Cathedral

by Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels

  He pounded away down the corridor at a flat-out run, a tumult of voices falling away behind him, but there was no immediate pursuit. After several minutes of running, the corridor widened into another room. It was a comfortably appointed lounge, where a man and a woman sat side by side on a low sofa, each of them reading silently. And studiously ignoring one another.

  They were much younger than the way he remembered them, so much so that he almost failed to recognize them as Richard and Amsha Bashir, his parents. So intent were they on their respective reading material—Father pored over what appeared to be a blueprint of some sort, while Mother studied an old-fashioned hard-cover thriller—that they both failed to notice his entrance. Not at all unusual, really. A bitter smile came to his lips. Some things never change.

  “Hello, Mother,” Julian said. “Father.”

  Father looked up from his blueprint and offered Julian an uneasy smile. “Ah, there you are, Jules.”

  Mother matched Father’s wan smile. “We were beginning to think you were lost.”

  Julian said nothing. I am lost, he thought, until he began recognizing some of the details of the room’s appointments. The corner chair, upholstered in a scaly gray leather made from the hide of some genetically altered beast. A bas-relief on the wall depicting one of the local eight-legged riding animals. Those details had been among the earliest trophies he’d placed in the Hagia Sophia.

  I’m in the waiting room. On Adigeon Prime.

  “Why have you brought me here again?” Julian said, glaring at his father.

  A scowl creased Father’s swarthy features. “Because it’s necessary, Jules.”

  “Because I turned out so dumb, you mean.”

  Mother adopted a sad, long-suffering expression. “Because we want you to have a chance to lead a happy, fulfilled life, Jules. And once the procedures are done, that’s exactly what you’ll have.”

  Julian struggled against his growing confusion. “We already did this once, Father. When I was six.”

  Father rose to his feet, his scowl deepening. “I’d never know it from looking at you now, Jules.”

  “Stop calling me that,” Julian said, an arc of rage sparking across some gap in his soul. “I’m Julian now. I’ve been Julian ever since I came to understand what you’d done to me here.”

  Mother rose and approached Julian, taking both of his hands, holding their palms upward. “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you really the same Julian we brought home from Adigeon Prime?”

  Julian looked down at his hands, encircled by hers, and studied them. They were the hands of a grown man, rather than those of a six-year-old child. In a rush, he realized that he could no longer remember having come to Adigeon Prime as a child.

  Because he had never been here.

  Because he had never undergone the “procedures.”

  Because he was now the grown man who young, ungenengineered Jules Bashir would have become, had he been left alone, unaltered.

  Father eyed the chronometer on his wrist with evident impatience. “Get ready, Jules. The doctors will be coming to examine you any minute now.”

  Julian thought about that for a long, silent interval. Perhaps he was being offered a way to recover everything he had lost. Everything that the alien cathedral had taken from him. Or perhaps not.

  Procedures. They think I’m nothing without their precious procedures. And maybe they’re right.

  Mother held his hands more tightly. Julian saw great tears of disappointment pooling in her eyes. “We only want what’s best for you, Jules. We love you so much—”

  He shook her hands away. “You obviously don’t love me the way I am now,” he said, taking a backward step and nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. He felt slow and awkward as well as stupid.

  A door across the room opened, and Richard Bashir turned toward the sound, blocking Julian’s view momentarily. Then he turned back, smiling. “The doctors are ready to see you now, Jules.”

  Julian’s breath caught in his throat when he saw that the two burly orderlies he had just eluded were standing in the open doorway, menacing glares fixed on their faces, fists as big as cured hams planted on their hips.

  Limbs flailing, Julian ran from the room the same way he’d entered.

  The air shaft was cold and filthy, but at least he was out of sight. Safe, if only for the moment. His hands shaking, Julian peered through the ventilation grill at the white corridor several meters below. Nobody seemed to be searching for him. He had no idea how long he’d lain in the cramped conduit, and wondered how much longer he could continue to hide. Or if he even should.

