STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  I bristled, remembering endless late-night dormitory debates on this very subject. “I consider it axiomatic that language contains all that can be thought by a being. Deny the word, and you deny the thought.”

  “Well said, Ensign. Freshman philosophy one-oh-one, I believe. Be by the book, but not of it, young Sisko.”

  “There is more in heaven and Earth ... ?” I asked respectfully, inwardly seething.

  Dax didn’t seem to notice my sarcasm. “Precisely. Language is invariably shaped by the philosophies and perceptions of the linguist. But while it tells us much about a people and the way they see the world, it doesn’t tell everything.”

  I nodded silently. It was my place to assist, report, and learn, not to question or interfere. Or debate. I could understand why a joined Trill would believe in non-linguistic cognition, but the idea was, to me, anathema.

  The tiled floor began to vibrate. The inner door slid open. The hallway beyond was good Federation tritanium and transparent aluminum, strong enough to contain a thousand atmospheres. Halfway down, the texture changed.

  The pathway beyond midpoint was smooth, enameled, perhaps too slick, rather like a snail shell. On the wall at my side, I saw the point at which the Azziz docking “device” had joined with the Federation platform. It appeared to be some kind of dried, hardened sap. I pressed against it with my thumbnail. Somewhat to my surprise, it was not diamond hard. Rather, it depressed an eighth of an inch and then held firm. When I removed my thumb the imprint healed almost instantly.

  “Look.” Dax pointed. Above us was something that looked much like a crab, hanging from the ceiling by a thick strand of that rubbery epoxy. “Imagine,” he said with unfeigned respect. “A substance extruded by the living body of a creature, that would pass Federation standards for structural strength.”

  I had to admit, the idea was dazzling.

  Dax stood before an opening that ... well, looked like nothing so much as a mammalian sphincter muscle. It was dry, but glistened.

  I reached out and touched it, felt it give beneath my touch—for perhaps two millimeters this time, and then hold firm.

  Dax shook his head very subtly, and I dropped my hands back to my side.

  “Nervous?” Dax said quietly.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “This is my first ‘first contact.’ ”

  “Forget your theories, young Sisko.”

  I almost objected, but noted how excited Dax was himself: eyes bright, carriage erect. This was a Moment, and clearly, he had never tired of them.

  With a tiny whiff of escaping atmosphere, the sphincter opened, and the Azziz ambassador stood before us.

  The ambassador was four feet tall, vaguely humanoid, with vestigial featherlike bristles that made me think that, in earlier days, his folk had been avian. His skin and bristles were black, and he was cloaked in a stiff leather armor that flexed without joints. Interesting.

  “Ambassador”—and here Curzon Dax said a word that I have never managed to pronounce, a tongue twister brimming with lethal fricatives—“we welcome you to Pelios Station.”

  The ambassador inhaled, and made a hissing sound. Somewhat to my surprise, a creature that looked rather like a flying amphibian, all wings and oversized head and a bullfrog throat, flew up and nestled on the ambassador’s shoulder. Rather like a rubbery parrot, I thought. “We of the Azziz,” the creature said, “extend our greetings in return.”

  Dax nodded sagely. “Would you care to come aboard?”

  The bullfrog croaked in the Azziz tongue. The ambassador answered, and then the bullfrog spoke in English once again. “I would love to. My Poet will accompany me.”

  “Poet?” Dax asked politely.

  Without translating into Azziz, the bullfrog spoke again. Its throat puffed out with unmistakable pride. “I am the Poet,” it said. “May our Refrigeration Unit, and Grain Exchanger come aboard as well?”

  Dax’s expression betrayed momentary bafflement. I leaned over, whispering: “Sir, if we assume that the Azziz vehicle is entirely bio-synthetic, it follows that the vehicle itself is a colony. Each part: refrigeration unit, translation unit, ‘grain exchanger,’ etc., is a living, separate creature.”

  Dax smiled at me warmly. There was no guile there, and no condescension. “Indeed.”

