by Judith
Jake tapped his hands on the sides of his food tray. "So humans and Klingons are
missing?"
Bashir shrugged and turned off his padd. "There's a lot they aren't telling us
about what's going on."
Intriguing to Bashir, Jake immediately dropped his eyes to his collection of
reconstituted rations and busily began peeling off their clear tops. When he had
first visited the mess hall, Bashir had been interested to notice that what he
thought were replicator slots lining one wall were actually small transporter
bays with a direct connection to a food-processing facility a few kilo-
meters away. Replicator circuitry and power converters were considered a
critical resource and used for only the most important manufacturing needs.
"So, how's Nog?" Bashir asked, trying to keep his tone innocuous, but wondering
why Jake had chosen not to react to his statement. He took a sip of the tea he
had requisitioned. It was too cold, too sweet, and tasted nothing at all like
tea.
"Different," Jake said, frowning at the contents of the containers he had
uncovered. Again, it was not clear to Bashir if the frown was directed at the
food or at his question.
'To be expected, don't you think?"
Jake gingerly dabbed a finger into the red sauce that covered a brownish square
of... something, then tentatively licked his finger. He grimaced. "I actually
miss the combat rations on the Augustus."
Bashir smiled in commiseration. Vulcan combat rations were logical and not much
else. They consisted of tasteless extruded slabs which were mostly vegetable
pulp compressed to the consistency of soft wax. Accompanied by packets of
distilled water and three uncomfortably large supplement pills to compensate
for the differences between Vulcan and human nutrient requirements, 500 grams
of pulp were sufficient to maintain a normal adult body for thirty hours.
Vulcans were proud of the fact that their rations only had to be ingested once
a day, and that the process could be completed in less than two minutes. How
much more efficient could eating become? All of the temporal refugees had lost
body mass during their voyage on the Augustus.
It was also possible, though, that Jake's joke might
have another purpose—to change the subject. Bashir didn't intend to let such a
ploy go unchallenged.
"Were you having an argument with Nog?" he asked. "Before we all had dinner at
the Starbase?"
He saw the answer in Jake's guilty expression. "Jake, it's bad enough that
Starfleet is keeping secrets from us. We can't keep them from each other, too."
Bashir dropped his own voice to a near whisper. "What did he tell you?"
Jake's shoulders sagged. "It's more what he didn't tell me... tell us."
"About what?"
Jake dropped his napkin over his untouched food. "He was lying to us."
Bashir felt the unwelcome touch of alarm. He had considered that possibility
himself. "About the Phoenix?"
"No... I don't think about all that. Like, the Phoenix and going back
twenty-five thousand years and the deep-time charges in B'hala... I really think
that's what Starfleet's planning. Or was planning. But... when he told us he had
no doubt that the mission would succeed ... that was a lie."
Bashir put down his pad. "Considering the rather audacious nature of the
mission, I'm not really surprised. It's perfectly understandable that Nog might
harbor some doubts about the possibilities for success."
But Jake shook his head emphatically. "I'm not talking about doubts. Or being
nervous. I mean ... look, it's as if Nog already knows the mission can't
succeed."
"Did he say that to you? Is that what you were arguing about?"
Jake looked right and left,, obviously concerned about anyone overhearing their
discussion. "That was part of it. But he didn't have to tell me. Not flat out."
"I don't understand."
Jake shifted uncomfortably. "He's been my best friend for... well, we were best
friends for a long time. And I can tell when he's lying. He does this thing with
his eyes and... his mouth sort of freezes in position."
Jake was obviously developing some skill in observation. "They call it a
'tell.' Or they used to," Bashir corrected himself, "a few centuries ago. In
gambling and confidence games, some people develop a nervous habit which gives
away the fact that they're bluffing. You're very observant."
Jake shrugged. "Not really. Uh, Nog sort of told me himself. His father and
uncle kept giving him a hard time about it. They, uh, they claimed he had picked
it up from me... a filthy human habit that would hold him back in business."
Jake smiled weakly. "He tried to run away from the station a couple of times."
"I didn't know," Bashir said truthfully.
"I... talked him out of it. But anyway, he's still doing it. And he was
definitely lying to us."
Bashir sat back in the flimsy mess-hall chair and mentally called up a Vulcan
behavioral algorithm to try to calculate the odds that Jake was correct in his
conclusion of Nog's truthfulness. Once the Vulcans had realized the failure of
their early predictions that any species intelligent enough to develop warp
drive would of course have embraced logic and peaceful exploration as the
guiding principles of their culture, they had developed complex systems for
modeling and predicting alien behavior as a form of self-survival. It was a
difficult set of equations to master, but one could always count on a Vulcan to
figure the odds for just about any eventuality.
