His heart raced. The lines still meant nothing to him. He wondered if this was what aphasia felt like.
“Of course,” Bashir said, unable to find any other words. “But…I’d like to hear some independent confirmation.” What the hell is wrong with me?
Krissten cleared her throat before speaking. “Julian, it seems pretty obvious that you, Nog, Ezri, and the symbiont are all exhibiting the very same weird quantum resonance pattern that Tenmei detected coming from the shuttle. And it’s getting more pronounced hour by hour.”
Bashir belatedly noticed that Ezri was standing beside him, also studying the indicators on the display. “So this has to be related to the shuttle’s having passed through that alien artifact’s interdimensional flux.”
“I’m no science officer,” Krissten said, “but it sure looks to me like your proverbial smoking gun. But that’s not all.”
Krissten touched the screen, which suddenly displayed two large, intertwined helical structures. Bashir immediately recognized it as a schematic representation of a strand of humanoid DNA. He was relieved to discover that he could still understand something.
“There’s a progressive change going on in the DNA patterns of every one of you,” Krissten said, sighing in frustration. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out why it’s happening. Or what it’s ultimately going to do to all of you.”
“For starters,” Bashir said, “it seems to have grown Nog a new leg. As well as given Ezri and the symbiont mutual independence.”
“But what about you, Julian?” Ezri said, an edge of concern in her voice.
Krissten changed the display yet again, but Bashir couldn’t bring himself to look directly at it. He could no longer deny what was happening to him. On some visceral level, he knew without needing any confirmation from the instruments.
“Progressive neurological degeneration,” he said, studying the weave of the carpet near his right boot. It felt strangely liberating to voice aloud the thought he’d tried so hard to avoid for the past two days. “At the rate I’m declining, by tomorrow I’ll probably no longer be able to function as this ship’s chief medical officer.”
“You don’t know that,” Ezri said.
“I can feel it, Ezri.”
“I think we need to run some more tests,” Krissten said, but Bashir couldn’t hear any hope underlying her words. She knew he was right.
Fatigue once again crept up on him. His eyes ached, and when he spoke there was more acid in his words than he had intended. “Ensign, I’ve already been scanned down to the Planck scale.”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you see a clear pattern of neural degeneration?” he said. “A systematic collapse of synaptic pathways?” In his mind’s eye, he saw the windows of the Hagia Sophia, in which hundreds of small candles were slowly guttering and flickering out, one by one. The image chilled him to the marrow.
Krissten nodded silently, though with obvious reluctance.
“Then we already have the essential picture, at least in broad strokes. Call in Ensign Juarez and Lieutenant Candlewood. They’ll be able to help you further interpret the data you’ve already collected. I want to know how long I have left.” Feeling a sudden leaden weariness, he turned and strode toward the door and entered the corridor.
“Julian,” Ezri said, dogging his heels.
He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. “Ezri, I need to be alone. To rest.”
“Well, it’s good to hear you admit that every once in a while. But there’s obviously more to it than that. So tell me.” Her voice had none of the steel he’d become accustomed to over the last several months. She sounded every bit as frightened and vulnerable as he felt.
He decided that now wasn’t an occasion that called for a stiff upper lip. “I believe I’m…reverting, Ezri. Regressing to what I was before Adigeon Prime.”
Her eyes widened with sudden understanding. “Before you were genetically enhanced.”
“I can’t begin to explain it,” he said, nodding. “But somehow our encounter with the alien artifact has begun…undoing my genetic resequencing.”
She seemed to mull that over for a moment before responding. “It sounds crazy, but it fits. Nog and I are reverting, too, if you think about it. He’s become the two-legged Ferengi he used to be. I’ve been turned into the unjoined Trill I was before the Destiny brought me together with Dax. And you’re becoming…” She trailed off.
Slow, plodding, uncoordinated, dumb Jules Bashir, he thought. The little boy who was such a grave disappointment to his oh-so-doting, upwardly mobile parents.
