by K. W. Jeter
"I'd better be getting back." Bashir took a deep breath, letting his shoulders drop with its exhaling. "To the infirmary . . . the last few cases should be arriving . . ."
"No, Julian; you should get some rest." She forced a stern tone into her voice. "They can do without you for now—you've set things up well enough, for the others to carry on."
He shook his head slowly. "I don't know . . . there's so many . . ."
"Then it won't help anyone, will it, for you to collapse in the middle of it all. Julian, let the other medical personnel take care of things. The best course of action for you at this time is to go back to your quarters and get some sleep."
"Maybe you're right . . ." He pushed himself away from the lab bench. "Don't say any more." He held up a hand to ward off any further argument, managing a smile behind it. "Your diagnosis is, of course, correct. And the prescription." Julian turned and headed for the lab's door; he stopped there and looked back at her. "Perhaps later, when everything has finally settled down—perhaps we can talk then. There's a lot you haven't told me about yet."
As the door slid shut, Dax turned again to her own work. The matters that Julian wished to discuss with her, the question that he had left unspoken but that she knew he wanted to ask—the time for all of that might never come. Because she didn't know—or understand—the answers herself. Not entirely.
She looked across the instrument readings displayed on the computer panel. The station's remote sensors indicated no subspatial anomalies in this sector; the dark, shifting processes that the CI modules had unleashed, the erosion and collapse of the universe's underlying structure, had ended. Something had happened, something that Benjamin—in that brief, chaotic moment that had followed the strike of McHogue's fist—had accomplished. An act of Benjamin's will, a blow surer and more telling than McHogue could have defended against. But one that her own eye had been unable to see . . . and that Benjamin himself had been unable to elucidate to her.
The sensor readings only confirmed what she had sensed to be true, even as the Ganges had returned to the station. After a last, near-apocalyptic fury, the atmospheric storms had already begun dying out on Bajor's surface; in space, the runabout had encountered none of the turbulence that had made Benjamin's rescue flight so dangerous. There had been time, a respite of calm on their journey home, for Benjamin to attempt telling her what had happened. What he had done.
Benjamin had lain back in the seat beside her, as she had piloted the runabout back to DS9; he had looked exhausted from the rigors of his confrontation with McHogue. In a low voice, he had spoken of things at the limit of her scientific understanding. Language itself was inadequate for the purpose.
He forgot, Benjamin had whispered to her. McHogue forgot, that the world he'd created . . . it was inside our heads as well. In our thoughts and dreams. Because he'd put it there. That was where it was real . . . or as real as it could ever be.
That had been how he had defeated McHogue. The true backdoor that McHogue had left behind, an entry into the secret workings of McHogue's idios kosmos, his private universe.
All that had happened, the lashing storms on Bajor and the deeper, more threatening disturbances beneath the fabric of space itself—it hadn't been an effect caused only by the CI modules' operations. We made it real, Benjamin had told her. Just as we make . . . this universe real. He had raised his hand to point toward the runabout's viewport. It doesn't just happen out there. It happens in here as well. Then Benjamin had tapped the side of his head with a single fingertip. And what McHogue had made real . . . inside our heads . . . Benjamin had closed his eyes, smiling faintly. Then we could make it unreal again. If we just knew how . . .
In DS9's research lab, Dax reached out and shut off the computer panel's display. The scroll of numbers and graphs, the vital signs of the universe, indicated nothing now, other than that her old friend Benjamin had indeed known how. Even if he couldn't explain it to her in any terms that her rational mind didn't push away as being just too mystical.
The older part of her, the symbiont inside, was equally rational—but wiser; it reserved its judgment on these matters. It had known Benjamin Sisko longer than she had; long enough to assure her that he had indeed changed, in some way both profound and subtle. It had something to do with what had happened to him in the wormhole; what he had found in there . . . and what he had found of himself. Whatever it had been—and he had only made the most cryptic comments about it to her, allusions to mysteries even greater than what had happened to McHogue's real and unreal worlds—it enabled him to speak of the connection between the universes both inside and outside the humanoid mind, and as more than just metaphor. The return of the remote sensors' readings to normal levels proved that. Whether she wanted to believe that or not. Or whether she even could.
It was a bit too much to think about now. Dax rubbed her own eyes. She knew she should take the advice she had given Julian, and get some rest herself. It had been a long shift, with longer ones before it. Whatever sleep there had been, for anyone aboard the station, had been filled with dreams more arduous than anything encountered while awake.
The lab door slid shut behind her, as she headed for her quarters. She doubted if there would be any dreams at all, in this long-delayed night.
Sleep would claim him, if he let it. He only had to close his eyes and lean back against the cushions of the sofa.
But not just yet. Sisko turned his head slightly, to regard the wooden crate that still sat in one corner of the room. Next shift, he promised himself, he would have it taken away and sent back down to Bajor. The objects inside, the mementos of the Kai, could be more properly taken care of by her own people. He had no need of them. He had his own memories of her.
Prophecies and blessings, thought Sisko. More than anyone else knew; more than he himself had known. So much had been changed within him, in ways that he was only beginning to understand.
The need for rest weighed heavily across his shoulders. He knew why he put it off, why he tried to forestall its inevitable approach.
When he had been down there, in Moagitty . . . in that city and world that McHogue had created . . . there had been the smallest possible glimpse, as he had passed through the doorway between one false universe and another. A instant that had been both remembrance and eternal non-time: for just that flash of consciousness, he had seen again that which had been shown him, so long ago, inside the wormhole.
He closed his eyes, willing himself toward that memory again.
He had seen his wife, Jake's mother, inside there. In that time, in that lost universe, when she had still been alive. She had turned toward him, one hand reaching back to his, smiling as if she were about to say something. . . .
There hadn't been time enough to hear what her words would have been. The vision of her face had gone as quickly as it had appeared; he hadn't even been conscious of it when he had found himself wandering in the corridors of a nonexistent Deep Space Nine. Only now, when he could allow his thoughts to sort themselves out, had he remembered what he had seen. What had been granted to him.
He wondered what it meant. Perhaps nothing; perhaps a gift, a blessing. He slowly shook his head, smiling in rueful acknowledgment. It would have been just like the Kai, to have given him something like that, something that would enable him to go forward and accomplish what he had to.
Falling now; he let himself fall. Toward that bright world, the other one inside him. Where he might yet hear those tender words that had been—and always were—about to be spoken to him.
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