STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax

by Marco Palmieri, Editor

  It seemed like such a big risk to take. “Was Bethan Roa your student’s grandfather?”

  Again the drowsy nod. “Lyrrin was so upset when her grandfather died. So I took her to the pools to see Roa, to show that her grandfather would never be completely gone. When Roa wasn’t there, and when I couldn’t find any information about a new host, I knew something was wrong.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell someone?”

  “I didn’t know what to tell them. I thought maybe Lyrrin’s family had heard wrong. I wanted to make sure I did the right thing, so I just asked myself, ‘What would Jadzia do?’ ” She squeezed Jadzia’s hand, her eyes drifting closed again toward restful slumber. “And I knew you’d find the missing symbiont and make sure it got back home. You’d find out what went wrong, and you’d fix things—you always do.”

  Jadzia didn’t answer. Being anyone’s hero was always a huge undertaking. Being the hero of the person who mattered almost more to you than yourself was a fearfully powerful thought.

  “Is your doctor okay?” Ziranne asked.

  “Recovering.” They’d found him nearly a half-hour after Roa surrendered Ziranne’s body, locked into a storage closet after being nearly overdosed on sedatives. “I don’t know whether to scold you or Roa for taking advantage of his good nature.”

  Ziranne managed a sleepy, lopsided smile. “I’m not sure who to blame, either. It was so strange, knowing and wanting things that somehow weren’t my own, but which felt so much like mine. I knew when I—we—it—drugged the doctor, that we meant to get him out of the way so we could kill Verad. Yet I kept thinking how I would never do that, how I could never kill anybody.” She laced her fingers with Jadzia’s, her grip loving and strong despite the lingering anesthetic in her system. “Thank you for helping me rescue him without having to become him. Thank you for letting me be just me.”

  Jadzia smoothed a hand across her sister’s cool cheek, smiling, then let Ziranne slip into whatever private dreams would soothe her now that she was alone with herself again, the way she wanted to be. Although it might not be very important to her sister, Jadzia was comforted to know that at least a little of Ziranne’s life would be remembered by one of Trill’s symbionts, and shared with all the others resting in the pools. She wanted the joined of the future to know what she knew now: that many, maybe even most, of the unjoined people of Trill felt no less a part of their complex species than those who hosted the symbionts. And that at least one of them, with no desire to be part of the continuum of joined memory, would still risk her own life to bring a symbiont safely home.

  EZRI

  “We’re part of something bigger than any of us.”

  —Torias Dax

  “Facets”

  “... and straight on ’til morning.”

  Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  “ALL THAT,” Vic said, “all of it ... and it hit you ... pow! ... Just like that?”

  “All of it,” Ezri said. “And more. So much more. I ... I couldn’t even tell Brinner what it was like. And he had had the preliminary courses.”

  “Brinner? He was okay?”

  Ezri nodded, experiencing the sadness and the awkwardness of her reunion with Brinner Finok once more. He was safe, unhurt, but what they’d had together could never be the same again. Not when she had been given what he had so desperately wanted and worked for all his life. “The changeling didn’t kill him. It just put him into medical stasis and hid him in a medical supply room.”

  “Kinda odd thing for a changeling to do, don’t you think?”

  Ezri sat up from where she had been leaning against Vic’s shoulder. “I suppose. No one ever figured out what that changeling was really trying to do. We don’t think there’s any way it could have joined with Dax. Maybe it could have linked minds somehow. Accessed Dax’s Starfleet secrets. Maybe even have kept Dax alive long enough to get back to the Founders’ homeworld and ... who knows what could’ve happened then?”

  “Which is why you couldn’t tell anyone what happened,” Vic concluded.

  “Not while the war was on,” Ezri confirmed. “In most sectors, especially on the front lines, it was Starfleet policy to withhold reports of changeling impersonations. To keep up morale. And to keep other changelings from finding out which ones had been caught. I think the policy’s changing now. But it still comes down to the same thing. At the time, I was the only Trill on board.”

  “And that changeling in the Bajoran uniform?” Vic asked. “The one that brought Dax onto the Destiny? Odo, right?”

  “Odo,” Ezri said. “I realized that later. But he was so upset, I don’t think he even remembers seeing me. At least, he’s never mentioned it.”

  “Strangers in the night,” Vic said.

  Ezri let Vic’s sports coat slip from her shoulders. Somehow, the night felt warmer. Maybe it was the heat from the lights on the improbable giant slipper. Or maybe she was just getting used to the night air.

  Vic stretched out the arm he had kept around her, as if a simulated cramp had formed in his simulated muscles.

  Ezri narrowed her eyes at him as he rubbed his arm, thinking about all the theories she had heard to explain his behavior. “Are you really a hologram?” she asked.

  Vic’s only answer was to give her a sly wink and a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Funny thing about those stories,” he said.

  Ezri decided he was trying to change the subject. Someday, she’d make a point of asking to hear all of Vic’s stories. She suspected he had more than a few surprises of his own. But that was a question for another day. Or for a timeless desert night. “What’s funny?” she asked.

