Enigma Tales

by Una McCormack

  I do wonder what will come next. Will the epic of my life repeat itself? Will I be proven guilty, yet again?

  Yes, let us leave the confines of this building and go outside. Right now, it is spring in the capital, and therefore the city is at its loveliest. We do have four seasons here, contrary to popular belief, but two—summer and winter—are very long and very harsh in their own inimitable ways. Spring and autumn are shorter, and all the more welcome for it, soft seasons of color and pleasure. But they do not last long enough, and what comes next is hard. Autumn’s kindliness becomes winter’s cruelty, and the fresh spring becomes polluted summer. Throughout our history we punished our land, Doctor, as we did each other, driven by hunger to farm with great violence. The land, like much else, did not thrive in our hands, and we created wastelands. Now the land punishes us in turn. The summer brings not only baking heat, but high winds, and with the wind the dust clouds roll into the city. We struggle to breathe, and we put on masks. We all carry our masks. We are never far from them.

  Yet even as we suffer these bad summers, those of us who have lived through all those long years since the Fire know that they are not as cruel as they once were. With your help—the help of Starfleet and the Federation—we have been busy. We have been clever. The lands beyond the capital are reestablishing themselves, and we hope that one day there will be a summer free from the chastening dust, when the whole city will look up at the sun and a bright blue sky without taint and be glad. Peoples change (as the poet does not quite say), and smile.

  Perhaps you might change too one day, Julian. Perhaps one day you might smile.

  Garak

  [unsent]

  Three

  Antok was yawning and doodling through yet another committee meeting, when her mind soon wandered back to the previous evening with her family. Her sketches were of candles, she realized, and she felt warmth—happiness—suffuse her whole body. The coziness of their home and the beauty of the little ceremony, lighting the candles and sharing the sweet cakes and thanking the Prophets. How blessed she was, how grateful. How different life was these days; how different life was for her two children, and how much promise the future held for them. Antok had been born in the dying days of the old Cardassia, when the people had been crushed under the double tyranny of the Central Command and the Obsidian Order. Just as she reached the age of emergence, she had seen these two powers collapse, and she had come to U of U as a student during the first civilian administration, that cruelly short time when it seemed that democracy might take root in Cardassia. She had found the courage then to explore her Bajoran roots, albeit still passing as fully Cardassian, but studying the history of those Bajorans who had come to Cardassia Prime. And then Dukat seized power, the Dominion arrived, and everything changed.

  The university changed within weeks. Directives came down stating what could and could not be studied. Some teachers complained and were promptly suspended. The shelves in the library thinned once again. Outlandish topics such as hers were sidelined, with the grants and prizes going to more traditional accounts of great guls and battles won. Antok had been discouraged by this turn of events, leaving her studies before she was pushed out. She worked for a while in a geleta house and then at a restaurant in Barvonok, waiting on the businessmen who were making a fortune from the trading opportunities that had opened up with the Dominion worlds, and from the war. She doubted many of them had lived to enjoy their wealth, but the change of career had saved her life. She had not been on campus when the Jem’Hadar arrived there to conduct their massacre. She had been asleep in her basement flat after a long shift, staying hidden down there while the building above her was destroyed and the city all around was flattened. She dug her way out, in the end, emerging hungry and frightened after three days to find that the world had ended.

  A dark time had followed, for her and all the others who had somehow survived the Fire; years of hunger and labor and fear, and then . . . Then one morning you found that you were sitting in a bright new purpose-built building, doing work that you loved, and that the city outside was no longer rubble and ruin, but thriving and renewing. And last night you and your beautiful family had spent the evening eating Bajoran food and praying Bajoran prayers and laughing and loving, and you were all so happy that the worst of your troubles was a lengthy and somewhat tedious meeting. Antok drew another candle and silently thanked the Prophets.

  The meeting ended with a decision to postpone the decision until the next meeting, and Antok gathered up her files to hurry off to the archive. Her colleague Nevek, who had been sitting watching her doodle, said, “You’re full of sunshine. Wild night last night?”

  Antok smiled. “You know me. Family girl at heart.”

  Nevek smiled back. “One day you’ll do something to shock us all.”

  Antok dashed off across the campus as soon as she could get decently away, and returned to her desk at the archive. She wondered again why she simply didn’t say what she and her family had been doing last night. Nevek was nice, a mother of four; she talked about what they did all the time. Like most Cardassians, she did not follow any religion, but there were the solstice festivals, and the fireworks on Liberation Day, and all the small holidays throughout the year when Cardassians remembered their history and commemorated both their many dead and their lucky escapes. Nevek, she knew, wouldn’t give two hoots that Antok had been lighting candles to thank the Prophets for the gift of the Emissary. In fact, given that Nevek was a sociologist, she would probably try to snag an invitation to their next celebration, and not just for the free food. Did anyone care, on the new Cardassia, that Elima Antok and her children had Bajoran genes? Would they really mind, seeing her family pray to the Bajoran gods? Antok thought not, but still some small part of her felt that discretion was needed. Old habits die hard. Perhaps when the boys were older; they were so small, too small to be exposed to the potential hostility of others, and she did not think she had the right to make that decision on their behalf. It could wait. Perhaps it would be their children who would be able to celebrate openly.