“Maybe this isn’t such a great time to rest, Julian. If you’re really slipping as fast as you think you are, then our best chance to find a cure might be sooner rather than—”
He cut her off. “Ezri, I don’t know if I could find a cure for this even if I were at the top of my game.”
She folded her arms before her, donning a smile that he sensed was purely for his benefit. “It’s not like you to just give up, Julian. The Persian army still hasn’t even shown up yet.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m just trying to make you understand that the cure, if it exists, isn’t going to come out of the medical bay. It’s going to come from inside the alien artifact that caused all of this in the first place.”
His mounting weariness was becoming acute, and she now seemed aware of it as well.
“All right, Julian,” she said, seeming to draw on some inner reserve of strength. “Get some rest. I’ll take what you’ve just told me straight to Commander Vaughn. If there’s a cure anywhere aboard that artifact, I swear to you we’ll find it.”
He thanked her, then excused himself. Alone, he found himself momentarily lost on his way to the quarters he and Ezri shared, but quickly recovered and found his way.
Once the door was sealed behind him, he collapsed onto the narrow bunk and considered what lay ahead: a transformation from the educated, accomplished, nearly superhuman Julian Bashir to plain, slow, unmodified Jules.
Jules.
He had repudiated that name during his childhood, after his parents had, in effect, repudiated him—when they’d had his DNA illegally rewritten when he was only six years old. Whatever Jules might eventually have accomplished if left to his own devices had been rendered moot from that point on, forever after consigned to the shadow world of roads not taken. Inaccessible mirror universes.
After Adigeon Prime, the frustrating learning disabilities he’d suffered as Jules had slowly receded over the horizon of memory, banished to an obscure corner of some boarded-up cloakroom within his mental Hagia Sophia. Reborn, young Julian excelled intellectually, academically, and physically—but not spiritually. All too often he had felt like a created thing, an object designed to replace a child who hadn’t measured up to his parents’ lofty expectations.
Which, in a very real and undeniable sense, was exactly what he was.
He vividly recalled the day, three short years ago, when he had taken his parents to task over this. Facing the distinct possibility of dismissal from Starfleet because of his illegal genetic alterations, he had wished that Richard and Amsha Bashir had never taken him to Adigeon Prime, that they’d instead simply allowed nature to take its course with young Jules, for better or for worse.
That errant wish now appeared to be coming true—and the brutal reality of it horrified him. He realized now that it meant the loss of abilities and talents that he had come to take for granted over the better part of three decades. The loss of what he sometimes feared were the only things that gave him value as a human being.
The loss of self.
Bashir closed his eyes. But instead of sleep, he sought a cobbled street in Istanbul, where a flight of stone steps led him up to the front of the silver-domed Hagia Sophia. He stood for a moment just outside the main gallery of his memory cathedral, apprehensive about what might await him inside, but determined to survey the damage regardless
.
He entered, expecting the series of chambers that curved around the dome’s interior to be disordered, ransacked, essentially empty. Instead, he saw a party of white-smocked men and women, busily constructing walls with bricks and mortar. He smiled, uplifted for a moment by the hope that they were here to make repairs, that their presence was evidence that he was somehow recovering his faculties, that he was going to make a recovery without recourse to whatever inscrutable powers had deconstructed him in the first place.
Then his heart sank like a burned-out star abruptly collapsed by its own gravity. The white-smocked men and women weren’t making repairs. They were walling off staircases, doorways, and vestibules. They ignored his screams, continuing their work as though he weren’t even present.
Brick by brick, they were isolating him from a lifetime of memories—and systematically robbing him of every skill he’d ever come to take for granted.
Vaughn sat in the command chair, listening to the various busy sounds of the bridge consoles. He quietly mulled over what Ezri had just told him before she returned to the medical bay to assist Candlewood and Richter with their quantum-scan analyses. Clearly, the Oort cloud artifact—which, according to Shar, the aliens regarded as either a place of worship or as a chamber of horrors—held the solution to the puzzle of what had befallen the shuttlecraft Sagan and her crew.
