by K. W. Jeter
For his son.
Sisko turned, looking about the fields of yellowed grasses, the darker shapes of trees at the horizon; the sky blue and unclouded, as though no storm could reach into this perfect sanctuary.
Go, he told himself. Do what you came here to do. He knew that this world's eternity was an illusion; that time inched forward in another world, where his hands had risen, gripping the echo's wrists in futile struggle. You don't have forever. He started walking again, the tall, brittle stems tracing against his legs.
"What are you doing here?" A child's voice spoke. A child's face, scowling with suspicion, turned to look at him. The child's eyes were dark pieces of a starless night. "You're not supposed to be here. Not anymore."
Water rippled against the glistening rocks. Sisko shaded his eyes against the sun, the better to see the boy kneeling on a rounded perch in the middle of the stream. The fish that had been the target of the boy's attention splashed and darted away.
"I came here . . . to see you." The wet, pebbly sand grated beneath the soles of his boots.
"Why?"
This was the boy that his son Jake had come here, into this world, to be with. A boy . . . and something more.
Without turning around to look, without stepping away from the stream's bank, he knew that bones whitened beneath the trees' heavy shadows.
He kept his voice low, even kindly. "I came to tell you," said Sisko. "That it's time for you to go home."
"What?" The boy gazed at him in mocking disbelief. "You're crazy. This is my home."
"No . . ." Sisko shook his head. "It can't be. Not anymore."
"You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about." Anger darkened the boy's face. "Get out of here! I killed you once before, already—" The boy's voice turned sullen. "I can do it again."
"No, you can't." He could see even more clearly, when the boy's eyes deepened and hollowed, the face of McHogue before him. "You can't do what you want here, anymore."
"Huh?" The boy crouched on the rock, head lowered to watch his confronter. "Why not?"
"Because . . ." There was no way he could keep the words from sounding sad. "Because it's not your home now."
That was the truth, that Sisko had come so far to discover. The world that McHogue had created—this little part of it had come to exist inside his own mind. When he had stepped inside here, so long ago, to find where his son had gone so many times before. And had found his own lifeless eyes gazing up through the trees' interlaced branches. McHogue's world—McHogue's universe—had come inside him then. A piece of it . . .
And that was enough. To make it his own, in ways that even McHogue could not have known about.
To reclaim it.
"You're crazy." The boy's voice, taut with rage, broke into his thoughts. "Go away!"
There was no need for any more words. Sisko bent down and touched the water's surface. The tips of his fingers penetrated the cold, silvery currents.
"No!" The boy's voice was a scream now, more fear and surprise than anger. "Stop—don't—"
There was no water now. The bed of the stream was dry ground, cracked where the mud had begun to crumble into dust.
He straightened up, turning to see the other changes that he had willed to happen.
"No . . ." The boy moaned in terror.
Brown leaves scattered from withered branches. The wind twisted them, a lifeless flock, across the mottled sky. Clouds incapable of rain tinged the sun to a dimming sulfur.
The sweep of Sisko's thought moved across the fields. Blighting the thick stands of grass, the stems curling black and skeletal, as though scorched beneath an unseen fire.
Dust trickled from the gaunt flanks of the false world's bones, the exposed rocks splintering in turn. And below those . . . there would be nothing, he knew. He turned away; there was not much time left.
The boy was silent now, huddled into a ball on the rounded stone. Silent but for his broken and uncomprehending tears.
And even those . . . Sisko closed his eyes again, not wanting to see what happened next . . . even those would be gone soon.
Perfect silence. He opened his eyes, catching just a glimpse of something that looked like tattered rags, swirled by the wind to vanish with the leaves from the dead trees.
Slowly, he nodded. In a dead world; mercifully dead. So that the other world, the real one, could have life.
"No," he said aloud. "You don't understand."
There had been no need to step back through a door, from the false bright world to this one. He had always been here. And in that time, from one heartbeat to the next, breath had rushed back into lungs.
His echo gazed at him, with the same uncomprehending wonder with which the dying boy had. And in the same death.
Another transformation, the final one, had taken place. Sisko opened his hand, releasing the throat of his echo, the thing with his face broken in sudden confusion.
"I don't. . . understand. . . ." Its eyes flooded with tears.
Sisko watched as the echo's image slowly crumpled to the floor.
"How . . ." It lay in agony, the last of its false life seeping from its body. "I don't understand. . . ."
Pity moved inside Sisko. It was still a part of him, however terribly changed.
"McHogue lied to you." He knelt beside the echo. His own voice became gentle now. "Or else he never knew. There was one element that he couldn't take into account, in all his plans."
"What . . ." The echo's eyes had begun to flutter closed.
"The CI technology—its operations are all based upon the users' experiences, memories, perceptions of reality." Sisko kept his voice level, though he had the disquieting sense of watching a part of himself die before him. "The CI modules extrapolate from the real world—the real universe—to form all their hallucinations and fantasies. That was how McHogue made his universe—from pieces of the real one."
"But you . . ." The echo nodded feebly. "There was something more to you . . . to us . . ."
There was no time left; he could sense the last of the echo's life dissipating.
