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Strange New Worlds IX

Page 13

by Dean Wesley Smith


  “No, Torrna,” she said, approaching the creature again, slowly, until it had stopped shivering. “From another time. And for some reason, it’s arrived too soon.”

  “Ashla, perhaps the wine has taken you, but this creature is not natural. Do not approach it! It needs antagonism to survive.”

  Kira sat next to the creature.

  “No,” she replied, shaking her head, “it needs no such thing.”

  While his breathing remained heavy, and he occasionally groaned from his injury, Antosso made no more protests. So Kira grew silent, and continued to stare at the creature. Its surface was smooth and calm. She began to see her reflection….

  The moons set and the suns rose, and the whole forest was filled with light. Her reflection was clear now, as perfect as a mirror. She leaned back at last to rest, her spine meeting the soft cushion of a pilot’s chair. She relished the silence….

  A humming began….

  The runabout seemed to be nervously distracting itself, but its tune had no rhythm, no form. Kira stared into her reflection, past the polite, compliant navigational controls. Through the smooth surface and impeccable Federation Standard font, her eyes looked terrible. Lifting her head, she saw Odo sitting in the copilot’s seat, one knee propped up as he stared out the viewscreen.

  “You look comfortable,” she said, “sitting that way.”

  He was calm, almost smiling.

  “It’s…meditative. I find my molecules flow easier.”

  She grinned in spite of the tears behind her eyes.

  “I’ve never heard you use that word before.”

  He turned his head, looking at her.

  “Which?” he asked.

  “Meditative.”

  “Ah. I’ve finally found a use for it.”

  They stayed in each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then back to meditations and reflections. The stars elongated through warp speed.

  “I’ve never seen space this empty,” Odo said. “Are you sure we entered the right coordinates?”

  A few concerned bleeps from the navigational display.

  “Yes,” Kira replied. She was finding it hard to see through her tears, which dotted her red militia uniform. She fiercely brushed them away.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “we’ll get there eventually.”

  After a moment’s pause, he said, “We should go exploring. Now that the war is over.”

  He was blurry in her vision. She pushed more tears away, desperate to memorize every detail of him.

  “When?” she asked, almost angry.

  His face changed, drooping as if he were going to regenerate.

  “Someday,” he whispered. Then he added, “I guess it’s easier to plan things when the future is more defined.”

  The tears fell independently, despite the furious signals Kira was sending to her brain for them to cease. Odo turned to her, and got up from his chair.

  “Kira,” he said.

  My formal name? Now?

  “Kira Nerys,” a heartbeat repeated. Reaching for her phaser, Kira found none available. She glanced incredulously at her empty holster, and then readied her body for physical combat. There was nothing but a thick landscape of white around her.

  A heartbeat? Since when does a heartbeat—

  “Kira Nerys,” it said again. She paced, spun, but found no source for the voice.

  “I’m Kira Nerys! What do you want?”

  “To understand.”

  The heartbeat began to take form, the voice growing slightly feminine in quality, less deep and echoing.

  “Understand what?” Kira asked.

  “Why basics apply to the complicated.”

  Kira waited for a further explanation, and then replied, “You’re gonna have to break that down for me. I never was much of a poet.”

  “I know,” the heartbeat, now clearly a voice, said. “It is your limitation.”

  Wisps of orange began to filter down from the infinite above, like ashy molecules taking shape. Kira stood still, trying to see what was forming, when her gut began to turn, her brain began to process, and just as she saw too late, hands grabbed her raised fists before she could attack.

  “It’s okay, Nerys. She only has questions.”

  “Benjamin?”

  He released her hands.

  “Have you brought me here?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I’m with the Prophets.”

  A Sisko smile.

  “Think of it as a halfway point.”

  “But…how could you…why is she here?”

  Sisko looked beyond, in the direction of their companion.

  “She’s finally learning what lies beyond treaty signatures and warp drives. It’s perfectly safe. She can’t do a thing.”

  He paused, and the father in him filled his demeanor.

  “I’m trying to give her a push in the right direction. For reform. For a dialogue. And all she could talk about…was you.”

  “Me?”

  Sisko grinned.

  “Yes. For some reason, she ties the whole beginning of things to you.”

  Kira looked at the other being, and then back to Benjamin.

  “But…how can I trust her?”

  “By trusting me.” And he was gone.

  But as long as she breathed Kira would not trust her. There, looking all too familiar in her chaotic patience, was the female shape-shifter, Leader of the Founders.

  “I don’t know how you can pull this apart,” a voice yelled, “when it’s been so good, so passionate, finally, after all this time.” It was Kira’s.

  She turned and saw herself pacing furiously. Standing at a cautious distance from this second Kira was Odo, who looked calm despite her fury.

  “Now,” the second Kira continued, “now you’re giving us up for a species who abandoned you, killed millions, and never shed a tear?”

  “My species,” Odo answered softly, and the second Kira let out a scream of frustration, thrusting her fists toward the sky.

  It was the argument they’d had after the war’s end, when they’d returned to Deep Space 9 and the peace treaty had been signed—the argument about Odo’s decision to leave the Alpha Quadrant and rejoin the Great Link. He walked over to the second Kira, holding out his arms.

