by Неизвестный
"So I take it that you're my official escort?" Kira glanced at the figure walking beside her. "I'm flattered that you think I deserve the special treatment."
"Oh, we're aware of your having been taken off full duty. Your Commander Sisko seems a bit given to groundless suspicions." The functionary made a dismissive gesture. "That will pass, and you'll be in his good graces once more. For whatever that's worth. And besides—" He turned the malicious smile toward her again. "You're a celebrity in your own right. It's a basic operating principle of an operation such as this, that you have to separate the VIPs from the more . . . common elements."
"How did you know I was going to pay you a visit?"
"Major Kira . . . please. If you hadn't, then we would have had to invite you." He stopped at another door, smaller and without decoration. "This way."
From the corridor, they stepped out onto a curved balustrade, its horizontal arc encompassing an area larger than the Promenade aboard DS9 by several orders of magnitude. At the guardrail, Kira could look down upon a milling crowd of the galaxy's sentient species. They were too far distant to make out as individuals, but they gave off en masse the same aura of mingled excitement and greed that had repelled her before—if anything it was even stronger here than on the Promenade.
"This is just the annex off the transportation area." The functionary pointed to the bays along the sides of the enclosed space; the crowd eddied around and through them like water swirling in a rock-lined stream. "We have centuries of recorded experience to draw upon, going all the way back to Earth itself, on how to design our operations for maximum profit generation. There really is a science to this sort of thing—the psychology of extracting wealth, as it were. You might remember that ancient political maxim about taxation being the art of plucking the most feathers from a domesticated fowl while causing the least amount of squawking. Here, we'd like to think we've transcended that state: we prefer the goose to pull off all his feathers himself and happily present them to us on a plate."
Kira brought her gaze up from the gaming floor. "You wouldn't be making a very successful pitch to tourists with that approach."
"On the contrary, Major. With all due respect, an observation like that only indicates how naive you are in these matters. That's one of the remarkable aspects of the business of satisfying people's innermost desires: the cynicism is on both sides of the equation. What all these people wish for, along with everything else, is a sinister glamour, the thrill of finding co-conspirators in the engineering of their self-destruction. They want to lose themselves in an abyss of vice and corruption; it amuses them to think of themselves fated and damned, rushing to a personal apocalypse. How could the Federation, with its essentially hygienic, problem-solving approach to reality, ever satisfy drives like that? Starfleet is like a torchbearer, bringing enlightenment to every corner of the galaxy—how noble of it. But that light must inevitably create shadows of its own, and those shadows have to go somewhere. Better they should come here to Moagitty, where Bajorans can garner the proceeds."
She studied the figure beside her while he delivered his dark sermon. A leaping fervor, like fire coursing across the branches of drought-withered trees, shone in the functionary's eyes. She could barely recognize him as a creature born of the same blood that flowed in her veins. This is what it's come to, she thought, her own voice masking the other's flow of words. This is what McHogue, and all the outsiders before him, have brought to our world. First the Cardassians, then the Federation, and now every intelligent species in the galaxy, swarming to Moagitty like insects to an overripe fruit rotting on the ground; the outside universe had impinged upon Bajor, and things could never be the same again. The Bajorans wouldn't be the same; they were already in the process of becoming different to each other. Their suffering had made them one, but that had ended. Wealth and power would split them apart, each a stranger to what had been a brother or sister. She had seen this functionary coolly slay her old comrade Malen, with no more reluctance than the assassination of a Cardassian during the resistance might have evoked. Perhaps less; the functionary—and how many more like him?—was now closer in nature to McHogue and Cardassians than to other Bajorans. They had evolved somehow, in a way that she could never have anticipated; they had become the very creatures that the resistance had fought to cast out from Bajor.
Her meditations took her to a dead place inside herself. Maybe this is the reason that Kai Opaka left us—a thought even bleaker than the steps that led to it. Perhaps the Kai hadn't answered the call of the Prophets at all; perhaps she had been cast out in her turn by the Prophets, those who could see what the future of Bajor would be like. A future that had no place for one such as the Kai.
"Why did you come here?"
For a moment, Kira suffered an auditory hallucination; it had sounded to her as if it had been the Kai's gentle voice that had spoken. Her breath came back into her lungs, and she realized that the words had come only from the functionary who had guided her to this inferno of excited laughter.
"Or why do you think you came here?" The functionary smiled as he peered more closely at her.
"I . . . I don't know. . . ." Kira shook her head, as if that might dispel the dream that had folded around her. She wondered where she would be if she did wake up—in her quarters aboard DS9, or on the bare ground of her homeworld? She could remember a time when she had slept under the night sky of Bajor, surrounded by the forms of her fellow resistance fighters, their weapons at their sides; they had all expected to die in the morning's action, a raid on a Cardassian armaments dump. Half their number had wound up exactly as feared; but in the night before, she had felt at peace, beyond hope or desire. . . .
