by K. W. Jeter
Sisko nodded slowly. "Of course I have. That teaching is found on many worlds, in one form or another. The learned ones say that to achieve wisdom, consciousness itself must be changed, molded to take on the eternal, unchanging nature of the universe itself."
"Then you must realize that what McHogue has brought to Bajor is the complete opposite of that teaching. Through his powers—the powers of illusion and the material world, which are the same—desires are increased and made stronger, to the point of complete and utter insatiability. Hungers are created that are greater than the universe which contains them; there is nothing in reality which can fill that void. How can this not have a reciprocal effect on the world in which it happens? The material and nonmaterial aspects of the universe are intertwined and cannot be separated; the wound inflicted on one part is suffered by the other as well. And that is exactly what is happening upon Bajor now; the storms that lash its surface are proof of that. The physical part of the universe encompassed by Bajor is itself taking on the darkest aspects of unenlightened consciousness."
"What will happen? If that process goes unchecked?"
The image of Kai Opaka seemed to waver for a moment, as if doubt had interfered with the apparition. "That is beyond even my understanding. The eternal is in danger of becoming a thing based in time, transitory and then finally instantaneous. Time and space are one; you know that, Benjamin. If time ceases, then so must space. All of the Bajoran system, including this end of what you call the wormhole, would no longer be."
"And what of us? What would happen to the station?"
"I do not know." The image shook its head. "The station is of a nature foreign to the world it serves; it represents the inward flowing of all that lies beyond in the universe. And yet at the same time, it has become linked to and has begun to share aspects of Bajor; the worlds have mingled together. If one should die, the other might yet live—it is not for me to say. But surely it would be a crippled existence, torn from all memory and purpose, in a place far from what had been here. Nonexistence would be thought of as a better fate."
He fell silent, mulling over the Kai's words. The matters of which she spoke were at the limit of his own comprehension; it was hard to know how much credence to give to the image's mystical pronouncements. Even before the Kai had answered the call of the Prophets, it had been clear to Sisko that she observed and moved in a sphere other than the one which he inhabited. As a Starfleet commander, he had to deal with the reality that was perceived in common by all of the galaxy's sentient beings; a reality whose dimensions, however vast, could still be measured and agreed upon.
And yet, at the same time . . . there were things he had seen, that belonged to that other universe, the one from which Kai Opaka spoke. When he had first been inside the wormhole, and time as he had known it had ceased, replaced by something fluid and malleable, a dimension where his consciousness and that of the wormhole's mysterious inhabitants had merged and expanded through all the worlds of memory and possibility—he had not emerged from that experience as the same human being he had been before. Some part of him, he knew, was no longer human . . . or at least not bound by the usual definitions of that state.
Perhaps that was the reason the Kai had come to him now, or had even been able to. The apparition Sisko perceived of her was something that existed outside of space and time; the mortal part of the Kai's existence was still located on the other side of the galaxy, past the wormhole's distance-annihilating transition to the Gamma Quadrant. Another part, the eternal one, could somehow hold Bajor within its palms, as one might cup a precious handful of water. The human shell of Commander Benjamin Sisko stood mute before these mysteries; the seed within, that had been planted in the wormhole's timelessness, could encompass the smaller world of Deep Space Nine.
"Benjamin . . ." The Kai's voice broke into his thoughts. "In your world, your existence, there is still time. But little of it. You must decide upon what it is that you will do."
He gazed before himself, at his fingers knotted into a doubled fist. "But I don't know," he murmured. He turned toward her. "What do you—"
His words fell into silence, as he saw that he was alone Where Kai Opaka's image had been, now empty space; nothing of the apparition remained behind. At the side of the couch stood the wooden crate that Kira had brought back from Bajor, still sealed tight, its dead remnants of the Kai locked in darkness.
They listened . . . and were appalled. Somewhere inside himself, Dr. Bashir analyzed his reaction, with a coldbloodedness that insulated him from shock, and put the label to it. For lack of a better word, he knew; appalled was suitable for mere disasters and horrors within human scope. The report that Ops had relayed down to the research lab went far beyond that.
"Do you require a repeat of that transmission?" The comm technician on Ops managed to keep his own voice controlled and professional, though Bashir detected a slight waver undercutting the words. It would have been impossible for the tech to not have had a similar gut-level response.
"That won't be necessary," said Dax. From where she sat next to Bashir, she reached over to the computer panel. "Thank you." With a touch of her finger, she blanked the screen and its last frozen video frame.
He was relieved at that; even with the lack of squeamishness that his medical training had given him, he had been able to glance only from the corner of his eye at the sight of the blood-drenched interior of Moagitty's main casino area. The madness of which he had caught the barest glimpse, in Ahrmant Wyoss's drugged mutterings, had seemingly found a new and more powerful incarnation, one that walked through the corridors of the distant pleasure city and wrote its name in letters that ran from the ceiling to the crowded floor.
