Rugal politely passed. Instead, he went for a long, angry walk around Coranum, trying to simmer down before returning to the house. It was much later than usual when he returned home. Maleta, the housekeeper, met him in the hallway and, as she took his jacket, whispered, “Your father has been waiting for you in his study for almost an hour! He has a visitor, someone from the Office of Public Order.”
Rugal did not yet know this euphemism, but the moment he walked into Kotan’s study and set eyes on the visitor, it was as if someone had started sounding a klaxon. First of all, the man gave him a vastly charming smile. Then he stood up, pressed his palm against Rugal’s, and told him it was a pleasure to meet him at last. He could not have given more warning about how serious—how dangerous—he was if he had been carrying a nightstick. Besides, Kotan looked scared stiff.
The visitor gestured toward an empty chair. “Do join us. If that’s acceptable to you, Pa’Dar?”
Kotan cleared his throat. “Of course. Rugal, sit down.”
They sat like three points on a triangle. “By way of introduction, Rugal,” their visitor said, “I am from the Office of Public Order.” He did not offer any other kind of introduction—a name, for example. “My department looks after the interests of high-profile politicians such as your father.”
Kotan had by now schooled his features to impassivity.
“I was delighted when you were found and I was delighted that your return has meant nothing but joy for your father. Thus far.”
Was that a threat? Kotan was no help. He was staring past Rugal, out the window.
“I’ve been making a study of your first few months on Cardassia Prime—Penelya is a charming young acquaintance, if slightly outré for someone of your status—and I’ve been fascinated to watch you come to terms with living here, after so long among our natural enemies. It must not be easy, at your age, having to learn rules that should have been your birthright. Perhaps this explains your lapse of judgment earlier today.”
“My lapse of judgment?”
“You certainly have a unique perspective on our state’s involvement in Bajor. But does it not strike you as arrogant to assume that your perspective is the most accurate? To assume that what your teachers present to you is not a better informed account?”
There was a pattern to this exchange, Rugal realized, a protocol being followed—a mode of appropriate interaction that they had been taught in a class on legal procedure. He was being informed of the error of his ways, and now he was expected to show remorse. Kotan, he saw, was still offering no assistance. He was leaving this entirely to Rugal’s own judgment. Trust? Or self-defense?
Rugal thought briefly of telling the visitor where he could stick remorse, but he didn’t. It was a pleasant fantasy, but it would, presumably, be the end of Kotan. And while Rugal would always be angry that Kotan had forced him to come here, he didn’t want to see the man harmed. Not in the way he would like to see Gul Dukat harmed.
“I think,” Rugal said carefully, “that I spoke out of turn today. I was not born at the time the state began to express an interest in Bajor’s Advancement, and for the sake of accuracy and fairness, I should listen more to those who have studied the events in depth. I’m sure that they know more about it than I do.”
Kotan relaxed visibly. The visitor glanced between them, and then gave a pleasant smile. “Excellently put. It’s particularly gratifying that you are at last exhibiting some deference toward authorities. You are certainly on the path to wisdom. Stay on it.” His smile faded and he glanced at Kotan. “You must be very proud.”
Kotan gave a stiff bow. “I do my best for the good of Cardassia.”
“As do we all, Deputy Minister, as do we all.” The visitor stood up, and Kotan quickly followed suit. “Well, duty calls. I needn’t trouble you any longer. Enjoy what remains of your evening.”
Kotan escorted him from the room. Rugal leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. His suspicions about their visitor were confirmed when Kotan returned and started systematically checking the chair in which the man had been sitting, the table next to it, the glass from which he had been drinking.
“Was that—” Rugal started, but Kotan lifted a finger. His search went on for a while and then he breathed out and sat down heavily.
“Do you understand who that was?” Kotan asked.
“I think... I think he was someone from the Obsidian Order.”
“I’m glad not everything I’ve said has fallen on stony ground. Do you understand why he was here?”
Rugal frowned down at the carpet. It had a complex, spiraling pattern that made his vision blur.
“You seem to have been expressing dissident opinions in class.”
Rugal’s head snapped up. “We were being told lies! I only told the truth!”
“Forget truth. I heard the recording. It was dangerously close to sedition.”
“They monitor our classes that much?” Rugal felt sorry for the poor junior official stuck with that task.
“Rugal, they monitor everything. Not just one-off communications to Bajor, everything. You are studying with a set of young people training to become the next generation of political leaders. Do you think they would not be watched for the slightest sign of unorthodoxy? What about all the conversations in that garden with your little orphan friend? Do you think they go unexamined too?”
Rugal went cold. “What about the house?”
“Here? I do my best. It takes a great deal of time, effort, and money.”
“But it was all lies! If Tret and Colat and the rest are going to be the next generation of political leaders, why tell them lies? If they don’t hear the truth, they’ll think that nothing wrong happened! Tret thinks that nothing about Cardassia is wrong! He, his friends—they’ll make the same mistakes over and over again. The Occupation will happen over and over again!”
“I know. I know what the Occupation cost Cardassia, more than most. But you must understand. When you say these things, it’s not only yourself you are putting in danger—”
“So I should put up with lies to save your skin?”
