Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust Read online

  All at once, Kira stood in a field of wild grass, surrounded by trees and hills, with children playing in the distance. Dressed in olive-drab pants and a vertically striped shirt of muted purple and green and yellow and red, Benjamin lay on a blanket with his long-dead first wife.

  “Jennifer,” she said, motioning to herself as though making a discovery. She wore a salmon-colored dress that sent a wide strap across her left shoulder.

  Benjamin examined their new locale and rose to a sitting position. Jennifer sat up as well. “Yes, that was her name,” he confirmed.

  “She is part of your existence.”

  “She is part of my past,” Benjamin clarified. “She’s no longer alive.” Kira believed that the statement must have been difficult for him to speak aloud, no matter how much time had passed since her death.

  “But she is part of your existence,” Jennifer persisted.

  “She was a most important part of my existence, but I lost her some time ago.”

  “Lost?” Jennifer asked. “What is this?”

  “In a linear existence,” Benjamin told her, “we can’t go back to the past to get something we left behind, so . . . it’s lost.” The reality that the word described plainly impacted him. Kira empathized with his pain. While she had never suffered the death of a spouse, she had lost lovers, as well as many family members and friends who had very much formed important parts of her existence.

  “It is inconceivable that any species could exist in such a manner,” Jennifer said, the expression on her face exposing her aversion to such a notion. A moment later, though, her eyes widened in sudden understanding: “You are deceiving us.”

  “No,” Sisko said. “This is the truth. This day, this . . . this park . . . it was almost . . . fifteen years ago—far in the past. It was a day that was very important to me . . . a day that shaped every day that followed. That is the essence of a linear existence. Each day affects the next.” Benjamin appeared satisfied with his explanation, but also as though he had never himself considered the nature of humanoid life in exactly that way. Kira had never done so either.

  Not far away, children ran through the grass, their voices joining with the chirps of birds to fill the air like the music of a summer’s day. Benjamin and Jennifer peered in that direction, and when Kira also looked, it surprised her to see another incarnation of the couple lying on a blanket in the park, wearing the same clothes and seeming for all the world like the same people. When the vedek glanced back, she saw the first Benjamin and Jennifer watching their doppelgängers.

  Kira’s heart still beat loudly in her ears as a strange sensation flowed over her. She felt somehow doubled in her own person, as though time had wrinkled and trapped different versions of her in its folds. She glanced around, expecting to espy another manifestation of herself, but she spotted none.

  “Listen to it,” the second Benjamin said, sitting up on the blanket.

  “To what?” the second Jennifer asked with a smile as she also pushed herself up.

  The second Benjamin lifted his hand and covered the eyes of the second Jennifer. “The sound of children playing,” he said. As he lowered his hand, he asked, “What could be more beautiful?”

  “So you like children?” Consistent with Benjamin’s comment about that day taking place fifteen years prior, it seemed to Kira that the conversation developing before her antedated the couple’s marriage, if not their entire romantic relationship.

  “That almost sounds like a domestic inquiry,” the second Benjamin said lightly.

  The second Jennifer shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve heard that Starfleet officers don’t want families because they complicate their lives.”

  “Starfleet officers don’t often find mates who want to raise families on a starship,” the second Benjamin replied.

  “That almost sounds like a domestic inquiry,” said the second Jennifer mischievously.

  “I think it was.”

  A memory, Kira thought. One of Benjamin’s memories. Within the historical event she beheld nestled another, older event, a story within a story. To Kira, the moment felt rife with possibilities—as it surely must have to the original participants. The couple leaned in toward each other until their lips met. They each raised a hand to caress the other’s cheek.

  Kira looked back toward the first Benjamin and Jennifer to see them still watching their doubles. The tension visible in Benjamin’s face—his rutted brow, clenched jaw, and trembling lower lip—laid bare his anguish. Kira’s friend and former commanding officer had rarely spoken to her of his first wife, but clearly the pain of losing her had run deep within him.

  Beside Benjamin, the Prophet manifesting as Jennifer raised a hand to her lips and deliberately kissed the tips of her fingers. The sensation seemed to startle her, and she turned to Benjamin with a quizzical mien. It took him a moment to respond.

  “As corporeal entities,” he explained, “humans find physical touch to cause pleasure.” Despite his words, he continued to look tortured.

  “Pleasure?” Jennifer asked. “What is this?” One detail after another, the Prophets wanted to know about worldly beings, about what it meant to have a body.

  “Good feelings,” Benjamin said quietly. “Happiness.” And yet he appeared anything but happy.

  “But this—” said another voice, one Kira did not recognize, and before the speaker completed his sentence, Benjamin turned to look at him. When he did, the venue slipped once more, from the calm and open park, bathed in sunlight and fresh air, to a frenzied and enclosed corridor, dense with shadows and smoke. People ran, some wearing Starfleet uniforms, some not. A red alert klaxon blared out its pulsating call above the cacophony of raised voices. The air tasted acrid. Amid the turmoil, Benjamin, once again in uniform, walked slowly forward beside a Bolian officer Kira had previously seen on the Saratoga bridge. “—is your existence,” the man concluded.