No time, and no possibility of explaining. What he had only now come to understand.
Prophecies and blessings . . .
The Kai had known. That there was another part of him, that no longer had its origin in the real universe. So long ago—a span beyond centuries, it seemed—he had gone into the wormhole, and had encountered things there beyond all knowing, beyond any universe's concepts of space and time. They, the ones whose very existences were mysteries beyond comprehension, had shown him only a little of what they knew.
But that had been enough to change him. Forever. To place a seed within, beyond all sentient reality. And beyond the reach of McHogue.
The echo died. Sisko laid his hands upon the sleeping image of his own face, and drew the eyelids shut. He stood up, looking over his shoulder as a noise of metal intruded upon the silence.
A jagged fissure ran through the bulkhead like a stroke of empty lightning. He could feel the illusory station tremble and shudder beneath his feet. An inanimate groan became a cry of agony as the buried girders began to separate from each other.
He turned, seeing black webs shatter across every surface. The ceiling broke apart above him, but the crumbling pieces didn't fall. Light and gravity had ceased. Spun from his balance, he raised his arms to protect himself as his shoulders struck and splintered open the wall behind him.
The last he saw was stars rushing in through the razor-edged shards of the viewport.
"We've got to get out of here—"
She didn't know what had happened. There would be time for explanations later.
"Come on, Benjamin." Jadzia wrapped her arm around the commander's shoulders, bearing his weight against herself. In the few seconds that he had been gone, struck from existence by McHogue's hand, his strength had been drained from him; he could barely stand upright.
"Where . . . where's McHogue . . ."
She half-carri
ed, half-dragged him toward the runabout. "I don't know." That much was true; the smiling, black-clothed figure had vanished as abruptly as Sisko had. "It's not important right now—"
Overhead, the sky had darkened with the return of the storm clouds; their first winds rushed through Moagitty's broken walls. The inlaid marble floors, spattered with blood, trembled from upwellings deep beneath Bajor's surface.
The runabout's door slid open, and she managed to dump Sisko sprawling into one of the seats. There wasn't time to strap him or herself into the restraining harnesses; she slapped the pilot controls, readying the thrusters for maximum force.
Sudden acceleration was enough to pin her against the seat's back. Without having plotted a course, Jadzia manually aimed the craft for the only opening she saw above them. Only when the Ganges had broken beyond the planet's atmosphere did she throttle back on the engines' force.
They were beyond the reach of something else as well. She felt something inside her, filling a hollowness as wide as her heart.
Welcome, child. The symbiont didn't need words to speak, its thoughts becoming her own again.
Beside her, Sisko stirred, his eyes dragging open for a moment. "Where are we . . . where are we going . . ."
Dax glanced over at him. "Home, Benjamin. We're going home."
He thought it to be a most peculiar thing. Where was everybody?
There had been so many of them here . . . and now they were all gone. McHogue looked around himself, wondering what had happened.
So many, and only one that wouldn't fit, that had to be gotten rid of. He had done that, out there on the station that was the other part of his world, and had come home to Moagitty. And found it empty.
Very peculiar . . .
Other changes had taken place in his absence. The broken walls had seemed to heal themselves, the domed ceiling again arching overhead. That was a good thing; he took a definite pride of ownership in the place. But none of his guests remained, none of his people, the lives that he had taken into his own and transformed into glory. No gamblers at the Dabo tables, the banks of holosuites all unoccupied; no one.
The odd thing, it occurred to him, was that there was no other place they could all be. This was the only world there was; there could be no other. He had seen to that.
He called out, voice echoing down the empty concourse, but there was no answer. So he would have to go find them. They had to be around somewhere.
McHogue started walking. The empty corridor stretched out before him, seemingly infinite. He realized he had no idea of how big it actually was.
He kept walking. He'd already decided that he would go on walking, for however long it might take. . . .
A FEW LAST QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 18
Major Kira Nerys stepped into the center of the Ops deck and gazed about herself. For a moment, it seemed to her as if she might still be mired in the dreaming that had accompanied her long sleep. The fatigue had drained from her at last, but had been replaced by a measure of guilt and surprise at discovering how long she had been out.
She looked with deep suspicion at the calm, orderly activity surrounding her. The last time she had been here, the very atmosphere had been electrified with the sense of crisis and impending disaster.
One of the comm technicians passed close by; she reached out and grabbed the tech's arm. "Did I miss something?"
In the commander's private office, Chief of Security Odo reviewed the statement that had been received from the Cardassian ruling council.
"Gul Dukat's formal apology—" Commander Sisko Pointed to the words on his desk's computer panel. "The line they've taken is that it was a rogue group of their scientists who had developed the new cortical-induction technology and supplied it to McHogue. Naturally, everyone involved will be severely punished."
Odo looked at the text on the screen with a cold eye. "In Cardassian society, failure is always accompanied by punishment. Its just a question of who receives it."
He watched as the commander nodded and blanked the panel. There had been other accounts, of measures taken and fates decided. The most satisfying had been the word received from Bajor, of the collapse of the Severalty Front and the reestablishment of the previous provisional government. At last report, the disgraced General Aur, chastened by experience, had resigned all positions and entered one of the contemplative religious orders that had formerly been headed by the Kai Opaka.
