“Since first contact with the Azziz almost two hundred years ago,” Sh’tan said, “we have admired their bioengineering. But we never had anything to offer them. However, our own advances in these areas led us into some arenas where the Azziz themselves have not gone.”
“Such as?” the admiral asked.
“Some of the genetic manipulation which has enabled crossbreeding and intermarriage between species has led to interesting avenues. When we demonstrated some of the results to the Azziz, it was as if they finally considered us to be civilized. Until now, they would make only minor trades with us. We believe that they found us amusing. Now ... we think we have cause to be optimistic.”
The dock’s former incrustation had become more advanced, a crystalline shell over the initial weld. It matched the coloration of the station walkway. “As far as we can tell, this happened automatically,” Sh’tan said. “What we thought was an exudate created by a living thing was instead a colony of polynucleic organisms regurgitated by a host. They spontaneously analyze any substance they come in contact with, and produce a matching composition.” One of his arched eyebrows lifted. “Quite remarkable, considering that it is stable to a thousand atmospheres.”
The sphincter dilated, and our group of eight entered the ship. It was warm, and the bullfrog Poet bounced ahead of us. It bounced up to a portion of the wall, stuck, and then burbled at us. Its English had grown surprisingly polished in its forty hours aboard the station. “Meet the Navigator,” it said. “Its optic nerves permeate the entire outer shell. It is sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It allows us to navigate by the stars.”
Poet bounced to another wall. “This is the Refrigeration Unit,” it said. A blue ball of what seemed to be glowing fluid oozed from beneath a bunch of cables that descended like living intestines. It extended a pseudopod toward me in what seemed a friendly gesture. Without thinking I reciprocated, and the Poet yelled something in a pitch far too high and fast to be intelligible. The pseudopod withdrew after the barest touch. Cold raced through my hand like electricity.
Poet had narrowly saved my fingers. The Refrigeration Unit had sensed my body heat, and responded by draining it off. I blew on my fingers to warm them.
The admiral asked several questions about the interaction of the Azziz ship components, some of which grew so technical and abstract that I had difficulty following. Sabbath listened intently to every question, and every answer.
One of the interesting surprises was the secondary propulsion system, something that apparently acted as a low-velocity steering system when the ship positioned itself. This was a creature whose digestive gasses apparently exited at a sufficient velocity to allow its primary “engine” to begin gathering interplanetary, and then interstellar hydrogen.
This primary creature would unfurl from the ship like a gauzy net, continuing to thin and expand and feed, gathering fuel and feeding it to the ship, which then accelerated to near light-speed. There was a living warp drive as well, but language failed our attempts to understand how such a being functioned.
It was magical. Why did all of these creatures work together? The more I saw of the ship, the more I realized the delicacy of their interdependence. The admiral seemed stunned at the implications of the Azziz ship, but curiously, Sabbath smiled, as if she understood something that we did not.
What was there about the Azziz ship that the Bactricans loathed so greatly?
I didn’t know, but suspected that the clue was right in front of me. If I could read the secret codicils. If the Azziz had interacted with the Bactricans in previous years ... but what was Dax hiding ... ?
The tour ended, and the Poet continued to interact with the officials as Sabbath looked out through the ship’s clear crystal shell, gazing out at the stars, her flat, beautiful, delicately furred face saddened.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked.
“They’ve come so far,” she said. “And so far to go home. You’re wrong, you know. You think they want your technology.”
“They don’t?”
“No more than you want another arm. No. They want family. That is their great drive.”
“And you understand them?”
“I think so.” She was quiet for a time, her lovely face falling into repose. “I was trained for my dance, to weave my web, my—” and here she said a word that sounded like shatharma. Then she seemed startled that she had said it, and smiled ruefully. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not?”
She ignored me. “But it seems that the more we do what we must do, the further from ourselves we stray.”
“What?” She was making no sense at all.
“The Azziz ship was constructed to leave home. Can you imagine what their home world is? One mass of organisms interacting for the common good. But the better such a ship is, the further it travels from all that it knows. Its excellence brings it pain.”
“And that’s what you understand?” I sensed that she was saying something of critical import, and strained to understand it.
She seemed to emerge from a self-inflicted trance. “I speak too much,” she said. “Come. Let’s join the others.”
* * *
The next event of the Azziz itinerary took us past the Bactrican negotiation hall, where Dax joined us once again. He had just finished his round of negotiations and was, I am certain, quite ready to join the company of joyful creatures once again.
And it was quite a parade. There was virtually a procession of the little living components hopping and rolling down the hallway, in and out of the paths of the humanoids and humans who walked in their midst. Because of the confusion, I didn’t see what was about to happen until it was too late.
A member of the Bactrican council stepped out of the corridor, and fired a narrow-beamed energy weapon. The beam was no brighter than a phaser’s, and at first that’s what I assumed it to be. But from the corner of my eye I saw it strike the Poet, bouncing just in front of Sabbath—and what happened then I didn’t think about until moments later.
