by S. D. Perry
Part of me says so what, I’m free to make my own decisions, I can do whatever I want—and if it just so happens to coincide with some religious writing somewhere about the Emissary’s son, big deal. It doesn’t mean my life has been plotted out, or that I’m helpless to decide my own fate…but there’s another part of me that feels totally helpless, and frustrated to the point of screaming. It makes me sorry that I asked Dez to help the Kai, like I’m this willing pawn, participating in my own puppetry, if that’s the word. I really wish I could talk to Kas about it, I know she’d understand. And I finally understand a little more about her, I think…and maybe Dad, too. When I think back to how it was for him, from the beginning, from the very moment that Kai Opaka told him he was Bajor’s Emissary…he went through denial, and anger, and even periods of depression, I think, over years. Maybe he finally embraced it not only because it was true, but because he just got tired of worrying about what it all meant, in terms of fate and free will. I don’t know, maybe that’s stupid. Maybe not.
Anyway, I don’t really feel like I can talk about any of this…maybe to Dez, but he’s been sort of unavailable since we left. Even when I do see him, he seems distant. I wonder if he’s angry that I asked him to take on passengers…I mean, he’s still Dez, he’s glad to see me and all, but I can see that there’s something on his mind that he doesn’t want to discuss, or at least not with me. And I know that Pif or Facity or Coamis would be happy to listen, but…
I know this is going to sound dumb, but I don’t want to talk about it to anyone here, because I don’t want them to think less of me. I don’t even think that they would, it’s just…it’s hard to explain. They’re my friends, I know that, but they’re new friends, forged under kind of extraordinary circumstances—Drang, and Stessie dying. Drang was so exciting, it was a very big deal for me, and it’s been meaningful for me, to be around people who were there, who experienced the same things I did. And then when Stessie died…I suddenly felt very close to everyone, because we all had this terrible thing in common, we could all talk about it. What I’m dealing with now, it’s not big, it’s not exciting or tragic, it’s just…me. Which isn’t embarrassing, I don’t mean that….
What do I mean? It’s like—when I think about my relationship with Nog, about some of the boring, stupid things he’s seen me through, I’m not self-conscious, I think because it’s an entirely reciprocal situation. For all the times he had to sit and listen to me talking about Mardah, or writing, or what I thought about politics or whatever, I had to listen to him complaining about his uncle, or going on about Starfleet. Not big stuff, just stuff. I guess what I’m getting around to is that I don’t want my exciting new friends to find out that I’m boring, sometimes. That’s going to have to change, I know…but at the moment, I think I’ll stick to writing.
I should go check on the Kai, make sure she’s comfortable and everything; I’ve put it off as long as I could, and she’s probably starting to wonder why I haven’t dropped by. She seems like a nice lady, too, so I can’t even tell myself that I’m dreading her personally—truth is, I haven’t wanted to get drawn into a conversation about Dad, or the Prophets, or my prophecy (which she doesn’t even know about, yet, and I’m not sure if I’m going to tell her; as far as she knows, I was caught in a storm and saved by the Even, which is the truth. Just not all of it). Now that I think of it, I should probably see how Wex and Tosk are doing, too. Wex came by twice yesterday, and once the day before, but I told her I was busy…. I’m not being much of a host, am I?
I’m not much of anything, at the moment, but things will get better, I know that. I wish…I wish I knew everything, how about that? That’s all.
16
IN THE DAYS following Ee, as the Even Odds traveled to the Idran system, Opaka spent a lot of time walking B Deck and meditating, trying to digest the things Jake had told her about Bajor. So much had happened since she’d left, so many things she never would have expected: Minister Jaro Essa and his failed attempt to seize power and isolate Bajor; the rescue and heroic death of Li Nalas; Winn Adami elected Kai, and her recent disappearance; the resistance fighter, Shakaar Edon, becoming First Minister; Bareil Antos’s death; the brief stir created by the return of Akorem Laan and his claim to title of Emissary; the rediscovery of B’hala; the foretold but incomplete Reckoning; Benjamin Sisko’s marriage and the conception of his second child, shortly before his disappearance; contact with the Dominion, who for a time had successfully pitted the major powers of the Alpha Quadrant against one another, leading to years of conflict and death on a scale Opaka could scarcely bring herself to contemplate, culminating with the near-genocide of the Cardassian people….
