by Andy Mangels
“You’re looking at Jake Sisko, aren’t you,” she said, clasping her hands together gleefully.
Of course Halar would have known who the son of the Emissary was; she’d fanatically followed his “ministry” to Bajor since the kai had announced the reopening of the Celestial Temple eight years ago. And then it occurred to her that Halar wasn’t referring to someone unknown to her. Halar was talking about her Jacob. Staring, Rena said, “Jacob Sisko?”
“Jacob, Jake.” Halar shrugged. “No matter—he’s a Sisko. Son of the Emissary. I practically squealed when I saw him coming down the gangplank. Did you see him aboard the ship?”
Jacob Sisko. Son of the Emissary. I guess I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
11
Sisko
A cool, syncopated rhythm insinuated itself into Ben Sisko’s dreams, gently lifted him and tried to carry him back into the waking world. Not just yet, he thought. Let me linger here for just a moment . . . . And, briefly, for a timeless instant, he thought he remembered how it was done, how to take a second, parse it, and keep it hanging in the air, vibrating. As the piano licks, bass, and drums wove their tale through his mind, he felt the metronome behind his eyes slow down, then stop, and he hung there for an instant, between the tick and the tock. The music still moved, but he, Ben Sisko, did not. And then the Prophets speak, he thought. Pausing, he tried to keep his inner eye from wavering, waiting . . . . Or perhaps They don’t . . .
He opened his eyes, and the moment between moments receded. Pale green light dancing through a leaf canopy. Garden. He touched the patch of grass beside him and felt the chill. Kasidy must have abandoned him once he fell asleep. A sighbreath against his bare collarbone. Baby. She stirred, hitching up farther on his chest, curling her knees against her body and snuggling into his chest. Sisko smiled, tucking her dislodged blanket back around her legs. But, yes, there was music playing. Coming from the open patio doors. Dave Brubeck, he thought, recognizing the tune. When did Kas start listening to jazz? He had done his best over the years to introduce his wife to good music, but she had willfully resisted every entreaty. Kasidy liked what she liked: modern classical, Centauri folk, and the occasional piece of youth-contemporary for mindless humming. Nothing wrong with most of it, Sisko generously concluded.
The bundle on his chest shuddered with a sneeze.
Bless you, he thought, patting the bundle comfortingly.
A shadow passed between him and the dappled sunlight. Kasidy. She plopped down beside him, propping herself against the tree trunk. “I think Rebecca has caught a cold. Which means we’ll both have colds in a day or two if we don’t take antivirals.”
“Can’t we immunize her for all these little diseases?” he asked. Careful not to disturb Rebecca, he lifted his head off the ground and pillowed it on Kasidy’s lap.
She inhaled deeply, caressed his face. “We can, but Julian recommended we let a couple of these run their course so she can build up immunities. Nothing works better than nature.”
“Except when it doesn’t.”
Kasidy shrugged.
Sisko tried to remember the last time he had lived through a cold. Sneezing, runny nose, headache, congestion. “If she has to be miserable,” he asked, “shouldn’t we be miserable, too?”
Kasidy laughed. “Sorry, I don’t subscribe to that theory.”
“Think of it as an anchor to corporeal life.”
“I prefer what we did last night,” Kasidy teased.
Feeling the residual ache in his stomach muscles, Sisko had to admit he did too.
“When did you start listening to Dave Brubeck?” he asked.
“Is that who this is?” Kasidy asked. “It was on one of Jake’s mixes and I liked it.”
“Jake’s?” He was genuinely surprised. “Something that happened while I was gone?”
“I don’t think so,” Kasidy said. “The recording was a few years old, from back in that period when he and Nog tried to convince Quark that he should open a dance club.” Rebecca, who had been dozing, awoke and immediately began to nuzzle against the cloth of Sisko’s flannel shirt. Breathless, frustrated grunts gave way to a puckered-up scowl: the bundle trembled with mewing cries.
Sisko wrapped his arms around her, whispering soothing words to his daughter, but Kasidy pushed him out of her lap and plucked the baby out of his arms.
