The Long Mirage

by David R. George III

  Kira actually laughed. “Is that another threat?”

  “It is not a threat; it is a fact,” Pralon said. “And I have never threatened you.”

  “Haven’t you?” Kira shook her head. “I thought I knew you, Eminence,” she said, the honorific sounding contemptuous when she spoke it. “I supported your candidacy to become kai—I prayed for your election—fundamentally not because of what I saw in you, but because of what I didn’t see: self-interest, ambition, political calculation. I witnessed those qualities firsthand in your predecessor, and I also saw the terrible damage she caused Bajor.”

  “This is not about my interests or ambitions, or about politics,” Pralon said. “It’s about holding together the collective spiritual life of the Bajoran people.” The kai leaned forward and put her hands on her desk. “The only reason I advised you to avoid mentioning Endalla and the falsework was that I didn’t want you inadvertently contributing to the ongoing conflict. You’ve only been back from the Celestial Temple for a few days. You haven’t been here to observe how the lines have been drawn, how one small act here or one minor comment there has magnified the divide. I wanted to ensure your speech didn’t add to the discord.”

  Kira appeared to give the kai’s words some thought. “I worked hard not to make the situation worse,” she said, her tone no longer strident.

  Pralon nodded. “I believe you,” she said, and the realization diminished her anger. She pushed off of her desk and sat down, then motioned for Kira to take a seat as well. After the vedek had, the kai said, “In my estimation, you succeeded in not exacerbating the situation. You might even have helped to ease frictions, which is the reason I asked you to speak in the first place. I’m grateful that you agreed, but you took a risk by making the remarks you did—a risk I wasn’t prepared for you to take at this time. If you had failed, if what you said today had aggravated the situation by supporting one side of the conflict over the other, I couldn’t do anything about it. Even if I censured you, the people who agreed with you would have seen it as a partisan move on my part.”

  “With all due respect,” Kira said softly, “this shouldn’t be about your position as kai.”

  “And it isn’t,” Pralon agreed. “It’s about me—or whoever holds this position—having the tools to hold our people together. If you had failed in what you attempted today, you would have tied my hands. There would have been nothing I could have said to the Bajoran people that would have undone the damage—not with the state of affairs as it currently stands.”

  “I . . . hadn’t considered that,” Kira admitted.

  “I didn’t think you had,” Pralon said. “It’s not your job to do so. But if you had trusted me, if you had spoken to me beforehand about what you wanted to say—”

  “I did speak with you about it.”

  “You did,” Pralon said. “But when I told you that the first minister and I didn’t want you to talk about Endalla, you agreed. You didn’t object and tell me why you thought you should bring up the falsework. You didn’t tell me what you wanted to say or how you would say it. I probably would have counseled against it, but I would have given you the opportunity to convince me otherwise.” Pralon rested her arms on her desk and leaned forward. “As it is, you convinced me today, in the Great Assembly.”

  “Did I also convince you that I should go to Endalla?”

  “Honestly, no,” Pralon said, sitting back in her chair. “I haven’t heard your argument for why you should go, even though you’ve left me with no choice but to send you.”

  “But you have heard my argument,” Kira said. “The Celestial Temple collapsed with me in it more than two years ago, but the Prophets sent me back to Bajor now, at this critical time.”

  “Which makes you think that your return has something to do with the falsework,” Pralon said. “I don’t know if I agree your conclusion is that obvious.”

  “Maybe it’s not,” Kira said. “But even if the Prophets haven’t sent me back to Bajor so that I can contribute to what’s taking place on Endalla, what harm would there be in permitting me to be an observer during the scientific expedition there? And if the Prophets have returned me to Bajor because of the discovery of the falsework, there’s no question that I should be there.”

  As Pralon considered Kira’s reasoning, a bell rang. “Come in,” the kai called, and Ranjen Linsa entered the office. He walked over to the desk carrying a padd in his hand.

  “Please forgive the interruption, Eminence,” Linsa said. “Doctor Altek came by immediately after Vedek Kira’s address. He left a message for you and requested that I deliver it to you as soon as you came back to your office. I wanted to wait for your meeting to end, but the doctor insisted his message was urgent.”

  Pralon held her open hand out over the desk. A focused, even-tempered man, Linsa Noth had served as an aide to the kai since her election to the post nine years earlier, and as her primary assistant for the past three. Among his many duties, he functioned as a gatekeeper, and so Pralon knew that he would not have interrupted her meeting with Kira had he not had a good reason to do so. Linsa handed her the padd, then immediately left, pulling the door closed behind him.

  The kai activated the padd. Its display contained a short message. She quickly read through it. She chuckled and shook her head, then pushed the device onto her desktop. “Vedek Kira, you believe that the Prophets have conducted you back to Bajor at this time specifically so that you can be an observer on the falsework expedition. It turns out that you’re not the only one who thinks that.”

  “Altek thinks I should go to Endalla?”

  “Not you, Vedek,” Pralon said. “He believes that the Prophets have sent him here, now, so that he can go to ­Endalla.”