  It was that smile that won me, made me want to know this Trill more deeply. The humor was there, some joke that I could not quite see. And Dax was inviting me to open my eyes, as if he had greater confidence in my potential than I did. In all likelihood there would be good conversation about this, later, over warm ale.

  “Yes, please,” Dax said, to the bullfrog Poet this time. “And to any of your colony would like to explore our station, we would be a happy to appoint a guide to answer all questions. How many ... ah, members would this entail?”

  The Poet croaked and whistled. The Azziz ambassador answered in kind. “We think that perhaps eight of us would care to see your station. It has been a very long trip.”

  Dax made swift, quiet comments into his communicator, and then smiled. “It will be done,” he said.

  “Would you and your companions care to inspect the ship?” the Poet said, without prompting from the Azziz.

  “Very much.” Dax turned to me. “Would you care to accompany us?”

  The laughter was in his eyes again. I would rather have had my fingernails pulled out than miss such an opportunity. “Yes, sir.”

  I hadn’t seen anything like the inside of the Azziz ship since the last time I attended an autopsy. It was moist but not wet, but everything seemed to glisten. The air was dry, but every surface seemed covered with a thin mucosa. The walls dilated to allow us to pass, and contracted behind us. I imagined that at times the ship could form a solid, organic knot with no extra space at all.

  In its present mode, the interior of the ship itself rather reminded me of the valves of a great heart, with wide open chambers surrounded by clusters of living tissue that fluttered, chittered and in general behaved like bats sleeping against the walls of a cave.

  The Poet preened and buzzed to various of them. Several pieces of the walls and ceiling emerged, whole creatures where before there had seemed to be a mosaic of tissue, patched together for some unified purpose.

  There were no viewing screens in the craft as such, although the Azziz ambassador explained that its own nervous system joined with the creature which exuded the external shell, and that elements of that shell were sensitive to the entire electromagnetic and gravitational spectrum, that this information was passed to another creature whose brain could sort the information, from infrared to ultraviolet, into a coherent map.

  “And the range of perception?” Dax asked politely.

  The translator seemed momentarily confused.

  “The range?” Dax pressed. “How many millions of miles, or light-years, or ... ?”

  “The entire range,” the Azziz said, simply.

  Dax nodded. My own head spun. The ambassador couldn’t possibly have meant what he said.

  Could he?

  The entrance back into the station was quite the parade, with a procession of slithering, hopping curiosities bouncing after ten guides recruited from the diplomatic staff. The Bactricans seemed to resent the Azziz, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps they felt the newcomers distracted us from the formal negotiations. Perhaps their apparent frivolity offended them. Personally, I thought it was simply that the Bactricans felt most comfortable with their noses held firmly and stiffly in the air.

  My Academy friend Cal Hudson was among the hapless guide recruits, and he smiled grimly as something that looked like a headless chimpanzee climbed up his legs and arms and hunched on his shoulders, ready for the tour.

  “She looks just your type.”

  Headless hugged him around the neck and did something that was either a kiss or the gravest insult imaginable.

  “You owe me,” Cal said.

  “It must be love.”

  “You’re buying tonigh
t.” Cal made a face, and then headed off down the corridor. “Pelios Station itself is a mid-sized platform,” he began, “orbiting Pelios between her second and third planets, twelve light-minutes from the star. It maintains a stable crew of two hundred and fifty ...” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Headless probably didn’t understand a word.

  The Azziz ambassador and his (its?) translator were as interested to examine our technology and mechanical innards as we had been to inspect the Azziz accomplishments. Through the Poet, it made the appropriate ohh and ahh sounds, and looked at the rivets, seals, and welds holding the steel and ceramics together. It touched, and perhaps most disconcertingly, tasted the seams.

  Curzon Dax, ever the diplomat, remained carefully oblivious to the chaos, guiding them here and there, showing them the station taking all the time needed or desired to absorb the entirety.