It was a lot to think about, to celebrate and mourn, and as eager as she was to see about the Tosk’s strange mission, to go home again, it was also a relief that the journey was to take almost a month. She was thankful for the time, to accept the things that had come to pass for Bajor.
When Jake signaled at her door, Opaka had just returned from a walk, her second of the day though it was barely midmorning. She was coming to realize that while her heart was relatively calm, she was already feeling physically restless after only a short time on the ship. In the years since she’d left Bajor, particularly the last few, she’d become accustomed to a fairly active lifestyle. As Kai, she’d walked in gardens; on the Sen Ennis moon, she’d tended them. Since leaving the moon, she’d dealt with everything from caring for the sick to watching large groups of children, and though she certainly felt it in her joints and muscles at night, she’d come to enjoy the exercise. And miss it, it seemed.
“Jake, come in,” Opaka said warmly, pleased to see his reluctant face at her door…and guessing, from his expression, that he was finally ready to talk to her about the one topic he’d carefully avoided since they’d left Ee, twelve days earlier.
Jake sat, and accepted a cup of tea, and politely asked after her comfort. Opaka reassured him that she was well, that everyone she’d met had been remarkably pleasant…and waited. After a few moments, Jake cleared his throat softly, his pleasant brown face a study of tension.
“Why haven’t you asked me about my father?” he asked, holding her gaze for only a second before dropping his own. “About what happened to him?”
Opaka took a deep breath, hoping that she would be able to comfort him. “I thought it might be a painful subject for you,” she said gently.
Jake seemed surprised. “But he’s in the Temple. He’s with the Prophets, and everybody’s been telling me how wonderful that is. For a Bajoran…I mean, isn’t that a good thing?”
“For him, yes, I believe so,” Opaka said. “And I rejoice for him. But for you…” She shook her head. “Your feelings are your own. If I were in your stead, the last thing I’d want to hear is how someone else feels positively affected by my personal loss, or what the religious significance is.”
“But I thought…you’re the Kai,” Jake said, as though that explained something, and Opaka had to smile.
“And so I don’t care that you miss him?” she asked lightly. “To me, to Bajor, he is the Emissary. But he’s your father.”
“I didn’t mean…” he began, then shook his head, smiling self-consciously. After a few seconds, his smile faded. “Actually, I guess I did. I thought that you’d want to tell me how blessed he is, about what the Prophets have planned for him, about the great tapestry of life.”
“You overestimate my awareness of Their plans,” Opaka said, aching for the scarcely disguised bitterness in his voice.
“But…I thought you had visions,” Jake said. “You said you’ve dreamed things…and you told my father that he was the Emissary.”
Again, the barely restrained distress…and she thought of her own son, and how it must have been for him during his all-too-brief life, to be the child of someone driven to seek a spiritual truth. Had he privately experienced feelings of jealousy, fears of being left behind? He was Bajoran, his faith had been strong, but had that m
attered, when she had been in retreat, when he had wanted his mother?
You can only be honest, she thought, feeling regrets of her own, wondering if any parents really knew how to balance their own lives with the lives of their children…and if any child understood the depths of such struggling.
“The Prophets do have ways of letting Their will be known,” Opaka said. “For me, there have been visions, and dreams…but those are rare, indeed, and not always specific. To walk with the Prophets…it’s about truth, about finding the things that are meant to be…and we find the truth inside our own pagh, the vast majority of the time. I’m afraid that faith in Them is usually quite undramatic.”
Jake nodded noncommittally, his expression carefully blank, and Opaka quickly continued, tempering her feeling for the Prophets with empathy for the young man in front of her.