“Goodness, little girl. How can you be hungry again so soon?”
“I remember that,” Sisko said, “but I don’t remember Jake listening to jazz. How could I have missed that?”
“I can’t imagine,” Kasidy said, loosening her shirt. “I seem to remember something about a war. Ring any bells?”
“Seems vaguely familiar.” He sighed, rolling over so he could prop himself on his elbows. Rooting around the grass, he plucked out stems of miniature, blush-faced daisy flowers and started piling them up. “I should make lunch.” Deftly, he knotted the flower stems together, making a chain of blossoms.
“Yes you should,” Kasidy agreed. “Why not reheat the gumbo you made yesterday?”
“Excellent suggestion. But none for you, little girl,” Sisko said, stroking her velvety cheek with his index finger. “Maybe when you’re older. None of that replicated lunch food at school. I’ll send you jambalaya.” He continued the flower chaining, his fingers smudged with powdery orange pollen grains.
Rebecca squirmed and tensed, followed by an unmistakable series of gaseous “phlbets.” Relaxing, she pulled away, bloated and happy, offering her mother a tipsy half-smile.
Kasidy draped the blanket over her shoulder, then lifted the baby up and began to gently pat her. Looking at her husband, she asked seriously, “Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Pack her lunch for her on school days? Do you really see that as part of our future?”
Sisko kept his eyes on Rebecca. “What makes you think I can see the future?”
“Then what do you want to happen next?” Kasidy asked earnestly. “You must have some hopes for how you want our lives to unfold, or it doesn’t matter whether you can see the future or not.”
He rolled off his belly, onto his back, watching the frantic ministrations of a mother bird delivering squirming insects to her nest of young in the branches above. “What I want,” he said soberly, “is to be here with you and the baby. But you know the truth: It’s never going to be about only what I want. I still have a duty.”
“To whom?”
Sisko stared out over his tessipates of land, the miasma of variegated greens and browns garnished with straw-colored seed clusters ripening as midsummer approached. He inhaled deeply, drawing in the scents of moldering leaves, the scents of the river, deep into his lungs. In a split second of awareness, he knew the insects gnawing through the tree bark, the schools of fish darting around the water lilies, the plump seed grains burgeoning with life, the katterpod seedlings twining up the garden arbor. The land infiltrated the marrow of his bones, binding him. Just as the sky still did.
“To the Bajorans,” Sisko said. “To these people who have placed their trust in me. To the Prophets who allowed me to return here. To Starfleet. And to those others . . .”
“What others?” Kasidy asked, her voice rising with emotion. “Who else is there who’s more important to you than your family?”
Scooting back to sit beside her, Sisko threaded his arm behind Kasidy’s waist, drawing her head onto his shoulder. The baby heard him coming and, head wobbling, turned toward her father’s voice. “My dear love,” Sisko said softly, touching her knee, “none of them is more important than my family. But consider this: What do you think we need to do to protect our daughter?”
Kasidy’s eyes, which had been growing red-rimmed, suddenly narrowed. “What do you mean, Ben? Do you think someone is going to try to hurt Rebecca?”
“No,” Sisko said, trying to keep his voice low and reassuring. “Not specifically for Rebecca, but, yes, something is coming. The Prophets tried to explain it to me
.” He shook his head. “I wish I could be plainer than that, but it’s difficult. The way they communicated—when I was there with them it all made sense, but now, here, meaning fades.”
“But it’s something that could harm Rebecca?” Sisko saw the fierce gleam in his wife’s eyes.
“It’s something that could affect us all, every Bajoran, yes.”
“Bajoran, Ben? Is that what we are now?”
Sisko held her eye for several seconds, then smiled. “Aren’t we?” he asked. He nodded at the world around him. “If Rebecca could answer, what would she say about this place?”
Kasidy looked. Sikso followed her gaze. The tree branches curved to form an archway over the dirt road; wildflowers, a riotous burst of color, carpeted the beds around the house; trails of cloud tufts lazed out over a luminous blue sky. And the house: He had designed it, Kas had built it.