"Oh, and Dukat appended a personal message." The commander leaned back in his chair. "Seems that he intended to tell us about the trapdoors, the whole system of surreptitious access, when we first took over the station. It just slipped his mind, is all."
"The Gul's memory can be . . . convenient when necessary." Odo had firsthand knowledge of that. "If there's nothing else, I should be returning to my duties at the security office."
"Yes, of course, Constable; I didn't mean to detain you. Though I noticed, when I passed through the Promenade, that our friend Quark seemed rather upset about something. I would have thought that he'd be feeling pleased now, what with the effective eliminating of his competition."
Odo shrugged. "The Ferengi does not easily let go of any grievance. Something occurred a few shifts back, something not quite to his liking, and he requested my assistance in determining absolute proof of the culprits involved. So he could press for damages from certain, shall we say, responsible parties."
"Oh?" The commander raised an eyebrow. "And what did you tell him just now?"
"I told him that absolute certainty, at least in this existence, was not to be acquired. He would just have to do the best he could, with what knowledge he did have available to him." Odo gazed up at the office's ceiling, as though contemplating the tiresome sins of the universe's sentient species. "I'm afraid, Commander, that this is something you're going to hear more about."
He had been idly tossing up a baseball and catching it with his fielder's glove when his father came into their living quarters. Jake looked up at him.
"You look kind of tired," he said.
His father managed to raise a smile. "A little more than usual, I suppose."
For a moment, his father regarded the wooden crate that still sat in one corner of the room. Jake still wasn't sure exactly what was in the crate; he'd been told that it was stuff that had belonged to the Kai Opaka, down on Bajor. His dad would have to do something about it all, eventually.
But not just yet.
Weighed down with fatigue, his father sat, slumping into the couch with his eyes closed. Jake wondered if he was going to fall asleep right there.
He didn't. One eye opened, regarding Jake with an alert, sidelong gaze. "I have a question for you." As Jake watched, his father drew himself upright; he took out his data padd and turned its small display panel around. "Could you tell me why Quark would send me a bill for two dozen broken items of assorted glassware?"
Jake gazed at the laced spheroid sitting in the center of his glove's padding. "I can explain. . . ."
"You know," said his father, "I really don't think you have to." He set the data padd down on the low table before them. "Quark will just have to realize . . . that it's one of those games where anything might happen." He plucked the baseball from Jake's glove; with a quick snap of his wrist, he side-armed it down the living quarters' long hallway. It could be heard crashing off unseen objects.
Jake grinned. "Nice pitch, Dad."
His father slouched back against the cushions, already looking less tired. "About as good as one of yours, judging from this." He held up Quark's bill on the data padd.
"Hey—" That remark brought a protest from Jake. "I wasn't pitching; I was at bat."
"Indeed?" His father raised an eyebrow.
"Well . . . yeah. Kind of." Jake realized that he had just been caught out. "Anyway, it's not exactly easy, you know, trying to practice inside a holosuite. And all by myself."
"What about your friend Nog?"
Jake snorted. "I don't think you're
going to see any Ferengi in the big leagues soon."
"Well . . . you present a very reasoned argument." His father flexed his hand. The toss of the ball had been nothing, a literal throwaway. But Jake knew that his father had a pretty decent fastball; maybe the kinetic memory was still locked inside there, somewhere inside his dad's arm, through his elbow and all the way up into his shoulder. "Tell you what—I could use a little practice myself."
"You sure?" Jake regarded him with a mixture of hope and skepticism. "I mean, you've been busy a lot . . ."
"Only with things that don't even exist." His father closed his eyes again, rolling his head back against the sofa cushion. A different tiredness, a better kind, visibly moved through him. "And . . . they can wait."
Jake watched him for a moment longer, then slid off his fielder's glove and set it down on the sofa cushion between them. He stood up, glancing back over his shoulder as he headed to his room, leaving his father to his long-delayed rest.
"It could have been much worse."
She knew she didn't have to tell Julian that; as the chief Starfleet medical officer in this sector, he had been in charge of evacuating the ruins of what had been Moagitty. There had been more individuals left alive than they had initially expected, enough to overwhelm DS9's own emergency facilities; hospital ships and personnel from the closest navigational sectors had been routed here and into orbit above Bajor. Dax had observed, at first with a degree of surprise and then with a growing admiration, the organizational skills that the doctor had brought to bear upon the problem of coordinating the rescue effort's varied elements.
"Believe me, I know," replied Julian. His around-the-clock labors had left him looking more unshaven and ragged-edged than Dax had ever seen him before. He leaned back against the lab bench, kneading his brow. "It's bad enough as it is. If everybody had been found dead down there, we could've just performed a few regulation autopsies and been done by now."
Dax made no reply; she was aware that he was merely trying to get a reaction from her with a bit of gallows humor. She knew him better than that; he wouldn't be working himself to the point of exhaustion if his heart wasn't in perfect synchronization with the demands of his profession.
