Strange New Worlds IX

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “Linear existence is no longer your path.” The Quark Prophet has turned into a Kira Prophet. Sisko has never seen the Prophets’ true form. They dress up to pass their wisdom on and become Kira, his father, Odo, Ezri, sometimes even dear Jadzia. They pretend. They take on. They do it because he is providing the template for their interaction.

  He knows this. He is one of them, even if he is still apart.

  “The Sisko holds himself away from us.” Kira sounds more listless than accusing. The one thing the Prophets cannot seem to do is get mad, get aroused in any way. They are so damned passive that at times he wants to scream at them.

  He keeps waiting for their calm to infect him, keeps waiting for the day when he wakes up from a sleep he no longer needs but can’t seem to give up and finds that he doesn’t miss his old life and friends. That he doesn’t feel longing and anger and a nagging annoyance that he is stuck here and still hasn’t figured the place out.

  Or how to leave it.

  He’s not trapped…exactly. Underneath the other emotions is the suspicion that he is where he is supposed to be. His mother’s influence, no doubt. Sarah’s legacy to him—a half-breed without knowing it until his life was almost over. Part Cajun cook, part impenetrable alien.

  “The Sisko should let go of what was.” Kira’s face changes into that of his mother.

  “How can it be what was, if there is no past for you?” Sisko loves to catch them up in the endless illogic of living all times at once.

  “We have no past, but you still cling to yours.” There is disappointment in Sarah’s voice. She shows up whenever he pushes too hard. He does not know if the Sarah standing before him is just one alien or all of them—or if that has any meaning. He has not yet reached a full understanding of their nature. He has not yet reached even a partial understanding of their nature. As far as their nature goes, he knows squat.

  He thought he understood them. He remembers the certainty he felt when he brought Kasidy to him and told her of his path. He thought he was in control then, but now he suspects that the Prophets were really at the helm because he has tried to bring Kasidy back, to find Jake and talk to him. He has never succeeded.

  He was a fool.

  And yet…he is not sure he would do it any differently. It is hard. He wants to leave, but he thinks he should stay.

  “The Sisko is troubled.” Long ago, his mother used to call him other names. She no longer does. She refers to him as the others do.

  He thinks she does it to distance him. To help him fit in, by giving him less of herself to hold on to. He believes she thinks he will open himself to the rest of the Prophets—to the experience that is the whole—if she takes away the part that he still wants to believe is his mother.

  “I am not upset.” It is not a lie. He is not upset. He changed the word so that his denial would be true. To be upset would require energy he does not wish to squander. But Sarah is right. He is troubled. Troubled takes far less energy than upset.

  Sarah looks out of place in his world, where the backdrop is the Promenade. He sits now in Quark’s bar, and she stands off to the side. The place looks like Quark’s bar, but it lacks the sounds and smells of Quark’s. There are no crowds yelling as the dabo girls take their latinum. There is no fiery Bajoran hasperat ordered from the replicator, or pungent Ferengi tube grubs. His version of Quark’s bar is like a painting done all around and below and above him. Sight with no sound and little fury, signifying everything to him. It may not be real, but it’s his.

  He used to imagine his briefing room. Then ops. But they were even less real somehow. Perhaps because there were never any ships going past his viewports. Because the people around him in ops made no noise and had no substance, and if he imagined the place empty, it felt even more unreal.

  He thinks it’s good to try to create these things. Thinks it’s good to exercise his will and imagination, although the Prophets never comment when he has changed the scenery. If this is a triumph, it must be a minuscule one in their eyes. He’s considering trying to create Bajor next. The pretty spot with the fragrant grass that won’t have any odor here, where he was going to build his house—the house he will never get to live in. He planned to hang wind chimes on the balcony; he’ll never hear them here.

  Sarah sighs. She always has a little more immediacy in her actions, a little more emotion in her voice, than the other Prophets. Purely a matter of degree though—she is nobody’s firecracker. Even at her most energized, she is like the two old sisters who lived around the corner from his father’s restaurant. They sat up in their rooms, windows and the door to the balcony thrown open, as if there was no other way to cool their place but the old-fashioned one. They occasionally called down to the street for one of their grand-kids to bring them some sweet tea. When evening came, they moved their chairs a few feet out to the balcony, fanning themselves and talking quietly as if they’d been holding their words back to avoid overdoing it during the heat of the day.