“But as I said, my feelings are my own, and yours are surely different. And I’m sorry for your pain, Jake. You didn’t ask for your father to be the Emissary, and I regret the unfairness of it to you.”
As Jake dropped his gaze again, working to control the hurt that showed so clearly on his face, Opaka felt a touch of wonder at her words, at her feelings, at the changes implied. Seven years earlier she would have been determined to at least say that the Prophets had plans for him, too, that Their love extended to everyone who wanted it…but she was no longer the same person she had been. As Kai, she had been responsible for the spiritual guidance of Bajor. Since leaving home, she had learned only to be responsible for herself, and for the touch of her hand or the kind word she expressed to the individuals she encountered. How had it taken her so very long, to understand that truth was a matter of perspective?
“I…” Jake began, then began again. “I was looking for him, in the wormhole. I read this prophecy, that I would go into the wormhole, and come back out with…with one of the Chosen. I thought it was going to be him.”
At the naked longing in his voice, Opaka felt her eyes well with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, after a moment. “It’s just how things are, I guess.”
They sat for a moment, silent. As much as she wanted to go to him, to embrace him, Opaka held back, respectful of his private reckoning and his space. After a moment, he managed a faint smile.
“If the prophecy is correct, at least we’ll be home in time for my little brother or sister’s birthday,” he said lightly, and while there was no real humor in his face, in his voice, she could see that it was what he needed to do. A distancing from a lost hope, a recognition that life went ever onward. The questions that she had about the prophecy would wait.
“That will be lovely,” Opaka said, smiling back at him. “Tell me, has Kasidy chosen names?”
She could see the relief in his eyes as he answered, and was glad that she could do at least that much for him.
They were only a few days from their goal, according to Tosk, and Dez sat on the bridge, staring at the passing stars on the viewscreen, thinking about Jake. Once they were done with the Eav-oq world—Dez couldn’t help thinking of it that way—Jake and Facity would be heading back through the wormhole, to pick up his things…and Dez was thinking that he ought to go with them, to meet Jake’s friends, to reconnect with Jake. Keeping quiet about the Eav-oq had put something of a strain on their relationship, and he figured that going with Jake to the station would be a good way to fix things…but he didn’t really want to go, and he wasn’t sure why. He’d been thinking about it a lot, and the best he could come up with was that he knew that he should, and he hated having to do things he was supposed to do.
And…the vague resentment he’d been feeling toward Jake wasn’t helping. Why did the boy have to be so insistent about the charity thing? Dez had tossed off a comment about it weeks before, to assure Jake’s interest in staying on, and he just kept bringing it up.
What does he want? I offer him an exciting future, a position on one of the best crews in the quadrant doing anything he wants, and he puts me in a position where I have no choice but to pretend, to lie. All I’ve ever wanted was to help, and look where it’s gotten me; I can’t even tell my own crew what we’re doing.
And yet…he couldn’t really blame Jake, not entirely. He’d played his part. Dez could still so clearly remember finding Jake on his broken shuttle, freezing, still clutching the pitiful words that had almost been his last. All Jake had wanted was his father, and Dez knew how that felt, he understood. He’d wanted to provide that security for Jake, to step in where Jake’s father had failed, where his own father had failed. He still wanted that…so why was it so hard? What was he doing wrong?
“Srral, could you take a look at something for me?”
Dez looked up at the slight concern he heard in Facity’s voice. It was just the two of them on the bridge; Fac had been killing time listening to random communications, but she’d apparently walked over to the sensor array at some point.
“What is it?” Dez asked, standing. There hadn’t been any alert signals.
“What is it?” Srral echoed, a half second later.
Facity shrugged as Dez moved to lean over her shoulder. “It’s probably nothing. I just looked up, and I thought I saw a slight subspace variance in the prox scan, but it seems to be gone, now.”
