by Неизвестный
The image's self-aggrandizing rhetoric nauseated Jadzia. It was as much to blank out McHogue's voice, as from any hope of rescue, that she focused her attention on the runabout that had appeared in the sky overhead. She recognized it as one of DS9's; her own expectations told her that Sisko was piloting it.
"Well done!" McHogue registered genuine approval as the runabout touched down and came to a halt in what had been Moagitty's grand concourse; there had been just space enough along the rows of decapitated pillars for the craft to glide to its landing. "Such professionalism—but then, we really wouldn't have expected much less, would we?" He glanced round at her.
Jadzia made no reply; the relief she felt at Sisko's appearance in the runabout's hatch was like a rush of oxygen into her lungs.
"My dear commander; it's always such a pleasure to see you." McHogue made a small bow toward him. "And especially on such a reciprocal basis. Not that I mind always coming to your place. It's just the thought that counts, I suppose."
Sisko had sprinted the few meters from the runabout's landing point. He grasped Jadzia by the arm. "Are you all right?"
She nodded. "I'll be fine . . . soon as I'm away from here. And I'm reconjoined with my symbiont. You know, don't you, about—"
"Bashir found the last research notes you logged into the station's computer. That, plus the message you sent me, was enough to fill us in on your plans." Sisko nodded toward the runabout. "The CI field has apparently coalesced here; once we're out of actual physical proximity to its locus, the effects upon you should be reversible—just as if you had been able to step backward from the module aboard the station. Then you'll be able to merge your neurosystem's processes with those of Dax again."
"Maybe; maybe not." Arms folded across his chest, McHogue had listened to the words between Sisko and Jadzia. "They calculate poorly, who don't take me into account—at least around here, that is." He shook his head in disbelief. "What, you think you can just drop in, refuse my hospitality, and take off whenever you feel like it? Really, Commander Sisko, I had thought Starfleet officers had more of an education in diplomatic etiquette than that. After all, there is an official relationship between us—I still am the Bajoran Minister of Trade."
"I hardly think your status applies any longer." Jadzia glared angrily at him. "Not when you've managed to turn the whole planet into a charnel house—"
A look of confusion crossed Sisko's face. "What are you talking about?"
"You'll have to forgive her, Commander." McHogue's smile became tolerant and knowing. "My fault, really. When you entered Bajor's atmosphere, your approach path was above the capital, so no doubt you saw the population there in relatively good health, all things considered; perhaps just a little battered from this spate of bad weather we've been having. Of course, there's no need to thank me for this brief respite I arranged just for your arrival—as I've always maintained, I am by nature a hospitable entity. Even more so, now that I've come into my own, as it were. Be that as it may, Commander; you're really only standing on the doorstep of my world." He gestured toward Jadzia. "Your colleague, however, has been inside and enjoying my company for some time now—though ordinary notions of time are not strictly applicable here. Let's just say that she's come to see the situation in its more fully developed state. When the weak and fallible flesh has been discarded, so that all who came here can assume the immortality they sought."
"He's insane, Benjamin." A trace of what Jadzia had learned from her symbiont emerged inside, enabling her to speak with clinical dispassion of the image standing before them. "There's no difference now between him and this world he's created. I had thought that I could come here and somehow change things; I believed that the rational nature of the universe outside—its original nature, before this madness began—I thought that could be brought to this place, like light into darkness. I was wrong." She grasped Sisko's arm, drawing him away from McHogue. "He's stronger than that; the infection from the CI modules has grown even more powerful than before. We should return to the station immediately; perhaps there is still some way we can find to limit the damage to the surrounding universe."
She saw the effect her words had upon her friend. Silent, Benjamin looked up at the sky. Or what had been, in this world, a simulation of Bajor's sky; now jagged lines of force could be seen writhing in it, shadow and fire intermingled, as though reality had become no more than a sheet of paper being crumpled in a gigantic fist.
McHogue's smile had faded with each of her words; the image's dark gaze took in both Sisko and Jadzia. "Now I am annoyed." The voice was a humorless, grating sound. "After all I've done for both of you—taken you in, shown you things you would never have imagined. I was even willing to let our little differences be forgotten, to welcome you here and make you part of all I've accomplished. You should have considered that a measure of my respect for you. And was any of that respect returned to me?" From the depths of his brooding, McHogue regarded them. "Fine; that's what I get for being nice to the marks. Well, no more of that." He straightened his arm, index finger pointing to the center of Sisko's chest. "You want to leave here? All right, I'll make it easy for you. But you might be surprised about what you find when you get home."
Jadzia saw the blow coming, the hand curling into a fist. She tried to pull Benjamin out of its path, but was too late.
As close as she had been, she was still unable to discern exactly what happened. Which had been real, and which illusion. The fist or its target; they seemed to pass, one into the other, illusions overlapped and mingled—
But only one of them remained afterward.