  Antok opened her padd to see what the morning held. The U of U archive had a small team of techies dedicated to trying to salvage data from the devastation caused by the Fire. With few survivors, and little surviving infrastructure, the process was like an archaeological project, Antok thought, digging through the rubble and trying to pull out something, making guesses from very small, limited finds. After more than a decade, such finds weren’t all that frequent, but earlier in the week one of the team had been in touch to say that he’d found something he thought might be of interest to her. He still had some work to do on making the files accessible, but he thought they should be ready for her to examine today.

  He was as good as his word. A little data packet squirted onto her comm—no, not that little, as it turned out; really quite substantial . . . Antok rubbed her hands in anticipation. There might well be some good pickings here. She murmured thanks to the Prophets again: this find was pretty miraculous, given how much of the city had been destroyed by the Jem’Hadar and how little tangible remained.

  Antok opened the first file. Her expert eye immediately recognized the seal of the Administrative Committee of the Office of the Academy—the main decision-making body of the old U of U. The files were marked confidential, but that didn’t set Antok’s pulse racing. The old U of U had marked everything confidential, even when they were discussing something as banal as whether or not to install new showers in the gymnasium, or whether the anthem should be sung at the end of classes as well as at the start, or what texts were to be removed or readmitted to the libraries. The old Cardassia could always find a reason to be secretive. The new U of U, like all of Cardassia’s new institutions, made so much information available that the more cynical sometimes suggested they were trying to bury bad news.

  The files were encrypted, but Antok knew most of the keys that would decrypt prewar U of U data.
These files, however, proved to be unusually stubborn. Corrupted data? Or a key she hadn’t yet found? That in itself would be valuable, even if the files themselves turned out to be about nothing more than how to make some sweaty undergraduates less sweaty. Antok had a bundle of documents on file that were, so far as she could make out, gibberish, but might become intelligible with a new key. And her techie colleagues loved a good puzzle.

  She played and played, but the data remained impervious to her charms. After an hour or so, she was running out of options, but not out of curiosity. She stood up, stretched, and went to get a cup of red leaf tea in the staff room: the bookish person’s alternative to going and standing under a hot shower and Antok’s preferred method of breaking a block. The archivists were there, on a break, and handing out ikri buns, and there were a couple of other colleagues from her department. A little later, fueled by tea and office gossip, she came back to her desk. As she sat down again, inspiration struck. She remembered some long-forgotten passwords, and gave them a go.

  The third one did the trick. The characters on the screen began to unscramble before her eyes. The first words she saw were:

  PROJECT ENIGMA.

  She wriggled excitedly in her seat and leaned in over the comm. How mysterious! What could it be? In general, Cardassians liked giving long and impressive names to things (as “Administrative Committee of the Office of the Academy” demonstrated), and so the brevity of this piqued her interest. Burying bad news? Or simply not important?

  Pages were unscrambling faster than she could read them, but Antok had been trained to read quickly and for comprehension. She was soon deeply immersed. After about twenty minutes of reading, she stood up, closed the comm, and went outside, where she stood gulping in deep breaths of fresh air.

  Project Enigma, it transpired, had been a hush-hush project arising from conversations between the medical school and the government Office for Bajoran Racial Equity. It dated back to the last few years of the Occupation. The project, so far as Antok had been able to make out, had set out to identify children of Cardassian-Bajoran liaisons and bring them to Cardassia Prime. For what purpose, Antok had not yet been able to identify, but the involvement of the medical school was filling her with foreboding.

  Do I want to know what is in this file, she wondered, thinking of her boys. She had read so much about the horrors of the Occupation; she knew already the depths that had been plumbed, and she was afraid to find out more, particularly when it struck so close to home. Her father, herself, her boys . . . Did she want to know?

  Antok took another deep breath. The fact was, she had to know. It was her job. It was her responsibility. But more than that—it was her history. She needed to know. She had to know. She went back inside, sat down again at her desk, and went to work.

  * * *

  Pulaski stayed awake reading Lang until well into the night. She was so impressed that she even located a copy of the novel that Lang had been dissecting, The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Ulan Corac, but a few pages demonstrated that while Lang’s analysis of its content had been witheringly accurate, she had skimped on eviscerating Corac’s style, which was deadly. Long sentences, contorted for effect; extensive digressions; and an overwhelming sense that the story wasn’t going anywhere but back again and again over the same ground. Pulaski wasn’t a great reader of novels at the best of times, but at least this one did the trick and sent her to sleep.

  She was fresh and alert when her alarm woke her, and found that she was excited about the day ahead. When she had received this invitation, her acceptance had been out of duty rather than enthusiasm. Her impression of Cardassia Prime, like many people in the Federation, even so long after the war, was of a dusty brown world where people lived a grim, subsistence-level life. True, the world was still harsh, and the land reclamation projects were still in their infancy, but Pulaski was finding Cardassia fascinating. How often did you get to see firsthand a civilization rebuild itself? So far, all signs were that the Cardassians had met the challenge admirably. Sure, there were bound to be problems—Pulaski was a seasoned enough traveler to know that—and she bet there were still pockets of poverty here in this city and across the Union. But the Cardassians were getting there.