And he was determined to get his hands on that solution, no matter the cost.
Vaughn rose and approached the science station, where Shar was intent on a scrolling display of the alien text. Many more of the symbols were now separated into groups by variously sized ovals, rather than running in an uninterrupted sequence. It certainly looked promising.
“Making any progress?” Vaughn said.
Shar lifted his eyes from the display only for a moment. “It’s difficult to know for certain. I’m beginning to wonder if Ensign Cassini might have been a bit too optimistic about our chances of success.”
“At least we’re finally able to converse with our new friends,” Vaughn said. He gestured toward the main viewer, where an image of the D’Naali ship hung suspended against the stygian darkness.
D’Naali. Vaughn turned the name over in his mind as his eyes swept the long, tapering lines of their vessel. Relief warred with frustration within him. On the one hand, it was a relief not to have to refer to the insectoid creatures solely as “the aliens” anymore. On the other, Shar’s initial translations of Sacagawea’s speech had yet to shed any real light on the nature of the mysterious space artifact—or on the reason the D’Naali vessel had been chased and attacked.
The turbolift door slid open, and Vaughn turned toward the sound. Lieutenant Nog stepped onto the bridge, leaning heavily on a cane. His new left leg had grown considerably over the past day. At first glance, it was a perfect match for the right one and seemed to be getting stronger by the hour.
Vaughn still found it difficult not to glance at the new limb. “How did the last round of repairs go, Lieutenant?”
Nog smiled, obviously happy to be back in his element. “She’s spaceworthy, just as long as no one else attacks her anytime soon. I told the D’Naali captain he can get under way whenever he needs to. Once we get Sacagawea back aboard his vessel, that is. I have to say, Shar’s revamped translators really made the technical conversations go a lot more smoothly.”
“Does that mean you were able to learn anything more about why the D’Naali were being chased out here?” Vaughn asked. “Our running into them so close to the alien artifact can’t be a coincidence.”
Nog shook his head. “They never did give us access to much of their ship, outside of the engine room and a few of the most heavily damaged portions of the hull. And whenever you ask them a direct question…” He trailed off.
“They’re evasive?” Vaughn prompted.
“I’m not sure it’s deliberate. The translators still haven’t ironed out a lot of the wrinkles in their language. So the D’Naali are about as easy to understand as some of Morn’s Lurian Postmodernist poetry.”
Vaughn had heard some of Morn’s poems shortly after his initial arrival aboard Deep Space 9. The occasion had been an “open mike” night at Quark’s; Vaughn recalled that he hadn’t comprehended so much as a couplet of Morn’s work. He made a mental note to recommend Shar for a promotion if he could coax just a little more performance out of the universal translator.
“Captain,” Nog said, “if you don’t need me up here at the moment, I’d like to get back to engineering. While Permenter and Senkowski and I have been off the ship, Merimark and Leishman have been a bit overworked.” Vaughn watched as Nog looked down at his regrown limb yet again. Nog’s smile made him appear more genuinely happy than Vaughn had ever seen him.
Tenmei was grinning in Nog’s direction. “It’s always best to stay on Merimark’s good side,” she said. “Especially if Leishman’s hid the candy stash again.”
It suddenly occurred to Vaughn that Nog could have saved time by making his report over the intercom. Of course, it wasn’t every day that one’s amputated leg grew back. Who could fault the lad for wanting to use it as much as possible?
“Dismissed,” Vaughn said with a paternal smile, then watched as Nog exited.
He looked toward Bowers, who occupied the tactical console. “Please open a channel to the D’Naali ship, Mr. Bowers.”
“Aye, Captain,” Bowers said.
Moments later, a bug-visaged alien face appeared on the screen, its vertical mouth parts spread in what might have been a D’Naali smile. “Grateful thanks of ours you have, humandefiantcaptain. Indebtedness, with thanks/ beholden again reiterated/multiplied.”
“Not at all. We were happy to assist you.”
“Anything in recompense/requital, we offer with gladness/joy to provide/make available. State the need/ request.”
