Cathedral

by Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels

  But she saw a huge flaw in the general’s logic, and didn’t hesitate to bring it up. “I’m Attainted. I’d be useless to you.”

  “Stop listening to the orthodoxy’s propaganda,” he said, military steel flashing behind his voice. “You obviously don’t have a clear picture of how much general discontent there is on Bajor about your Attainder.”

  Or about how thoroughly I’ve fractured my people’s faith, she thought, a bitter taste in her mouth.

  “Attainted or not, you’re considered a hero by many people,” Lenaris continued. “A hero in war and a hero in peace. And now you can be a hero in a profound cultural struggle.”

  She felt anger warm her cheeks. “I never wanted to be anybody’s hero. And I’m not going to be a religious symbol. That’s Yevir’s game.”

  He sighed. “Nerys, have you ever had the pleasure of meeting Li Nalas?”

  “Of course I have,” she said, frowning as she recalled the day the brave symbol of the resistance was murdered by other men bent on remaking Bajor in their own image. “You know that. We’ve both met him.”

  “So we both know that we sometimes aren’t given a choice in these matters.”

  Kira was incredulous. “You’re saying it’s my destiny to support the Ohalavaru?”

  “Call it what you will,” he said, shrugging. “But we both know that your support would greatly influence whether or not Solis becomes the next kai. Unless you prefer to see Yevir in that position. Remember, he’s a relatively young man. He could be kai for the rest of your life.”

  Kira couldn’t dispute the general on most of these points. But it all still felt fundamentally wrong to her.

  After taking a long, silent moment to compose her thoughts, she said, “I simply can’t risk dividing Bajor any further. Especially not so close to Bajor’s official entry into the Federation. Until Bajor’s admission, the Emissary’s work here is incomplete.”

  It was Lenaris’s turn to appear incredulous. “The Emissary? Benjamin Sisko. Nerys, I have nothing but respect for your former commander, but he is part of the past. You should embrace the future instead.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m trying to do, Holem. If the Ohalavaru would simply stand back, be objective, and try to look at the bigger political picture, they might be able to see that now isn’t the best time to open up political rifts. Surely Vedek Solis can understand that.”

  “It was Vedek Solis who asked me to speak with you today.”

  Kira let out a weary sigh. “Has either of you considered the Bajor–Cardassia talks?”

  “As little as possible,” he said with another shrug. “What about them?”

  “The talks are stalled at the moment. What chance will we have of restarting them if we’re preoccupied with our own religious squabbles?”

  Lenaris was clearly unmoved. “If the talks with Cardassia are stalled, then you can rest assured that the cause is Cardassian intransigence. Nothing that’s happening on Bajor now or in the future will change that one way or the other.”

  But Kira knew better. She had already spoken at length about this very topic with Shakaar. And as far as she was concerned, the first minister could make a nice living conducting master classes in intransigence.

  “General, I’d like you to speak to Solis for me,” Kira said after another lengthy pause. “Ask him to be a little gentler in pushing the Ohalavaru agenda. At least until the current business with the Federation and Cardassia is resolved. There really is a bigger picture to consider here, Holem. Bigger than Solis. Bigger than Yevir. And certainly bigger than either of us.”

  Lenaris rose and set his empty cup on her desk. He looked sad, deflated. “You’ve changed, Nerys.”

  She bristled. “Yes. I’ve become a bit wiser about doing what’s right for my people.”

  “You worry about dividing Bajor,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But that sinoraptor’s already jumped the fence. That happened the moment you uploaded Ohalu’s suppressed prophecies onto the Bajoran comnet. The only question we ought to be asking now is how best to manage that division.”

  “I’ll leave that to wiser heads than mine, thank you.”

  “Whose heads?” Lenaris walked over to the painting that hung on her wall, idly examining it for a moment before turning back to her. “Yevir’s? Vedek Scio’s? Vedek Eran’s? The other hard-liners? This ‘division’ you’re so frightened of might actually be the beginning of Bajor’s future unity, Nerys. The start of a transformation into something with more vision than the current orthodoxy has. Something truer to the plans of the Prophets.”

