Cathedral

by Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels

  Shar’s eyes never wavered from the floating object. “Of course. Perhaps we can run another simulation on the idea of using the warp nacelles to extend the range of the transporter.”

  “We keep losing the transportee through signal attenuation,” Nog said, shaking his head. “We need a different approach. I don’t think brute force is going to work this time.”

  Whatever the solution was, it was bound to involve something subtle. Or perhaps several subtle somethings. A four-cushion bank shot on the dom-jot table, involving both luck and skill.

  Shar nodded dreamily, his eyes still fixed on the artifact.

  Nog had never seen his friend appear so…haunted. Or so quiet. He was used to Shar’s reticence about discussing his personal life, of course, but his moody silence over the past several days was extreme, even for an Andorian.

  Nog set his own padd down. “Shar, what’s wrong?”

  Shar sat mutely for a long time before speaking. “You are one of my most valued friends, Nog. I wonder if I have ever taken the time to tell you that before.”

  Nog wasn’t sure what to say. “Thanks, Shar. The feeling’s mutual. Now, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “Just that the people in our lives are irreplaceable. Once they’re gone, there are no more opportunities to repair our relationships with them. There are no second chances.”

  Nog was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Clearly, something cataclysmic was going on in his friend’s life. And just as clearly, Shar didn’t know how to begin talking about it.

  “Has something happened back home?” Nog asked quietly after ordering the computer to silence the background music.

  Nog found Shar’s sudden burst of brittle laughter surprising. He couldn’t have been more shocked if his friend had suddenly sprouted a second head.

  “Tell me, Shar,” Nog said, after his friend had again subsided into silence. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  Almost a minute elapsed before Shar spoke again. “It isn’t easy…. We Andorians do not confide easily withone another, let alone with…outworlders.”

  “Ouch, Shar, I thought we had more in common than that. Aren’t we both the sons of Very Influential People? And aren’t we both always trying to keep that fact from swallowing us whole?”

  Shar only nodded, looking miserable.

  “So we’re both outworlders,” Nog said. “Anywhere we happen to be. No matter where you go, there you are.”

  Shar nodded again, but continued to remain silent.

  “All right,” Nog said. “I’ll get confessional first, if that’s what it’s going to take to get you to talk.”

  Shar’s antennae stood up quizzically, illuminated by the artifact’s glow. “I have nothing to confess.”

  “Well, I do,” Nog said, gesturing toward the artifact. “And do you know what I want to confess? I want to confess not being sure I’m really doing everything I possibly can to crack this mystery.” He pushed his chair back and placed his new left leg on the tabletop with a loud thunk. His bowl of tube grubs arced onto the deck with an audible splat, but he ignored it.

  Shar blinked in evident incomprehension, and Nog felt his frustrations begin to tear at their fetters.

  “Don’t you understand?” Nog said, pointing at his regenerated leg. “That alien thing hurt Dr. Bashir and Lieutenant Dax pretty badly. But I actually got some good luck out of it.”

  “That is fortunate for you,” Shar said.

  “No! It’s terrible! If we reverse whatever that artifact did to the three of us who were on the Sagan, I’ll probably go back to…the way I was before. Right after the Jem’Hadar took my leg at AR-558.”

  Shar’s eyes widened with understanding. “Forgive me. I hadn’t considered that.”

  Nog felt oddly relieved to finally begin articulating his thoughts on the matter. “I’ve had a tough time thinking about anything else.”

  “Perhaps,” Shar said, steepling his fingers thoughtfully, “you could remain aboard the Defiant when we insert the away team onto the artifact. Dr. Bashir and Ezri could take the symbiont inside without you and seek a means of reversing their own conditions without altering yours.”

  “I already asked Sacagawea about that,” Nog admitted, feeling a surge of shame. He wondered if he was reverting to type—becoming a stereotypical cowardly Ferengi, who’d always opt to hide rather than stand and fight. “As near as I can tell from his answer, everybody who was aboard the Sagan when we found the artifact is somehow linked. He says that if I don’t go along, whatever Ezri and Dr. Bashir have lost will stay lost.”

