICH Alexander? We've got two on the ship: Ensign Alexander in astrophysics and a maquis crewman."
"I didn't mean somebody on the ship. I meant the Gross Alex. You know, Alexander the Great." And the doors had whooshed closed.
Janeway had glanced over her shoulder at Tuvok. "Alexander THE GREAT?" Tuvok had just given her one of his 'I'll never understand humans' expressions. Beside her, Chakotay had chuckled. "What do you find so funny, Commander?"
"The mental image of a modern female starship captain trying to interview a Greek about leadership. The Greeks were so misogynistic, they wouldn't even ride mares into battle."
"Alexander OF MACEDON was not a Greek," Tuvok—the ever-precise —had said from his station.
"Whatever," Chakotay had replied. "Close enough for government work."
Janeway had twisted her neck in time to catch Tuvok's raised eyebrow, then covered her mouth to hide a smile.
That should have been the end of it. A joke. But somehow, the idea just kept spinning wheels in her head. Interview Alexander. Perhaps it had been the insouciance of Chakotay's amusement, his assumption that Alexander would not take Janeway seriously, that had kept her worrying mentally at the question.
Oh, Janeway knew all about Alexander of Macedon, Wunderkind. "General by 18, king by 20, conqueror of Persia and master of most of his known world by 26—dead before his 33rd birthday. And what have you done with your life lately?" That was the traditional litany with which Admiral Ashbrook opened his lecture on Alexander in Terran Mil-Hist 1 class. Everyone at the Academy had known what he said, could even repeat it with him. Yet there was something about the line which still had the power to knock the wind out of one. It was precisely Alexander's youth which made him fascinating. Not what he had done—amazing enough itself—but who he had been: that combination of Homeric hero with something new and fresh and utterly novel. He had possessed charisma in spades.
He had led a ten year march of conquest from Greece on the Aegean Sea to the banks of the Indus River—a distance of 50 longitudinal degrees—and his army had followed. They had been so far from home, they had not known where they were; they had thought the Indus flowed somehow into the Nile. But still they had followed. When in India they did finally mutiny, it had been only to make him turn around. They had not wanted to get rid of him.
His army had mutinied twice, in fact: that time in India, and once more back in Persia. The second time was the only mutiny in history that she knew of where the soldiers' complaint had been that their general was sending them away from him. Not quite a year later, when he had lain dying in the heat of a Babylon summer, his soldiers had become so surly at being kept from seeing him that his marshals had been forced to knock out a wall in the bedroom where he had lain, so they could file past to pay their last respects. When he did die, his empire had promptly shattered into fragments because none was his equal. Forceful, calculating, shrewd, flamboyant, charming, brilliant, mesmerizing, and never defeated in battle...there had simply been nobody quite like him.
Interview Alexander. Yes, she could learn something from him, but "What am I supposed to do?" she wondered aloud to no one in particular, "Resurrect him out of a history book? Conjure him from a copy of Arrian?" And yet, the very fact she had asked the question meant she was thinking about a way to do it.
***
"Computer," she said later in her cabin, "check database for information on Alexander of Macedon, dates 356-323 Before Common Era. Monographs and articles, non-fiction only, spanning 1850 to the present."
The computer blipped and purred, then produced screen on screen on screen. Janeway was floored by the flood of citations. "What is this? A small cottage industry in publishing on one person?" She had known he was important; she had not guessed he was this important. "Arguably the most famous secular figure in Terran history," one scholar had said.
But how on Earth (or in the Delta Quadrant) was she supposed to interview a man 2600 years dead? The holodeck immediately popped to mind, but holographing fictional characters into existence was one thing. Holographing a living person was something else entirely. All the computer could do would be to project a synthesis of scholarly debate and archaeological data. But no synthesis could be the Alexander—the man known for pulling military rabbits out of hats (or out of kausias). To create a holoimage of a living person, one needed a recording, a sigmund, and half a dozen other collections of data which created a program like their own ship's doctor. Janeway did not want to talk to a synthesis. She wanted ALEXANDER.
She pondered the problem for several days until she finally remembered something, a tidbit of classified information from a mission a century gone concerning an archaeo-scientific artifact called the Guardian of Forever. The then-captain of the Enterprise had come across a machine-being called "The Guardian" who had been able to play back, like a holoshow, aspects of the histories of various worlds. The then-science officer of Enterprise had, with his tricorder, recorded some of what the Guardian had shown. But due to the delicate nature of the Guardian which could allow interference in a planet's past, the information Spock had retrieved had been stored in an archive somewhere as "CLASSIFIED: Level 2B". Janeway had clearance for Level 2B. The question was whether anyone had bothered to put that data into Voyager's library.
Someone had. The next question was whether the portions of Terran history recorded by Spock happened to include Alexander's conquests. Anxiously, she accessed the file and sped through the contents.
There it was: "Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 BCE: record semi-complete"
Well, semi-complete combined with the analysis of generations of historians...it just might do.
"Computer," Janeway said, "Begin a synthesis of section 23.D from classified record Keeler-Alpha together with historical analyses of Alexander the Great and Macedonian studies from 1850 to the present. Store in holodeck memory under the title 'Janeway: Alexander.'"
It was time for supper. Rising up from the desk in her quarters, Janeway headed down to the mess hall.