As disaster struck, Dax grabbed the little Azziz ambassador and moved him to relative safety, out of the line of fire.
Cal protected the admiral.
Reflexively, without thinking, I threw Sabbath to the ground and shielded her, then jumped up again. But Cal had already seized the offending weapon, and wrested it away from a Bactrican I had never seen before. He was tall, and feral, and wore jewel-encrusted chevrons on his shoulder, and I automatically assumed that this was the prince of whom the Bactrican ambassador had spoken.
I glanced at Sabbath. Her eyes met mine. She knew that I had placed my own life in jeopardy for her. Something profound and electric passed between us.
All was confusion, voices strident and frightened. “Was anyone hurt?” I looked again at where the Poet had been, and shuddered.
There was nothing left. And my memory, searching back over the last few seconds, remembered something that made no sense: the Poet had not “disintegrated.” It looked as if he had been abstracted to angles, then impossibly folded and folded and folded again until there was nothing left, until he simply disappeared from our reality.
“God’s Tooth.”
The Bactrican writhed in Cal’s grasp, hissing “The abomination! The abomination!” before collapsing in defeat. A team of security people arrived, circling the Azziz ambassador and the admiral.
Dax looked utterly ashen.
The entire group was hustled into a side room, while alarms blared throughout the station. Dax calmed the Azziz ambassador with gestures, then surprisingly, and quietly, spoke to Sabbath.
He turned to me. “This situation is very grave,” he said. “Grave for all. Please, take charge here. You are my eyes and ears. I will call for you later.”
Dax and Admiral Janeway hurried away. I was able to overhear only a little of what was said between them. A little was enough. My ears burned.
From diplomatic triumph, suddenly this on
e crazed act had destroyed everything. What worried me, and what I couldn’t understand, was the way the Bactrican seemed to have completely deflated. There was no mistaking his body language. Alien or not, inhuman or not, the only possible message was one of naked, feral rage and betrayal.
And a promise of death.
The station was quiet again, and I had waited for the emergency to die down before relaxing my guard. I was completely wrung out, exhausted. The situation seemed clear cut, and yet impossibly complex at the same time. For reasons that I didn’t understand, a Bactrican prince had attempted to assassinate the Azziz ambassador, and had instead killed the little translator. Had he acted alone? That seemed unlikely, considering that he had ranted of “the abomination,” the same word used by their diplomatic mission. But as an act of policy, what if anything exactly did it mean?
My head was spinning.
Dax sent me a message to join him in his quarters. When I entered I was surprised that the room was so dark and gloomy. For a moment, I didn’t see Dax at all, then finally spied him in a corner standing, gazing out through a wall-sized viewscreen that masqueraded as a window. He looked somber in a way I had never seen.
“Excuse me,” I said, after standing for almost a minute with no sign of recognition. “Is this a bad time, sir?”
“Indeed it is, but not for the reasons that you might suspect.”
I was silent, suspecting that Dax was about to tell me something I had been waiting to hear for weeks.
“Would you care to pour yourself a drink?” Dax asked and indicated the bar. I did, but this time gave myself a good synthehol-based brandy. I suspected that I was going to need all of my wits.
“Sir, you were nearly killed this afternoon. ...” Dax waved me away, dismissing that concern. I tried again. “Does this destroy hopes of recruiting the Azziz for the Federation?”
Dax nodded. And then he sighed vastly, and began. “Ensign,” he said. “I am going to tell you something that I should tell no one. But I have to have another mind share the information, or it is going to be impossible for me to think. Can you do that for me?”
I nodded, and approached a bit closer.
“You know that the situation here has been delicate. The Bactricans seek to join the Federation, but have cultural as well as economic considerations. We would like access to their null-beam technology, and they don’t want to share it.”
“Moot, now that we’ve seized a sample for ourselves,” I said. “And the Poet, well, that is tragic, of course, sir. But the ambassador is safe.”
Dax shook his head slowly. “No, young Sisko. I am afraid that there has been much here that you have not understood. Unfortunately, your contact with other species has primarily been through study. You have yet to make the adjustment to actually interacting with them. You see only what is shown.”
The day had been entirely too stressful. I really didn’t need to hear this. But I controlled myself. “Please,” I said. “Educate me.”
Dax sat, enough of his face in shadow that I still couldn’t read it easily. “You saw the Azziz collective without intuiting the implication of such a body. You saw the Bactricans and felt some disdain for their drabness. ...”
“I never said ...”
“You didn’t need to, Ensign. And lastly, you saw my interaction with Sabbath, and assumed that my interest in her was the same as yours.”
That perked me up. “It isn’t?”
“No, it is not. Let us progress down the line.” He held out his hand and began to tick off fingers. “One. The role of the Poet was crucial. Each separate creature in the collective had its own dreams, its own needs, its own mind. They stay together because of the Poet. It was the job of the Poet to sing to them, to keep them in harmony.”
I was sobered by the implications. “And without him?”
“Without him, the collective fails. The Azziz ambassador cannot return home.”
“But ... certainly one of our own ships can carry him ...”