  The skimmer passed through the campus and out toward the city circular. Chief among these signs of growth and change was the liveliness and variety of the news. It was everywhere, she saw: the big public screens in the main squares, the tabletop tickertapes, the constant updates on personal comms and padds. Pulaski could live without all this—as long as there wasn’t a major war happening, she could happily stay uninformed, but she understood how, for the Cardassian people, this new freedom and vibrancy of the press must still be a novelty. Certainly it added color and flavor to everyday life, and Pulaski was more than happy to provide some content.

  “Wool-gathering, Kitty?” said Alden.

  “Enjoying the sights,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll see anywhere like this place again.”

  The first item on Pulaski’s intricately detailed schedule for the day was an interview with one of the major news ’casters. Efheny had explained that the interviewer, Edek Mayrat, was one of the most respected journalists on Prime. His two daily ’casts—morning and evening—were watched by millions across the Union. Efheny clearly thought that the interview was a great coup, and he had gone to some effort to secure it. Pulaski wasn’t bothered either way, but if it did something for Efheny’s resume, she was happy to oblige. But with even only a vague interest in the whole process, she had to admit she was impressed with the studio building when she arrived—another of these fine buildings that filled the city skyline—and the facilities were certainly state-of-the-art. She was introduced to the producer of the show, a female named Ista Nemeny, who quickly set her at her ease, ran her through the process, and introduced her to Mayrat.

  Mayrat was a focused and intelligent male of middle age, whose direct style she liked immediately. “Welcome to Cardassia, Doctor Pulaski. Thanks for coming here today.”

  “A pleasure. Happy to try something new.”

  He eyed her thoughtfully. “You don’t do much ’casting?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t, generally, let in front of journalists, not without a minder, and not unless her superiors were either bored and in need of a busy afternoon or desperate. The problem was her tendency to tell the truth as she saw it. Someone had offered her “media training” once. They hadn’t offered again.

  “Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “Not my world at all.”

  Mayrat smiled at her. “I promise not to be difficult.”

  “Me too,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nemeny signal that they were going live, so she took a sip of water and waited to begin.

  There was some brash music, and on the monitor in front of her, Pulaski saw some garish graphics resolve into the ’cast’s logo, with the word Today emblazoned across it. Mayrat did some spiel to the holo-camera, then made a fine introduction that emphasized ­Pulaski’s eminence. They’d done their research: he knew about her work in genomic therapy, and he didn’t just talk about the work she’d done with Bashir, although naturally this was mentioned. His introduction finished, he got right to it.

  “Doctor Pulaski, how do you like Cardassia?”

  “I like it very much. No, really. Everyone’s making a fuss of me. What’s not to like?”

  Mayrat laughed. Perhaps this was the moment he saw that Pulaski wasn’t going to be his usual guest, holding back and equivocating. “Nothing you haven’t liked?”

  “It’s pretty hot, obviously, but then, I’m a very ordinary mammal with very ordinary warm blood. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do there. I’m drinking plenty of fluids, keeping my hat on, and staying out of the midday heat. That’s great advice, by the way, for any of your listeners who also happen to be warm-blooded.”

  “Tell me
some of the things that have struck you about Cardassia Prime,” said Mayrat.

  “How little devastation remains from the war,” Pulaski said promptly. “Sure, there are places here and there where there’s clearly still some rebuilding left to be done. That blight on the campus is a tragedy, for one thing. But the most striking thing, when you come in to land, is how complete the city looks. Also, things work. Your infrastructure’s great. I’m dying to get a ride on the trams.”

  “We have the Federation to thank in part for the infrastructure, I guess,” said Mayrat.

  “That’s very courteous of you, and maybe that’s fair if we’re talking about bringing the stuff here, and replicating more stuff, but we’ve been gone a few years now, haven’t we? If things are running well now, it’s not just a question of being well designed. It’s about the will to keep it running well.”

  “Sounds like we might be able to persuade you to stay.”

  Pulaski shook her head. “Nuh-uh. No chance. Too much fish juice in the sauces.”

  “Anything else you like?”

  “I like the hound-racing. Those beasts are beautiful. Poetry in motion. I’d like to get to ride one before I leave.”

  Mayrat smiled. “I imagine half the teams on the circuit are contacting your aide right now to be the first in line.”

  They talked for a while about the purpose of her visit, her work on the Andorian genome project, and her impressions of the university. He also asked, politely, about her current work, and she spoke warmly of the Athene Donald and the projects and plans for that ship. She hoped her colleagues would hear this and be pleased at what she’d had to say. (She didn’t have to worry on that score. Katherine Pulaski’s colleagues never missed any of her broadcasts. One of the other pools that ran on board the ship concerned how long it would take her to cause a diplomatic incident. Her best friend on the Athene Donald, the Trill Director of Research, Maurita Tanj, was about to clean up.)