  Kira’s thoughts wandered back to the pivotal battles she had fought on behalf of the ancient Bajora after she had been thrown thirty millennia into her planet’s past. She hadn’t hesitated to get involved then. But grappling in the same way with the future seemed an altogether different matter.

  “Let history make those decisions,” she said. “Not me.”

  His voice rose in both passion and volume. “Nerys, you are history. Wasn’t it you who introduced us to Ohalu’s truth after the vedeks tried to destroy it? Wasn’t it you who created this ‘division’ in the first place?”

  “I’m not proud of it. I just did what had to be done to let our people make up their own minds about their faith. To keep Yevir from short-circuiting those decisions by suppressing Ohalu’s prophecies.”

  A triumphant smile spread slowly across the general’s face. “You acted to defend prophecies which have turned out to be utterly, perfectly correct. Not just some of them. All of them, Nerys. Given those facts, how could Ohalu’s writings be anything but the inspired words of the Prophets? And isn’t your first duty to them?”

  Kira couldn’t avoid the ring of truth his words carried. How easy it would be to simply go along. To use the Ohalavaru as a weapon against Yevir and his ilk. But at what cost to Bajor’s future? Other than her Orb experiences, she had never claimed to have any special knowledge of the minds of the Prophets. But surely such convulsions couldn’t be part of their plan.

  “No,” she said quietly, her voice pitched almost in a whisper.

  The general nodded, then took a different tack. “Do you think you might be more kindly disposed toward us if we were to convince the Vedek Assembly to reverse your Attainder?”

  She decided that she had had just about enough of this. Friendship and rank would go just so far. “Why not just tow all fourteen planets in the system into a straight line?” she said. “It would probably be easier. Besides, my religious status is something personal, between me and the Prophets and—”

  “—and none of my damned business,” he said with a chuckle, interrupting her. “Forgive me, Nerys. I overreached myself.”

  The general moved toward the door, which opened for him. Then he turned around on the threshold and faced her. “It’s clear to me now that you’re not ready to come along with us on this. At least not just yet.”

  With that, he bid her a warm good-bye and departed. Alone in her office, Kira recalled how tenacious a fighter her old friend had been during the bad old days of the Occupation.

  And she was absolutely certain that she hadn’t heard the last of the Ohalavaru. Or of their agenda for Bajor.

  15

  Taking care to tread quietly, Ezri entered the quarters she shared with Julian. She wanted to look in on him once more before preparing for the tactical briefing.

  “Hello, Julian.”

  He was sitting cross-legged on the bunk, his usually immaculate hair disheveled, his uniform jacket torn and askew, his eyes closed as though he had been deep in meditation. When they opened, she saw a momentary whirlpool of confusion in their brown depths.

  Then he smiled at her.

  She smiled back, relieved. She hadn’t startled him this time. And he wasn’t throwing things. Or screaming.

  “You’re quite pretty,” he said, his voice sounding like a kilometer of gravel-strewn road. Her smile wavered as she looked into his eyes. Did he even recognize her?
>
  Her gaze was drawn to the uneven lettering that Julian had evidently burned into the bulkhead during one of her absences. Beside a few archaic Terran words was scrawled Voice and nothing more.

  Was that how Julian saw himself during his lucid moments? Ezri found the idea difficult to understand. She had come to believe in his steady judgment, his rock-solid humanity, the way a mathematician accepts a geometrical axiom. She found the phrase Julian had carved to be a far better description of herself. Nothing but appearances, she thought. Pips on a uniform that’s no longer even the right color.

  She recalled her counseling training. “Impostor syndrome” was how the texts had described the feelings she was having. The irrational conviction that one’s continued presence in a given job is somehow fraudulent. What frightened Ezri most about the notion was that it felt completely rational.

  Because she knew it was the truth.

