STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  Jadzia opened her mouth to protest, but Bashir forestalled her. “Normally I’d agree, Commissioner. But there are also signs of iscemic necrosis in the symbiont itself. That generally means the symbiont hasn’t established the vascular connections it needs for life-support.”

  “And it’s also a sign of even more advanced rejection.” Duhan looked truly alarmed now, not just unsettled by the intrusion of Starfleet into Commission affairs. “We have to act. Jadzia Dax, I’m sorry, but if the choice must be between your sister’s life and the life of a symbiont, you know the Commission must protect the symbiont.”

  Jadzia glanced over her shoulder at the still form on the bed behind them. She felt more than saw Benjamin Sisko’s reassuringly solid presence come a step closer to her. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know.”

  Bashir surprised her with a loud sigh. When she shot a startled glance at him, she could tell from the twist of his mouth that it was himself he was irritated with. “Excuse me if I was unclear, Commissioner. Ziranne has begun forming the appropriate capillary network to support the symbiont. It’s not complete, of course, since implantation was so recent. But the necrotic tissue I’m seeing is from some previous implantation trauma. Something of a much greater duration than the normal host—symbiont bonding period.”

  Jadzia frowned. “You’re saying the previous host kept the symbiont despite ongoing rejection problems? For a long time?”

  “Impossible.” Duhan shook his head, hands smoothing the air in front of him as though chasing out the wrinkles in a quilt. “The Commission would never allow—”

  Benjamin Sisko frowned him into silence. Sisko might have no official standing here, but the cloak of moral authority he wore as a Starfleet captain seemed to carry as much weight in the Trill Symbiosis Commission as it did on Deep Space 9.

  “Doctor, is there anything about the symbiont’s condition that the host would be able to feel physically? Could Ziranne have known something was the matter if a doctor didn’t tell her?”

  “I’d need to run more tests to be absolutely sure.” Bashir opened his tricorder to consult whatever notes he’d made there. “There are some anomalous protein and enzyme traces I’m not sure how to interpret, but I think they’re contributing to the symbiont’s inability to establish a correct neurological bond with its host. And when you add that to the previous damage—I don’t think Ziranne can be consciously aware of very much concerning this symbiont.”

  “Other than being overwhelmed by its memories, which she can’t organize or control.” After that long first session with her sister, it was still the only thing Jadzia was sure of. “She can’t sort any of her own memories out of that flood, not even the most basic childhood facts.”

  Bashir followed her gaze to the bed and its restless occupant. “She may not have access to her own memories. She’s been sedated in one form or another since showing up in Gheryzan. With a majority of her higher neurological functions suppressed, she can’t possibly be processing speech on her own. Anything we’re hearing has to be from the symbiont.” And its inability to communicate in the pools—as well as Jadzia’s repeated failures to reach through it to Ziranne—proved just how addled and unreliable it had become.

  “Maybe we don’t need Ziranne’s memories.” Sisko leaned back against the windowsill, fists clenching in thought. “Maybe all we need is what we already know.”

  Jadzia took a deep breath, hearing the undertone of realization in her old friend’s voice. “What are you thinking, Benjamin?”

  Sisko took a step as if to begin pacing, then brought himself up short, glancing across at Ziranne’s fragile suspension into sleep. “According to the other teachers at her school, your sister took a leave of absence a week ago. Before she left, she told several of them she was concerned about the grandfather of one of her students, and intended to go off planet. We’ve found records of her having booked a shuttle to Shal Tul, but no records of her return to Trill.”

  “That was all in the message we sent to Starfleet,” Duhan said tiredly. “And I don’t see what any of it has to do with the symbiont’s current state of health.”

  Sisko ignored the comment, turning instead to look directly at Jadzia. “We all assumed Ziranne wandered into that hospital in Gheryzan because she knew she needed help—she knew the symbiont and she were in danger. But what if that wasn’t the case? Gheryzan is half a planet away from Ziranne’s home. What if she went there, to that particular hospital, because she was looking for someone?”

  “Her student’s grandfather?” Bashir guessed.