  Maybe those men only wanted to make me smart, the way Mother and Father said. He wondered how he could ever hope to recover what he’d lost if he remained too frightened to take a chance and let them try.

  He recalled how doctors had always frightened him during his childhood, until he’d understood that they were only trying to help him. The death of that poor little girl back on Invernia II, which he had witnessed at the tender age of ten, had occurred because an ion storm had prevented anybody from reaching a doctor in time—and because nobody had known that a local herb could have saved her from the fever that took her life. That sad incident had made him want to become a doctor, a notion that had already been in the back of his mind ever since five-year-old Jules had begun stitching up Kukalaka’s wounds.

  That memory hadn’t been taken from him, he realized. He tried to recall exactly what it was that had been hunting down and killing his memories, but couldn’t. All he could come up with was the vague impression that his memories had been somehow related to a church of some sort.

  Footfalls echoed loudly in the corridor below, startling Julian into clunking his head into the side of the air shaft. Ignoring the sharp pain, he looked through the grillwork again to see who was coming. The footfalls crescendoed, and a moment later the two large orderlies walked by directly beneath Julian’s vantage point. They were escorting a small figure who appeared to be a patient. He was a frail boy who couldn’t have been older than six. Julian could hear him crying; one of the orderlies appeared to be muttering bland reassurances to the child.

  Julian’s heart leaped into his throat when the boy looked up at one of the men, turning his tear-streaked face ceilingward, his eyes bright and alert. The child bore little resemblance to the dull, vacant creature Julian had expected to see. But there was no mistaking his identity.

  The weeping, terrified patient was young Jules Bashir. And he was about to undergo, Julian was certain, the “procedures” his parents had arranged.

  A short while later, Julian clambered down from the stifling air duct into another corridor, which turned out, thankfully, to be empty. Hearing approaching footfalls, he flattened himself against the wall. Julian knew he had an important task to perform here, but couldn’t quite recall what it was. Trying to think in terms of plans and objectives was proving utterly frustrating.

  But there wasn’t time to think as the footfalls grew near. The orderlies, their young charge between them, passed Julian along a perpendicular corridor. He heaved a sigh of relief as they went by without noticing him, then quietly shadowed them through several turns. Luckily, they never turned to look behind them, and the sounds of their passage covered whatever noise Julian’s pursuit was making.

  Peering from around a corner, Julian watched as the two large men shepherded young Jules through a door to what appeared to be some sort of lab or infirmary. Moments later, the two men emerged again into the corridor—this time without the child—and walked away, taking no notice of Julian as they disappeared around another bend in the hallway.

  Responding intuitively to some vague ghost of a memory, Julian saw that this had to be the place. The place where the doctors changed me.

  He moved quietly to the unlocked door, pushed it open, and stepped into the room.

  The boy sat in a too-large, swept-back chair. His slight body al
l but lost in his bulky hospital gown, the child’s slippered feet dangled several centimeters off the sterile floor. His small hands were in his lap, clutching at one another as though each were competing for the protection of the other. Little Jules was facing in Julian’s direction, while a trio of graceful, birdlike Adigeons—evidently doctors or surgeons—handled hypos and tricorders, their white-smocked backs to the door, apparently oblivious to Julian’s presence. The boy, though he clearly had noticed Julian’s entrance immediately, said nothing. He made no sign that might serve to alert the Adigeons.

  Clever child.

  Julian stood in silence, studying the boy’s dusky eyes—the same eyes that once studied him from the other side of his father’s old-fashioned looking glass—for what seemed like minutes, seeking some justification there for his parents’ fervid desire to remold and remake him. The child’s eyes, though betraying a hard edge of fear, nevertheless smoldered with something irrepressible. This boy seemed to be anything but the afflicted alter ego his parents had assured him that he was so much better off without. Young Jules bore scant resemblance to the cautionary specter that had followed him ever since the day when fifteen-year-old Julian Subatoi Bashir had learned the far-reaching extent of the genetic enhancements his parents had secured for him on Adigeon Prime. The child looked more like the bright if slightly learning-disabled doppelganger who sometimes stalked Julian’s dreams like the ghost of a murdered twin.