  “Nerys—”

  But she ducked away, whipping up the white atmosphere as she stalked.

  “You can’t just smooth this over, Odo! It’s not an arrest on the Promenade we’re disagreeing about or a con from Quark we don’t know how to catch! This is about us!”

  She looked at him with her fiercest eyes.

  “How many times have we almost died in the past four years? How many more since we’ve been together? Was none of that enough to draw us closer?”

  Odo approached slowly, his features still calm, decisions unchanged.

  “Nerys,” he said softly, “I don’t know how to make you understand. I’ve exhausted all my reasons. If I leave my people to their own recovery, the possibility of insurgence is too great. You know as well as I that a peace treaty doesn’t mean a thing if enough people take action against it. When the Occupation of Bajor ended, you left your home to make sure the Cardassians didn’t return.”

  “My people weren’t the perpetrators and murderers,” the second Kira retorted.

  “I know,” Odo sighed. “But I’m sure you were torn about leaving your people, your friends.”

  Kira mouthed the next words along with herself, never forgetting them for a second.

  “I didn’t have enough in my life that was worth staying for.”

  The scene grew quiet.

  “You didn’t respect his choice,” the female shape-shifter said. “But that is in line with your limitations.”

  Kira took a deep breath before turning to face the Founder.

  “What exactly do you classify as my ‘limitations’?”

  “Because you are unable to become another being, you are unable to know their innermost thoughts.”


  “But you don’t have the ability to read minds,” Kira said.

  “It is in becoming a being’s movements and shapes that we find all we need to know.”

  “So, if you saw, for example, birds flying,” Kira asked, “and they were all the same kind, you’re saying you would know for certain what they were all thinking?”

  “Animal solids do not express emotions as their humanoid counterparts do,” the Female Shapeshifter answered.

  “True,” Kira replied, “but then you can never really know how to become every kind of bird.”

  The Founder shook her head.

  “You are thinking from a humanoid solid point of view. I cannot expect you to fully understand our ways. This is merely confirming all I knew before.”

  “You wanted this dialogue,” Kira retorted, and then stopped herself. He left me, technically, for her. Maybe it’s time to find out why.

  “Why don’t you try seeing things from my point of view?” Kira offered. “Use my ‘limitations.’ Without shifting, become me.”

  The Founder’s gaze hardened, and she turned to the frozen other Kira.

  “I will use this scene as an example,” she began.

  “No,” Kira interrupted. “Use me. She’s a memory.”

  “Very well,” the Founder replied, looking her over. “You are not confident. You see signs of weakness within you, and that is why you treat every conflict with an extreme case of anger.”

  Kira narrowed her eyes. Tread softly, Nerys, softly. For Benjamin. For Odo. For me.

  “That was true in the past, but my edges have smoothed somewhat.”

  “I see a panic within you,” the Founder continued, as though she hadn’t heard her, “a deep fear that you cannot handle all that is laid before you. Because you cannot shift, you cannot change your pace or find other methods of exhausting your anger and grief.”

  “I do not live in a world of anger and grief,” Kira replied. “I receive a lot of it, but I move on. That’s what humanoids do.”

  “You do indeed receive much of it,” the Founder said, “but you, Kira Nerys, Humanoid Solid, do not move on. You harbor all that befalls you until you snap like the weakest tree branch. You push away everyone who could step up to catch your fall. And you can never admit that at times, you could use someone to catch you.”

  “And you,” Kira hissed, “are afraid. You’re terrified that all your centuries of ‘exploration,’ domination, and murder have occurred in vain. That with the signing of the peace treaty, everything you’ve sought to ‘correct’ has come slamming back at you. Your people were persecuted, but so were mine! We don’t strive for dominion of the galaxy.”

  The Founder grew quiet. Her approximations of eyes cut deep into Kira’s.

  “You know,” she finally said, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a solid.”

  She shimmered, and red flooded up her torso until she had taken on Kira’s form.

  “I wondered: Is it jealousy that causes a solid to persecute a changeling?”

  She shimmered again, taking on the form of Sisko.

  “Desires unfulfilled?”

  And then again she shimmered, becoming Odo.

  “Or is it the simple frustration of not understanding how the universe works?”

  She stood as close as Odo would have. The features were so real, the voice so precise. The Founder held out a hand to Kira’s cheek, but Kira grabbed the limb before it could touch her.

  “Why does he mean so much to you?” the Founder asked in Odo’s voice.

  And then, before Kira could answer, realization dawned in the changeling’s eyes. Had the Founder been in her usual form, Kira might have missed it. But on Odo, it was clear as day.

  “Without him,” the Founder said, “we are incomplete. Because he is a part of us.”

  “And without him,” Kira whispered, “I am incomplete.”

  “Because he is a part of you.”

  “And I of him.”

  The Founder shimmered back into her humanoid self, and Kira released her arm.