Bashir completed his calculations. In the limited way
he had trained himself in the Vulcan technique, he was forced to conclude that
given the relationship between Jake and Nog, Jake was more likely than not
correct in his assessment of his friend. Since there was nothing to be gained
from questioning Jake's conclusion, the only logical course was now to determine
the underlying reasons for Nog's behavior.
Bashir began the requisite series of questions. "Did you tell him that you knew
he was lying?"
Jake nodded. "That's when he got mad at me."
"But did he deny lying?"
"How could he?"
"Did he say why?"
Jake appeared to be more profoundly unhappy than Bashir ever recalled seeing him
before.
"All he told me was that I should keep my... my ridiculous hew-mon opinions to
myself. And then, well, he sort of let me know that it was really important that
I not tell anyone what I thought."
"With what you know of him, Jake, is there any reason you can think of why Nog
would lie to us about the success of the mission?"
Now Jake looked positively haunted. "I... I think so."
Bashir leaned forward to hear Jake's theory about how Captain Nog was really
going to save the lives of the temporal refugees—and the universe.
And what he heard was utterly fascinating, and at the same time utterly
horrifying.
CHAPTER 14
"You know how Stardates work," Commander Arla Rees said.
"Of course." Sisko nodded, distracted, wondering about what was beyond the
windowless hull of t
he small travelpod they were riding in. It reminded him of a
two-person escape module, though he could see no indication that it carried
emergency supplies or even flight controls. According to Weyoun, transporters
were not permitted to operate anywhere within the Bajoran system—though he had
provided no explanation why— and all travel here was carried out by pod,
runabout, or shuttle. Thus, the survivors from the Defiant had been sent off
from the Boreth's hangar deck two by two, in these tiny pods with no means by
which to observe the somehow restored Deep Space 9 as they neared it.
"Seriously?" Arla persisted. "You've actually looked into how the Stardate
system was devised?"
Sisko looked across the cramped pod—or down the pod, or up it. There was no
artificial gravity field, and no inertial dampeners either. Essentially, he and
the commander were the only passengers in a gray metal can with two acceleration
seats with restraint straps, a pressure door, and four blue-white lights, two at
their feet and two at their heads. Sisko even doubted if the simple vessel had
its own engines or reaction-control system. He guessed they were being guided
from the Boreth to DS9 by tractor beam.
"I've studied timekeeping."
Arla frowned. "When? They don't tell you a lot in the Academy."
"Actually, I had reason to take an extension course a few years ago. I even
built a few different types of mechanical clocks on my own." Sisko tried to
lean back in his acceleration seat, but of course there was no gravity field to
aid his maneuver—only the two chest-crossing straps that kept him from floating
out of the seat.
"Did your course deal with how the system got started?"
"Some of it. As I understand it, Commander, the impetus behind devising a
universal—or, at least, a galactic—standard time- and date-keeping system was
primarily religious."
From her seat beside him, Arla nodded her head in agreement, though Sisko didn't
understand the reason for the odd smile that accompanied that nod.
He continued, not knowing what she was looking for in his answer. "There's
certainly precedent for it. Many of the religious festivals and holy days
celebrated on Earth are tied to the calendar."
"More often than not the lunar calendar, I believe," Arla said.
"That's right," Sisko said. Though he still didn't know why they were having
this conversation, it seemed harmless enough. He decided to run with it The
commander would give him her reasons when she was ready, and mat was fine with
him. "Now if my memory serves me right, when the first outposts were set up on
Earth's moon, since everyone lived underground and the moon is less than a
light-second from Earth, timekeeping wasn't a problem. But when the outposts on
Mars were established, and it was common for people to spend years mere with
their families, I recall learning mat it became awkward trying to reconcile
Martian sols at twenty-four-and-a-half hours with Earth days at just under
twenty-four. So a council of religious scholars on Mars came up with the first
Stardate system—Local Planetary Time—based, I believe, on the look-up tables and
charts the Vulcans had been using to reconcile their starships' calendars with
their homeworld's."
"The Vulcan system was based in philosophy," Arla said, as if making some
important point, "not religion."
"I... suppose you could say that," Sisko said amiably. "Now, for most people,
once you have a few thousand starships and outposts and a few hundred colonies,
it gets too cumbersome to keep using look-up tables and charts. But," Sisko
smiled, "not for Vulcans. It's no secret they have no problem keeping forty or
fifty different calendar systems in their heads at the same time. But humans,
we freely admit, tend to place more cultural and religious importance on
specific days."