  It seemed forever before Dax turned the ambassador over to Starfleet Admiral Janeway, who had arrived at Pelios only an hour after the Azziz ship. Janeway was here for the final negotiations with the Bactricans, and to assist in the rituals of initial contact, but the unflappable admiral’s eyebrows definitely raised at the spectacle.

  I managed not to laugh aloud.

  Finally, Dax and I were alone. “So, Ensign,” he said. “What did you see?”

  “They’re like a troop of trained monkeys,” I said. “I’m not at all certain that we’re really dealing with the Azziz brain. I think they sent this flock out as a test.”

  In the hall behind us, something that looked like a leather beach ball with tongues for arms bounced down the hall, stopping every few hops to sniff the feet and crotch of passersby.

  “Then you haven’t seen enough yet. I heard you offer young Hudson a drink.”

  He would have heard that. How a man can have such a tolerance for the leaden rituals of diplomacy and simultaneously possess such an appetite for good ale, I will never know. I enjoyed a drink now and then at the end of an excruciating shift. It was dessert, if you will. For Dax, I sometimes thought the dessert was the meal itself. “Come, Ensign,” he said. “You will buy me a drink, and I will tell you what your eyes do not see.”

  Because of its position near two mining planets, exploration and transport ships paused at Pelios Station more often than such a minor outpost would ordinarily require, and entrepreneurs of several kinds managed to establish a good living, providing for their varied tastes.

  The most popular of the shops, not surprisingly, was a grogatorium, offering a variety of flavored ales and entertainments, most of them of the gypsy variety, but lately a new dancer had thickened the evening’s crowd. I rarely missed a show when off duty.

  Dax had the capacity to work through any normal creature’s sleep cycles without losing focus or mental speed. That being said, just as he could focus himself utterly on any task at hand, he could concentrate just as impressively on a good glass of synthehol.

  We sat at our usual table, in a corner dark enough to avoid the glare, but central enough to catch the eye of the overworked waitresses.

  “So,” I said as we waited for the next show to begin. “Exactly what is it that you think I missed?”

  Dax leaned back against the wall. “You saw a conglomeration of creatures, engaged in an enterprise, and assumed that they were nonsentient, controlled by a central mind.”

  “They certainly behaved that way. They only allowed a few of them off the ship, and those behaved like children at best. I can only assume that those remaining behind were vegetative.”

  Dax’s every word and gesture were carefully measured. He paused deliberately, listening to the music for a moment before continuing. He seemed to understand that good teachers and storytellers make the audience want the information.

  “The mere fact of interaction in a group effort says nothing about the individual intelligence of the members, young Sisko. Each member of the Federation suppresses certain elements of its own will for the common good. Each member of a military unit forgoes certain personal liberties in exchange for a heightened efficiency of action.”

  “I hardly think that’s the same thing. And even if it were, that’s not my point.”

  “Isn’t it?” Dax said with deceptive innocence. “And, regarding that theme, what would you say of our Bactrican brethren?”

  I cocked my head sideways. “I fail to see how a bunch of—”

  “Ah ah ah ...” Dax reminded me. He was, as usual, right. I had to fight the urge to assume that those things I cannot understand are necessarily of a lower order.

  “All right.” I wrestled with my thoughts, seeking a better way to express myself. “I hardly see how the two situations are equivalent. One is a group of genetically engineered animals designed to replace machinery, the other is a highly evolved, cultivated world in which ideas of caste and duty have evolved to a level that would shame the sixteenth century Chinese court.”

  “And if I were to suggest that the two have much in common?”

  “I might grant that,” I said, “but still wouldn’t understand your argument.”

  “You’re learning, young Sisko. Only a month ago, you would have allowed me to ambush you. ...”

  Despite myself, I allowed myself to feel a touch of pride. He was right. I would have.

  Cal Hudson appeared, and dropped himself into the seat at my side.

  “Well, Ensign Hudson,” Dax laughed, “Young Sisko tells me you might be engaged.”

  Cal muttered words I have never written down in my adult life. He grabbed my ale, telling me to order my own.