  “Of course we have no objective proof that anything Sacagawea says is true,” Shar said.

  “Fair enough. But he’s all we’ve got.”

  Shar’s expression grew distant. “I have noticed that you often seem to see the world in terms of things lost or things acquired.”

  “Ezri would probably call it a cultural predisposition,” Nog said, pushing his chair back and withdrawing his new left leg from the table. He wasn’t sure where his friend was going with this.

  Shar nodded. “True enough. Perhaps it makes it difficult to recognize that the gains we make in life often come with certain losses built into them. That we are defined by our debits as much as by our credits.”

  Nog began suspecting that Shar’s words were as much for Shar as for him. He smiled. “You’d make a terrible Ferengi.”

  Shar answered with a small wry smile of his own. “And your emotional transparency would not make you very popular on Andor.”

  Nog wondered if Shar was still trying to deflect attention from whatever secrets he was guarding. He decided that the time had come to confront the matter directly. “Okay. I’ve made my ugly confession. Now will you finally tell me what’s been bothering you?”

  Shar paused to gather his thoughts, then raised his gray eyes to Nog’s. The science officer’s jaw was set, as though he had just made a major decision. “When you first learned that you were going to lose your leg, and that the loss was to be permanent, how did it make you feel?”

  Nog recognized Shar’s primary evasive maneuver immediately. “Shar, why do you always answer a personal question with one of your own?”

  “Please, Nog. Tell me how you felt.”

  Nog sighed. Sometimes Shar could be as stubborn as Uncle Quark. “All right. I felt…incomplete. It never occurred to me that I’d end up permanently scarred by the war.”

  Shar nodded, rocking quietly in his chair. Then, almost inaudibly, he said, “That is precisely how I feel, Nog. Incomplete. Permanently.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  There was another pause. But this one was suffused with tension rather than evasion. Nog waited, sensing that a floodgate was about to open.

  Finally, Shar said, “It’s Thriss.”

  “One of your bondmates,” Nog said, well aware that this was an extremely awkward conversational topic for Shar. A Jem’Hadar torturer would have had a tough time extracting such stuff from Shar.

  “Yes. She came to the station with Dizhei and Anichent shortly before we left for the Gamma Quadrant. To try to persuade me to return to Andor with them, to marry. Instead, I left on the Defiant.”

  “I remember them. I just wasn’t sure exactly why they wanted to see you.”

  Shar made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a cough. “Now you know.”

  Nog’s throat went dry. “Something’s happened since we left.” Nog knew it had to be something terrible.

  “Yes.” Shar’s eyes became as icy as one of the local comets. He dropped his padd on the table, rising to his feet and placing his hands behind his back as though unable to find any better use for them. “Thriss is dead, by her own hand. Our quad is sundered forever. I have no future. And I am solely to blame.”

  Shar’s words struck Nog like a body blow. He knew he had never experienced anything remotely comparable to Shar’s loss—even taking the battle at AR-558 into account. Nog knew that in spite of the l
oss of his leg, he could always marry and have children—and that he didn’t need to be in any particular hurry to do it. But what little he’d studied about Andorian biology had made it clear that members of that species couldn’t afford to live at such a leisurely pace. They had to contend with two extremely unforgiving biological constraints: four sexes and a narrow window of reproductive opportunity.

  Nog quietly rose from his chair and approached Shar, following the curvature of the table until the two were less than a meter apart. He watched Shar’s impassive face, well aware that he could offer no words that might assuage Shar’s pain. All he had to offer was his presence.

  Acting on a sudden impulse, he offered that presence, stepping toward Shar and drawing him into a gentle embrace. He felt Shar’s body stiffen as though responding to an attack. Then the Andorian relaxed, evidently overcoming the violence that came so naturally to Andorians in dire emotional straits. Shar seemed to be accepting Nog’s gesture as it was intended.

  Seconds or perhaps minutes later, Nog disengaged himself and took a step back. I want to help you through this. If only I had the words.