  Jadzia frowned. “You mean she never went to Shal Tul? But it’s not like Ziranne to lie. “That was assuming she was still Ziranne then, that she hadn’t yet become the not-quite-joined thing she was now.

  Sisko shrugged. “Maybe she did go to Shal Tul first—and whatever she found there sent her surreptitiously back to Trill. Back to that hospital in Gheryzan.”

  This time, it was Duhan’s turn to pace. “Captain, I’m afraid there’s nothing special about the hospital in Gheryzan.”

  “Except for the mental ward.” Jadzia was rewarded with puzzled looks from Sisko and Bashir, and a startled, but suddenly thoughtful, frown from Duhan Vos. Curzon Dax’s cynical memories reminded her that even up-and-coming Trill politicians didn’t get appointed to the Symbiosis Commission by being stupid. “Unlike humans, Benjamin, there are Trills who still suffer from some brain disorders that don’t respond to even the most advanced Federation medicines. Our neural chemistry is complicated by our ability to join—”

  “So the same characteristics that let you bond with your symbionts also leave you susceptible to debilitating brain disease.” Bashir sounded satisfied rather than surprised, as if this confirmed something he’d long suspected. Duhan’s scowl told Jadzia this was another matter the Symbiosis commission preferred not be discussed among non-Trills. If Bashir noticed the Commissioner’s discomfort, he gave no sign. He was already striding over to punch a new request into the computer terminal at the corner of the room. “That means the symbiont could have come from someone whose own brain-damage in turn gradually damaged the symbiont—”

  “—and who was a permanent resident of the hospital in Gheryzan,” Sisko finished.

  “No!” Jadzia couldn’t tell if the distress in Duhan’s voice reflected his agitation at the disclosure of so many intimacies regarding the Trill symbiont-host relationship, or merely his growing anxiety about the damaged symbiont itself. It didn’t help that Ziranne looked more pale and fragile with each straining breath. “This is all a waste of time!” the commissioner insisted. “Even if you locate a former host at that hospital—even if the host is still somehow alive—we can’t risk putting the symbiont back into a brain-damaged Trill. Look how much damage has already been done! What we need to do is return this symbiont to the pools so it can heal.”

  “If we do that, my sister will die!” Jadzia heard her own voice scale upward, but didn’t care anymore how much fear it revealed. She was fighting for a life as important to her as her own. “I won’t let you take the symbiont until we’ve exhausted every other possible—”

  “Verad.”

  The name seemed to echo between the white walls like the dying rumble of the avalanche of shock it triggered. Duhan spun around to stare at the human doctor in what looked like horror, as if Bashir had sprouted wings. Jadzia simply stared at Bashir, stillness the only possible lid she put on the cold, unwanted flood of memories her symbiont could not help but offer. It was left to Sisko to ask the obvious question.

  “What about Verad, Doctor?”

  Julian Bashir turned away from the computer, his dark eyes looking as stunned as Jadzia felt. “That’s who’s at Gheryzan. The Trill who tried to steal the Dax symbiont over a year ago—he was sentenced to permanent residence in the mental ward at Gheryzan.”

  It made a certain amount of sense that he’d be there, Jadzia realized. Verad certainly hadn’t been stable when he’d appeared at Deep Space
9 to announce that, despite the Symbiosis Commission’s opinion otherwise, he was the perfect host for Dax. Yet the last she’d heard was that he’d spent one year and a day at a Trill rehabilitation facility, only to emigrate to an off-world job after being declared cured of his pathological insecurity and envy of the joined. Jadzia had magnanimously allowed that she’d probably have wanted to move someplace where nobody knew her, too, if she’d committed the crimes he had.

  “Don’t expect him to be too communicative,” Bashir had warned them, paging through the documents on his computer screen more rapidly than any human had a right to. “His medical record states that he’s currently suffering from dissociative catatonia. That’s just a few steps up from a persistent vegetative state. Not surprising, really—dissociative disorders are apparently the most common facultative disorder among Trills.” He looked up from his reading, the blue-green light from the touchscreen reflecting faintly in his eyes. “If this is right, he’ll be in a worse state than your sister. She at least has a stolen symbiont to give her some semblance of a voice.”

