The fear that nibbled at Jadzia, however, couldn’t be so easily addressed. “What if it isn’t Curzon?” Her voice came out all quiet and small. “What if even after Curzon is gone, it still doesn’t like me? What if it’s Dax?”
A sister’s value lay in her ability to judge when to laugh and when to take a foolish fear as seriously as its presenter. “How can it be?” Ziranne wanted to know. “Doesn’t the symbiont become one with the host after joining? In a sense, won’t Dax essentially become you?”
Or the two of them become something else. Still, the end result was the same.
“Then how can you hate yourself, Jadzia? You’ve worked so long and hard for this. You know what it means to accept joining, and you know that you’ll be good for this symbiont, and for Trill.” She smiled and reached up to tuck Jadzia’s hair back behind her ear. “You can’t hate yourself as Jadzia Dax when you don’t hate yourself now.”
“I might hate myself for leaving you,” Jadzia said, very softly.
“But you’re not leaving.” Ziranne pulled her into a fierce hug, and Jadzia clung to her with a strange feeling that she was never going to see her again. Not precisely like this. Not in exactly this way, with these eyes. “If symbiosis is really right for the Trill,” Ziranne insisted in her ear, “then it’s because there are people who are made greater by joining, who make the Trill greater by sacrificing a little of themselves to carry the legacy of all that knowledge and power.” Separating them, Ziranne gazed deep into her sister’s eyes. “You’re one of those people, Jadzia. You were made for this.”
Jadzia tightened her hands on Ziranne’s shoulders. “So were you. You passed all the tests—the Commission said you’d make a wonderful host.”
But Ziranne only shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t. I know I wouldn’t because I don’t want to be joined.” She laughed a little at Jadzia’s disbelieving blink. “Honestly, Jadzia. I have never wanted this. I went with you to take the tests because—” She shrugged a bit self-consciously and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Because I always followed you everywhere. When I did things with you, it was fun, and exciting, and so different from any of the things I do by myself. But I never pictured me as anything but who I am, and I never pictured you as anything but joined.”
Standing, she hefted the small suitcase and thrust it playfully into Jadzia’s arms. “Go have this adventure for us.”
Jadzia blinked back tears, the love between them pushing against her heart so hard she knew even a million lifetimes couldn’t weaken it or wear it away. “I’m glad you’re my sister.”
“So am I.” Ziranne smiled and took her by the arm. “I’m really looking forward to all the fascinating conversations I’m going to have with Jadzia Dax.”
“Are you sure he’s a criminal? He doesn’t look like one to me.”
Jadzia’s heart felt squeezed inside her chest as they made their way down Gheryzan Hospital’s quiet halls. Memory wasn’t supposed to have this effect on a Trill. Not even the memory of the man who tried to kill you and steal the very essence of what you were. She could almost smell Verad in the cool green walls.
She let Sisko answer the medic who’d walked with them since the main gate. “A kidnapper and a thief,” the captain explained in a voice much calmer and more pleasant than Jadzia could have managed. He made no effort to clarify that the object of Verad’s attempted theft had been a symbiont. Perhaps he thought that information something the other patients in Gheryzan didn’t need to know, like never telling the inmates in a prison colony that one of their number had murdered babies.
The hospital medic shook his head in disbelief. “You’d never guess he had such a colorful past from what he’s like in here. Especially if they’ve been declared rehabilitated, their criminal records are sealed and we never even know they did anything.” He sighed, then surprised Dax with an almost affectionate smile. “Well, whatever he did before he came, he’s the easiest client we’ve got nowadays. Some of these dissociative disorders, they’re outwardly violent, or self-damaging, at least every once in a while. Verad just watches holovids all day.” He gave a little laugh as he pushed open the door to the sunroom ahead of them. “I think the most trouble we’ve ever had with him is over syto beans at dinner. He really hates syto beans.”
It was a strangely intimate detail, one Jadzia wasn’t sure she wanted to share. “How did he end up here?” she heard herself ask. She didn’t mean to pry, yet her thoughts kept circling back to that off-world job, and wondering how it led him back to Gheryzan.
