Star Trek: DS9: The Never-Ending Sacrifice

by Una McCormack

  He and his party moved on to the table that was waiting for them. Slowly, Kotan began to shift food about his plate. He was sufficiently a product of his culture to be pleased at the news of an enemy’s ruin—but to bring a lost child back to Cardassia? That, Kotan knew, was an act of real courage. It did not seem right for Dukat to be punished for it, not when there were plenty of crimes to choose from. What about the girl herself? Was her life to be ruined, as Rugal’s had been? Was she going to be another victim of Cardassia’s entrenched and senseless rivalries? He could imagine the treatment she was receiving at the hands of her newfound family: the veiled barbs, the outright hostility. It must be unspeakable.

  Strange, Kotan thought, as he put food mechanically into his mouth. He had been intending to rally Alon’s spirits, and now he was beginning to think that his friend had it right. They had lost. All the hope and good intentions with which they had embarked upon this experiment in civilian rule were worn out. He himself was tired of it—the compromises, the missed opportunities, the never-ending feuds. It had all lost its flavor. Even his position on the Detapa Council didn’t count. He had never wanted it. It had been Geleth’s ambition, not his. She had lived to see him accomplish it, and now she was dead and it did not matter anymore.

  “Nobody would blame you, Kotan,” Alon said in a neutral voice, “if you were delighted by this news. Dukat deserves nothing better from you.”

  Kotan put his knife and fork down by his plate in orderly fashion. He drained his glass. “Maybe not. But, do you know, Alon—I think I may have had enough too.”

  Tora Ziyal tried not to mind when people stared. She was a young woman of courage and determination, and she trusted her father absolutely when he swore that they could be happy together on Cardassia Prime. For this reason, she had resolved not to hide herself away in the big town house in the Paldar sector. She would go about her business on Cardassia as if she had as much right to be here as anyone else. Besides, her stepmother, Athra, detested her, and her half-brothers and sisters followed their mother’s lead. If she was going to have friends on Cardassia other than her father, Ziyal knew she would need to look beyond the Dukat family home.

  She had taken solace in drawing and painting. She had begun tentatively at first, but very quickly she realized that if this was to be serious work rather than a pastime, she had to study. Each morning, therefore, Ziyal took the shuttle down into the Tarlak sector to visit the state galleries. She was slowly working through each room, taking the paintings and the sculptures one by one, learning the progression of Cardassian art and the techniques of the masters. Each day, at least one stranger remarked upon her appearance, as if she too were one of the exhibits. Sometimes it was harmless: a child who could not help pointing at her face and exclaiming. Sometimes it was less pleasant, but until recently Ziyal had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp, and far worse had happened there.

  This particular day, Ziyal had gone to the Betik Gallery’s collection of approved contemporary art. The previous evening, to make up for a dreadful scene with Athra, her father had presented her with a book about the holo-mosaics of Lim Prekeny. Ziyal had come to the Betik Gallery to see the most famous of them, The Collectivity. It was generally accepted to be Prekeny’s masterpiece, the piece with which she reestablished her reputation after her artistic license had been revoked for profligacy. The form she had chosen proved her patriotism: nine-tenths of the mosaic was holographic rather than material better used for military purposes.

  At least, that was the conventional reading. As with all Cardassian art, Ziyal found herself looking for hidden meanings. For example, Prekeny could have made her mosaic entirely virtual. She had not. Dotted around the whole were small triangular pieces of stone. The holographic tiles altered their color and shape, but these physical pieces remained solid and unchanging. If you sat and watched the mosaic for some time, your eyes drifted to them. Most people didn’t sit and look for a while. They looked for long enough to say that they had seen it, and then they walked on.