  Crossing the Symbiosis Commission’s central garden, Jadzia tried to focus her thoughts on something other than the image of her sister as a silent, fragile mannequin. So. instead, she thought about how the Trill sunlight felt almost alien on her skin after all her time in the artificial light of Deep Space 9.

  It always unsettled Jadzia when she came home—this feeling that her home planet had become less familiar to her than a Cardassian-built orbital pile of steel and duranium. For reassurance, she reached as she always did for Dax’s memories of Curzon’s reaction to the same feeling. Her immediate predecessor had enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of seeing his home-world with fresh eyes after every diplomatic mission, and Jadzia could usually soothe her uneasiness by dipping into his remembered delight. This time, however, all she felt was her buffeting fear that the Trill home-world would never be the same after this visit, and neither would she.

  “I’ll try to talk to the symbiont while you’re gone,” Bashir had promised softly, just before Jadzia slipped from her sister’s room to follow Sisko to Gheryzan and whatever answers waited there. “I think I can adjust the sedative balance enough to completely neutralize Ziranne’s input while leaving the symbiont coherent. Commissioner Duhan can help me try to make contact with it. I actually think it may work better if you aren’t here to spark an emotional response.”

  Jadzia nodded, not trusting her voice by then. After coming so many light-years, it felt strange to be told her best chances of saving her sister involved simply walking away.

  “What are you thinking, Old Man?” Sisko held the door that led out of the garden and through the Symbiosis Commission’s teaching halls to its transporter station. He’d already alerted Chief O’Brien back on the Defiant to coordinate their transport to the Gheryzan mental hospital, although for politeness sake they’d use the hospital’s own pad. Now that they knew Verad might somehow be involved in this mess, Sisko had said grimly, there was no sense taking chances. Jadzia wasn’t sure if she should feel vindicated that Sisko took the Verad threat more seriously than Bashir, or if she should just suspect her captain of humoring her.

  “I’m really worried, Benjamin.” Jadzia took a deep breath, trying to sort through the emotional worries she knew were hers and the logical concerns that belonged to her inner self. “Ziranne wouldn’t have any reason to get in touch with Verad on her own. Any connection she has to him has to have been initiated from his end. What if Verad’s not catatonic, and this is all his idea of getting revenge on me—on Jadzia—for being the one who got to keep Dax?”

  Sisko shook his head, but she knew him well enough to recognize disbelief rather than disagreement in the gesture. “Don’t jump to conclusions, Old Man. We still don’t know for sure that Verad had anything to do with what’s happened to your sister. After all, part of the agreement Starfleet had with the Symbiosis Commission when we returned Verad was that they’d never let him endanger another symbiont, especially yours. His presence in Gheryzan might just be a coincidence.”

  Jadzia stepped onto the transport platform before him, her own headshake as crisp as Emony could have made it. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in seven lifetimes, Benjamin, it’s that even coincidences don’t come out of nowhere. I can’t ignore the fact that my sister ended up practically on the doorstep of the man who once stole my symbiont, only days after she apparently stole a symbiont of her own.”

  Sisko sighed softly, as though carefully considering what he was planning to say. “Maybe you want to believe Verad’s involved in this because you can’t believe Ziranne would do it to herself.” He caught Dax’s hand in midair, stopping her before she could end the conversation by signaling O’Brien. “Old Man, I was there, too, when Verad came to Deep Space 9. I saw his pain, and I saw how readily Dax adapted to Verad’s conviction that he’d been wronged once they were joined.” He shook his head. “Are you absolutely sure your sister didn’t feel that same frustration? That she didn’t decide, all by herself, that joining was worth any price she might have to pay?”

  “Benjamin, I know my sister as well as I know myself. And in all her life she never lied to me.” Or, if she had, she had lied so well that even Jadzia couldn’t pierce the deception. That thought was intolerable. As intolerable as the possibility that Ziranne had refused joining only because Jadzia had achieved it first, thus sacrificing her own happiness in some misguided loyalty to her sister. “She wasn’t the sort to steal someone else’s symbiont,” Jadzia said carefully, her hand moving reflexively toward her abdomen. “There isn’t much else I’m sure of lately, but I have to be sure of that.”

