STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  When they were eleven, they didn’t realize yet how the change from children into young women would shatter their illusion of sameness. It was the last year in which the shape of their faces would be so exact, the lean wisp of their bodies so featureless. By the very next summer, Jadzia would have begun the irreversible bolt toward statuesque; the year after, Ziranne’s voice would deepen and her form fill out toward plumpness. They would forever carry the family mark that said “sister,” but no one would ever again mistake them for twins.

  So in retrospect, that summer-turned-winter was in many ways the last of their childhood. Jadzia often wondered if they would have spent it differently, done things differently, if they’d had some inkling of the different directions in which they’d soon go. Seven lifetimes of experience said no. That was part of the joy of childhood—every day seemed eternal, the whole of the universe spread out before you. By the time you could truly appreciate the fearful impermanence of life—even seven times over—it was already too late to go back and make better use of your misspent youth. So instead of cherishing each moment by constructing loving holopics of all the childish pleasures they shared, they galloped heedlessly through that vacation time, squandering their days in countless undocumented snowball battles and skating contests. They made silhouetted tableaux by flinging themselves into the snow, and dared each other to stick their tongues to icicles.

  Surfacing from yet another collapsed burrow in the snowy blanket, Jadzia blinked through the sparkle of frost on her eyelashes at the escarpment bordering the lida orchard. “Hey, Ziranne,” she announced, “I’ll bet we could slide down that.”

  Ziranne didn’t look up, distracted by the detailed work of scooping the slush out of her snowsuit sleeves. “We could if we got up to the top.” She yanked off one glove and shook it fiercely. “I don’t feel like climbing, Jadzia.”

  “Sissy.”

  An angry blush steamed across her cheeks. “I’m not a sissy. I’m cold.”

  “It’s winter.” Jadzia scooped up a double handful of snow, twisting to cram it down the back of her sister’s collar. But Ziranne, as always, knew what she was thinking, and flung herself backward with a squeak to avoid the attack. “Everybody’s cold in winter. You’re a sissy!” Hauling one foot then the other loose from the rucked up snow, Jadzia trooped off toward the hillside with big, stomping strides. She felt like she had to pick her feet up to her shoulders to crunch her way through the drifts. “I’m gonna go sliding.”

  She heard Ziranne flounder upright behind her, but didn’t expect to see her mirror sister barrel past at an awkward run until Ziranne was already in the lead, arms pumping, snow-wet hair flapping in her wake. Yelping a wordless objection, Jadzia gulped a lungful of air and galumphed off in pursuit.

  They reached the foot of the hill almost together—Ziranne got her foot on the slope first of all, but Jadzia let herself fall forward so that her hands hit only a bare heartbeat after. Their eyes sparkled with tears from their running, their cheeks red and glowing, and steam blasted out on the sound of their laughter as they collapsed atop each other, panting.

  “So how do we get up?” Ziranne asked at last, rolling to her back to peruse the hill from this new perspective.

  Jadzia propped herself up on her elbows and took a serious look. “Uncle Koal has a path that he climbs up to spray the trees in the spring.” She only knew this because she’d heard him talk about it, not because she’d ever been here in the spring. “It’s got to be under the snow someplace. All we have to do is find it.”

  Which, under almost a meter of windswept powder, was much easier to contemplate than do. They finally found the first weathered stone close up against where the rocky slope jutted straight skyward. Jadzia used the full length of her arm to sweep one step, then the next, and the next, climbing the carved path as she cleared it. Ziranne followed behind, kicking loose whatever snowpack was left with the heel of one thick-soled boot. By the time they crested the top, Jadzia shrugged against a trickle of clammy sweat between her shoulder blades, and Ziranne was forced to plop to the ground and dig snow out of her boot tops as well as her sleeves.