  Ziyal had been sitting here all morning, becoming more and more absorbed in the minutiae of this extraordinary piece of work. As she studied the small purple triangle in the top left-hand corner, two young Cardassians, a male and a female, came and stood before it. The young man was wearing overalls and had his hair cut aggressively short. Her father would be shocked by that, Ziyal thought with a smile; he was constantly nagging his sons to grow their hair longer. The young woman was neat and small; she wore a gray dress, and her mid-length hair was tied back in a simple style. They were holding hands. The young man said, “I’m not trying to make a big deal, I just don’t like it.”

  “You don’t understand the first thing about it!”

  “I shouldn’t need to understand anything about it. What’s wrong with me saying that I don’t like it?” He looked and sounded like someone from the service grades. Ziyal was surprised to see him here—surprised and pleased. She had thought Cardassian society was strictly regimented and segregated. Perhaps, once again, the surface was misleading. That was heartening. Perhaps there was somewhere she could slot in too.

  The young woman said to him, “You can’t appreciate it properly if you don’t know what Prekeny was trying to do when she sat down and made the thing. She didn’t throw bits of rock around randomly, you know!”

  “Are you sure?”

  She slapped him on the arm. “Sometimes I could throttle you—” Ziyal smiled. She liked this kind of enthusiasm, and, from the plainness of the girl’s clothes and hair, she suspected this was someone else dependent on a family’s goodwill.

  “Before murdering me, how’s this for an opinion? I don’t like the colors—that one there is horrible, like someone’s mixed mud with blood—and I don’t like how the shapes change all the time either, it makes my eyes go weird. And when you stare at it for too long, you feel like you’re about to fall over.”

  The young woman almost jumped up and down on the spot with rage. “That’s the point, you idiot! It’s meant to make you feel like that! Prekeny spent eight years in forced resettlement—this is all about her exile, her dispossession, her terror. She did the sketches for it in between digging ditches in a field on Cardassia IV. It’s a brilliant combination of neo-Hebitian archetypes with Third Republic abstractionism, and it’s a downright miracle it even exists, never mind that she got permission to display it here!”

  Ziyal reached for her sketch pad. These two were too good to miss. Quickly, she got down the broad strokes of them: the girl’s passion, which was spiky but appealing; the boy’s frown, which could have been unlikable if he hadn’t been so obviously smitten with his companion. Right now he was scowling and trying to come up with a way to counter the barrage of information that she was throwing at him. They looked as if they had arguments like this all the time. Eventually, Ziyal guessed, they would realize that this was what they did with each other, and then they could simply get on with enjoying being together.

  “How exactly am I supposed to know all that?” the young man said. “And why should I have to know it before I can stand and look at a picture and say whether or not I like it?”

  “Rugal, you’re impossible! I don’t know why I bother with you!”

  “I just think it looks horrible!”

  Ziyal laughed out loud. The two young people turned to look at her. The young man’s frown deepened. “What? What have I said now?” The young woman hit him on the arm again, and then smiled brightly at Ziyal. “Hello!”

  Ziyal tilted her head, part friendly, part shy. “Hello,” she replied.

  “Did we disturb you? I’m sorry if we disturbed you.”

  “You didn’t disturb me at all. I was enjoying your discussion.” She hesitated. She was never quite sure whether she was saying the right thing on Cardassia. She suspected this was in part a blessing, making her miss many of the insults that were directed toward her, but it also made her feel as if she was not able to participate fully in any conversation. “I’m so
rry I eavesdropped.”

  The girl sat down next to her—thumped would perhaps be a better description—kicked off one of her shoes, and started rubbing her foot. “Oh, don’t worry about that! I bet I was talking at the top of my voice. You probably couldn’t have helped listening if you’d tried. Aren’t you Tora Ziyal?”

  The question came out so quickly that Ziyal had almost answered it before suspicion stopped her. “Why?”

  “Well, we came all this way to meet you, and Rugal spent a fortune on getting into a gallery containing art that he can’t stand, so it would be a shame if we’d found the wrong person—”

  “Pen!” the boy hissed. She blinked back at him, unperturbed, and went on.