  Despite the accelerating deterioration of his own intellect and perceptions, Julian knew that he could believe in one simple, objective truth about young Jules simply by meeting his gaze—somebody was in there, a tenacious soul stoking an inner fire.

  A pointed question suddenly jolted him: Would his parents’ well-intentioned interference douse those fires?

  Julian fell out of his reverie when he noticed that one of the three Adigeons had turned to him. The creature glared at him, its feathery neck ruff rising in agitation. “How did you get in here?”

  The other two Adigeons turned to him as well. “Don’t worry, Doctor,” said a second one. “Don’t you recognize him? He’s the mature version of the youngling we’re treating.”

  “I see,” said the first Adigeon, scouring Julian from top to bottom with one of its side-mounted, lidless eyes. “Well, we certainly do seem to have made a botch of things, haven’t we?”

  “I’ll call the large humans back in to remove him,” said the third physician. “If he interferes with these procedures, even accidentally, who knows what will happen to this child as it matures?”

  Who knows? Julian thought, wondering whether he would have fallen so far had he never been forced to climb so high in the first place. Still, what these doctors wanted sounded like what he should want as well. As though it were the whole point of his having come to this place. He wished he could remember more than that.

  And that the boy’s pleading eyes didn’t make the whole endeavor feel so completely wrong.

  Young Jules sat, watching in silence. But Julian sensed that the boy wasn’t simply staring vacantly. He seemed to be paying very close attention to the tableau before him. Discordant music played quietly in the background, echoing down some distant corridor.

  The first Adigeon approached Julian until he could smell the creature’s cool breath. Its aroma was an incongruous mixture of buttered popcorn, peppermint, and Tarkalean tea. “You’re not supposed to be here,” it said.

  His arm suddenly tremulous, Julian pointed to the boy—the person he had once been, so long ago. And without being certain why, he came to an utterly visceral decision.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the Adigeon repeated, raising one of its taloned hands threateningly.

  “Neither is he,” Julian said, and then rushed the delicate alien, bowling him over into the other two Adigeons. Surprised, they collapsed in a heap of flapping limbs. Julian knew they wouldn’t stay down long. He only had seconds.

  He moved quickly to young Jules, whose eyes had widened in either fright or awe, or perhaps both. The child offered no resistance when Julian took his hand, pulled him to his feet, and marched him through the laboratory door.

  They stopped for a moment in the corridor, regarding one another appraisingly. “Thank you,” Jules said. Julian grinned down at the boy. Thank me, he thought. And then they ran together down the corridor.

  Past the orderlies, who gave chase but swiftly fell behind, waving lollipops in the air in their impotent rage.

  Past a very surprised Richard and Amsha Bashir, whose confused, angry shouts died away as they sprinted across the waiting room, knocking over a potted plant from which sprays of royal red, heart-shaped flowers spilled.

  Past the astonished-looking members of the Starfleet Medical oral examination jury. The Vulcan’s mouth made an O of surprise as Jack’s top hat fell from his head.

  Julian felt a stitch in his side and stopped to catch his breath. Jules came to a halt beside him, standing in companionable silence. Julian looked up. The Adigeon Prime hospital was gone. Seemingly kilometers above their heads, the wildly intersecting interdimensional geometries of the alien artifact soared, appearing somehow inside out.

  Because I’ve been inside the thing all along. All of us from the Sagan have been inside it.

  He could feel that everything he hadn’t been able to remember was flooding back to him. He stared up into the artifact’s ever-shifting skyscape of counterintuitively constructed beams, braces, and spires as he felt his body and mind surge with every genetically enhanced talent he’d feared had been lost forever. Turning his eyes back to young Jules, Julian regarded the child for a long moment before speaking.