  The view more than made up for any discomfort. The whole of Uncle Koal’s plantation stretched out beneath them, a fluffy quilt of patchwork white, brown, and silver where snow, roads, and ponds intersected. Jadzia imagined she’d scaled Bes Manev in the far east of Trill, the world’s tallest mountain. She squinted against the fierce Manevri sunlight, shielded her eyes from the stinging wind that had blown many a previous explorer from this exalted height. When I’m joined, she thought, I’m going to explore all the places and do all the things I’ve ever dreamed I could. She might even bond with a symbiont who already possessed all those experiences and more, memories ripe for the living. She found the thought exhilarating.

  “Jadzia, look! It’s already got a slide built in!” Ziranne ducked across Jadzia’s view, interrupting her reverie. Tugging at the arm of her sister’s snowsuit, Ziranne shook a soggy mitten at the narrow downward sweep clearly visible in the contours of the snow.

  It wasn’t really a snow-slide, of course—it was the run-off channel Uncle Koal had installed to keep the lida trees from flooding when the spring rains came so often and hard. This became apparent as they rolled and slid and scooted their way down the curving track. It took three or four passes to finally pack enough snow against the synthrock to form an acceptable chute. When they’d succeeded, the trip from top to bottom was wild and fast, and Jadzia had to close her eyes so that the thrilling rush of the world flying by didn’t distract her from her screaming.

  It was on her third trip down, after she’d thudded into the wall of snow at the bottom and rolled, that she craned a look back up the slide to greet her sister—

  —And found no one there.

  “Ziranne?”

  A thin little sound that might have been a voice, might have been the wind. Lurching to her feet, Jadzia gulped two deep breaths to fill her lungs and clawed partway back up the bottom of the slide. “Ziranne!”

  This time her sister’s shriek was unmistakable.

  She aborted her first instinct to struggle back up the way she came, and instead flung herself down the rest of the chute to hit the ground running. They’d used their own bodies to plow a crumbling trench from the foot of the slide to the foot of Uncle Koal’s hand-carved stairs. Jadzia stumbled through it now with her knees knocking against the too-close sides, her feet catching on lumps and bumps she’d somehow never noticed in her previous passings. The trail stretched suddenly endless and labrynthine. She skidded to round the last bit of curve before the stairs, and her eyes clapped on a splash of sun yellow suspended from the hill only a few steps from the very top.

  Jadzia was up the narrow flight and on her knees above her sister without clearly remembering how she got there.

  “Jadzia!” Ziranne had lost one scarlet mitten; the fingers of that hand made a claw between chinks of stone and had already gone from pink to white in the cold. Her mittened fist balled around a handhold Jadzia couldn’t even see. “Jadzia, I’m stuck! I slipped and I’m stuck!” She glanced up at her sister for barely an instant, sensing perhaps some dangerous shift of weight Jadzia could only imagine. The trembling in her narrow frame kept knocking one foot off its perch, forcing her to fight all over again for that purchase.

  “Hold still!” Jadzia commanded. She felt suddenly cold herself, her belly all liquid and sick. “Stop shaking, Ziranne, or you’re gonna fall.” She tried to straddle two steps, a knee on either, and lean over to take hold of Ziranne’s wrists. But even before she could put a hand on her sister, she knew she didn’t have the leverage, didn’t have the room to drag her back up to safety. She straightened without ever grabbing her. “I can’t pull you up—”

  “Jadzia!” Ziranne jerked with sudden movement, as though frantic to lessen the distance between them. “Jadzia, don’t leave me!”

  Jadzia let herself thump a few steps farther down the stairway, afra
id she’d reach out to Ziranne on frightened impulse and cause them both to fall. “Ziranne, hold on. I’m just going down the stairs, but I’m not leaving. I’m gonna fix things. Okay?”

  Ziranne might have nodded, Jadzia wasn’t sure. “Just hold on,” she said again. Then she turned decisively away and rode the stairs down on her bottom. Suddenly, the thought of standing up on that narrow descent was too unnerving.

  At the bottom, she rounded the slope to stand beneath her sister. From above she’d harbored some vague plan to go below and catch her—to stand on something, maybe, and reach up and let Ziranne drop down into her hug. But there was nothing there to boost her taller, and Ziranne was higher than she’d seemed from the stairs. They’d even shouldered away whatever snow had shrouded the foot of the slope to make their path from the slide, which left only packed ice and frozen ground to catch her sister’s body. Jadzia felt frustrated tears burn at the backs of her eyes and blinked them angrily away.