McHogue dropped his fist and let the fingers slowly uncurl. "There—"
Dazed, she looked down at her own empty hands.
"That's what he wanted." McHogue nodded in grim satisfaction. "Let's see how he likes it."
He walked in a place where he had walked before.
One footstep came after another, unconscious and automatic; he could have been asleep, if his eyes had not followed the angle of the corridor, the metal grids and doorways indicating—to the watching part of his mind—where he was.
This is the station. Sisko's thoughts moved slowly inside bis head, one word matching each pace. I'm back . . . back aboard Deep Space Nine.
He must have been asleep, and dreaming; that was the only explanation that appeared in the silent chambers of his skull. He had been someplace else, he knew—but where? Dax had been there as well . . . but not Dax; not all of her. Just the part of her named Jadzia. His old friend Dax had been . . . in a whole other world. How could that be?
And there had been another face, just for a moment, a vision that had appeared and then had been gone before he could catch it. And words that were just about to be spoken . . . He shook his head, knowing that those were lost as well.
That was the problem with dreams, mused Sisko as he walked along the endless station corridor. Dreams showed you things, but didn't explain them. Very much like the vision of Kai Opaka that he'd had, so long ago. Prophecies and blessings; he smiled to himself, remembering. Things that the Kai had warned him about; things that would happen and for which he would have to be ready. The unreal becoming the real . . .
McHogue.
The single name was enough. For him to wake from the last remnants of his dreaming. He stopped his walking, turning to look about himself. Now he could remember where he had been.
The last thing Sisko could recall, from his standing in the middle of the ruins of Moagitty, had been McHogue's glaring hatred and the fist aimed at his own chest. Jadzia had tried to pull him away; he remembered her tug at his arm. And then . . . nothing.
Until he had found himself here, back aboard DS9.
Or not DS9; that was a possibility he had to consider. He had stepped again into McHogue's world, not by walking into an altered holosuite this time, but by making the arduous journey through the spatial disturbances to Bajor. The result was the same; any dealings with McHogue wound up being on M
cHogue's terms. McHogue got to choose the playing field; in baseball terms, Sisko thought grimly, he had a permanent home advantage.
There had been a time, the meeting when General Aur and his new Minister of Trade had come to the station, when McHogue had made the assertion that an infinite regress, artificial realities nested within a spiral of hallucinations, was impossible, both in theory and practice. Even now, he had no reason to doubt the claim. McHogue was too much of an egotist to create more than one world to be in at a time; the CI technology's self-appointed deity would be unlikely to divide himself up.
Sisko started walking again. If he could reach the Ops deck, perhaps he would be able to determine the exact nature of the world into which he'd been thrust. There might be people there, the other crew members; anyone with a voice and face that wasn't McHogue's. He hastened his steps, heading from the empty sector to the regions where there would be life and sound. . . .
He came to the Promenade.
But silence greeted him. Even there, at the station's heart, where greed and appetite and the manifold lusts of sentient creatures had tumbled together in their own perpetual, noisy storm . . .
He felt the silence before he saw the rest, the other indices of death. Strewn across the Promenade's open walkways were blackened shapes that had once been living creatures, the human and nonhuman population of DS9, connected now to each other like a string of black hieroglyphs, sentences whose meanings were beyond the scope of mortal reading. Charred figures lay facedown and anonymous in the doorways of what had been the Promenade's business establishments; in Quark's bar, the tables and stools had been knocked aside by whatever fiery hand had left the last patrons curled around their own ashes.
Sisko stood at the edge of the grim display, his senses at war with a mind that refused to believe its perceptions.
This is what Jadzia saw. His thoughts struggled to connect the pieces spread out before him. What she saw down there, in the city of Moagitty. The unleashing of death itself, the face of pure murder—the only difference being, he knew, between whitening skeletal remains and these things of crumbling cinder. What he and the other officers of the station had termed an epidemic of murder had been transformed, apothesized, into its own incendiary hurricane, an annihilating firestorm. All to feed McHogue's vaulting ambitions, his embrace of godhood; no doubt he would be ready to boast that he had given these victims immortality as well, incorporated them into the fabric of the world that had burst into existence from the limits of his skull.
"Is there anyone here?" Sisko called aloud, his voice echoing in the high-ceilinged space. "Anyone left alive?" He could hear in his voice the absence of hope, the playing out of his role as the station's commander. A charade, he knew, a performance without an audience, unwatched except by embers inside the blackened eye sockets on all sides of him as he moved forward. He walked carefully, finding an empty space for each footstep.
Outside the entrance to the security office—the doors had pulled away from their surrounding girders, the heat that had passed across them sufficient to warp metal—unexpected motion snagged at the corner of his sight. Sisko turned, his hand reaching to touch a section of bare wall.