  “It’s difficult to be here,” Benjamin said, his tone quiet, his manner defeated. “More difficult than any other memory.”

  These are Benjamin’s memories, Kira realized. She traversed not through the real world nor through time, nor even through some mental construct created for her benefit, but through the recollections of the Emissary. She did not know the how or why of the process, or the propriety of it—it seemed to Kira like a violation of Benjamin’s privacy—but she believed that the Prophets had brought her there, and she had confidence in Their reasons and Their moral justifications for what took place.

  “Why?” the Bolian lieutenant asked Benjamin, wanting to know why he found that particular memory the most difficult of all. The two men walked past damaged equipment, jets of escaping gas, loose and hanging cables. Around them, Kira saw disheveled and wounded men and women. Benjamin plodded down the corridor past all of them, seeming to take almost no notice of the chaos around him.

  “Because . . .” Benjamin began. He walked as though in a trance. “Because this was the day . . .” He arrived at a door set into the side of the corridor, propped partially open. Smoke billowed out of the cabin beyond, which flickered with the hot orange glow of fire. “. . . that I lost Jennifer.” Benjamin stared into the cabin but made no attempt to enter it. Farther down the corridor, Kira saw other individuals watching him—Prophets observing Their Emissary, she thought.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Benjamin proclaimed. He turned and paced away from the door, but then he stopped, as though anticipating something. Past him, the corridor erupted in a rolling ball of flame. Inside it, a figure appeared: Jennifer Sisko, incongruously clad in her two-piece bathing suit. She emerged from the blaze and walked up to Benjamin.

  “Then why do you exist here?” she asked him.

  Confusion replaced the heartache showing on Benjamin’s face. “I don’t understand.”

  “You exist here,” Jennifer reiterated.

  Benjamin looked at her, clearly struggling to comprehend what she said. He glanced over his shoulder at the half-open door, then back at
Jennifer. Suddenly, a great white light rose in the corridor. It grew in intensity until it engulfed her, until it overwhelmed the surroundings, leaving Benjamin and Kira standing alone in a field of emptiness. He did not appear to see her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s happening?” He stared ahead into the luminous void.

  Kira’s stomach lurched as the weight of her body abruptly abandoned her. She floated in space as the white light faded, replaced by the shining blue streamers of energy that flowed through the Celestial Temple. She wore no environmental suit but did not suffer for it. She felt small in the great subspace tunnel, dwarfed by the radiant structures she’d seen so many times from the safety of a runabout or a starship.

  The vedek did not see Benjamin. She looked about in search of him and spotted an indistinguishable shape in the distance. As she attempted to identify it, it quickly grew into a massive form, resolving into a Cardassian warship. Kira gaped at the vessel as it soared past her. She watched it continue along the wormhole until a circular maw swirled into existence ahead of it, revealing a spread of distant stars. Kira immediately recognized a constellation in the Gamma Quadrant.

  The Cardassian ship surged out of the Celestial Temple. Instantly, the contours of the wormhole collapsed, pulling in on themselves until they flashed in a brilliant spark—and then nothing. Back in the immeasurable, empty whiteness, Kira once more saw Benjamin, though he still did not seem to see her.

  “Are you still there?” he asked, sounding concerned. “What just happened?”

  Back on the beach, Jennifer Sisko walked alongside Benjamin. “More of your kind,” she told him.

  “Another ship?” Benjamin asked. “In the wormhole?”

  “Wormhole?” Jennifer asked, and followed with a familiar refrain: “What is this?”

  “It is how we describe the passage that brought me here,” Benjamin said.

  In the Enterprise conference room, Captain Picard declared, “It is terminated.”

  “Terminated?” said Benjamin.

  “Our existence is disrupted whenever one of you enters the passage,” Picard said. The declaration would have concerned Kira had she not known that the Prophets would subsequently alter the Celestial Temple to allow the benign transit of starships through it.

  On the Saratoga bridge, a dark-haired female officer rose from her seat at the conn. “Your linear nature is inherently destructive,” she said.

  Another dark-haired woman, shorter, with Asian features, stood from her position at the operations station. “You have no regard for the consequences of your actions.”

  “That’s not true,” Benjamin protested. Kira saw that behind him, on the main viewscreen, the Borg-enhanced figure of Captain Picard looked on. “We’re aware that every choice we make has a consequence.”

  The Vulcan captain bounded up from the command chair and strode to the middle of the bridge. “But you claim you do not know what it will be.”

  “We don’t,” Benjamin admitted.

  “Then how can you take responsibility for your actions?” Jake asked from where he sat above the pond, a fishing pole in his hands.