  Ziranne’s wail floated down from above, a lace cloth dropped from a great height. “My feet are slipping!” That same foot, pawing at the rockface, slipping off, flailing in the air for a moment until it found its place again. “I’m gonna fall!”

  “No, you’re not! “The assertion burst out of Jadzia sounding more like anger than the desperation she felt. “I told you, hold on! Don’t let go ’til I tell you to!”

  She said it without quite knowing what she meant. But as soon as the words were in the air between them, Jadzia knew what she needed to do.

  Slim, child-arms could only shovel up so big a load of snow, and the whole width of a child’s shoulders could only bulldoze a tiny bit better. She ended up turning her back to the target she’d mentally drawn on the ground beneath her sister, and bent over to dig two-handed like a mreker, throwing snow between her legs in a rapid shower. She dug out everything within a body length of ground zero, then moved another length away and starting digging some more. Her back ached by the time she moved inward to redistribute the new circle of snow onto the rest of the pile. First with bent-over digging, then an armload at a time when her hands wouldn’t dig anymore, she built up a bed of snow almost as tall as her head. She could hear Ziranne crying high above her and realized even before her sister did that if this cushion wasn’t good enough, they didn’t have time to make it any better.

  “Okay!” she called upward, stumbling back from the pile. “It’s okay now, Ziranne—let go!”

  Ziranne was falling before Jadzia’s voice had even faded from the air.

  She hit the pile with a breathy, heavy whump! Snow billowed up like smoke, splashed outward in a wave. Jadzia ducked her face away only enough to avoid being blinded by the shower, then rushed forward to scale the mini-mountain and grab at her sister’s hand.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded breathlessly. She crawled on top of Ziranne, patting at her fearfully, trying to read the wide-eyed expression on her face. “Are you hurt?”

  Ziranne raised her head up to look from side to side. Her bare hand patted at the snow her fall had packed, and she blinked as though not sure what she was seeing. “You piled up the snow.” Looking squarely at Jadzia, she repeated, as though amazed, “Jadzia, you piled up the snow to catch me!”

  Jadzia’s heart lodged in her throat. “‘You didn’t know?” When Ziranne only shook her head, Jadzia hit her on the shoulder, hit her again as fear and anger all came to a head inside her. “Then why did you let go, you idiot? If you didn’t know I had the snow pile down here, why did you just let go like that?”

  Ziranne seemed amazed the question even had to be asked. “Because you told me to.” She laid back against the snow and gazed up at her sister with a trust Jadzia had never recognized before and would never misunderstand again. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me to let go if it wouldn’t be okay. I knew you’d take care of me, Jadzia. You always do.”

  Not this time, Jadzia thought as she watched Bashir carefully repack his medical kit at Ziranne’s bedside. It pained her to admit that she’d failed so miserably at her age-old job as sister’s keeper. This time there’s not snow enough in the world to cushion your fall, Ziranne.

  None of Jadzia’s recollections had seemed to connect with her sister, and she’d finally given up when Bashir had come in to do another round of tests in an attempt to identify the symbiont biochemically. She didn’t know whether to be reassured or worried that chemically induced sleep could erase so much more of the turmoil from Ziranne’s face than the most important shared memory of their young lives.

  “How are you holding up, Old Man?”

  She flashed Sisko a quick, automatic smile. “I’ll be all right.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself against another phantom shiver. “I just wish I could say the same about my sister.”

  “We’re certainly not making the progress I’d hoped for,” Duhan Vos admitted. Jadzia thought she detected a surprising impatience in the Symbiosis Commissioner’s voice. He’d been elected to the Commission less than six months ago. A late arrival from a backwater colony world, he’d entered the running with promises to revolutionize how the Commission dealt with unjoined Trill and abuses of power. Now, the possibility of making good on all his campaign promises apparently took precedence over whatever empathy the man had once possessed. Or maybe it was just his newness to a position of power that left him feeling he had to prove his worth by solving this mystery single-handedly.