Vaughn blinked while he parsed the translator’s fractured grammar. Then he realized that the D’Naali commander was not only presenting his thanks, he was offering to provide something of value in return for the Defiant crew’s labors.
He decided to seize the opportunity. “There is one thing we’d like to ask of you.”
“Denominate that one thing, I request.”
“We need to survey a remote part of this solar system. In the outer comet cloud. We could use a guide who is familiar with the territory.”
The D’Naali lapsed into what seemed a thoughtful silence before he spoke again. “Answer/result is affirmative/positive. Ryek’ekbalabiozan’voslu now dwells aboard your vessel.”
Vaughn realized that the other captain was referring to the D’Naali whom Bowers had dubbed Sacagawea.
“We would be grateful if Sacagawea would act as our guide,” he said, glancing back toward Bowers, who now looked somewhat embarrassed. Vaughn was aware, of course, that the translators had been calibrated to render the nickname into the D’Naali language. “If he is willing.”
The D’Naali captain made a sweeping gesture with one of its slender limbs. “Unneeded it is to check. Ryek’ekbalabiozan’voslu will be/is obligated to be your guide. What time-interval is requested/required?”
“A few solar days at the most,” Vaughn said. “Then we will return your crew member to you.”
The D’Naali captain’s head bobbed up and down. “Assent granted readily/with enthusiasm. After/following five turnings-of-the-star, we will await/expect your return to this place/coordinates.” And with that, he vanished, replaced by an exterior view of the D’Naali ship.
Vaughn returned to the captain’s chair, sat, and looked at the conn station, where Tenmei was posted. Her dark eyes regarded him expectantly, and he could see that she had already laid in a course.
“Best speed to the alien artifact,” Vaughn said.
The flight into the fringes of the system’s Oort cloud, guided by the subspace beacon Nog had deployed during the Sagan’ s close encounter, took less than ten minutes. Vaughn ordered Tenmei to bring the Defiant to a relative stop a mer
e one hundred kilometers from the coordinates where the Sagan had nearly been swept forever out of normal space by the enigmatic artifact’s interdimensional effects.
In the center of the screen, an indistinct structure appeared, growing steadily in apparent size as Tenmei increased the viewer’s magnification levels. At first, Vaughn thought it might be one of the countless dead, icy bodies that spangled this cold, remote region of the system. These objects were diffused throughout the Oort cloud, covering a volume of space so vast and dimly illuminated by this system’s distant sun that any one icy body was scarcely distinguishable from any other.
But the object that was growing on the screen swiftly resolved itself into something else entirely. Its artificial nature was now clearly discernible, as it continued its stately, eternal tumble through the unfathomable interdimensional deeps. Its shape was constantly morphing as new, hitherto unseen facets rolled into view. Spires, arches, buttresses that evoked Gothic buildings appeared and vanished, each in their turn. Curving, swirling lines seemed to fall into existence, then straightened into right angles, contorting immediately afterward into shapes that no mind could fathom but which nevertheless bewitched the eyes.
The feeling of awe that had descended upon him when he’d first viewed a holographic image of the object returned tenfold. In spite of himself, Vaughn had to wonder if he was staring into the business end of another one of the universe’s transcendent, inquiry-resistant mysteries. He recalled the peaceful, floating death-dream he’d experienced after touching a Linellian fluid effigy, a memory that remained green despite being nearly eight decades old. The artifact also brought to mind the life-changing epiphany he’d received from the Orb of Memory, when he had helped recover it from the derelict Cardassian freighter Kamal only a few months earlier. That encounter had forever altered the trajectory of his life, ultimately leading him to DS9, the Defiant… and finally out here, to confront the ragged edge of the human experience. In the presence of the weird alien construct, he could not help but recall his far more recent sojourn on the world of the Thoughtscape entity, which had forced him to confront the many mistakes he had made as Tenmei’s absentee father. Over his almost eighty years of Starfleet service, he had witnessed enough inexplicable events to credit the notion that some things just might remain forever beyond human ken.
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