The functionary's voice seemed to speak right at her ear, soothing her heavy eyelids closed. "I can tell you why. The same reason you came the last time, before the coup d'état by the Severalty Front. You have this vision of yourself, don't you, Major? The avenging angel, the fiery sword, the one-woman hit squad. The people around you, your fellow officers up on Deep Space Nine, they think that you're always so irascible and impatient, that you go charging off on your own because you don't feel anyone can keep up; you have to do everything all by yourself. When really it's quite different: you don't want anyone else to help you. You want to do it all by yourself. What did you think you were going to do this time?" The voice became slyly mocking. "Find some switch to throw that would overload the power generators and blow all of Moagitty to atoms? One big cataclysm, with you at the center of it—I'm sure that would have made you very happy. Or perhaps something less flamboyant but just as satisfying—you could have leapt and with your bare hand torn out my throat."
Her eyes flew open. She saw before her, not the functionary, but the image of McHogue turned to flesh. The transformation had been accomplished as easily and swiftly as discarding a mask—the narrow face that she had seen photos of now smiled at her.
"You shouldn't act so surprised, Major." The black-clad figure was an optical vacuum, holding her attention with no chance of her breaking away. "You've entered my territory—this is the city that bears my name, is it not? You should be flattered that I'm giving you such special treatment."
It almost seemed as if she had stepped from the shuttle that had brought her here into one of the Cl-modified holosuites. Anything could happen.
"Major, I regret that we seem to be on opposing sides; that's unfortunate. This—" McHogue gestured toward the vast open space before them. "It's all going to be much bigger than what you see; this is just the beginning. That's why General Aur and so many others—so many of your former comrades, Kira—that's why they joined me in this great enterprise. Because they could see the possibilities. I'd find it very convenient if one of your capabilities took part as well. There'd be a place for you."
"Spare me the recruiting pitch." The shock of the transformation had passed, though it was still a mystery how it had been done. "I've got a better idea of just what your program entails."
"No, you don't. You don't have the slightest idea." McHogue's smile turned cold. "If you did, you'd realize that you might not have a choice about joining or not. Come on—" He turned and started walking farther along the balustrade. "There are some other things I'd like you to see."
Away from the murmur of the gaming floor, a balcony framed by raw girders and nets of dangling electrical cables opened to a view of the hills surrounding the new city. The landscape had been scraped bare by the towering construction equipment arrayed along the horizon. Cranes taller than any of the capital's minarets dangled pre-formed panels and modular units toward the waiting plasma torches. The scale of the partly finished buildings was beyond anything Kira seen before. DS9 itself could have been settled between the massive walls like an egg in a steel and cementene nest.
"I suppose I should be impressed," said Kira. "Your friends the Cardassians certainly have a taste for epic architecture But then, I already knew that they like to build monuments to themselves."
"Gul Dukat has been very useful . . . and discreet." McHogue leaned his hands against the balcony's rail. "He's been quite agreeable to the proposition that the Cardassians should not just be silent, but invisible partners in this enterprise. They've suffered serious public relations problems before; they're not universally well liked. It's better for all concerned that the Cardassians should stay in the background. We wouldn't want anything to keep potential guests away."
"Or their money."
The look in McHogue's eyes grew distant as he gazed across the empire being assembled before him. "You don't understand yet, do you, Major? It's not that simple." He pushed himself away from the rail. "I'm not done giving you the tour yet."
Another corridor, high-ceilinged, with soft, dreamy light the color of a perfect dawn; McHogue indicated the doors extending in a curve whose end couldn't be seen. "Look familiar?"
"Holosuites." Kira shrugged. "Should I be surprised? There's obviously a limit to how much you can mess with people's minds in reality."
"Bravely spoken, for one who's not quite sure who she's talking to." McHogue regarded the holosuites with a proprietary satisfaction. "But of course, you're right about that. Everything else—the Dabo tables, the ordinary brothels and simpler pleasures of life—that's all pretty much a loss leader to attract a wider range of customers. Though I think that once word spreads across the galaxy about the rather more outré delights that can be sampled here, all of that other stuff could be largely dispensed with."
The vision she'd had before, when the person with her had still been in the guise of the government functionary, came once again into her head. A vision of a darkness that could swallow whole worlds and everybody on them, Bajor included.
She thrust the vision away, unwilling to admit that it could be true.
"Do you really think intelligent creatures are going to fall for this?" She gazed at McHogue, willing the contempt she felt to strike him like one of the fists she held at her side. "Once people find out that there's nothing but death and madness at the end, you'll be walking around your precious Moagitty by yourself."
"I'm hardly worried about that. You speak from ignorance, Major; what you know about the possibilities here is nothing, no more than the small unpleasantness you encountered back on DS9." McHogue nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps you should have a little talk with someone more experienced. Someone you might trust . . ."
He pressed the control at the side of one of the holosuites; the door slid open. Inside, a figure knelt at the center of the chamber. The head was bent so far forward that Kira couldn't see the face.
"Go ahead," said McHogue, smiling. "It wasn't that long ago that you and this person talked with each other."