Kotan gripped the arms of his chair. Calmly, he said, “I am sure that it matters a great deal to you that the story you are being told does not match the one your Bajoran carers told you. Unfortunately, you must learn to live with the contradiction.” Rugal opened his mouth to reply, but Kotan lifted one hand to stop him. “What I care about most is the potential fallout from your folly. You don’t know it, but you are playing fast and loose with the lives of many other people.”
“How?” Rugal was bewildered. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at! Just tell me straight—I know it isn’t the Cardassian way, Kotan, but please try!”
Kotan sat for a while deep in thought. “Very well. I’ll try. Have you heard me—or any of your tutors—talk about the Detapa Council?”
“That’s the civilian governing body, isn’t it? Not the Central Command, not the Obsidian Order, but something else.”
“You really have been listening! Good. Do you know how much power the Detapa Council has?”
“It’s like the Bajoran Council of Ministers, isn’t it? Plenty, I suppose.”
“So you might think. In fact, it has practically none. According to the terms of our constitution, the Detapa Council operates chiefly in an advisory capacity. The Detapa Council and the Civilian Assembly formulate policy and write legislation, but all of it has to be passed before the Central Command in order to become law. Mostly, this is a formality. On certain key issues—military appropriations, say, or constitutional reform—it’s not. How happy do you think that makes the current members of the Council? Having virtually no executive power?”
“Not very, I should think.”
“And you’d be right.” Kotan leaned forward in his chair, his hands resting now on his knees. He had an eager look in his eyes. So he did enjoy something about his political career. Perhaps it was the skullduggery. It seemed to be the national
pastime, like religion was on Bajor. “So how happy do you think the current Council is to keep things the way they are?”
“I’d guess not at all,” Rugal said, and frowned.
“Go on,” Kotan said encouragingly.
“But that’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? If it’s part of the Cardassian constitution. But you said the current Council was unhappy. So what’s changed?”
Kotan beamed. “Excellent question!” Despite himself, Rugal almost felt pleased. “The difference is that the Central Command has badly overstretched itself. Wars with the Federation, a disastrous end to its Bajoran policy, all those skirmishes in the Demilitarized Zone that have caused your poor friend so much distress... It’s not been a happy few years for the Cardassian military, and the Cardassian military, Rugal, derives its power from success. It thrives—the Obsidian Order allows it to thrive—as long as it keeps Cardassia safe and fed. It’s managed the second of those well in recent years, I’ll admit that. But on the first, it’s running out of credit, and it’s running out of time. And when the constitutional space that the Central Command currently occupies becomes free, the Detapa Council will be waiting.”
Rugal stared at the carpet for a while, rearranging the shapes into a pattern. “All this that you’re telling me—it’s sedition, isn’t it? Treason?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Kotan, aren’t you afraid?”
“Afraid?” Kotan gave a sad smile. “My beloved child, I’m absolutely terrified. Every day, looking at the people around me, I think: Are they like me? Are they someone I could trust? Or are they simply showing me the right kind of face, so that I will tell them about myself and my friends, and then they will pick us off, one by one, and put us on trial, and shame us and our families in front of the whole Union. Do you see now why your performance in the classroom is so dangerous? When you speak out of turn, the eyes of the Obsidian Order fall upon me, your father. And when their eyes fall upon me, they are close to seeing the movement for change in Cardassia—that quiet set of patriots who are slowly, carefully, cautiously trying to shift our country to a place of greater safety. Rugal, when you speak out of turn in public, you are endangering the lives of many good and brave people, who have worked hard for longer than you have been alive.”
“I don’t know why you brought me back,” Rugal burst out bitterly. “This place is poisonous! Even when Bajor was at its worst, people looked after each other, they tried to help each other! My mother and father—they took in a Cardassian child! But you’re all at each other’s throats! I’ve no place here. Why did you bring me back?”
“Because I love you.”
“But you don’t know me! How can you love me? When I do the things that I think are right—tell the truth, care for Penelya—you don’t like it. How can you say that you love me?”
Kotan held up his hands—a helpless sort of gesture. “Because you are my son. Because I remember you as a child, even if you can’t remember me. Because I loved your mother.”
Rugal had no answer to that. It was too late, he thought; they had been too long apart. He was not, and never could be, what he thought Kotan wanted—Cardassian.
“I am aware,” Kotan said hesitantly, “that you are struggling to settle here. Please believe me when I say that I am anxious for you to do well, for you to be happy. You sounded, as we were talking, as if you might like to know more about Cardassian politics, about how our great state works. You certainly asked some good questions. Perhaps you should spend some more time with me? As I go about my work, I mean. You could see what my responsibilities are, how our institutions work...”
It was a tempting offer. Kotan presumably had access to much of what went on behind the scenes at the highest levels of Cardassian politics. More than that, however, Rugal wanted to learn more about Kotan’s dissident friends: what they believed, what they did. He was about to say yes when Kotan said, “It is the career you are expected to follow...”