“It’s home, Ben. It’s our home.”
“Yes, it is,” Sisko said. “And if we need to defend it . . .”
“ . . . We’ll do what we must.”
He kissed her on the forehead, then quickly scrambled up to his feet. “I hear that gumbo calling to me.”
Kasidy chuckled, and the sound made the baby jump, then hiccup, a bubble of milk exploding on her lips. Her mother wiped the baby’s mouth, then called out to her husband again, suddenly serious. “So what do we do now?”
“First, we should have lunch,” Sisko said, pausing where he stood and meeting her eyes. “Then, when we’re done, I think we should begin to plan a dinner party.”
12
Rena
Rena awoke distressingly early the next morning, a full ten minutes before the house computer was programmed to chime. What could have awakened her? Noise from the street? Unlikely. At this hour, most of the fishermen had been out in their boats for a couple of hours, and few of them lived this far up in the Harbor Ring hills, preferring that their houses be close to the docks. Marja would already be downstairs in the bakery, which was on the other side of the house, and Rena knew from experience that Marja would have to drop one of the biggest mixing bowls or—unthinkable!—slam an oven door for her to hear it up on the third floor. So the question remained: Why was she awake?
Guilt, perhaps. Her stomach knotted as she contemplated the looming confrontation with Marja. When she had arrived, yesterday afternoon, Marja had been at services. By the time her aunt had returned home, Rena had already fallen asleep and was just now waking up for the first time in fourteen hours.
Images from night before last swam up from memory: Jacob. He might be in Mylea now. Would she see him again? Not that he would want to see her, or she him, for that matter. To think she’d been with the son of the Emissary all that time and not known it! Thinking back, she couldn’t honestly say he’d lied outright about his identity, but he’d certainly withheld it. In retrospect, there had been clues in some of things he let slip, and the fact that she hadn’t put the details together before was now a source of embarrassment.
She remembered the single holo the newsfeeds had been permitted to take of the Emissary and his newborn daughter—the Avatar, as some believed. Many, many images had been taken of Sisko over the years, but the press had been cooperative about not taking images of his family, a privacy demand the media had no choice but to comply with. Sisko had made it clear: If one newsfeed ignored his request, all the others would be cut off. Perhaps that’s why she hadn’t recognized Jacob the way Halar had. Halar had spent most of her middle years digging through the comnet, saving every file and picture she could find, becoming an expert on all things Sisko in the process. If it hadn’t been in the headlines, Rena hadn’t bothered, being more concerned with her art and Kail. It seemed appropriate now that they were adults that their childhood obsessions still defined them: Halar was studying to become a prylar, Rena was still painting and with Kail—sort of. Or maybe neither.
Rena sagged back against the narrow bed, sighed, hauled herself up into a standing position, and wobbled across the cool wood floor to her tiny ’fresher.
After pulling her wiry black hair back into a loose knot, Rena quickly scrubbed her face, took her allergy medicine, and cleaned her teeth, not thinking about any one thing, but letting a dozen stray thoughts course through her consciousness. After the initial foundation work was completed, she worked up the nerve to look herself squarely in the mirror and was pleased to see that things could be worse. Her complexion, naturally creamy brown, masked the bags (with a little help from a little powder), but the lines around her eyes were difficult to disguise. Scrunching up her eyes, she stared at herself and recalled her grandfather’s comment: It’s not the years; it’s the distance traveled. Only last month, she had plucked the first silver hair from among the black and she could see another growing in its place. Marja had told her that her sister, Rena’s mother, had gone completely gray by thirty. Rena hoped that environment had been a factor: her mother’s life had been much more difficult than hers had been.
When she was a young girl, Marja and Topa had told her tales of her mother and father, Lariah and Jiram, so many times that they were, to Rena, like characters in a story. Their tale went like this: Her mother, Lariah, and her father, Jiram, had grown up during the Occupation. By day, Jiram had fished, like most of the men, and Lariah had worked with Topa and Marja in the bakery making Cardassian scorca, the flat bread the Occupation troops craved. “They were the bravest people in town,” Topa had told her over and over. “They could have been like everyone else and just done what they were told, but they wanted life to be better for everyone.”