Slowly, Kira stepped into the holosuite. Around her, the grid of sensory projectors formed a dead cage. The kneeling figure didn't move as she approached. Only when Kira stood immediately before—a face radiant with belief looked up at her, and she recognized the acolyte from the capital's temple.
The acolyte's gaze pierced Kira and focused on a vision far beyond the physical limits of the holosuite. Kira reached down and touched the side of the acolyte's face.
"I saw her," murmured the acolyte.
"Who did you see?" But she already knew what the answer would be.
The acolyte's voice was a whisper of reverence, as though a revelation greater than the world's limits had been witnessed.
"The Kai . . ."
She knew that McHogue stood somewhere behind them. Stood at the door, watching. And smiling.
In her living quarters, she lay on her bed and gazed up at the ceiling. For a long while, she had seen faces there, conjured from recent memory; a face rapt and transcendent, focused upon an unseen image, and another, that rendered judgment upon everything before it with a twist of one corner of its mouth.
On the shuttle back to the station, Kira had picked apart the events of this brief journey. A few hours spent in another world, McHogue's world. The sky no longer guarded a Bajor that she could recognize. All had changed, or was about to.
Change—the word brought a flare of resentment inside her skull. Nearly an entire shift had passed since she'd returned to the station, and the memory of the cheap magic by which McHogue had appeared in front of her was still irritating to think about. It meant nothing—or so she wanted to believe. A distracting of her attention, an opportunity seized when she had closed her eyes, McHogue stepping into the place of the functionary that had been standing there. DS9 had a shapeshifter aboard that was certainly more impressive—you could watch Odo change from one thing to another.
She clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes narrowing as she gazed harder at the ceiling. What ticked her off, she decided, was not the efficacy of McHogue's full-body sleight of hand, but the fact that he had attempted it at all. There was a commingling in the man's character of inflated boasting that verged on mysticism and a child's glitter-eyed cruelty. It infuriated her to think of one who had befriended her, such as the temple's acolyte, lost in thrall to such a mind and its creations.
Another emotion stirred inside her, that she had tried to extinguish but had failed. What if it's true? A simple question, but one whose answer meant everything. The whispered fervor in the acolyte's words, the vision that could be seen in the window of her eyes . . .
A fake, as fraudulent as all the rest of it. Not on the acolyte's part, but McHogue's. He had devoted his life to trickery, for the sake of putting his hand into other people's pockets, just as the acolyte and the others carrying forth the temple's work had devoted themselves to seeing the truth.
And illusion had won, had proved itself to be the more powerful force.
An interesting philosophical problem, one that Kira could have imagined herself discussing in another life with the Kai. If lies were so mighty, at what point did they become omnipotent? When would the Great Liar McHogue declare himself to be the truth? And if he did so, would he be wrong . . .
Kira pressed her hand over her eyes, as though trying to shove down the voices that had risen clamoring inside her head. Sisko should never have taken me off full duty, she thought. The inaction, the inability to get her hands on the controls, a weapon, anything with which she could have put up a struggle, had left an empty space inside, that torments of useless reasoning had rushed to fill. It was why she had known there had never been any place for her inside the temples of her world's faith, among those who contemplated eternity through the quieting of their souls. What those of her fellow Bajorans possessed could never be hers, as much as she envied them; the constant restlessness that she had been born with, and that had been sharpened by the years of fighting in the resistance, made it impossible.
The storm inside had already been building when the shuttle had left the surface of the planet. Through one of the small craft's viewports, she had been able to look back and see clouds just as furious swirling in Bajor's upper atmosphere, as though a season of hurricanes had begun to prematurely gather its force. T
hat was what the world behind her brow had felt like, as though it were a mirror of Bajor itself.
She sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling the muscles tensing across her shoulders and down into her arms. Her fingertips dug into the thin mattress.
You want to do it all by yourself—McHogue's words were a bitter echo among her thoughts. The fiery angel, the avenging sword . . .
"I can't stay in here any longer." That was her own voice. And a bad sign, speaking to herself, with no one else around to hear. Much more of this—of nothing—and she knew she wouldn't be far from going crazy. She fastened the collar of her uniform, stood up, and hit the control panel for the door.
She had no taste for company, which precluded going down to the Promenade and listening to Quark moan about his financial troubles. From what she had observed of his competitor's booming business in Moagitty, the bar's tables and booths would be even more deserted, the Ferengi's mournful expression setting deeper into his face. It was hard to imagine how a sight like that could do anything to lift her mood.
The station's corridors were empty and silent except for the echoes of her footsteps. She paid no attention to where her wanderings took her. Only when a crackle of energy barred her path—then she was abruptly brought back from her brooding thoughts to present time.
"Entry to this sector is restricted." The voice of the station's computer spoke above her. "Per orders of Security Chief Odo."
Kira looked down the corridor before her. She saw the row of holosuite entrances with their small control panels darkened and inactive, except for one halfway down. It came as no surprise that her seemingly random course had brought her here. Beneath the storm inside her head, there was another part that wordlessly pursued its own intentions.