The shimmering movement rippled away from his fingertips, as though a stone had somehow been dropped into vertical water. The firestorm that had swept through the Promenade had left the expanse before him smooth as molten glass. A dead thing, as dead as all the rest of the station's structure and those who had occupied it . . .
But alive as well. In some sense beyond Sisko's understanding; he could feel a minute vibration, less than breathing, against his skin.
"Who's there?" he asked, though he already knew.
I remain . . .
A voice, a whisper that brushed against his ear. But one that he recognized.
"Odo?" He turned to look over his shoulder, as though he might find the shapeshifter's human form standing close to him.
Where I have always been. Where I will always be. . . .
The wall rippled again, and became a mirror, one in which he could see his own face reflected; the depths of apparent space might have been made of obsidian, rendered dark as the ashes that surrounded him.
There was another face in the mirrored surface, that Sisko could just discern. Eyes closed, it might have been asleep and dreaming, encased inside a becalmed sea. The slow currents of its words parted the somnolent mouth.
Where I should be . . . where I wanted to be . . .
The voice was drained of all emotion, as though it emerged from narcotized sleep. That was how Sisko knew the face he saw in the glass-smoothed wall was not the real Odo—not the Odo of reality, that place outside McHogue's dark universe—but his echo. From that time when the security chief, taunted by Gul Dukat's hints of secrets to be revealed, had gone into the altered holosuite and found . . . what? Odo had refused to tell anyone; had said, in fact, that he had found nothing in there.
That assertion might have been true, but even then Sisko had doubted the other's words; doubted, but had not pressed him on the matter. The mix of emotions that he had detected in Odo's face and voice—rage and fear and a swirling confusion—had been too close to his own, the product of stepping into the brightly lit nightmare into which McHogue had twisted his son Jake's summer fantasies. Such knowledge was shameful, something to be hidden away, clutched tight to one's own belly; he had too much respected Odo's privacy to order him to reveal what he had found inside the holosuite. If Odo had found some clue to his origins, the mystery of his created nature, it remained his secret.
But what Odo had left there in the holosuite, left the way that all who had entered McHogue's world left some small parts of themselves behind—the "echoes" that McHogue fastened upon and nourished in the forcing ground of unlimited possibilities, a nursery for insanity and murder—that was something Sisko had known of, but hadn't wanted to think about.
Until now, when he had to confront the results of that process.
He stepped back from the mirrorlike wall, looking up and across its breadth. His vision had sharpened, or Odo—the inanimate yet sentient thing that bore Odo's face and essence—had chosen to show itself more fully. The original Odo, the Odo who had existed in the great reality outside McHogue's skull, had been an entity personifying the notions of fluid and protean, an embodiment of constant change. The echo of Odo that Sisko now saw before him, an echo magnified and made louder, silently deafening, by McHogue's powers in this world, was both less and more than what the original had been. Whatever the shapeshifter's true nature—and Sisko knew that that might always remain a mystery—here in the CI technology's revealing illusions was the static, frozen development of that nature, a Life-in-Death like that encountered by so many other travelers in uncharted realms.
Sisko could see now how far Odo had been subsumed into the fabric of Deep Space Nine. The mirror wall that held the keeping face was Odo, as were the heat-twisted girders stretching overhead; they rippled with the same in-place motion, stone dropped in water, as Sisko's gaze passed across them. And farther: the metal flooring held the blackened corpses, as though they were cradled in Odo's protective embrace. As far as Sisko's vision could reach: walls against other walls, and the twisted doors within them. Even the space between them, the stilled air; everything locked into place, eternal and unmoving.
"Constable . . ." Sisko reached out to touch the sleeping face behind the mirrored surface. "What have they done to you?" he murmured.
Another face was discernible, behind the closed eyes of Odo's visage. Sisko drew back his hand, his fingertips having encountered only smoothed glass; he could feel the other watching him, a thin smile already forming. When the whispered voice came again, he heard the other's words seeping through.
You should be glad for me, Commander . . . this is what I want . . . what I've always wanted . . .
He stepped back, looking above himself, as though he might spot McHogue hovering like a puppeteer deity, invisible strings radiating fr
om the outstretched fingers. He saw nothing there; he dropped his gaze again to the image whose barest rudiments had filtered through Odo's, as though they were antique photographic transparencies laid one on top of the other.
You see? The words sounded different. What a generous sort I am, to let people find out what it is they desire, and then to give it to them. To cause it to be. Odo so loved the station—his only home, his only real family—and now he's part of it. Just as he wanted.
"But it's not him," Sisko spoke aloud, his voice tightening with contempt. "It's a lie—there's nothing here of Odo."
Nothing but the truth, whispered McHogue's smiling voice. That's the risk everyone took when they stepped inside here. That they would see things they might have preferred to remain hidden. The mocking smile showed in the wall's depths. That they might become things . . . the same way.
"You've left the truth behind; you wouldn't know it if it did find its way in here." He shook his head. "There's no one here but you now."