"Just like Bajorans," Arla said as she turned to him, her eyes filled with a
passion Sisko didn't recall having
noticed before. She then paused expectantly, as if she had still not heard what
she needed to hear.
"Is there some point to this conversation?" Sisko finally asked.
But Arla's answer merely took the form of another question. "What happened next?
According to the extension course you took."
Sisko sighed, tiring of their exercise. He wondered how long it would take for
the pod to drift over to the station. He was surprising himself with his need to
touch the metal walls and feel the decks of DS9 beneath his boots again. And
with his desire to have someone tell him how it was that he could have seen DS9
destroyed, and yet see it now restored. Weyoun had been of little help. All he
would answer in reply to Sisko's questions was, 'In time, Benjamin. All will be
explained in time."
Only because there was absolutely nothing else to do at the moment, Sisko
continued to humor Arla. This time his answer came straight out of the Academy's
first-semester text file. "The underlying principle of the universal Stardate
system is that of hyperdimensional distance averaging."
"Which is?"
Sisko grimaced. The last time he had had this basic a conversation with anyone
about Stardates, Jake had been five and sitting on his knee, struggling to get
bis Plotter Forest Diary program to work on the new padd Sisko had given him for
his birthday.
"If you insist" Sisko then rattled off the requisite information. "Any two
points in space can be joined by a straight line. The length of that line,
divided by two, will yield the midpoint. If the inhabitants of both points
convert their local time to the hypothetical time at the
midpoint, then they both have an arbitrary yet universally applicable constant
time to which they can refer, in order to reconcile their local calendars." He
paused before continuing. "You know, of course, it's the exact same principle
developed on Earth when an international convention chose to run the zero
meridian through Greenwich, establishing Greenwich Mean Time. It was a
completely artificial standard, but a standard everyone could use."
"And...," Arla prompted.
"And," Sisko sighed. The Bajoran commander's persistence was fully up to Vulcan
standards. "Any two points can be joined by a straight line. Go up a dimension,
and any three points can be located on a two-dimensional plane. Go up another
dimension, and any four points in space can be located on the curved surface of
a three-dimensional sphere. Any five points can be found on the surface of a
four-dimensional hyper-sphere, and so on. The standard relationship is that any
number of points,«, can be mapped onto the surface of a sphere which exists in n
minus one dimensions. And that means mat all of those points are exactly the
same distance from the center of the sphere. So, just after the Romulan War, the
Starfleet Bureau of Standards and the Vulcan Science Academy arbitrarily chose
the center of our galaxy as the center point of a hypersphere with... oh, I
forget the exact figure... something like five hundred million dimensions, okay?
So theoretically, every star in our galaxy�
�along with four hundred million and
some starships and outposts—can be located on the surface of the hypersphere and
can directly relate their local calendars and clocks to a common standard time
that's an equal distance from
everywhere. Just as everyone on Earth used to look to Greenwich." Sisko gripped
his restraints and pushed himself back into his acceleration couch, trying to
compress his spine. The microgravity, not to mention his traveling companion,
was giving him a pain in the small of his back, as his spine elongated in the
absence of a strong gravity field. "Is that sufficient?" he asked sharply.
"What do you think?" Arla replied.
A sudden shock of pain pulsed through Sisko just above his left kidney. He
remembered the sensation from his microgravity training decades ago in the
Academy's zero-G gym. He forced his next words out through gritted teeth. "I
think it's a damn simple system. One that works independent of position and
relativistic velocity. And since it's based on the galactic center it's
blessedly free of political overtones." Sisko smiled in relief as his back spasm
ended, as suddenly as it had begun, and as he at the same time relived a sudden
memory of the one sticking point Jake—like most five-year-olds—had had when it
came to learning Stardates. "And once a person gets used to the idea that
Stardates can seem to run backward from place to place, depending on your
direction and speed of travel, it becomes an exceedingly simple calculation to
convert from local time to Stardate anywhere in the galaxy.
"So—if you're asking me if I'm in favor of Stardates, Commander, yes, I am. Now
what does this have to do with anything?"
Arla's expression was maddeningly enigmatic, and Sisko could read no clues in
it. "So you consider the system to be completely arbitrary?"
"Any timekeeping system has to be. Because the uni-
verse has no absolute time or absolute position. Now would you please answer my
question."
"Then how is it—" Arla said, and Sisko's attention was caught by her tone. The
commander was finally ready to make her point. "—nine days from now, when the
two wormholes are going to open in the Bajoran system only kilometers apart from
each other and... and supposedly end the universe, or transform it somehow,
that that completely arbitrary Stardate system is going to roll over to 7700.0