  It was then that she noticed the laser scalpel on the beside table. The instrument lay discarded, apparently forgotten, atop a battered copy of a book titled Alice in Wonderland, a favorite from Julian’s childhood. Ezri noticed then that the scalpel was still lit up and active. Not good. She realized that he must be stashing away some of his instruments. Or perhaps her own shortcomings had prevented her from finding and removing all the dangerous objects that were already in their quarters.

  Some exec I am. I can’t even keep the sharp objects away from the man I love.

  Carefully meeting Julian’s curiously childlike gaze, Ezri sat on the bunk beside him. Without calling attention to the gesture, she carefully picked up the scalpel and shut it off with a quiet flick of her thumb. She also took the dermal regenerator.

  He noticed. “Those’re mine,” he said, scowling, his eyes hawklike.

  Careful, she told herself. The last thing she wanted was to provoke him into another frustrated tantrum. She didn’t want to be forced to have him sedated. What would be left of him after he woke up?

  “It’s all right, Julian,” she said, trying to keep her tone pleasant without offering any condescension—that would be a sure way of setting him off. “You weren’t planning on doing any surgery anytime soon, were you?”

  Only then did she notice the small teddy bear that lay partially concealed by the chaotic bedclothes. The threadbare animal was missing an eye. She recognized Kukalaka, Julian’s childhood teddy bear, which she had once been amused to discover that he still owned. Until now she hadn’t realized that he had brought it along with him to the Gamma Quadrant.

  Then she saw the crazy quilt of razor-thin, intersecting lines across the stuffed creature’s abdomen. Obviously Julian had been using Kukalaka to practice whatever surgical skills he could still remember.

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m a doctor. I need my instruments.”

  Julian’s manner made her think of her brother Norvo. When they were little, he had announced that he was a dilithium miner. Norvo’s face had had that same earnest expression.

  “Yes, Julian. But doctors keep their instruments in the medical bay.” She tucked the tools into a pouch on her jacket. “I’ll take these there for you, while you stay here and get some rest.”

  “I don’t need to rest.” He pushed himself off the bed, reaching his feet with a stumble she’d never seen before. “I have to go to the medical bay, too.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Julian.”

  He elbowed his way toward the door. In the room’s tight confines, it was difficult to stay out of his way.

  “There’s a patient I need to see.” The door whooshed open as he approached it. He made a dismissive gesture toward Kukalaka, who still lay on the bed. “A real patient. There’s some…therapy I need to administer.”

  Sacagawea, she thought. He was talking about their D’Naali guide.

  “Julian, you need to stay here. You’re in no condition to care for a patient. Besides, Ensign Richter and Ensign Juarez can give the alien whatever therapy he might need.”

  He regarded her in silence for a lengthy moment, apparently about to explode in an emotional outburst. But when he finally spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm and gentle.

  “You don’t understand, Ezri. The therapy isn’t for my patient. It’s for me.”

  Ezri suddenly understood something: Whatever skills the artifact had taken from Julian, his courage and determination—his emotional intelligence—still remained with him, at least in some measure. And she knew that now wasn’t the time to hide—or to surrender. Not while the alien artifact still held onto its secrets.

  All he seemed to be asking for was some simple dignity. Maybe, she thought, that’s the only thing nobody can ever truly take from any of us.

  Tears stung her eyes as she forced aside all thought of her own loss. Simultaneously galvanized and shamed by Julian’s courage, she arrived at a command decision.

  “Let me walk with you to the medical bay, Julian.” A moment later, they were moving together down the corridor.

  And for at least a few fleeting minutes she felt far less like an impostor. She wished she could believe that the feeling would last.

  Right ahead of Shar, Nog stepped onto the bridge. He relished the solid feel of his left leg as he put his weight on it. The new limb seemed every bit as strong as the other one. Don’t get too attached to it, he reminded himself, then nearly laughed aloud at the absurdity of the notion.