  “Not that I’d mind if you were the wrong person, since you’re perfectly pleasant and I’m enjoying talking to you.” Ziyal was lost for words, but the girl had plenty left to say. “The thing is,” she went on, “we were worried that you were having a bad time—we’re both fairly new to Prime and we’ve not always had a wonderful time—and when we saw on the ’casts that you spent most of your time out here in the galleries, we thought we’d drop by and say hello and see how things were going for you. Rugal, don’t kick my ankle! It hurts!”

  The boy turned to Ziyal, a horrified expression on his face. “Look, I’m really sorry. Sometimes she starts talking and doesn’t stop and it’s a disaster, but most of the time it’s fine and once you’re used to it it’s even interesting...”

  Ziyal, who had started packing away her sketching materials, stopped. She looked up at them. The boy was distraught, the girl still friendly. She brought out her drawing pad. “This is what you look like,” she said, opening to the page where she had sketched them, and holding it out for them to see.

  At first, they were both suitably chagrined. Then the girl started laughing. “Oh, I bet we do! That’s wonderful. He’s Rugal, by the way, and I’m Penelya—Pen. That’s very funny. I like you, Ziyal. I think we should be friends.”

  Friends had been in lamentably short supply on Cardassia Prime. Ziyal smiled. “I think so too.”

  They wandered around the gallery together, as if they were three ordinary people and not an orphan, a half-breed, and a disappointment. Every so often Ziyal attracted attention and occasionally comments; somehow it did not seem so bad now that she was with the others. In the gallery’s cafe, between cups of hot bitter gelat and sugary white cakes, she shyly let them look through her sketches. Penelya quickly grasped her main themes: hybridity, coexistence, outliers. Rugal became deeply absorbed in a series she had done trying to merge Cardassian and Bajoran architectural features.

  “It doesn’t work yet,” Ziyal said, fretfully.

  “No,” he replied, “but you can see how it might be done.”

  After that, the most pressing matter was to resolve the quarrel over Prekeny’s mosaic. “It’s ugly,” Rugal stated flatly.

  “It’s important,” Penelya shot back.

  They turned to Ziyal for adjudication. She thought about the remarkable work for a little longer, and then said, “I think it’s both.” It took her a moment to understand why they started laughing at her; when she did, she started to laugh herself. She was in danger of becoming a walking advertisement for reconciliation.

  They left the gallery and walked across Meritok Square toward Victory Boulevard. Ziyal asked her companions about themselves. Penelya, it transpired, had too few parents; Rugal too many. Ziyal spoke with love and gratitude of her father. He was her blind spot—she knew that—but now that her mother was dead, he was all that she had. The faint hope of being welcomed by a large family of half-brothers and half-sisters had been extinguished within moments of arriving on Cardassia. Her father was everything. Penelya understood, Ziyal could see, Rugal less so.

  “‘Family is all,’” he said, his frown deepening. “That’s the old expression. But it isn’t true. It can’t be all. It can only ever be a piece. People need more resources than that.”

  At the far end of the boulevard was the massive monument to Gul Darhe’el, hero of the Occupation. Ziyal had not yet visited it, and Penelya and Rugal insisted dryly that she must—every Cardassian child was dragged through it at least once in their school career. Rugal’s cohort at his academy had gone there on three separate occasions even during his brief time there. They joined the long queue, stretching back down the boulevard, and slowly shuffled toward the entrance.

  The monument was a massive block of huge white stone with an arch cut right through it. At the center, sunk deep into the ground, was a big black stone on which Darhe’el’s name was set in golden letters. Visitors to the tomb streamed past on either side, coming through in opposite directions, passing the carvings on the wall that showed scenes from the gul’s life. When they reached the black stone, they had to bow their heads to look down at it. They had to show respect. “I hate this kind of thing,” Rugal muttered. “It’s offensive. There are sick and hungry people a short shuttle ride away from here, and still they spend all this money on huge monuments and infantile parades.”