  On the stage before us, the bar’s Betazoid manager was quietly setting up a trio of chairs for their musicians. A moment later, three creatures of mismatched proportions emerged, and initiated a tuning-up process with strange instruments.

  Dax leaned forward. “Mr. Hudson,” he said. “We were debating whether a culture utilizing advanced language and symbolic logic is necessarily more advanced than a symbiotic form.”

  “Such as the Azziz?” Cal asked. “Or such as the Trill?”

  Dax chuckled and sat back.

  “I wasn’t falling into that one, sir.”

  “Kudos, Mr. Hudson. Ahh,” he said with vast satisfaction. “The evening’s entertainment commences.”

  Cal actually felt more at home than I with verbal games, and I was glad that he had seen through Dax’s question—although mortified that I had not. The waitress returned with a glass for me just in time for the lights to dim. The bar had gone mostly quiet now, in expectancy, and I felt the tension building even before she arrived.

  And oh, yes, it was she. Unmistakably she, devastatingly she. As positively she as any creature I had ever seen. Behind the silver body makeup and the silver mask, it was difficult to tell what race she belonged to. Humanoid, certainly, but her dance motion was so fluid that I would have sworn her to be some manner of cat. She moved not exactly to the music but with it, using it, her muscles fluttering and writhing in a costume that fit more closely than a sheen of oil.

  It was impossible to miss her animal sensuality, but there was far more to her, a kind of purity, an almost religious ecstasy.

  I had seen Sabbath Nile perform at least a dozen times, and every time, she wove me into her web. I saw Dax reach under the table for the slender contact wires. After a moment’s hesitation, I pulled a set out and applied them to my temples.

  And was lost. The contacts fed me her exertions, created the sensation that I was observer, the dancer, and the dance itself. As if Sabbath spun me, spun us in a web of exertion, skill, and pure spirit. I forced my eyes open, saw that most of the others in the bar had also donned the equipment, and that we were all joining together, all feeling what she felt. I felt what the others felt, a feedback that grew more intimate and intoxicating by the second.

  I was drunken with her, touched by and reveling in the woman called Sabbath Nile. She called herself an Empath mime, one whose art consisted of the creation and projection of emotion. We not of he
r species needed some kind of artificial linkage to experience her art.

  I could barely imagine its impact in native form.

  Dax was connected as well, I could feel him on the web, feel his odd, doubled presence there next to me, but ...

  But where the rest of us were completely immersed in her performance, helpless in the hands of a master, Dax’s eyes roamed the room, perhaps searching for something.

  Was he studying the effect she had on others? Strange, because on the surface he was as attentive, as passionately silent as the rest of us.

  And yet his attention was elsewhere, as well, no doubt a side effect of his symbiotic nature.

  I saw where his eyes had roamed.

  Today, for the first time, I saw a pair of Bactricans in the bar. Dour, dry creatures with no observable sense of humor, half the time I found myself hoping that the negotiations with them fell through, and that they never joined the Federation.

  I had seen their thin tall males and short dusky females (at least that was what I assumed them to be). But the sight of them shuffling about Pelios Station in their robes, on their way to this meeting or that, had never meant anything beyond the need for another round of talks.

  Now, they watched Sabbath like a hawk, and halfway through her performance, rose and stalked out, seething with hostility.

  Jealousy, I thought. Simple jealousy.

  There was a yearning quality in Sabbath’s performance now. I felt her sadness pulsing in my temples, and her dance had ceased to be a thing of rhythm or spirit, but more personal, something of her own heart. Her aura literally flared, the light seeming to emanate from her pores like a glowing mist.

  Every motion, every time she folded her waist like a flower bowing to the setting sun, triggered another whole spectrum of response from the room. The induction equipment fed it to us, and took a portion of our emotions and, doubtless, fed it back to her, taking us all higher and higher.

  Except for Dax, whose attention remained on the departing Bactricans. I wondered if the man had any real feelings at all. Was everything just an exercise in diplomacy?