“Slipped into catatonia while on the job.” Their guide wove his way neatly and gently through a sun-room not even half-filled by perhaps two dozen quiet, blue-gowned “clients.” Except for the disparity in their ages, they could have been residents at one of the many communities for elderly Trill who no longer had families to look after them. “Most Federation outposts these days don’t have anything passing for long-term care for mental patients, so Shal Tul was forced to ship him home. He’s been here ever since.”
Jadzia exchanged a look with Sisko. He nodded without speaking, letting her know he remembered Ziranne’s shuttle passage to Shal Tul without committing himself to any other interpretations.
Few of the patients in the sunroom seemed interested by the trio’s passing. They continued with their reading, or worked with computers; others slept on mats rolled out in the nicer sunspots, and still others sat in little groups and talked or worked on puzzles. In most cases, it wasn’t easy to see what about their behavior made them unable to live in the general flow of Trill society.
In other cases, the difficulties suffered became more obvious. A row of chairs, padded and draped with colorful quilts, faced a large holoscreen that ran a lively video track with no sound. It was among this group that Jadzia saw the unconscious gestures and slack, sightless eyes that she associated with the severely mentally ill. Her heart went out to them all, even Verad, wherever he might be. To be of a people that valued mind and memory so much, only to end your days locked away inside yourself like this ... It was too horrible a fate to consider.
The medic singled out a dark-haired man of middle years, and smiled down at him as he pulled his chair out of the line. “You’ve got company.” As he swung the chair smoothly to face Jadzia and Sisko, he announced cheerfully, “He’ll have been with us four months next week. Like I said, a good guy, as far as these things go.”
Jadzia wasn’t sure what to say. Glancing uncertainly at Sisko, she knelt to stare into eyes as pale and blind as brushed silver. “This is Verad?”
“Sure.” The medic sounded surprised. “Isn’t that who you asked for?”
Indeed they had. But the man staring back at Jadzia from the bottom of a well so deep he couldn’t climb out wasn’t familiar because of buried memories from Ops on Deep Space 9. He was familiar because of the arguments she’d had with him—or with a man who looked exactly like him—less than two hours ago in her sister’s room at the Symbiosis Commission.
The man staring slackly from the chair in front of them was Commissioner Duhan Vos.
Even the long moments needed to fully materialize seemed too long. Jadzia willed her legs to run! before the transporter had a chance to release her, wanted to shout with rage at the delay between her thought and when her muscles obeyed. She heard Sisko trying again to raise Bashir via combadge, but burst through the door separating the transporter station from the rest of the hospital without waiting to hear if he received an answer this time.
The sunshine that had warmed her so well on her way to Gheryzan was merely blinding now. She squinted hard against the shards of brightness, and told herself the tears flooding into her eyes were from that pain and not her own helpless fear.
A quick records check via the Defiant had given them enough information to create at least a sketchy image of the horror Verad had committed. Duhan and Vos had been joined more than twenty years before, when Duhan had been a very young man, eager to take his first off-world job as a ch
emical engineer. Now, the real Duhan sat, dead-faced and dull-eyed, in the last Trill asylum, and there was no sign of Vos within him. Verad had found a way to have the symbiont he desired without having to flee the quadrant after his theft—by taking over the life, even the face, of an already existing joined Trill. There was no need to explain how Verad came by a symbiont; he became Duhan Vos, not Verad Vos, and Duhan Vos was the legitimate version of everything Verad wanted to be.
Jadzia shuddered to think of what he intended to accomplish as a member of the Symbiosis Commission.
Sisko grabbed at her arm to slow her as she skidded around the doorway to Ziranne’s room. “Easy, Old Man.” Whether he’d somehow known to suspect what they found or simply saw the tableau a moment sooner than her own fear-blinded eyes, she’d never know. But Dax’s trust of the man let Jadzia be stopped, and she would forever be grateful for that instinct.