  “They’re all so different. I mean, same worm, right? But there’s Lela Dax loving politics and mixing it up with a crowd. But Tobin Dax sounds like he would’ve been happy living by himself in the middle of Death Valley. Torias Dax wanted to win everything for himself. Curzon Dax wanted to help everyone else win. And Joran Dax ...” Vic paused as he seemed to understand the sudden flash of warning in Ezri’s eyes. “Well, enough said about that cat.”

  Ezri couldn’t have agreed more. Having all of Joran’s memories restored was one of the hardest adjustments Jadzia had been forced to make, and they proved no easier for Ezri to live with.

  She stood up and stretched herself. She had no idea how long she had been sitting with Vic. “Your point?” she asked.

  “Hey, I’m a crooner not a counselor.”

  A hologram with false modesty, Ezri thought. What a universe. “You’re not ‘crooning’ now,” she reminded him. “But you do look like you have something to say.” She folded her arms as she faced him. “Am I right? Or am I right?”

  Vic laughed. “Seems to me that you didn’t want to get joined because you were afraid of losing yourself. But from what I can tell, none of Dax’s previous hosts lost anything from being joined. They just got more.”

  Ezri had never thought of it that way. “More of what?”

  Vic pursed his lips, shook his head. “More of ... I don’t know ... maybe more of whatever it is that ... that makes us human.”

  Ezri stared at the hologram until he lost his stage performer’s grin. She didn’t care what anyone else said. She was certain there was something more to Vic Fontaine than holoemitters and microforcefields.

  “I told you what I was doing out here,” she said at last.

  “Checking out the place for Julian. For one of his lost causes.”

  Ezri nodded. “So tell me, what were you doing out here, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It’s my night off.”

  “No,” Ezri insisted. “I mean, really, why were you out here?”

  Vic put his hands in his pockets, and for once his expression was serious. “Really? It’s a big simulation, doll. I like to make sure my friends don’t get ... lost.” But then he grinned again, erasing whatever moment of connection Ezri felt she might have just established with him. “It’s bad for business when the tourists start turning up in the s
and dunes, if you catch my drift.”

  “Yeah,” Ezri agreed, “I suppose it is.”

  Vic picked up his sports coat from the electrical box, gave it a shake, then brushed some dust from it. “So how about it, doll? Need an escort back to the bright lights and big city? Maybe check up on that boyfriend of yours?”

  Ezri looked up, past the glowing shoe, past the jumbled, waiting signs no longer pointing the way to anywhere, to the stars above.

  And with a start, for the first time that night, she realized they were not alien stars after all.

  “Emony was on Earth,” she said, the memories of those days and those adventures rushing through her consciousness even as she said the words, sparked by the stories she had told.

  “You mentioned that,” Vic said.

  Ezri was suddenly overcome by the knowledge that the tapestry of lights above, nothing more than random patterns to Ezri Tigan, were old familiar friends to Ezri Dax.

  “Orion,” she said softly as the patterns coalesced. “And Taurus. Ursa Major.”

  “You sound like you’re on to something,” Vic said encouragingly.

  Ezri sighted from those stars and pointed into the darkness. “Due east,” she said. “The Strip is three kilometers in that direction.”

  “No holding you back, dollface.”

  Ezri smiled in agreement, even as she tried to find some hint of what Vic was actually thinking, what he really meant. But the hologram, the nightclub singer ... her friend, gave no clue to the depths that lay hidden deep beneath his surface. If, indeed, there were depths there to be explored or comprehended.

  “No,” Ezri said, because she did understand the truth of what Vic meant. “No holding me back. Not now.”

  “For my money, doll, not ever.”

  For no reason at all that would ever make sense to her, Ezri suddenly stepped forward and kissed Vic on the cheek, hologram or not.

  He actually blushed.

  “Whoa, what was that for, doll?”

  Ezri straightened his tie. “You know.” She sighed and the sigh turned into a yawn. “I’d better be going.”

  Vic checked his watch, as if a hologram could have someplace else to go. “Me, too.”

  “See you,” she said.

  Vic cocked a finger at her, as if to shoot her with an imaginary phaser.

  “And thanks,” Ezri added. Then, her earlier fatigue a thing of the past, like so many other things, she started to walk from the clearing, into the thicket of signs.

  “Hey!” Vic called out from behind her, “it’s two miles to town! You could just say, End program.”

  Ezri looked back over her shoulder. “I know where I’m going.”

  “You know something, doll? You always did.”

  Ezri couldn’t resist. She gave Vic his own parting shot with an imaginary phaser. “Badda bing,” she said.

  Vic laughed, threw his sports coat over his shoulder, and started off in another direction, wherever it was that holograms went when there was no one around to see them.

  Ezri turned back to the east, saw the sky brightening with dawn, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

  This should be interesting, she thought. Not even Emony had seen Las Vegas by day.

  No longer lost, Ezri Dax set off on her own journey, sure at last of her own destination, but, like every Dax before her, curious to see what she might find along the way.

  From the shadows of the signs, Vic watched her go, and allowed himself a smile. A real one, this time, and not a simulation.

  Then he turned and hurried off on his own journey, secure in the knowledge that there were many more stories still to be told by his friends on Deep Space 9, and that he’d be able to hear them all.

  Because he knew that he’d be back—they all would be back.

  Just like Dax.

  About the e-Book

  (DEC, 2003)—Scanned, proofed, and formatted by Bibliophile.