by Judith
vessel, complete with the usual bold yellow sign warning about variable gravity
fields, and the stacks of modular shipping crates marked with the Starfleet
delta and standard identification labels. Other than the fact that the lighting
was about half intensity, and the air unusually cool, Bashir could almost
believe he was on a standard Starfleet cargo ship in his own time. Only the
Starfleet emblem on the crates confirmed that he and the others from the Defiant
were still in the future.
Interestingly enough, that emblem, though understandably different from the one
used in his time, was also different from the emblem Captain Riker had worn on
his uniform, and that had been emblazoned on the Klingon cruiser. That
identifying mark, Bashir recalled, had placed a gold Starfleet arrowhead against
an upside-down triangle of blue. But here on this ship, the arrowhead was set
within a vertically elongated oval, its width matching the oval's. The arrowhead
itself was colored the red of human blood, the lower half of the oval teal and
the upper half gold—as if the colors of the k'Roth ch'Kor, the ancient Klingon
trident that was
the symbol of the Empire, had been merged with the more recent symbol of
Starfleet.
But rather than give himself a headache trying to fathom the political
permutations that might have led to the two different versions of the Starfleet
emblem in this future, Bashir set that particular problem aside. Instead, he
directed his attention to the conversations going on around him—five now—and his
mind was such that he could effortlessly keep up with each at the same time. In
all except one of those conversations, Bashir heard relief expressed, primarily
because of the familiar surroundings.
The single conversation that was more guarded was that between Jadzia and Worf.
Klingon pessimism and the Trill's seven lifetimes of experience were obviously
enabling the two officers to come to the same conclusion Bashir's enhanced
intellect had reached: They were in more danger now than when the Defiant had
come under attack.
Bashir wasted little time contemplating what might happen in the next few
minutes. His primary responsibility was to his crewmates, and to the few
civilians who had been evacuated from Deep Space 9 to the Defiant and then
beamed here.
He rapidly assessed the fourteen others for obvious signs of injury or distress.
Nine of them were either Defiant or DS9 crew members, six in Starfleet
uniforms, three in the uniforms of the Bajoran militia. The other five,
including—Bashir was surprised to see—the unorthodox archaeologist Vash, were
civilians; three of these human, the other two Bajorans.
He also noted, without undue concern, that the medical patch on the side of
Jadzia's forehead was stained
with blood and needed to be replaced. Without a protoplaser he had been unable
to close the small wound; the dense capillary network beneath a Trill's spots
made them prone to copious and unsightly—though not life-threatening—bleeding as
a result of any minor cut or scrape in the general area.
Close by Jadzia's side, Worf was uninjured and unbowed. His uniform was soiled
by smoke, and one side of his broad face was streaked with soot. His scowl was
evidence not of any wound to his body, but rather to his sense of pride and
honor—outrage being his people's traditional response to captivity.
Bashir also observed that Jake Sisko, who was currently engaged in listening
carefully to Worf and Jadzia's conversation without taking part, also seemed
unharmed. The tall, lanky young man had been helping out in the Defiant's
sickbay when the group transport to this ship had taken place. It was a
blessing, Bashir thought, that at least none of the Defiant's surviving crew or
passengers had required critical medical attention before their doctor had been
kidnapped.
Then again, the last he himself could recall from his own final moments on the
Defiant's bridge was that there were still some antimatter contact mines
attached to her hull, so there was no way of knowing if the ship or any of the
crew and passengers not transported here still survived.
Then a hoarse female voice interrupted his thoughts. 'This isn't good, is it?"
It was Vash, and automatically Bashir reviewed her condition. The last place he
had seen her had been in Quark's bar, when the three Red Orbs of Jalbador had
moved themselves into alignment and somehow trig-
gered the opening of a second wormhole in Bajoran space.
Vash, an admittedly alluring adventurer and archaeologist of questionable
ethics, was still in the same outfit she had worn in the bar—no more than an
hour ago in relative time—as if she were prepared to trek across the Bajoran
deserts in search of lost cities. She no longer toted her well-worn oversized
shoulder bag, though. Bashir guessed it must be either back on the Defiant or
left behind in the mad rush from Quark's and the subsequent mass beam-out to the
evacuation flotilla.
Vash waved an imperious hand in front of his face. "You keep staring at me like
that, I'm going to think one of us has a problem. And it's not me."
"Sorry," Bashir said, flushing. "I didn't see you on the Defiant. There were
some injuries from the evacuation, and ..." He shrugged. It was pointless to
say anything more. It was quite likely Vash was used to people staring at her,
for all the obvious reasons.
"I was hustled into the Defiant's mess hall right after I was beamed aboard."