“You are correct,” Srral said. “For point eight seven seconds, there was a temporal shift in subspace density, at approximately 1630 kilometers port, bearing—”
“We see that,” Dez said, frowning at the freeze that Srral had pulled up to Fac’s screen. The panels wouldn’t sound an alert on anything singular under a second, they passed too much random debris…but the sensors had picked up a flash of something big, that appeared to be moving at warp. “What does it mean?”
“Insufficient data to be certain,” Srral said.
“Reflection?” Facity asked. “It’s either that, or…do the Hunters use cloaking tech?”
“No,” Dez said. They were advanced enough, but they didn’t bother with it. The same with the Dominion, and they wouldn’t stalk the Even, they’d probably just open fire…
…except hadn’t he heard that Thijmen was looking into buying a cloak ship? Rym Thijmen, probably the Even’s main rival, ran an aggressive retrieval crew, they’d snatched a number of jobs away from the Even…
…and how many people did that Tosk go spilling his story to before he told it to Jake? Was it possible that Thijmen had heard about the Tosk’s experience, and was following the Even to get to the Eav-oq crystals?
Dez looked at the scan another moment, then sighed, shaking his head. It was about a thousand times more likely that they’d caught a reflection, a bounced signal. He was digging for trouble where there was none, tired of his own boring self-analysis, tired of hassling with the whole Jake equation.
“Reflection,” he said. “Srral, tune the scans up to alert at two-tenths of a second, at least until we hit Tosk’s planet.”
He smiled at Fac, then returned to his chair, sinking back into his silent reverie. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that things would have to change once they reached the Eav-oq world. Although he hadn’t announced it directly, everyone knew by now that he was planning to head down to the surface with a team…and if they found what Dez was hoping to find—evidence that it was the Eav-oq world—Jake would figure out in about a heartbeat why he’d been so willing to transport the Tosk.
Dez shifted in his chair, irritated that the thought bothered him, suddenly glad that Eav-oq was only a few days away. It was time to stop pretending, it was time for Jake to accept how things were going to be, to accept him. And if Jake was disappointed…well, Dez wasn’t his father, it wasn’t his job to be Jake’s role model, or to keep Jake from being disillusioned by the universe.
Besides, he’ll get over it, Dez thought, watching the stars slip past. We all do.
17
TOSK STEPPED OFF of his ship and breathed deeply, feeling t
he slick rocks beneath his feet, smelling the wetsoil smell of the morning air. He was relieved beyond measure to be back at the small and empty planet, to be looking out across the gentle rifts and peaks of stone. On the way down through the ice storms, his vessel had suffered a terrible beating, he’d even taken a possibly serious hit to his warp drive that he’d have to see about before leaving, but his relief had nothing to do with having survived the trip. He’d lost grasp of his original purpose here, but it was almost over…and then he would be Hunted again, only Hunted.
It will be my time once more.
His pursuers need never even know that he had faltered from his duty. Though not ideal, it was not unheard-of for Hunters to lose track of Tosk for months at a time. The crystal had made him act unpredictably; he was certain that once the Other matter was settled, he would revert to patterns he wasn’t even aware of, and the Hunters would once again find his trail.
Behind him, the roar of the second vessel. He turned to watch the Even Odds’s dropship settle to the ground, and he hurried to greet them as soon as the engines rumbled to a stop, as the doors opened and the crew members began departing the ship.
Captain Dezavrim had insisted on escorting Opaka Sulan to the surface, and had brought a number of the crew, as well, presumably to conduct a salvage survey. Besides the captain and first officer there were Jake, Pifko, Brad-ahk’la, Glessin, Neane, and Coamis, each of them wearing equipment belts. Tosk didn’t care, he only cared that Opaka, too, was departing the vessel, Wex at her side, that she had agreed to come and was now standing on the surface of the unnamed planet, brushing a tendril of silvery hair behind one ear as she looked around. The others filed out, talking among themselves about the fierce ice storms and the planet’s apparent emptiness, gradually falling silent as they turned their collective attention to Tosk’s approach.