  Six

  Arbitrage

  i

  * * *

  As the early-morning sun sent its warm rays into the suite at the Shining Oasis, Nog pushed the small box across the table. “It’s done,” he said, satisfied with his efforts, and hopeful for what they would be able to accomplish with it.

  Lani raised her head from where she’d lain down on the sofa after getting up at dawn. Her eyes appeared bleary, but she quickly sat upright and shook her head back and forth, as though trying to clear her mind. Not far from her, Candle­wood looked over from where he sat in an overstuffed chair, leaning over the low table in front of the sofa. In his hands, he had a deck of playing cards, half of which lay on the wooden surface before him. The prior night, Nog had taught him the principles of counting cards. Candlewood already knew how to play the game of blackjack, as well as an understanding of the basic strategy required for optimal results—although that basic strategy did not guarantee victory, since the odds still tipped in favor of the casino. But paying attention to what cards had already been dealt, keeping a corresponding count, and adjusting both gambling and in-game decisions based on that count would, when done correctly, skew the probabilities so that they benefited the player. Candlewood had been practicing ever since waking that morning.

  The science officer stood up and walked over to the table. “That’s it?” he asked. Nog detected a note of skepticism. “It doesn’t look like a device.”

  “It’s not supposed to,” Nog said. It looked like nothing more than a wooden box, too large to hide in one’s pocket, but small enough to be carried easily in one hand. He reached over and plucked off its top, revealing the circuitry within.

  On the previous night, sometime between designing the device and teaching Candlewood the “black seven” card-counting approach—both of which the casinos would have taken great exception to a gambler using—Nog had gone out into the streets of Las Vegas in search of everything he would need to bend the city’s slot machines to his will. He, Candlewood, and Lani hunted through myriad pawn shops for both tools and components. They found both, although they had to cull many of the electrical and electronic parts from existing applia
nces: radios, televisions, thermostats, remote controllers, adding machines, a microwave oven, and a compact refrigerator. They also bought a small, used slot machine, which Candlewood took apart in order for Nog to study.

  The science officer leaned in to examine the device. Nog peeked in as well. By the standards of the twenty-fourth century, the operations chief hadn’t crafted a particularly elegant apparatus, but given the level of technological advancement inside the holoprogram—or the lack of it—Nog felt pleased with his efforts.

  “Will it work?” Lani asked.

  “Technically, it should,” Nog said.

  “What do you mean, ‘technically’?” Candlewood asked.

  “I mean I used materials contemporary to the period,” Nog said, “but I cobbled them together in a far more sophisticated engineering design than was available at the time. Because of that, I’m not sure it will function as expected inside the program.”

  “Did you test it?” Candlewood asked.

  “As best I could here.” Nog waved toward the primitive ammeter and voltmeter that they’d purchased from a pawn shop. “It may need to be calibrated, but—” He turned the small box around, revealing a button on one lower corner. “—I found a way to do that easily.”

  “How are we going to get it next to a slot machine?” Candlewood asked. “It might not look like a device, but if we start winning jackpots, we’re sure to draw some attention.”

  “That’s easy,” Lani said, and she disappeared into her bedroom. When she came back out, she carried a handbag with her. She set it down on the table, reseated the lid of the device, and loaded the box into the purse. It fit easily.

  “That’s it, then,” Candlewood said. “Let’s go see if we can win.”

  ii

  * * *

  Candlewood sat at the bar in the Shining Oasis casino. He, Nog, and Ulu had decided to split up for their first foray into cheating a slot machine. They didn’t want all three of them associated with a single jackpot, in the hopes that each could then win ample prizes. Nog thought he could construct a second device fairly quickly, and possibly even a third, though if not, Candlewood would do the best he could at the blackjack tables.

  The science officer watched Ulu as she sat down at a slot machine on the end of a row of the gambling machines. Off to her right, a wall of video monitors and tote boards dominated an area of the Shining Oasis casino called the RACE & SPORTS BOOK. On the screens, various uniformed players participated in a myriad of athletic competitions, and horses carrying jockeys ran around dirt tracks. Beside those displays, probabilities, payouts, and scores announced numerous gambling opportunities and outcomes.

  After they had met with Calderone’s accountant, Candle­wood had suggested they earn the money they needed to buy Vic’s freedom by wagering on sporting events. After all, Felix Knightly had coded the program to incorporate real historical data into its matrix. Candlewood reasoned that if Ulu could safely exit and reenter the holosuite—by no means a surety, because of her entry via the back door—she could look up the results of the games scheduled for that day and the next, then return to Las Vegas to tell them on which entries to bet. Morn, it turned out, had already tried such a scheme—and failed. According to Ulu, the Lurian found out by experience that, while the sporting events listed in the holoprogram reflected actual events, the code randomized the results. Apparently, Knightly wanted to prevent users of Bashir 62 from being able to amass financial winnings without actually gambling—and knowing the scores of athletic contests beforehand did not constitute taking any kind of a risk.

  Candlewood sipped at the glass of orange juice he had ordered at the bar. At the slot machine, Ulu set her handbag down, then loaded a coin into a slot. She pulled the machine’s lever, and the reels began to spin. When they all came to a stop, Candlewood saw a bar, the number 7, and a bell on the payout line. Because of his location, he could not see the fourth image past Ulu’s head, but he could tell that she had won nothing.