Vash frowned. "What the hell happened?"
Bashir told her as succinctly as he could. The old, apocryphal legends of the
Red Orbs of Jalbador had turned out to be correct, at least in part. A second
Temple—or wormhole—had opened, though since they were now twenty-five years or
so into the future the part of the legend about the opening of the second Temple
causing the end of the universe was clearly and thankfully not correct. Bashir
was about to describe the attacking ships and what Captain Thomas Riker had
said about the War of the Prophets, but Vash interrupted.
"Twenty-five years? Into the future?"
Bashir nodded. "It happens."
"Not to me."
"Think of it as archaeology in reverse."
Vash's eyes flashed. "This isn't fanny, Doc. The longer we stay here the more
likely it is we'll learn about the future, and the less likely we are to have
someone let us go back." She looked over at the crates. "Especially if some
bureaucrat at Starfleet has anything to say about it."
"That's true," Bashir agreed. He glanced at the main personnel doors leading
into the interior of whatever vessel they were aboard—one of the two surviving
attack ships, he had concluded. "But on the plus side, no one from this ship
has attempted to communicate with us. That could suggest they're also following
Starfleet regulations, and want to keep us isolated for our return."
"You don't really believe that."
"And why not?"
"If they wanted to keep us isolated, why beam us off the Defiant?"
"We were under attack. The Defiant might have bee
n destroyed."
"Attacked by who?" Vash asked, and Bashir told her the other half of the story,
about Thomas Riker in the Opaka and the three attacking Starfleet vessels.
"That makes no sense," Vash said when Bashir had finished.
'Things change. Twenty-five years is a long time."
"How things have changed has nothing to do with our current situation," Vash
told him. "If this is a Starfleet vessel, how long do you think it would take
some technician to run a search of the service record of the Defiant?"
"Your point?"
"C'mon, Doc. Did that strange transporter scramble your synapses? If the
historical record shows the Defiant disappeared with all hands when DS9 was
destroyed, then we're not going back. It's that simple."
Bashir bit his lip. Vash had reached the same conclusion he had. There were a
few unresolved issues, however. "This ship we're on was probably one of the
ones involved in the attack. If it's been damaged, the Defiant's service record
may not be available. The delay in any attempted communication could be a result
of having to wait to hear back from Starfleet Command."
Vash looked skeptical. "I never took you for much of a dreamer."
Before Bashir could reply, Jadzia, Worf, and Jake had joined them.
"Julian," Jadzia said teasingly, "a dreamer? Like no other, complete with stars
in his eyes."
Bashir did not respond to Jadzia's banter. She had been trying to act as if
nothing had changed between them since she had married Worf. But it had. Though
until these last few weeks, when Jadzia and Worf had sought his counsel on the
likelihood of a Klingon and a Trill procreating, Bashir had almost convinced
himself that Worf was only a temporary inconvenience, not an insurmountable
barrier. In time, he had reasoned, Jadzia would tire of her plainspoken Klingon
mate and begin to seek more sophisticated company. But knowing her as he did,
even he could not fantasize a time when Jadzia would tire of her child-to-be, or
deny that child a chance to know its father.
So there it was. His heart was broken, and his success at hiding his misery
from Jadzia was one of the few advantages of having an enhanced intellect: Only
his ability to master advanced Vulcan meditation techniques was sparing him
public and personal humiliation.
"Vash is concerned that the longer we wait here," Bashir explained, "the less
likely it is we'll be allowed to go back to our own time."
"Allowed?" Jake asked in alarm.
Jadzia put her hand on the young man's shoulder. 'To go back, Jake, we're going
to need access to advanced technology."
Jake looked confused. "What about temporal slingshot?"
Jadzia shook her head. "We didn't get here by slingshot, so we don't have a
Feynman curve to follow back to our starting point. Any attempt we make to move
into the past will result in a complete temporal decoupling."
Jake stared at her, not a gram of understanding in nun.
Worf took over. "It would be like entering a planet's atmosphere at too shallow
an angle. Our craft would skip out, away from the planet, never to return."
"Though in our case," Jadzia continued, "we would skip out of our normal
space-time and ... well, then it becomes a question of philosophy, not physics.
But if you think about it, if anyone with a warp drive could go back in time
wherever and whenever she wanted, half the stars in the galaxy wouldn't exist. I
mean, a century ago Klingons would have gone back in time a million years and
dropped asteroids on Earth and Vulcan to eliminate the Empire's competitors
before they had ever evolved."
Jake glanced at Worf. "Really?"
Worf shifted uncomfortably. "It was a different time. But yes, I have heard
rumors of the Empire dispatching
temporal assault teams to destroy ... enemy worlds before the enemy could
arise."