  It’s hard to imagine Sarah living in New Orleans, bearing his father a child. Sisko is that child, yet she is a mystery to him. He came from her; even if most of his life he thought his stepmother was his real mother. All Sarah did was give birth to him and then abandon him to his fate, to the battle he was fated to wage in her name, in all the Prophets’ names.

  Only most of the Prophets don’t have names. She probably doesn’t have one either, except that he can only think of her as Sarah and she has never told him not to. And even if she were to tell him to stop calling her that, he wouldn’t stop thinking of her that way.

  Another Prophet shows up, and this time it’s Curzon who is the avatar. Sisko sees something in Sarah’s face he’s never seen before from a Prophet—surprise. He’s not sure why she is surprised. Curzon has shown up before. Not often, but enough times that seeing him isn’t any kind of shock.

  This Curzon looks different though. He’s younger than expected; Sisko generally remembers him older, wiser. Grayer. The Curzon Prophet looks around and begins to smile.

  Sisko is not sure he’s ever seen a Prophet smile that way. “Old man?”

  “Benjamin, Benjamin.” The force of Sisko’s memory of Curzon seems to overwhelm even a wormhole alien. It has been a long time—although Sisko has no idea how long he’s spent in this nonlinear cuckoo clock—since he was called anything other than “the Sisko.”

  Sarah disappears with another strange look at the Curzon Prophet, who is walking around the promenade construct. Sisko can feel energy leaking off him, and it is surprisingly comforting to realize that the energy is actually emotion—trust the old dog to instill fun even in a place where fun has no meaning.

  Another alien shows up, materializing with a strange shimmer that seems to leave a taste in Sisko’s mouth—like crisp lemonade on a hot day, or the snap of a dill pickle, the kind you get to pick out from a barrel. Sisko misses food. He wants some gumbo and jambalaya, blackened catfish and crawfish etouffee, or maybe just a bowl of cool sweet cherries taken from the chiller. He wants to pry open oysters and suck them down with an ice-cold beer. Or sit in the bleachers of a stadium with Jake and gobble up hot dogs with ketchup and mustard and sweet relish. He likes the buns toasted and the franks to have the blackened lines from the grill on them.

  There is no food in the Celestial Temple. Sisko can’t bear the idea of trying to manifest a stadium, a diamond and players and the silent crowd around him. It would be too real, yet it wouldn’t be real enough.

  Besides, he can’t bear to watch a game without Jake-O sitting next to him, cheering the players on—sometimes cheering for the opposing team just to get Sisko’s goat. He misses Jake. How old is his son now? Is he even born yet? Or is he long dead? Has Sisko, living in no time, passed Jake and all of his grandchildren by?

  Since he arrived, the Prophets have never appeared to him as Kasidy or Jake. He suddenly wonders why.

  “The Sisko makes himself unhappy.” The other alien has chosen to appear as Kai Winn. She shows up
infrequently. Sisko wonders what the Prophets really think of her, the leader of their religion who aligned herself with the Pah-wraiths, then recanted at the last minute.

  She tried. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Especially when she may have turned the tide so that Sisko could stop Dukat. It wasn’t much, Winn’s effort. Very little, very late. But it was enough.

  The Winn Prophet frowns at him. It is a perfect rendition of the real Winn’s favorite expression. “The Sisko is not content.”

  “The Sisko is bored out of his skull.” It seems heresy to say that. But it’s true. He wants to go back to Kasidy. But he can’t because she’s alive, and, while he used to believe he was going to see her again, the Prophets don’t speak of his return anymore. He suspects that he died in the fire caves battling the enemy. He is not sure, because there was a moment in the fight with Dukat when Sisko thought he felt something fill him. Energy and support and a rush of something so powerful he worried that he might explode. Then he was here. This place that is his reward. A reward for which he had high hopes but that has turned out to be nothing but an endless parade of old friends and enemies, and a bad case of the bed-spins.