  With casual movements, Ulu reached into her handbag and pulled out another coin. Candlewood knew that she had also pushed the button on the back of Nog’s device, recalibrating it for another attempt. She played the slot machine a second time, with the same losing result.

  Ulu repeated her actions a third time, a fourth, and a fifth, all without success. By her ninth attempt, what sounded like a couple of coins dropped into the tray at the bottom of the machine. Whenever she ran out of coins, she retrieved another from her handbag so that she could again recalibrate Nog’s device.

  On Ulu’s nineteenth try, the three reels that Candlewood could see lined up as three 7s. The lights on the slot machine began flashing, and a bell rang loudly. Coins clattered into the payout tray. A casino attendant went over to Ulu, and with his help, she collected her winnings and took them to the cashier, where she deposited them on account.

  Candlewood headed back to the suite. By the time he got there, Nog had already arrived and had started work on a second device. When Ulu got back to the suite, the trio plotted out their strategy. Ulu would go from casino to casino with the device in her handbag, winning one or two jackpots at each. When Nog completed the second device, he would place it in one of the paper bags they’d received to carry purchases out of one of the pawn shops. He too would make his way throughout Las Vegas to collect jackpot winnings, though he would visit different casinos from Ulu. In the meantime, Candlewood would try his hand at blackjack and counting cards.

  Ulu headed out first. As Candlewood followed her, he stopped at the door of the suite and looked back at Nog. “I can’t believe I’m going out to gamble in an effort to accumulate wealth,” he said. “I know this must be commonplace in Ferengi society, but it feels strange to me.”

  “We’re not trying to make profit,” Nog said soberly. “We’re trying to save Vic’s life.”

  iii

  * * *

  Kira stood by herself in the aft section of the vessel, between a transporter platform and a bank of replicators. A short time earlier, she had risen from her seat in the passenger compartment, where she’d sat with two dozen other vedeks. She had begun to feel claustrophobic—a result, she thought, of the attention paid to her. Of all the vedeks traveling aboard the transport, only Solis Tendren had done more than offer her a pleasant greeting, pulling her aside to say that he appreciated her address the day before and that he believed the kai wise in sending Kira to Endalla as one of the observers. But even though the other vedeks aboard the ship said nothing of substance to her, she could feel their collective awareness of her presence among them. She tried to calm herself, but the atmosphere felt oppressive. She eventually decided that she needed to move, to find some space for herself, if even for just a few minutes, so she slipped out of her seat and walked to the rear of the vessel.

  Alone by the replicators, Kira felt the slight shift of the inertial dampers as the ship altered its heading. She peered through a lateral port and saw the receding blue-and-white form of Bajor. As best Kira could tell from reports on the comnet that day, the fear and mistrust that had spread across the planet in the wake of the falsework discovery had eased in the previous twenty-six hours. No issues had been definitively resolved, but there appeared to be movement in both factions toward a less divisive, more open dialogue. Only a few minor incidences of violence had been reported since Kira’s address, with no casualties of any kind. The vedek did not credit herself for bringing a calming influence to the populace, but venerated the Prophets for returning her to Bajor at a time when doing so would have an impact.

  “It’s still strange to see the world like this, from out in space.” Kira flinched at the sound of Altek’s voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “It’s all right,” Kira said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude if you want some time to yourself,” Altek said. “When you didn’t come back to yo
ur seat . . . well, I just wanted to check on you.”

  “Thank you,” Kira said. “I’m fine. I was just lost in my own thoughts.”

  “I know what that’s like.”

  “Of course,” Kira said, thinking of just how far from the life he knew Altek had come, by no design of his own. “This entire experience must be difficult for you.”

  Altek nodded. “For a long while after I arrived on Deep Space Nine, it was almost impossible for me to believe that what I was experiencing wasn’t some sort of dream or Orb experience—I had one of those before leaving my time. But then I spent my energies acclimating myself to this new reality, and then working to actually travel back to Bajor—to my homeworld and to my people. Except that’s only nominally accurate. Every settlement I ever knew is gone from this future face of Bajor, as are all the people I ever knew—save, in some sense, Keev Anora.” Kira tried to conceal the discomfort she felt at the mention of her alternate identity. If Altek noticed her unease, he gave no sign. “On a very basic level, all I want to do is go home, but even though that’s Bajor out there—” He pointed to the port, through which the receding form of the planet still showed. “—my home is lost to me forever.” He smiled and shrugged. “I guess that’s why, after struggling to be allowed to return there, I don’t mind that I only stayed for three days.”

  “Surely you’ll go back to Bajor after our time on Endalla,” Kira said.

  “Yes, I will, and I’ll try to do the best I can with my life,” Altek said. “But I think I’m always going to feel like an outsider.”

  “I hope that’s not the case,” Kira said. “It is a fool’s errand to presume to know the will of the Prophets, but since They sent you here, I have faith that you belong. Maybe one day you’ll feel that too.”