  “Sisko feels all of this will reform me. I enlisted his aid in putting you through the tests: the ancient Bajor, the occupation raid, the caves. He helped to cloud your mind, and you reacted without fear or hatred upon meeting undeveloped changelings.”

  “I never hurt a creature unless it gives me a reason.”

  “You killed the Cardassian hiding in the bushes,” the Founder replied.

  “He was going to kill me.”

  “And you were willing to kill game for Antosso.”

  “Hunger necessitates taking from nature every so often.”

  “And would you kill a changeling if you had the need?” the Founder asked, suddenly growing angry.

  “If it was not in its true form,” Kira said carefully, “and appeared to be of necessity, and if I did not know its true form, then, yes, I would have done with it as I had seen fit.”

  “So deception is your excuse,” the Founder hissed. “If something does not show its true form to you from the beginning, you cast aside its worth. Just as you cast aside Odo’s worth when he decided to rejoin the Great Link when it ‘did not fit’!”

  “Did Odo’s choosing to live with solids fit into your plan?” Kira shot back.

  “No,” the Founder replied. “But we did not harm him when he made his choice. He gave us no reason to.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Kira said, “until you manipulated the ‘right’ reasons out of him.”

  The Founder craned her head and glanced at the white landscape around her.

  “This is the most I’ve seen in over a year,” she said.

  “And it’s more than you should see.”

  The Founder sighed in resignation.

  “I never understood why Odo loved you more than his own people. I see it, but I do not understand it. If ‘reformed’ is what I’m meant to be, I feel I should understand his need for you, the catalyst. But it appears I still can’t.”

  “No,” Kira replied. “I guess you can’t.”

  The Founder started to walk away. Sisko was once again at Kira’s side.

  “Perhaps,” the changeling said, “one day I shall.”

  The Founder began to fade into the white clouds, but turned back before she was completely gone.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise me that you will listen to Odo. And that you won’t expect him to live within your limitations.”

  “I never do,” Kira said. Benjamin’s hand was upon her shoulder, light and warm.

  And then she was gone.

  “How much do you know about me, Odo?”

  “More than you probably realize.”

  Conversations from the past danced in Kira’s head.

  The buttons wouldn’t push themselves. She stared into her reflection, past the polite, compliant navigational controls.

  All she had to do was leave.

  The sea of changelings was asleep now, healing, exhausted.

  All she had to do was leave.

  “Good morning.”

  He was anxious. She could always tell.

  Living on the Edge of Existence

  Gerri Leen

  Colors flash, their hues more intense than Sisko could have taken in before. Blue is no longer just blue, but something more alive, more energetic even than the blue of the sky on Bajor, when the sun hangs in a cloudless expanse over the green hills Sisko fell in love with. Bluer than the sea in the Gulf of Mexico, when he took his father’s boat out far beyond the shore to where the green and turquoise waters gave way to cerulean. Bluer than his father’s old indigo shirt. Bluer than the cornflower dress of Molly O’Brien’s favorite doll.

  If he were to think about red or yellow or green, they’d be bigger and more majestic too.

  They’d also be empty. For there is nothing in these colors that he has not put there. Nothing that the Prophets did not give him. There is no sunrise, no rising moon in the midnight sky. There are no roses
, no violets, no daisies. There is no life, no movement, no…nothing. There is nothing here.

  “We are here. The Sisko is here.” The Prophets have chosen to appear as Quark.

  Sisko used to try to figure out why they chose the avatars they did. He’s given up.

  When he appeared to Kasidy, when he told her he would return, he thought he understood. He thought he knew his path.

  That was before he rested. That was before he spent much time—or non-time—with the Prophets, with Sarah, the alien that had inhabited the young human woman who gave birth to him. He thought he understood her, when she caught him up and brought him to the Temple. He thought he understood everything.

  He understood nothing. And now, he thinks he understands even less.

  He stares at the Quark Prophet, counting it a small victory that the Quark figure no longer blurs or shifts position or disappears entirely under such scrutiny. But his corner of the wormhole or the Celestial Temple—he calls it both things and the Prophets never correct him—begins to spin as he turns his concentration to studying the alien. Sisko’s world is stable only as long as he works to make it so. Except…there is no world. His world is a construct, one he creates to help himself understand his surroundings. One he needs to keep from feeling as if he will throw up. Linear existence may be limiting, but at least it doesn’t bring on constant nausea.

  When he was first here, when he thought he understood his place, he felt a part of things. But the longer he is here, the more he realizes he does not understand. He wanted to be part of it, he believed he was. It was new and overwhelming. Fresh and exciting to be part of this—to be a god of sorts.

  Then he realized he wasn’t a god. He wasn’t even a demigod. And he may never be. When his mother pulled him from the fire caves, he felt just as the warriors in the myths his stepmother read to him must have felt. Brave fighters caught up by Valkyries, carried to Valhalla where they belong, where they would rest and make merry.

  And he is resting. That he is doing. But there is no one to make merry with. He is not sure this place has even seen merry. And in his current mood, he feels a long way from merry—and a long way from belonging. He has never become part of the “we” that is the gestalt of the Celestial Temple. He is always the outsider. Always “the Sisko.”

 

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