  Whatever his reasons, Jadzia didn’t need Duhan Vos to tell her that if she failed to find out how Ziranne had come to be joined, the only alternative was to take the symbiont from its unauthorized host and place it directly into the subterranean pools to regenerate. She fiercely pushed that thought out of her own mind, although she couldn’t keep its shadow from darkening the cascade of Dax’s memories. Duhan was right—this would all have been so much easier if the traumatized symbiont inside Ziranne had been able to communicate with the unjoined symbionts in the pools when Ziranne was immersed in their waters. Instead, they’d detected only chaos in that ancient mind.

  “What about your end?” she asked Sisko, abruptly. If she thought too long and closely about all the odds arrayed against them, it only served to distract her. “Have you managed to track down any hosts who could have lost their symbiont without the Commission being informed?”

  Her old friend shook his head. “We’ve checked all of Starfleet’s sources. There still haven’t been any reports of a dead or dying Trill host, on-world or off.” His dark glance slanted over to Bashir, who was running more diagnostics over the slow rise and fall of Ziranne’s diaphragm. “So far, all Julian’s tests have been able to do is help narrow the search to symbionts between two-and three-hundred years old. That still leaves us with hundreds of possible joinings to check up on.”

  “Some of which,” Duhan said with an edge of frost in his voice, “the Symbiosis Commission has already made contact with. Captain Sisko, I’ve already told you that we’re going through the list of joined Trill as fast as we possibly can.”

  “The whole list,” Sisko reminded him. “I’m sure your overworked assistants won’t mind us continuing our efforts to narrow down the number of Trill they have to call or visit. After all, Starfleet has put us at your disposal until this matter is resolved.”

  “It wasn’t my idea to call Starfleet.” Duhan looked as if he wished he could call the words back once they were released, tightening his lips until his teeth dug into them. After a moment’s thought, he continued, “I don’t feel it’s appropriate to involve outsiders in what has always been a most private and sacred affair for Trills.” He didn’t have to elaborate for them to know he meant the passing of symbionts from host to host. “Yes, the Commission has heard rumors that a sort of ... ‘black market’ exists for unjoined Trill symbionts. The theft of symbionts from their legitimate hosts is a crime so heinous that most Trills could never consider such a thing. But for others ...” His voice trailed away, and he turned away from Ziranne as though suddenly unable to look
at her. “Well, Captain, you simply can’t imagine what it’s like to be denied something every aspect of your native society insists you want to have.”

  Sisko might not be able to, but Jadzia certainly could. For a handful of hours, Dax had been nested in just such a symbiont thief—a sad, desperate communications worker named Verad who had been willing to risk as many lives as it took to obtain the symbiont he wanted. Dax had been Verad for the duration of their joining—hours that the symbiont, and, through it, Jadzia, still remembered with an eerie, pitiful clarity. The feelings of self-hatred and rage that seemed to boil out of those brief memories were so alien, so horrible, that Jadzia touched on them as rarely as possible. Dax had seemed perfectly content to bury them as deeply as any symbiont’s memories could be, although they were never truly gone.

  Could Ziranne have felt that same crushing self-hatred? What kind of sister did that make Jadzia Dax, to have never noticed Ziranne’s agony?

  Duhan Vos saved her from further recrimination by reaching out to draw the blinds on the room’s only window. “I’m sorry, but as soon as we finish this questioning session, I’m going to recommend—”

  “We may not be able to finish it.” Bashir snapped off his medical tricorder and swung around to join them. His somber face warned Jadzia that the news wouldn’t be good. “Your sister needs more than just bed rest. Her neurotransmitter and endocrine levels are all over the map, and I’m seeing evidence of peritoneal inflammatory in the connective tissue surrounding the pouch.”

  “She’s rejecting the symbiont,” Duhan said sadly. “It appears it no longer matters—”