His voice faded away, as if he had realized at once that he had made a mistake. Rugal shook his head. Learning from Kotan might be interesting, but it would only give the man false hope. “I know you’re trying to help. And I appreciate that—truly. But I don’t intend to stay here. I’m going home.”
Kotan sighed. “Very well. Off you go. But please try not to get us all killed.”
Later, lying on his bed, Rugal watched again all the display of the capital city, that complex shimmering pattern of lights and lives. How many more times would he have to sit through it? When would it all end?
Three
The next time Penelya dared Rugal to step outside Coranum, he took her up on the challenge. “Show me everything,” he said. “Show me why I should care.”
She did her best. She took him through galleries of brash conformist art, to outdoor concerts of strident music, past gigantic memorials of guls and legates whose names he did not bother to memorize, and up to the top of the city’s tallest building, a monument to Collective Endeavor that represented the unity of the people and gave an imperious view out as far as the black mountains in the west. They walked down the river to admire the Veterans’ Bridge, and he did not need her to point out the undercity half-hidden below. They toured the main buildings of state, saw the Assembly debate third-tier healthcare provisions, and he could not discern any difference between the speakers. They did it all at Kotan’s expense, as Geleth was at pains to point out. Rugal told her to think of it as reparations.
For everything Penelya showed him, Rugal told her in return something about Bajor: the fountains and gardens, the pale stone, the silver sound of temple bells on a fresh spring morning. He described the spirited guttering made by trams that miraculously still worked after years of neglect, and the heated political arguments that took place in every street-corner tavern. Everyone was poor, but it was out in the open, not tucked out of sight below bridges.
For her own safety, Rugal had not told Penelya about the visitor from the Order. True friendship on Cardassia, he was learning, depended less on openness than on knowing when to keep secrets. He did tell her about Kotan’s offer, though. They were on the shuttle at the time, heading home. That morning they had taken a boat down the river to Ostek on the coast, where they had watched the gray sea and eaten salty litik fresh from their shells and walked along the esplanade holding hands. He was the happiest he had been since going to Deep Space 9. “Kotan said I could go and see him at work. Find out what he does and how.”
It was near fourth bell and the shuttle was packed. Penelya had to twist around to look at him. “How fascinating! When are you going?”
One of the passengers stood up, and they shuffled around to let her near the door. “I’m not,” Rugal admitted. “I said no.” Penelya didn’t reply, but he could feel disapproval radiating from her like the hot stones of a sauna. “Go on! Say it!”
“Nothing...”
Rugal sighed. She did this all the time: hid what she was feeling rather than risk confrontation. He knew why, but he wished he could make her understand that she could be honest with him. “I know it’s something, Pen.”
“Honestly, it’s nothing. It’s none of my business.”
They stood in silence for a while, chest to chest, forced together by necessity rather than familiarity. On the screen on the wall above the seats, a bored district archon was sentencing vagrants to work centers and expressing her strong hope that they would seize this opportunity, granted by a generous state, to become productive citizens. The shuttle lurched into a stop. Six or seven other passengers got off, and Rugal and Penelya slipped into some free seats. At the far end of the carriage, two young men in the gray and silver uniform of the city constabulary got on and started checking identities. Rugal glanced sideways at Penelya. She was glowering alarmingly by now. He waited for the eruption.
“I used to dream that my parents would turn out to be alive!” she told him in a hot whisper. “Every night I would go to bed, and I would close my eyes and think,
Perhaps when I open them in the morning, they’ll be there... Perhaps it would turn out to be a mistake, perhaps they’d got lost or their memories had been affected, or they’d been unconscious for ages and then woke up again and remembered me and came to get me. That’s exactly what’s happened to you! And all you can do is wish that your father had never turned up! It’s as if you hate him—”
“I don’t hate Kotan!” Rugal whispered back angrily. “But I already have a father, one I love and want to be with. I didn’t ask to come back here, you know, they made me! I didn’t want to leave Ba—” He glanced around. “—to leave home.”
“But didn’t you wish for it too? Your mother and father coming to get you?”
“Migdal and Etra are my mother and father, the only ones I remember!” Rugal thought briefly of that Cardassian hand on his shoulder, pushing him away from a safe place that he didn’t want to leave, then shoved the memory firmly aside in turn. “It’s not like I ever knew Kotan and Arys. How you feel about your mother and father is exactly how I feel about Etra and Migdal. Why is that so difficult for everyone to understand?”
“I can’t help thinking how lucky you are. Not just one father, but two. I wish I had even one.” She looked very sad; very young and very sad. He put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, Pen,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I wish we could swap. I wish Kotan had been your father and had come for you.”
“We wouldn’t have met then,” she said. That was true. He squeezed her arm, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. That was how they were sitting when the two officers reached them. Rugal held out his wrist for them to check his identity, and they passed on quickly to Penelya. The senior of the two frowned at her. “You’re under the age of emergence.”
She dropped her eyes and shrank down into her seat. “Yes, that’s right.”
“And your parents are listed as dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does your guardian know that you’re out?”
Star Trek: DS9: The Never-Ending Sacrifice Page 6