“Especially me!” the young Rena would say (her recurring line).
“Especially you,” Topa would say.
No one else in Mylea had been brave enough to give up their soft lives; everyone knew how bad living conditions were in the big cities, the industrial centers, and the mining camps. No one wanted to take a risk.
But bravery was not always enough, or so the story went. One night, someone made a mistake or, possibly, the Cardassians just got lucky. Lariah and Jiram had not returned from their mission to free a group of prisoners, so baby Rena went to live with Marja and Topa. Somewhere along the line, she had learned that Topa, too, worked for the resistance, but had the sense or the luck to not be caught. As she grew older and understood things more clearly, there came a point when he would say, “They were the bravest people in town,” and she would mentally append, Except for you.
Enough, Rena thought, unknotting her hair and trying to rake the wild locks into submission with her fingers. This was all twenty years ago. You don’t even remember them. The Cardassians are gone now. Padding back into the bedroom, she took the clothes she would wear today from the hooks on the back of the door: black skirt (or pants), black shoes, black or gray shirt (or sweater, depending on the chill in the air), and a white pullover with purple fluting. Now all she needed was her apron and the transformation would be complete. Seeing herself in the mirror, she said, “Hello, Bakery Shop Girl,” and started downstairs to help Marja.
* * *
Every late spring, the intercoastal salt marshes north of Mylea were infused with newly warmed seawater from a southerly warm current bringing along the immense schools of tiny fish that, in turn, brought the bigger game fish. At almost the same time, give or take a week, a mass of damp, cool air descended from the mountains and mingled with the warm sea air, creating a dense white fog of such peculiar perspicacity that it was renowned around the planet and treasured by artists, holographers, and, in particular, lovers.
Before leaving Mylea for university, Rena had often enough read the expression “tendrils of fog” in stories and assumed that the author had described a condition that he had seen. Now that she had been away, Rena knew the truth: Most writers didn’t know real fog. In other towns, fog was wispy and insubstantial. In Mylea, you could practically wrap it around you and wear it like a coat. In other places, fog was merely the ghost of a cloud; in Mylea, fog was like an ambass
ador of the ocean coming up onto land to remind it who was really in charge.
Lovers walking in Mylean fogs were almost always sure to lose themselves and wander into shadowy gardens and secluded corners. The lonely and the lovelorn claimed to feel soothed by visions of those they had lost too soon or never known. Harsh breezes never disturbed the vapors, but soft breezes would often waft through the streets, making the tendrils curl and dance like ocean waves. Even after the sun rose, the fog would linger and shroud the shops and houses in a translucent silvery veil. In Mylea, in the proper season, at the right hour, those who were open to wonder could find anything there they could possibly wish to see.
As she passed the round window on the stairway down to the bakery, Rena yawned hugely. Outside, the sky was just beginning to turn pinkish gray as the first rays of light began to rend the low morning clouds. She had seen enough early-morning fogs to know it would be a beautiful day, though she might not see much of it if Marja was in a punishing mood. “Here we go,” she muttered, and pushed open the heavy wood door that led to the main kitchen.
The heavy door creaked as Rena walked in. Marja, bent over a tray of specialty breads with a glazing brush, glanced up, waved absently, then went back to what she was doing. Except for their pale skin, the same spray of freckles over the nose, and (so Rena was told) the same laugh, the sisters Marja and Lariah could not have been more unalike. Where Lariah had been willowy and tall, Marja was broad-shouldered and buxom, her arms thick with ropy muscle. Where Lariah had been fair, Marja’s cheeks and nose were perpetually red, the result of a sensitivity to raw prusin seed enzymes, a condition that might have been eradicated if Federation medicine had been available to her in her youth. She walked with a slight limp from a childhood break that never properly healed. Rena’s father had been the darkskinned one, and though she was built more like her mother, only the most observant could see any resemblance between her and her aunt. “Is there any tea?”