  “So,” Ziranne asked, her face alight with mischief, “what’s he like?” The late spring breeze through the windows tied her hair into macramé knots, tossing the ends playfully over her shoulders as she shook out another of Jadzia’s wrinkled shirts. “Have they let you talk to him yet? Is he nice?”

  Jadzia sighed somewhat dramatically, and bent to rearrange the contents of her small suitcase in an effort to hide her blush. “I wished you’d stop calling the symbiont ‘he.’ ” She tried to sound cool and precise, but had a feeling she merely sounded prissy. “It makes me feel like I’m getting married, or signing up for a sex change or something.”

  “Well, calling him ‘it’ makes me feel like you’re buying a hovercraft.” Plucking a pair of trousers from the suitcase, Ziranne lifted a skeptical eyebrow and turned to rehang the slacks in the closet. “Come on, Jadzia. Half its hosts have been men, including the last two. It isn’t wrong to call your symbiont ‘he.’ ”

  A little taste of discomfort twisted Jadzia’s mouth. “If you have to call it something, call it Dax.”

  “All right.” Content with her new choice from Jadzia’s modest wardrobe, Ziranne turned back to the staging area that used to be her sister’s bed and resumed her folding. “But you still didn’t answer my question.”

  It seemed somehow unfair that her younger sister could be more balanced and mature than Jadzia so much of the time. She bought herself some time by sorting through her toiletries, counting the last few doses of the medicine that would help ease her transition, then having to count them again when the number simply flew out of her head. “I’ve met Curzon lots of times,” she said at last, quite calmly. “That’s kind of like meeting Dax.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged, was suddenly afraid that would look too sulky, and sighed a little as she dumped the toiletries back into her bag. “Curzon used to be an ambassador for the Federation. He worked a lot with the Klingons, even lived on Qo’noS for a time.” That last thought made her stomach pinch. While she’d studied the structure of Klingons in comparative biology, she’d never actually met one. She wasn’t sure she wanted to adopt a lot of intimate encounters with a species she wasn’t even sure she liked. “Before that, Dax was joined with a pilot, and before that, the scientist who headed the Symbiosis Commission.” She glanced up at Ziranne
a little shyly. “There’s a lot of math and science in Dax’s background.” As well as a craving for strangeness and new experience. The need to understand, her Symbiosis advisor had called it. It was what got her picked for this symbiont over hundreds of other applicants.

  Ziranne stepped back to let Jadzia finish patting down the contents of her suitcase. Teaching preschool had imbued her with a patience Jadzia sorely envied. So few things seemed to frustrate her, not even a sister who couldn’t articulate what made her want to run and hide on the eve of her joining. They’d grown so different, not just in height and figure, yet remained so much the same that Jadzia knew her thoughts still leapt straight from her brain into Ziranne s.

  “This is a wonderful thing for you,” Ziranne said gently. “You can’t know how proud I am.” She let a moment of silence grow between them, then finished, “So why don’t you seem happy?”

  Jadzia closed her case with a bang, crying out in frustration, “Curzon doesn’t like me!”

  It didn’t help that Ziranne’s first reaction was to laugh.

  “I’m serious, Ziranne!” She swept up her suitcase and swung it to the floor. “He really, really hates me! I think he tried to stop me from getting any symbiont at all.”

  “That sounds just a little paranoid.”

  “But it’s true.” She sat on the bed hard enough to jounce it, and leaned forward to catch at her sister’s knees. “Do you know what it’s like to have your symbiont’s last host hate you?”

  Ziranne twined her fingers with Jadzia’s and gave her a little shake. “Maybe it’s not about you. Maybe he’s not ready to give up Dax just yet.”

  “No.” Jadzia shook her head, frowning with sincerity. “He’s been ill a long time, and after that heart attack on Risa, he’s been deteriorating rapidly. I think he means it when he says he doesn’t want the symbiont to be damaged as his health fails.” Besides, there must be a certain complacency about your own death when you knew that, in a sense, you wouldn’t really die. A certain aspect of your awareness would remain within the symbiont forever. The possibility of who-knew-how-many more lifetimes of exploration and challenge was more exciting than any fear of death could be.