  “The Sisko should rest.”

  Again there is the strange pop-tingle in the back of his mouth—does he even have a mouth? He imagines himself as still human and so he creates hands and feet. He can move his tongue around his mouth, sliding it over teeth and pushing with it at the insides of his cheek. But does he live? If he could fathom it, could he become pure energy?

  And what did the Prophet mean he should rest? He’s been resting. For years. Or minutes. He’s not sure which.

  The Winn Prophet walks over to the Curzon Prophet. She smiles—the ingratiating and utterly false smile of the worst kai to ever hold office. Sisko almost laughs as Curzon gives her a grin and a quick pinch on the rear when she turns to walk back to Sisko. The Winn Prophet either does not feel it, or knows better than to acknowledge that she does.

  Is Sisko making the Curzon Prophet act this way? Is it a sign of growing dementia or a sign that he is finally learning to control his surroundings? Sisko worries it is the former, because all too often he feels as if he’s slowly losing his mind. Maybe he isn’t bored. Maybe he’s just insane. He’s not sure how he will know if he’s gone mad. And it’s just possible that he has to be a little bit crazy to survive in the Celestial Temple.

  He tries to forget Curzon and Kai Winn and to look out past the limits of the Temple. He wants to see Kasidy, to see if the baby has been born yet. To see Jake and Ezri and Kira and all the other living friends he left behind. But he has trouble moving his perception beyond the Temple, and by the time he has strengthened an image enough to see, he has lost the time line again.

  He is not sure if he is looking at a Bajor of the past, before the Cardassian occupation, or of the future. The civilization is peaceful, looks warp capable. The planet is green and beautiful, just like he remembers. “I was going to retire there,” he says.

  “Real pretty place. Tough break for you, Benjamin.” Curzon stands next to him, and Sisko is surprised that he is still in that form. The Prophets usually change quickly, as if they have a short attention span or are simply following the meanderings of Sisko’s mind. He turns to look at his friend, who suddenly appears to shimmer in a different way than the Prophets do.

  The prophets, even in human, Trill, or Bajoran form, seem to glow along the edges. They always appear superimposed upon whatever backdrop he provides. But Curzon shimmers from within. As if he has an energy source inside him. As if he is the realest thing to ever show up in the Temple.

  Sisko wonders if he shimmers the same way. Or does he glow from the perimeter, standing apart from the world the same way the Prophets do?

  “You’re thinking too hard. You always do that.” Curzon grins again, and it is a wicked expression. One that Sisko is relatively sure the Prophets could not make if the fate of the entire quadrant rested on it.

  “Old man, is that really you?”

  “In the not-so-corporeal flesh. I’ve been trying to find you for a while, took me some time to get in.” Curzon looks around the limited extent of the Celestial Temple—as temples go, it’s lacking. “So, what do you do for fun around here?”

  Sisko turns to the Winn Prophet. She is staring at Curzon, as if she cannot decide what to do.

  “This is the Curzon,” Sisko says by way of introductions. He’s not sure how to introduce his hostess.

  There is no disdain in the Winn Prophet’s expression. But it’s not welcoming either. “This being is not a part of our existence.”

  “My loss, I’m sure.” Curzon winks at him, and Sisko laughs out loud.

  The sound pushes at the edges of Sisko’s Promenade construct. His whole world seems to shudder, and Sarah appears, Winn’s features morphing into his mother’s more pleasing ones. She strides more forcefully than Winn did. Moves with growing power.

  Sisko suddenly knows all the aliens are in this avatar.

  “What is your purpose?” they ask his friend.

  Curzon shrugs. “Just visiting. I hope that’s not against your policy?”

  “You do not have corporeal integrity.”

  “I’m afraid that happens when you die.” He looks over at Sisko. “Have you seen Jadzia? I mean the real Jadzia, not one you imagine here. I’ve been waiting, but she doesn’t come.”

  Sisko grins. “I think she’s in Sto-Vo-Kor.”