  As Nog took another silent step back, Shar broke the lengthening silence. “Nog?”

  “Yes?”

  “Watch where you’re going. You’re about to step into your tube grubs.”

  Still lying on the table, Shar’s padd suddenly began emitting a rhythmic, repeating bleep. Nog felt a surge of gratitude for the interruption. Shar immediately got busy tapping at the padd’s controls.

  “The automated linguistics protocols seem to have finally translated a few large chunks of the alien text,” he said, his voice still slightly quavering.

  Nog thought Shar sounded apologetic for having even raised the subject when the problem of the Nyazen blockade still remained unsolved. But Nog hadn’t ordered Shar to ignore his computer alarms. And, though he didn’t have time to think much about it at the moment, he had to admit that he was probably every bit as curious about the alien text as Shar was. Maybe the text could even shed some light on defeating the blockade. Nog allowed himself the faint hope that the text might contain just the lucky break he needed.

  “Well? Any major mysteries solved?”

  Shar’s eyes were rapidly skimming back and forth across the padd, his face a mask of fascination. “Maybe you’d better see for yourself.”

  Chief medical officer’s personal log, stardate 53578.6

  Part of me knows that the size of the room isn’t really changing. The quarters Ezri and I share are small—cozy, she would probably say—but I know that the bulkheads can’t actually move.

  Still, I’d be willing to swear that they do. When I lie on the bunk and close my eyes, I sometimes sense the ceiling dropping slowly toward me.

  But I can live with it, at least for now. At least there’s nobody here to witness what I’m becoming, except for the times when Ezri drops in to check on me. I smile and search for clever, reassuring things to say to her. There’s still enough of me left in here to tell that she’s anything but reassured. Just how clever my remaining words are I can’t say. Nor can I understand how she can ever look at me the same way she used to. The Julian Bashir she loves simply isn’t in here anymore. When the rest of whatever it is I’ve been my whole life finally finishes boiling off, what will be left for her to love?

  Then there are what I’ve come to call my “red periods.” When I was an intern, I once treated a severely autistic eight-year-old child. She didn’t like to be touched, and if anything in her environment changed too quickly, she would succumb to fits of blind rage, lashing out with fists, feet, and teeth.

  Now, at least some of the time, I think I understand how her world must have looked from the inside. Especially when I can’t remember some simple thing. Some ridiculously common bit of knowledge, like a word with more than three syllables. Or the moment when I realized that I no longer could read, speak, or think in Latin. Or when I tried to ask the replicator for a cup of Darjeeling and instead just confused the computer. I can’t even get the damned sonic shower working on the first try.

  Thinking about things like preganglionic fibers or postganglionic nerves right now only makes me want to weep. Or smash something.

  On the bulkhead beside the bunk are the words I etched this afternoon with one of the laser exoscalpels Ezri overlooked the last time she’d tried to rid our quarters of anything that might endanger me. My clumsy wall engraving occurred during one of those “red periods,” and evidently involved my very last vestiges of Latin. I see that I’d been thoughtful enough at the time to carve an English translation as well. My own personal Rosetta stone, rendered in a hand that looks too childlike to be my own. In a few hours, it could be my epitaph as well.

  “Vox et praeterea nihil.”

  “Voice and nothing more.”

  When I last closed my eyes to survey the progressive damage still going on inside my mind, it took longer than ever even to reach the outside of my memory cathedral. To get to the front steps, I had to step across an open pit filled with fragments of cobbles and concrete, apparently left behind by some massive piece of demolition equipment. An east-facing buttress was almost entirely gone, shattered by some force I couldn’t even imagine.

  Inside, the dome had begun letting in slivers of sunlight through several long cracks that weren’t visible from the outside, as though some gigantic predatory bird had just raked its talons through the stonework and glass. Rubble lay everywhere, with books and papers scattered randomly against pieces of cracked, upended masonry and shattered bookcases. Tapestries lay twisted and soiled, discarded haphazardly across the floor. I started up the staircase leading to the upper-level library and paused on the fifth step from the bottom. It no longer squeaked.