"What happened to them?" Jake asked.
"We do not know."
But as Bashir anticipated, Jadzia found so simple an answer unacceptable. "As
far as we can tell," she said, "the physics of it is pretty straightforward. Any
given time traveler moving from one time to another at a rate greater than the
local entropic norm, or on a reverse en-tropic vector, has to move outside
normal space-time along a pathway called a Feynman curve. Now, if the past the
traveler goes to is not disrupted, the Feynman curve retains its integrity and,
provided the traveler can find it again, the way is clear to return to the
starting point. However, if the timeline is significantly disrupted, the
Feynman curve collapses, because its end point—that is, the traveler's starting
point—no longer exists. It's like cutting the end of a rope bridge."
Bashir was curious to see how Jake's imaginative mind would tackle Jadzia's
elegantly defined problems of temporal mechanics. Though strict causality did
not exist at the most fundamental levels of the universe, it was the defining
characteristic of macroscopic existence. Indeed, that was one of the chief
reasons why the warp drive and time travel took so long to be discovered by
emerging cultures. Even though both concepts were rather simple, requiring
little more than a basic atomic-age engineering capability to demonstrate, the
ideas of faster-than-light travel and time-like curves independent of space
could not easily be grasped by minds narrowly conditioned by primitive
Einsteinian physics—any more than Newton could have conceived of relativistic
time dilation.
Jake's young face wrinkled in concentration. "Hold it... it sounds as if you're
saying that the Klingons could have traveled back in time and destroyed the
Earth."
"There's no reason why they couldn't," Jadzia agreed. "In fact, several of the
temporal assault missions Worf mentioned could have succeeded. It's just that if
they did destroy the Earth in the past, the present they came from—in which the
Earth had not been destroyed—no longer existed, so they could never return to
it."
"But..." Jake said uncertainly, "... the Earth does exist."
"In this timeline," Jadzia agreed. She smiled indulgently at Jake. "What you're
struggling with is what they used to call on Earth the grandfather paradox. It
was a long time ago, before anyone thought time travel possible. Yet early
theorists imagined a situation in which a time traveler could go back in time
and kill his grandfather before his father was conceived. No father meant no
son. No son meant no time traveler. But no time traveler meant that the
grandfather hadn't been killed, so the father was born, the son became the time
traveler, and..." Jadzia smiled as Jake finished the paradox.
"... and the grandfather was killed." Jake's expression was thoughtful. "But...
you're saying that can happen?"
"There's nothing to prevent it The difference between what the Einsteinian-era
physicists thought and what we know today, from actual experimental
demonstrations, is that no paradox results."
"How's that possible?"
"Two solutions are suggested, but neither is testable—so both have equal
validity. One solution is that if you, s
ay, went back in time and killed your
grandfather, a temporal feedback loop would be established that would collapse
into a hyperdimensional black hole, cutting the loop off from any interaction
with the rest of the universe. The end result would be as if the events leading
to the feedback loop never happened. The second solution states that the
instant you killed your grandfather, you'd create a branching timeline. That
is, two universes would now exist—one in which your grandfather lived, and one
in which he died."
"But if he died, then how could I go back and kill him?"
"You can't, Jake. Not from the new timeline. But since you came from the old
one, there's no paradox. However, because the Feynman curve you followed no
longer exists, you are trapped in the new timeline you created, with no way to
get back. In effect, you're a large virtual particle that has tunneled out of
the quantum foam."
Jadzia put her hand on Worf's shoulder, a gesture of familiarity that caused an
unexpected tightness in Bashir's throat. "A few years ago," she said, "when Worf
was on the Enterprise, he encountered a series of parallel universes that were
extremely similar to our own. Some researchers suggest that those parallel
dimensions have actually been created by the manipulation of past events by
time travelers."
Vash put her hands on her hips and sighed noisily. "Do the rest of us have to
know this for the test? Or does any of this hypothetical moonshine have anything
to do with our situation, right here and now?"
Bashir sensed Jadzia's dislike of Vash in the Trill's quick reply, though her
words were polite. "It has everything to do with our situation, Vash. From our
perspective, we've traveled into our future. But from the perspective of the
people who live here, we're intruders from the past who—if we return—could
prevent this future from ever existing."
"It wouldn't just be a split-off, parallel dimension?" Jake asked.
"It might be," Jadzia allowed. "But then again, this present might just wink out
of existence, along with everyone in it. Remember what happened on Gaia, to the
people who were our descendants? If this was your present, would you be willing
to risk nonexistence for the sake of a handful of refugees from the past?"
As Jake thought that over, Worf added, "Several years ago, the Enterprise