  Seated at the ops console, Ensign Tenmei glanced over her shoulder, acknowledging Nog and Shar with a smile and a nod. Commander Vaughn swiveled the command chair in their direction, an expectant expression on his face.

  “Have you found a way around the blockade problem yet?”

  Nog shook his head, feeling somewhat disappointed with himself. “Not quite, sir. We’re still working on that.”

  “We did make another discovery, Captain,” Shar said. “And we thought it best to bring it to your attention immediately. It concerns the alien text.”

  Vaughn’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve translated it.”

  “Partially,” Shar said, nodding. “I believe we’ve uncovered some of the artifact’s history, or at least some sort of…origin myth.”

  “Go on,” Vaughn said, stroking his silver beard thoughtfully.

  “Apparently the Oort cloud artifact was once located on the surface of an inhabited planet,” Shar said.

  Bowers approached from the tactical station, his curiosity obviously piqued. “And where is this planet now?”

  “Lots of places, as far as we can tell,” Nog said. “And in lots of little pieces.”

  “The artifact’s world of origin was apparently destroyed aeons ago,” Shar said, “in some great, planetary-scale cataclysm.”

  “Caused by what?” Vaughn wanted to know.

  “We think by the artifact itself,” said Nog. “Whatever the artifact did released enough energy to send it way out here, to the outskirts of the system.”

  Vaughn gestured toward the main viewer, which continuously displayed the object’s eternal tumble. “It’s powerful enough to destroy an entire planet?”

  “I don’t think there’s much that’s beyond its capabilities,” Shar said. “The text mentions a progenitor species, perhaps ancestral to both the D’Naali and the Nyazen, who constructed the artifact to ‘reap the bounty of the many unseen realms.’”

  Bowers frowned. “‘Unseen realms’?”

  “Parallel universes, perhaps,” Vaughn said. “Maybe it’s some kind of interdimensional power collector.”

  “That’s our best guess,” Nog said. “We think it was designed to draw energy out of higher-dimensional spaces and the parallel universes adjacent to our own.”

  Bowers looked impressed. “I guess that would explain why parts of the thing are always bobbing in and out of normal space.”

  “And it might also explain,” Tenmei said, “the weird quantum resonance patterns the Sagan’ s been giving off. The shuttle must be carrying the fingerprints of some of those other universes.”
>
  Shar nodded, his expression dour. “And if the artifact is some sort of energy collection device, that might also account for the power-draining effect it had on the Sagan.”

  “So what do you suppose happened to the people who built this thing?” Vaughn asked, his eyes riveted to the artifact on the screen.

  Bowers’s brow wrinkled in thought. “And how did they manage to incorporate stuff into this text about what happened after their homeworld got blown to kingdom come?”

  “That’s been bothering me, too,” Nog said. “From these translated fragments, it looks as though a number of people were aboard the artifact during the disaster. A few survivors evidently amended the text.”

  Shar glanced at his padd before weighing in on the matter. “Those survivors may have persisted for many generations, and might even be the remote ancestors of the D’Naali, the Nyazen, or both. Whatever really happened is shrouded in mythological language, so it’s hard to be certain. But it appears that the attempt these beings made to mine the adjacent dimensions unleashed forces that literally ripped their homeworld apart.”

  “And the artifact itself survived because it was in the eye of the storm,” Vaughn said.

  Shar nodded. “Exactly.”

  “And the forces that destroyed the planet flung the object way out here,” Nog said. The image of the powerful artifact caroming off billions of frozen planetesimals and icy Oort cloud fragments brought to mind a complicated bank shot on some cosmic dom-jot table.

  Vaughn rose from the command chair. “Good work, gentlemen. Mr. Bowers, you have the bridge. Mr. Nog, I want you and your people to keep searching for a way around that blockade.”

  “Aye, sir,” Nog found himself suppressing a sudden urge to smile. For some reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough. But he knew that a good engineer didn’t discuss such things with his captain until after he’d taken the time to test them.

  “Shar, I want you to come with me,” Vaughn said on his way to the turbolift.