"We knew this was coming . . ." Dax's voice had retreated to a soft murmur. "Didn't we?" She looked beside her at Bashir. "It's what we were afraid of all along. And now it's come to pass."
His silence and hers closed over them, as though the lab had been sealed against the vacuum surrounding the cold stars.
What they had viewed together on the computer panel's screen had been only a few minutes long . . . but that had been enough. The comm technician had signaled them that a fragmentary transmission had been received from the surface of Bajor; the exact source was the new city of Moagitty. Even with the reconstructive enhancement techniques run on the transmission by the station's central computer, what remained of the signal's audio component was little more than roiling static. But the visual portion was more than enough to indicate what had happened in Moagitty—or what might still be happening, if there were any inhabitants left alive.
Murder, thought the doctor. But even that word implied some function of humanoid intelligence, a comprehension of an action and its consequences, even if that was the psychopathic desire for the shedding of another creature's blood. What the images received from Moagitty showed was something beyond that, a force of nature implacable as the hurricanes buffeting the walls from outside. It was as if the storm had broken through and brought with it not the cleansing fury of wind-driven rain, but a red torrent that washed battered corpses against the gaming tables and other abandoned instruments of pleasure. A war zone contained within the domed spaces of the city—or its aftermath, when the force whose enemy was all life had strode onward.
"There may be still someone alive there." Bashir pointed to the blank screen where the images had been. "Whoever sent the transmission . . ."
Dax shook her head. "It's possible, but this doesn't constitute any real evidence. The transmission may have been recorded and then beamed here by the city's autonomic security system. It would be a standard design protocol for such an alarm message to include as much detail as possible on whatever situation might be encountered by an outside rescue operation. As it is, there was so much data lost coming through the electromagnetic fields surrounding the planet that the time stamp encoded on the sub-band frequency is missing. If the transmission had been assembled by a living person, it may have been recorded hours, e
ven days ago, and set on a repeater uplink until DS9 received it; by this time, the person responsible may be as dead as the others that we saw."
"True, but . . ." He tried to find a rebuttal to her argument; the thought of so much loss of life was beyond his ability to bear. "But we don't know," Bashir said slowly, "how much of Moagitty's interior the alarm transmission would show if we had received it intact. There may be sectors of the city that at least some of the people were able to seal off, to protect themselves from whatever this . . . this process is that's started."
The Trill science officer considered his words. "There's always that chance—but I would hesitate to raise our hopes on that basis. From what we've been able to ascertain of the CI modules' effects, any psychotraumatic behavior would have erupted on a nearly simultaneous basis throughout the city; it wouldn't have spread from area to area, like a traceable vector of contagion. The likelihood of anyone being able to take defensive measures against such a rapid and widespread outbreak of violence would be infinitesimally small."
Bashir had found one thread to cling to; he wasn't about to let it go, however the odds weighed against it being correct. "I can't operate on that assumption, even if it is the most logical. As a doctor, that is; I have to base my actions on the possibility, no matter how remote, that some fraction of the city's population will be found still alive, when the storms finally pass and the station will be able to launch a rescuesortie. And if that's the case, then those survivors will require medical attention. The DS9 infirmary will be the first place to which they'll be brought; I need to have our facilities ready for an undetermined number of casualties, anywhere from one to hundreds of them."
He slid off the stool that he had dragged over to the lab bench, and began gathering together his data padd and the hard-copy working notes that had accumulated over the last several shifts. The weight of Dax's gaze was palpable against his shoulders.
"Am I to assume that your assistance in this research will no longer be available?"
With the stack in his hands, Bashir glanced back at her. "I'm sorry," he said. "But at this point, I believe we've already found out all we need to know. We could go on forever, tearing apart that one CI module and running computer simulations of its programming, and every time we did that we'd find out a little more—and what good would it do? We'd essentially be right back where we started from."
Listening to his own voice, its rush of words, he knew that he was unloading his sense of frustration upon Dax—a frustration that he was aware she felt as well, that Commander Sisko and everyone aboard the station felt by now. All that had been their hope to accomplish, the mission of Deep Space Nine, was being annihilated in front of their eyes. The fragmentary transmission from Bajor hadn't been the sounding of an alarm, but a death knell, a mute obituary sealing others' lives and their own hopes. The development of Bajor, after its ransacking at the hands of the Cardassians, was to have been a triumph of Federation policy against the type of consuming greed that left only wreckage and bare-scraped, valueless stone behind; this world would have someday joined with others as an equal. . . .
Or perhaps more; he was not so much of a rational materialist to be unaware of the ennobling grace that sometimes resulted from such suffering as the Bajorans had endured. There had been a few occasions when Commander Sisko had broken his silence about such matters, commenting briefly and somewhat mysteriously about the unique spirituality shared between this world and the absent Kai Opaka. The commander hadn't achieved his rank by an indulgence in softheaded mysticism; yet Bashir knew that something inside Sisko had been changed, made different from ordinary humanity, by what he had encountered both on Bajor's surface and inside the wormhole. The doctor had had his own experience along those lines, just enough of a meeting between himself and the wormhole's extratemporal inhabitants so that he would know better than to doubt the existence of the universe beyond the one he normally saw. Perhaps that knowledge was what Bajor would have brought in turn to the Federation, a means of passage even greater than the wormhole's access to the Gamma Quadrant. A passage to something within each sentient creature, that would never have yielded to a scalpel or the finest optic probe; a passage to the soul.
