Beyond Antares

"Beyond Antares" was a 23rd century love song.
Lieutenant Uhura was fond of the song, and sang it on a couple of occasions while serving on the . () Uhura tried to explain to the space probe Nomad about the song, but found this difficult as Nomad did not understand about music. ()
When she performed the song in the rec room in 2266, she accompanied herself on a Vulcan lute. ()
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== Lyrics ==
The skies are green and glowing,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the scented lunar flower is blooming:
Somewhere, beyond the stars...
Beyond .
I'll be back, though it takes forever.
Forever is just a day.
Forever is just another journey.
Tomorrow a stop along the way.
Then let the years go fading,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where my love eternally is waiting
Somewhere, beyond the stars...
Beyond Antares.
== Appendices ==
=== Background information ===
The music for this song was written by Wilbur Hatch with lyrics by either Barry Trivers (Star Trek Concordance, pg 34) or Gene L. Coon. (). On screen, the song was sung by Uhura actress Nichelle Nichols and featured a backing track that included piano, played by Marl Young, harp, played by Catherine Gotthoffer, and guitar, played by Laurindo Almeida.
In the final revised draft script of "The Conscience of the King", "Beyond Antares" was characterized as "a strange, soft, delicate love song borne in the depths of space... love and loneliness and vast distances, with poignant memories." The teleplay also notated the song's lyrics. In the episode, the song was scripted to be sung "softly" with "beautiful" music.
Originally, this song was to have included an extra verse, between the first verse and the verse which ultimately became the second one. The lyrics of this verse (from the final revised draft script of "The Conscience of the King") were as follows:
There waits my love, a-sleeping,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the great blue crane its watch is keeping,
Somewhere, beyond the stars...
Beyond Antares.
In the aforementioned script for "The Conscience of the King", the only other change from the on-screen lyrics was that Uhura described "the scented lunar flower" as "growing," rather than "blooming."
Nichelle Nichols once described this song as "a very ethereal thing" and went on to say, "We had a rendition of it that was out of sight, but it was too now, too hip. It had just the tinge of sultriness and it could have gone wrong [...] I should have recorded it. Anyway, when I took it just a little lower, it had a throaty quality." Nichols thoroughly enjoyed the process of recording the song. "What was marvelous about it was that we had Laurindo Almeida and full accompaniment," Nichols enthused. She also described Almeida's guitar background as "beautiful beautiful." (The World of Star Trek, 3rd ed., p. 114)
An alternate version of this song, from "The Conscience of the King", is included as part of the featurette "Swept Up: Snippets from the Cutting Room Floor", in the Blu-ray Disc release Star Trek: The Original Series - The Roddenberry Vault. Whereas the version of the song in the final edit of the episode intermittently cuts away from Uhura, the camera stays on her in the alternate version, which also includes the song's extra verse.
An instrumental rendition of the song additionally appeared on Leonard Nimoy's album titled .
=== External link ===
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Beyond Antares