  Ziyal understood. Places like this did not move her, although she could see their purpose. “It’s for consolation, isn’t it? Cardassians seem to need to be reminded that they matter. And if there are Klingons hammering at the gates and Maquis blowing up colonists, and if—as you say—there are people getting sick and going hungry, then perhaps a little consolation is no bad thing?”

  Penelya pressed her fingertip against the sheer mass of white stone that loomed above them. “I think I take more consolation from Prekeny’s mosaic,” she said, very softly, as if afraid she might be heard. “To think that someone could live through what she lived through, and then produce something beautiful and wise.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Ziyal said frankly. Rugal kissed Penelya gently on the ridge on her forehead. Then a man in the queue behind them made his opinion known. He had a long white scar down one cheek and a medal on his chest—a veteran of the current campaign. “You three should be ashamed of yourselves. Darhe’el was one of our greatest heroes. He gave everything for Cardassia!” He was shaking with anger. “I bet you’ve all sacrificed nothing. How dare you come in here and say things like that! As for you,” he spat in Ziyal’s face. “Filthy murdering Bajoran scum.”

  Rugal, hand raised, took a step forward, but before it went any further, Penelya pushed her way out of the queue and ran back outside. Ziyal and Rugal chased after her. “I’m so sorry!” Penelya cried, close to tears. “That was my fault! I shouldn’t have said anything!”

  Rugal put his arm around her. “You can say whatever you like. Anyway, I think it was all three of us in combination.” He looked around, bitterly. “There are times when I hate this place so much I could rip all the ridges from my face.”

  Ziyal was shocked. “Don’t say that! You don’t mean that!”

  They stood for a while in silence, in varying degrees of distress. Ziyal thought about what Rugal had just said. She herself had never felt that way, had never wanted to change the way she looked. She knew people assumed she was the product of rape, of hatred—but she knew she was not. She had seen how it had been between her mother and her father. She was living proof of the possibility of love between Bajor and Cardassia.

  She said, slowly, “People here have all these reasons to hate each other, and they feed them rather than try to lose their appetite for them. And they brought that way of doing things with them to Bajor, and now Bajor has to struggle with exactly the same problem. And that’s not to say that people don’t have good reasons to hate each—Bajor has every reason to hate Cardassia!—and I do understand why people want revenge, and reparations, but... when will it end? Would Bajor be happy if everything Cardassian was wiped out? I don’t think so. And I don’t want half of me to be wiped out. All told, I quite like myself!”

  She stopped speaking. She didn’t often say these things, not in speech, at any rate. Most of it was in her pictures, if people took the time to look at them p
roperly. Most people didn’t. Her friends, however, were looking at her approvingly. They glanced at each other, and Penelya smiled, and Rugal nodded, as if to say: Yes, she’s one of us. It made Ziyal feel better than she had done at any time on Cardassia, except for the times when she was with her father.

  They parted ways in the early evening, in friendship, and with promises to meet, all three of them, as soon as possible. They never did. Before they could get together again, Tora Ziyal and her father had been driven from Cardassia Prime.

  The young master nearly kicked down the front door. Maleta had to jump out of his way as he came past her. “Where is he? In the back?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but strode down the hall toward the master’s study. Maleta hurried after him. She had seen many things in her years of service to the Pa’Dar family, but the young man who refused his father’s money and preferred to live like he was lowborn was something shockingly new. Maleta thought the master should have taken a firmer stand over the whole business, but for some reason he seemed content to let his only child spend his days wiping up after beggars. Nothing good would come of it. There had to be standards. One day the young master would inherit the house and the money. Maleta doubted he would keep on scratching out a living in Torr when that happened. But would he be fit to be the master of the house?

  The young master had kindly left the door of his father’s study open behind him, so Maleta lowered herself down to sit on the stairs and listen.

  “How could you!” the young master shouted.

  “Rugal! Always a pleasure to see you. What have I done now?”

  “You know what I’m talking about!”

  “These days, I never know what anyone is talking about—don’t kick that, please, it belonged to your mother—perhaps you could take a moment to tell me?”