And that was what was being murdered upon the surface of Bajor; all those possibilities beyond present understanding. What would become of a world that had suffered such a wound? A wound to Bajor's soul, the consequence of its bartering away the grace it had once possessed. Bashir and everyone else aboard DS9 could only wait and watch, listening for the silence that would mean all the storms were over. And they could go down and unseal the oddly peaceful city, and find whatever was left inside . . .
"I understand." Dax's voice entered the desert to which his thoughts had led him. He glanced at her and saw the same bleak realization apparent inside her. "It wasn't that long ago that we started this investigation; I really believed then that we would find some kind of answer, some way of preventing this from happening." She touched his arm. "Julian . . . I still think it's possible. If we just keep trying . . ."
He shook his head. "It's a little late for that now." The lab door slid open, and he carried his things out into the corridor.
At the infirmary, he dropped the data padd and the other items onto his own desk—it had been a number of shifts since he'd last seen it. He propped his hands against its edge, working out the fatigue that had accumulated across his shoulders.
You should get busy, he told himself, head lowered. He opened his eyes and looked across the unoccupied beds. There was no way of telling how soon he'd need to be ready. He pushed himself away from the desk and straightened up.
Walking through the dimly lit area, Bashir came to the last door. The one that led to the infirmary's attached morgue. It at least had one occupant.
He went in and stood looking down at the face of Ahrmant Wyoss. At peace, as though asleep . . .
"That was smart of you," said Bashir. There was as much pity as irony in his soft words. "You beat the rush."
She slept. And dreamed: again in air, in the night sky of her home planet. But not wrapped in fire this time; Kira felt only a cold emptiness in that place where her heart had been torn by a scouring wrath.
As though on a bed of stars, she turned, opening her eyes to look down upon the world below her. A cry of anguish caught in her throat, almost breaking through the silent chambers of her sleep.
Below her was ashes. And whitening bones. As though the contents of her stricken heart had covered the bared mountains and dry seabeds of Bajor. No living thing remained; all had been transformed to the denizens of this new, harsh landscape. The dead creatures of a dead world.
"No . . ." Kira tasted ashes upon her tongue. Her eyes squeezed shut. A single tear emerged and fell. It glistened diamondlike against the other cold sparks of light.
She saw it fall and strike the scorched, lifeless ground of Bajor, as though the tear had been a last, futile drop of rain.
She saw, as the night's sharp wind filled her clenched fists. She saw, but did not, could not, waken.
CHAPTER 15
She knew more than he did. Perhaps that was why she had made no more than a token protest when he had wanted to leave. As much as he had been her partner in the research up to this point, there were now things to be done—decisions to be made, actions to be taken—that would be easier without him.
Carefully, Dax set the rectangle of the glossy-black casing to one side of the lab bench. The innards of the CI module formed a glittering assemblage before her, the microcircuits like a maze rendered too fine for the humanoid eye to follow. There were mysteries locked inside the tiny components and networks of fibers that trembled at the touch of her breath, as she bent her face lower to study them. Some of the mysteries had been revealed, opened by the patient force of her investigation; others still waited, beckoning her to enter their domain. . . .
And the mysteries outside the CI modules, outside the boundaries of the station, entwined into the fabric
of the universe; those had come closer, the pattern of data from the remote sensors growing clearer. The questions that were posed by the bits and pieces of information were more discernible, even if they still lacked answers. The connection between what was happening on the surface of Bajor and the web of seemingly random anomalies that had slowly formed both through and beneath space itself was real now, if still invisible. To others, but not to her. Bashir and the others would have been able to see it as well, if she hadn't made the decision to keep the growing data file a secret.
It would be a secret no longer. After Bashir had left, she had recorded another message, in addition to the research logs already in the computer's data banks. A private message, addressed to the only other person on board DS9 who would understand—not just what she had done, but why. She had tagged the message for a delayed delivery to the recipient; a delay of no more than an hour, but still enough to make her actions and their consequences irrevocable.
That message had been the last thing she'd needed to take care of. Now, sparks of light glowed along the circuits as Dax switched on the power supply that she and Bashir had rigged up for the CI module. Now that the last of the altered holosuites had been shut down on Sisko's orders, this device was the last functioning piece of the CI technology aboard the station. Like a caged animal, its tearing claws pulled to render it even less capable of harm—if Dax loosened the grip of her rational thought processes upon her imagination, she could almost feel the sense of sleeping danger contained by the object. But not entirely asleep; with the power activated, it seemed as if one of the glinting points was the corner of an eye, twitching open just enough to watch her, waiting for its chance to spring.