“Again, you don’t understand. The entire ship is the ‘ambassador,’ as if a biosphere sample of every important life-form on Earth were sent to another star for study. Remove a single major link, and the chain fails. We have no means of conveying the entire ship to its origin. We wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
This was bad. “All right. And where else have I presumed?”
“You presumed that the Bactricans tried to kill the Azziz ambassador.”
“Didn’t they?”
He shook his head. “No. The target was Sabbath.”
My head spun. “Sabbath? Why? Have they a quarrel with her people?”
Dax turned and looked at me flatly. “They are her people.”
“What?”
“That is the secret that they have fought so hard to keep, for which they very nearly ruined their entrance into the Federation. You have seen the ‘male’ and ‘female’ of their species. Sabbath is like a bee, a creature that lives to aid their pollination. There are not many of her kind, but they are necessary for reproduction. Their males and females cannot respond to each other sexually except in the presence of such a creature. Sabbath’s kind are raised and taught in nunneries, separate from the general population. And only the ruling classes have them on permanent call: They form bonded triads, betrothed at birth, and sealed until death.”
My head spun. “Then the recent death of the royal family ...”
“Yes. Sabbath is a ‘Third,’ the third of the Triad. It was her place to die with the king and queen, a custom that on Earth I believe was called ‘suttee’ and ended by your British in the India of the nineteenth century ...”
“It was actually continued well into the twentieth,” I said. Dear God. Suddenly it became clear. Sabbath’s unique appeal ... trained from childhood, bred for a thousand generations, there was only one downside: She was expected to commit suicide when her “mates” died.
Instead, somehow, she had escaped to Pelios Station, stowed away perhaps, and there she had found Curzon Dax.
“She supplied you with information about the Bactricans, and you fought to keep her alive,” I said, finally understanding.
He nodded, silently.
“And you’re going to give her passage from the station?”
“No. What I tried to do was force the Bactrican government to renounce their claim on her life. If she travels from the station, they will hunt her down. Here, at least, I could provide a modicum of protection.”
What a nightmare. His attempts to protect her had led, indirectly, to the death of the Poet necessary to return the Azziz to their home world.
I shook my head. It hurt. “Why is Sabbath’s existence such a secret, for God’s sake?”
“Multiple reasons—only the obvious one being the fact of the royal disgrace. Long ago they fought a terrible war over the ‘Thirds.’ Jealousy beyond anything we can imagine. It is impossible for them to imagine outsiders who do not desire the creatures of Sabbath’s sect.”
I saw the problem now, for the first time, and marveled that Dax had been able to hold it all in his head. The Azziz, who possessed a technology coveted by the Federation. The Bactricans, who enslaved an entire segment of their population, but might be induced to change their ways to gain the recognition they craved.
And a single creature named Sabbath. Certainly not male, but not truly female, either. Something else. Something other, that had touched me deeply, almost spiritually. Her life was in the balance, in a situation that now had no balance. The treaty would collapse, the Azziz were lost. Without the intercession of the Federation, Sabbath’s people might endure another thousand years of reproductive subjugation.
And I had seen the look in Admiral Janeway’s eye: This little problem could end Curzon Dax’s career in disgrace, and kill mine before it had a chance to start.
The Academy had not prepared me for this.
I cradled my head in my hands. “Is there anything we can do at all?” I said.
He la
id his broad hand on my back. It felt strangely comforting. One part of me wanted to kill him, and another wanted to praise him for attempting the impossible. If he had succeeded in pressuring the Bactricans into pardoning Sabbath, it would have created a cultural ripple that might have freed her kind.
Bless you, Dax.
Damn you, Dax.
“Nothing we can do, no,” Dax said finally. I rose, still shaken, and left him. And it wasn’t until I had left Dax’s presence that I realized that I had heard an emphasis in that last sentence that I hadn’t understood at all.
Sleep came slowly to me that night, and for a very long time I was certain that it wouldn’t come at all.
I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kind of creature Curzon Dax was, to weave so tangled a web.
Here there was despair, alienation, murder, perversity, miscommunication, technology beyond our imaginings, provincialism, and disaster on five or six different levels. Those were just the first problems that came to mind.
A single tragic error seemed to have collapsed the possibilities for success on two different fronts. I was horrified. If this was the life of the peacekeeper, give me the cold equations of an engineer. This was not for me.
I barely heard the door to my cabin opening.
I smelled her before I saw her, outlined there against dim night light. I held my breath, not believing. She bent over me, silencing my questions with a single finger to my lips.
“Do not ask from me,” she said. “Do not try to take what I cannot give. But you risked your life for me, and it is right to share with you.”
She bade me stand, and clumsily I obeyed. I seemed to have forgotten how to speak, or move. She took my hands, and smiled the saddest, gentlest smile I had ever seen.
We danced. Just danced. She performed for an audience of one. I didn’t need the induction equipment. I wasn’t a Bactrican. But I understood then, what she meant to them. I understood why they would kill for her, would throw away their chances of peace and security to keep her kind a secret.
STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Page 24