  If my memory processes had been functioning properly, that step would have squeaked automatically in response to the pressure of my mental foot.

  Withdrawing from the staircase and walking through the main gallery, I saw that the dream corridor was completely bricked up. This had been the tunnel entrance leading to a twenty-second-century-vintage outbuilding where I kept my dreams in temporary storage until eventually filing them away permanently under the dome. Everywhere else I looked, portals and entryways were similarly barred. Several slender, spidery creatures worked diligently to add to the chaos.

  Each of them had Kukalaka’s gumdrop eyes.

  It seemed that there probably wasn’t much more room left inside the Hagia Sophia than there was in my shrinking quarters. And I filled the tiny soundproofed space around me with screams.

  14

  As Quark dressed for the evening, his belly roiled with a curious mixture of anticipation and fear. The anticipation was easy enough to understand—Ro Laren was an extraordinarily attractive female. The fear was a little harder to fathom. After all, tonight wouldn’t be the first time he and Ro had shared dinner together. But it would be the first time he had been the one to pick the evening’s activities.

  On the previous occasion, Ro had treated him to an evening of pointlessly strenuous windsurfing on a body of water called the Columbia River, which she had told him she’d visited during her Starfleet Academy days. No fun at all really, except for the company.

  He set aside the tooth sharpener and inspected his tuxedoed reflection one last time. What if she can’t relate to this holosuite scenario at all? he thought as he carefully smoothed his cummerbund and adjusted the knot on his black bow tie. It’s not as though she’s some nostalgia-crazed hew-mon.

  As he made his way from his quarters onto the lightly populated Promenade, he tried to put his lingering misgivings aside. Whether or not Ro would appreciate Las Vegas might not matter any more than Quark’s attitude toward windsurfing had.

  Because if there was one being in the entire quadrant capable of putting Ro into a romantic frame of mind, it was Vic.

  He entered the bar and crossed to the spiral staircase that led to the upper level and the holosuites. Behind the bar, Frool was dol
ing out drinks to a pair of Rigelians and a Valerian while Morn appeared to be trying to regale them all with one of his innumerable traveler’s tales. Quark walked quickly to avoid being drawn into the verbal melee. As he ascended, he glanced down toward the dabo wheel, where Broik was taking drink orders while Deputy Etana watched a hulking Nausicaan with obvious suspicion. Hetik, the aggressively profitable dabo boy Treir had hired, was doing an admirable job hustling the dabo customers—representatives of at least a half-dozen worlds—who had obviously been drawn to the gaming area by Treir’s abundant charms. The tall Orion woman met Quark’s gaze and regarded him with an unrestrained smirk. He wondered yet again what she had really said to Ro about their impending dinner engagement, then decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about. It’s never too late to fire the staff, Quark thought, quoting the 193rd Rule of Acquisition to himself. Let’s see how the evening goes first.

  There still was no sign of Ro, which concerned him. She was nothing if not punctual. Then he opened the holosuite door, where Julian Bashir’s 1962 Las Vegas lounge scenario was perpetually up and running—except on those occasions when Vic himself voluntarily took his own program off-line. The band was tuning, perky cocktail waitresses were serving, and hew-mon alcoholic beverages of various sorts were flowing freely among the sparse but growing dinner crowd. Quark noted with considerable relief that Taran’atar apparently hadn’t left the place in ruins after his visit a little earlier. It was important that everything go perfectly tonight.

  Ro was already seated at a table not far from the stage, looking exquisite, if somewhat uncomfortable, in a black, off-the-shoulder evening gown. He had no idea whether she was as uneasy in this twentieth-century Earth scenario as he had been trying to control a holographic boat that seemed bent on tossing him overboard. But she didn’t appear ready to bolt. At least not yet.

  Which, Quark realized, had to be due to the reassuring presence of Vic Fontaine, who stood near Ro’s table, an authentically archaic-looking stage microphone in his hand.