  But he was completely at a loss as to why.

  “My God,” he said. “What have I just done?” Unearthly crystalline sounds, like those he’d first heard aboard the Sagan, began reverberating gently in the middle distance. Or perhaps they were coming from light-years away.

  The boy smiled. “You finally recognized me.”

  “I think you mean I rescued you. And it was a stupid thing for me to do, considering that it should have made whatever the artifact did to me permanent.”

  “No,” Jules said with a solemn shake of his head. “It was the act of a simple but decent man.”

  “But I prevented you from…having the ‘procedures.’ Where does that leave me?”

  “You’ve merely cut a tether to an unhealthy part of your past,” Jules said, then pointed straight up. Julian’s neck and eyes followed the gesture. “Consider your love-hate relationship with me resolved.”

  The gilded dome of the Hagia Sophia now arced majestically over their heads. The discordant yet not unpleasant music swelled through the basilica in long, reverberating strains. The cathedral’s gallery stretchedout to a remote vanishing point, restored to its full sixth-century splendor. Every painting, every tapestry, every sculpture appeared to be back in its appointed place and repaired to its original condition.

  My memory cathedral.

  Relief vied with incomprehension. “How?”

  Jules beamed at him. “You’ll have to find your own answers, Julian,” the boy said as he began walking. Julian quickly followed, easily keeping pace as Jules moved through the gallery.

  Julian felt a rush of gratitude for the inexplicable return of his mental acuity as one possible answer immediately presented itself. Making my peace with Jules must have snapped me loose from all the other quantum realities. All those other worlds in which Mother and Father never brought me to Adigeon Prime.

  Jules nodded, as though he were privy to Julian’s innermost thoughts. Of course, Julian thought, how could he not be?

  “That’s undoubtedly part of it,” the boy said, coming to a stop beside the staircase leading to the main library. “But not the biggest part.”

  “So you’re saying that I’m missing the point about what happened here,” Julian said as he walked a short distance up the staircase. He put all his weight on the fifth step, and it made a sat
isfying squeaking sound in response. Just as it was supposed to.

  “Yup,” the boy said.

  He looked down the staircase toward Jules. “This doesn’t make sense. How could this place ‘realign my worldline’ when I actively prevented the procedures that would have turned you into me?”

  Without saying a word, Jules strode toward a large stained-glass window that loomed nearby. Julian abandoned the staircase and followed the boy, noting that both of their reflections were clearly visible in the glass. Julian realized then that he was clad once again in a Starfleet duty uniform—complete with a combadge—and wondered idly what had become of the environmental suit he’d been wearing when the away team had beamed into the cathedral.

  The child smiled up at Julian. “Let me give you a hint, then. Every decision you made in here was without the benefit of Adigeon Prime genetic engineering.”

  “I wasn’t given much choice about that.”

  “Exactly,” Jules said. “But in spite of that, you displayed courage and compassion. And not just here. Back aboard the Defiant as well.” Then the child approached him, as though seeking a brotherly embrace.

  Julian put his arms around the child—and was surprised to feel the youngster’s volume seeming to diminish. Looking toward their reflected images, he watched in shock as the child’s body grew insubstantial, literally melting into his own before vanishing, wraithlike.

  Except for the image of the boy’s smile, which seemed to linger on the glass a moment longer before it, too, disappeared.

  In that instant, Julian came to an epiphanic understanding of his unexpected rapprochement with his long-vanished alter ego. For the first time in his life, he saw that there was no difference, at the core, between Jules and himself.

  Jules never left me. He’s been with me all my life. And Adigeon Prime never changed that.

  Julian looked up, taking in the vista that stretched into infinity above his head. The Hagia Sophia’s central dome had given way to the mind-bending internal geometries of the alien cathedral. A Wonderland, Julian thought, recalling a beloved bit of verse from his childhood.