  If he didn’t believe his old friend was really there, the put-out look on Curzon’s face would convince him—no wormhole alien can manage that much annoyance. Sisko grabs Curzon, pulling him into a hug. As he wraps his arms around his friend, he is suddenly with Curzon, back on Risa, experiencing the Trill’s last moments.

  As deaths go, expiring in the arms of Arandis wasn’t bad.

  But then neither was going out in the arms of the Prophets, knowing that the Pah-wraiths would not escape the fire caves. It was worth his life.

  “She was something, huh?” Curzon says, not seeming surprised that Sisko experienced the memory, even if such empathy wasn’t an ability Sisko had ever displayed when they knew each other.

  Sisko smiles. “She was indeed. Death by jamaharon is the way to go.”

  “Except that I thought I had at least ten more years,” Curzon says, his smile fading into a scowl. “I might have, if I’d stayed away from Risa.” He makes a face that clearly says he can’t imagine avoiding that lovely place—or the beautiful woman who did him in.

  “At least you got to die an old man. I wasn’t that lucky.”

  “The Sisko is mistaken,” Sarah says, and her voice is unexpected. Sisko almost forgot she was there.

  “He often is.” Curzon winks at her, getting nothing back.

  “How am I mistaken?” Sisko wants to touch his mother, wants to feel her soft skin under his hand, wants to feel her love—did she ever love him? Does she consider him her son or only a tool she created to fight the Pah-wraiths? She used to manifest warmth, but was it only to get him to do what she wanted?

  “You are the Emissary.” A Kira Prophet appears, and there is a tug as if power is being pulled into her from the very fabric of the Temple.

  Sisko again tastes the combination of sharp and sour. He realizes that the rest of the Prophets have moved to the Kira construct, leaving the Sarah form to the Prophet he considers his mother.

  “You are the Sisko,” Sarah says, as if that explains everything.

  “But are you a Sisko?”

  Curzon is watching their exchange with interest but very little comprehension. He is probably used to that. Diplomacy is often a matter of digging through the surface behavior until you comprehend the nuances, and Sisko knows Curzon is the consummate diplomat. Death probably hasn’t changed that.

  “I am what I am.” Sarah frowns, and Sisko suspects it is because she used the first person. That is unusual—Curzon’s bad influence maybe?

  Curzon seems to be fading. He clo
ses his eyes, as if he is concentrating on staying with Sisko, but he continues to lose substance. “Looks like I’m headed home, old friend.”

  “I want to go with you.” Sisko turns to Sarah. “I want to go with the Curzon.”

  “The Sisko’s place is here.”

  Sisko is filled with a crushing disappointment. Then he feels something else. Something he never expected. The same distress emanating from Sarah. Does his desire to leave cause her pain?

  “He is a prisoner then?” Curzon asks, his voice little more than a whisper.

  “The Sisko is not a prisoner.” The Kira Prophet steps forward as Curzon disappears.

  “I cannot leave. I cannot go where I want. How is that not being a prisoner?” Sisko has never let out the anger and disappointment he feels about being cheated of his life with Kasidy and Jake and his unknown son or daughter. He has never railed against the loneliness or the dreadful feeling of having nothing to do. He feels as if he is a shuttle pilot in a perpetual holding pattern, going round and round with no perceivable end to the torment.

  Only it’s not torment. It’s just…not what he expected.

  “I expected the afterlife to be more like life.” He sounds like a petulant child. And he feels like one. A child trying his best to understand the grown-up world around him and the incomprehensible adults that fill it.

  “The Sisko has been resting. Life has tired the Sisko. The Sisko must rest more.” The Kira Prophet has a new note in her voice. Is it kindness?

  “I’m tired of resting.” He looks over at Sarah. “I don’t like being dead.”

  Sarah smiles at him, and the look is full of the love he has wondered if she holds for him. “The Sisko is not dead. Resting is not dying. And this is not the afterlife.”

  He realizes the Promenade has disappeared, and the landscape that appears before him cannot possibly be from his memory or his imagination. He doesn’t even have words for the colors and shapes he sees, has never experienced the smells and sounds that assault him until he closes his eyes, and puts his hand over his ears, and breathes through his mouth in defense against the onslaught.