Ziranne didn’t turn, didn’t even so much as cock her head when the two Starfleet officers froze a few meters away. Her face was so pale, Jadzia could almost see the yellow of her skull through the flesh, her spots faded almost transparent by shock and system imbalances Jadzia could only guess at. She had backed Verad/Duhan against the window, the electromagnetic blade of one of Bashir’s laser scalpels glowing greenly against his throat. The doctor himself was nowhere to be seen.
The commissioner slid a panicked glance toward the doorway. “Help me,” he whispered. “We’ve been here ...” He swallowed thickly, took a shuddering breath. “She’s sedated—the woman is gone.”
“Your doctor was able to waken the symbiont, but ... it’s ruined, it’s gone completely mad—”
“Stop lying.” Ziranne’s voice sounded clotted, blurred and rounded by drugs and—Jadzia suspected—a certain unfamiliarity with producing language minus the help of an appropriately suited brain. Nothing else about her body moved, as though the act of creating speech made it impossible to move any other muscles. “If we’re ruined, it was you who ruined us. Tell them what you did to me. Tell them why I’m going to kill you.”
Verad’s eyes reached for Jadzia across the distance. Frightened, defiant, he wouldn’t back down, she knew. Not for her, not for Ziranne, not for anyone. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. You’ve got to stop her before she does something no one can forgive.”
“It’s over, Verad.” Sisko tightened his hand on Jadzia’s arm, ever so slightly, and took a step closer to Ziranne. “We’ve been to Gheryzan. We know what you’ve done.”
There was a moment when Jadzia thought he’d try to extend the ruse. Then Verad stared yearningly at Ziranne, and the naked desperation on his face made him look suddenly more like Jadzia remembered. “I only wanted a symbiont,” he said, in a very tiny voice. His eyes looked at Ziranne, but his words reached deeper, toward the life-form she carried inside her. “Just one symbiont. For myself.”
“And he followed the rumors to Shal Tul,” the symbiont took up. “To Bethan Roa, the old man whose failing mind led him to the greatest madness of all.” The host’s head twisted slightly to direct the words toward the officers in the doorway, but Ziranne didn’t precisely turn away from Verad.” He wanted to hide his brain’s infirmity from the Symbiosis Commission. He took drugs that the humans said could knit his fractured thoughts back into order. Except the price he paid for clear thinking was ours. His mind rebounded to its youthful brilliance, but the drugs began to dissolve the bond he shared with us. Thus a new and bitter vice was born.”
“I only wanted a symbiont.” That mantra seemed to sustain Verad. A lack of empathy toward others, Bashir had said. Perhaps this was how Verad justified it all to himself. “Bethan Roa sold me a perfected version of the drug, which I used on Duhan Vos. The drug makes it possible to extract a joined symbiont without killing the host. Bethan knew of doctors who could help, who could transfer the symbiont once the bond was broken, and dispose of the old host. They gave me his symbiont and his face. I made my own life for myself.”
At the expense of a man who had never done Verad even a moment’s harm.
“He won’t recover.” Jadzia couldn’t keep the anger and anguish from her tone. “Whatever your drug did to him, it’s destroyed his mind forever.”
As sincerely as could be imagined, Verad said only, “I’m sorry.” The same answer he’d given on Deep Space 9 when told his theft of the Dax symbiont would kill an innocent young woman. Old men on distant colonies were less well defended than Starfleet science officers, but apparently no more valuable.
Jadzia met her sister’s eyes, but saw someone else in the anguished face. “You’re Roa, aren’t you?”
Slowly, as though with extreme conscious effort, Ziranne blinked and took a breath, nodding. “The trace chemicals your doctor found in this host’s system were from the drug set Bethan developed. His success, with Verad convinced him he could use it to exploit others like him—unjoined Trills who would do anything to be joined. The drug would make it possible to give them a taste of what they wanted—for a fee. One symbiont could be passed among many—a month in one, two weeks in another. When Verad learned of Bethan’s plans to use Vos, he used the drug on Bethan first. He killed Bethan, and made me a commodity. But Verad gave no thought to the damage Bethan’s drug was doing to me, or to my hosts. Then this host found out, and paid to be the next in line, in order to bring me back to Trill.”
Jadzia was too horrified to speak. Sisko asked, “So you—and Ziranne—never intended to remain joined?”
The joined thing that was neither entirely symbiont nor entirely host shook its head. “There was no intent involved. This host and I stole the drug before running, to use them once we were back on Trill, so that I could return to the pools. This host gave of itself to rescue me. This host offered of itself the gift of movement and form. But we were too damaged to continue functioning for as long as we had hoped, and the drug was lost.”
Jadzia’s complete revulsion at the atrocity being described was absolute. Bond, dissolve the bond, pass the symbiont along to the next host in line with no regard for its mental health or stability. Her stomach turned sour at the prospect. In the past, when there weren’t enough homes for individuals on an overpopulated planet, whole families learned to live in a single apartment, people who would never otherwise know each other chose to pool their funds to purchase housing. But a symbiont was not a house. Neither Jadzia nor Dax could imagine the damage wreaked—on both symbiont and host—by something so barbaric as treating a fragile life-form like a summer house that many different owners could share. Yet it stood here in front of them, in the form of a beloved sister who no longer knew her own name.
“Ziranne ...” Jadzia took a few careful steps into the room. The remnant of her sister didn’t even turn to look. “Ziranne, you can’t kill him.”
“She doesn’t have to,” the stranger’s voice said. “There is no part of her consciousness involved in what’s happening here. As soon as we have forced him to confess his part, I will kill him for us all.”
Fear flooded her eyes briefly with tears. Jadzia blinked them back, retreating to Dax’s steadier perspective. “You can’t kill him either, Roa.” This time Ziranne’s head swivelled, slowly, dreamily. “The symbiont inside him doesn’t deserve punishment any more than you did. If you kill Verad, you risk killing the symbiont he carries—the symbiont he stole.”
She thought she saw just the slightest hesitation in Ziranne’s eyes. “You could remove it before he perishes—”
“We can do that anyway.”
Realization blossomed between Roa and Verad at almost the same moment. The horror and anguish on Verad’s face almost balanced the satisfaction that crept into Ziranne’s expression.
“The drug set Bethan developed gives us that ability,” Jadzia continued. “You may have lost the sample, but you were once Bethan, too—you know what’s needed to synthesize more. We can use it to remove you from Ziranne, and Vos from Verad. You can both return to the pools and find some peace. With the i
nformation you can give us, the Commission will find Verad’s other ‘customers’ and make sure this never happens again. And Verad will be punished as he deserves.”
“More carefully than last time.” Roa angled a pleading look over Ziranne’s shoulder.
Jadzia nodded solemnly. “More carefully.” Although she didn’t know that this was a promise she needed to make. The loss of life in Verad’s eyes almost matched what she’d seen in Duhan’s back at Gheryzan. They had no idea how long Verad had carried this symbiont, how complete their mutual bond had become. Or how much like Duhan he would finally be when this was over. Even if he retained his sanity, to face the rest of existence after having your symbiont extracted from your being, and no chance that death would mercifully release you from that future—that seemed a greater punishment than anything Jadzia or anyone else could devise.
Evidently, the Roa symbiont agreed. With a slow blink, and then a sigh, Ziranne’s body took an unsteady step back from the hunched-over form of the erstwhile commissioner—then crumpled into Jadzia’s outstretched arms.
Holding her sisters cool hand in both her own, Jadzia watched the ghostly movements of Ziranne’s eyes behind their lids. Even in sleep, she smiled now. Once, when her eyes flickered open at the sound of a bird caroling outside the window, she’d focused hazily on Jadzia and whispered, “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d make everything okay.”
Jadzia leaned down close, resting her forehead against Ziranne’s. “Have I?” The not knowing for certain frightened her. “Ziranne, the symbiont is gone.”
“Roa.” Ziranne nodded sleepily. “I know. I can ... tell.” She smiled with amazing peacefulness. “I was so afraid they wouldn’t call you. That no one would believe me when I said I wanted it removed. But I knew you’d remember. I knew you’d know what to do.”
STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Page 28