  “We use past experience to help guide us,” Benjamin said. “For Jennifer and me, all the experiences in our lives prepared us for the day we met on the beach, helped us recognize that we had a future together. When we married, we accepted all the consequences of that act, whatever they might be, including the consequences of you.”

  “Me?”

  “My son, Jake,” Benjamin said.

  Jennifer peered up from where she lay atop a bio-bed in Starfleet’s Potrero Hill Medical Center on Earth—a facility Kira didn’t think she’d ever even heard of, but that she nevertheless recognized. On one side of the bed, a nurse gathered readings with a tricorder, while on the other, Benjamin held a newborn baby swaddled in a blanket: Jake. “The child with Jennifer,” said the Prophet posing as Benjamin’s first wife.

  “Yes,” Benjamin said.

  “Linear . . . procreation?” Jennifer asked.

  “Yes,” Benjamin said. “Jake is the continuation of our family.”

  “ ‘The sound of children playing,’ ” Jennifer quoted Benjamin, as though making an intellectual connection.

  On the baseball field, the man at home plate again swung his bat; he missed the ball, which stuck in the catcher’s mitt with a smack. “Aggressive,” the batter said, just as he had earlier. “Adversarial.” His words seemed to Kira more a comment on his own physical actions, as though drawing a clear distinction between the nature of corporeal beings and that of the Prophets. The vedek couldn’t disagree, but she worried about the tone of the terms used.

  Benjamin stood in the middle of the diamond, on a raised circle of dirt—the pitcher’s mound, she recalled—surrounded by grass. Though he wore his old Starfleet uniform, a black cap with a white letter G topped his head. “Competition, for fun,” he said with a wide smile that Kira had seen many times before—particularly in the holosuites, when he’d played or watched games at similar fields. She didn’t much care for the sport—or really even understand it—but she could not deny its ability to transport Benjamin. “It’s a game that Jake and I play on the holodeck,” he said. “It’s called baseball.”

  Jake removed the padded catcher’s mask he wore and stepped forward past the batter. Behind the chain-link fence of the backstop, other players turned to follow the conversation. Like them, Jake wore a white athletic uniform, though protective gear also wrapped his shins and torso. “Baseball,” he said. “What is this?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask that,” Benjamin said. Kira agreed. Although she had eventually learned the rules of the sport, she had never really understood it.

  The Emissary plucked a baseball out of a standing wire basket and held it up for Jake and the batter to see. “I throw this ball to you,” he said, walking from the mound toward Jake, “and this other player—” He pointed at the batter. “—stands between us with a bat . . . a stick . . . and he . . . and he tries to hit the ball in between these two white lines.” Benjamin stopped before home plate and gestured at the foul lines. Jake and the batter gazed at where he pointed, then stared back at him questioningly. “Oh,” Benjamin said, perhaps realizing the futility of attempting to explain baseball to the Prophets. “The rules aren’t important,” he went on. “What’s important is—” He seemed to experience a moment of inspiration. He tossed the ball up before him and then snatched it triumphantly out of the air. “—it’s linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss. He might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.”

  “And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed,” the batter said, evidently following the metaphor.

  “That’s right,” Benjamin said. “In fact, the game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.”

  “You value your ignorance of what is to come?” Jake asked, incredulous.

  “That may be the most important thing to understand about humans,” Benjamin said. “It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here: not to conquer you with weapons or with ideas, but to coexist and learn.” The description of humanoid curiosity sounded to Kira both eloquent and compelling.

  “If all you say is true,” said the Bolian Starfleet officer, “then why do you exist here?” He crouched amid the wreckage of a smoke-filled cabin, the shrieking call to battle stations and the crash of weapons fire against the hull punctuating the scene. Across from him, on his hands and knees, Benjamin quickly took it all in, awar
eness dawning on his face. Kira saw with dismay that the inert body of Jennifer Sisko lay between the men, trapped beneath fallen metal girders and other debris.

  Benjamin hurriedly backed away, scuttling from under a collapsed beam until he could stand up. Kira could read the horror in his desperate movements, could see the torment in his expression. She had always understood that the loss of his first wife had overwhelmed Benjamin, but she had never truly considered the depth of his despair. Benjamin had been so busy commanding Deep Space 9, and he had spoken so little about the death of Jake’s mother . . . and then he’d met Kasidy . . .

  And I counseled him against marrying Kas, Kira thought, distraught at the memory. When the Prophets had told Benjamin that if he spent his life with her, he would know nothing but sorrow, Kira had told him that he shouldn’t go against the word of the Prophets, and that he was doing the right thing in choosing not to wed Kasidy. Even though their eventual marriage had been followed by numerous terrible events, the advice Kira had given disturbed her. Who was I to speak for the Prophets? she asked herself. Who was I to infringe on a chance for the Emissary to lead a happy life?

  Like Kasidy and Jake, like his friends and former crewmates, like the people of Bajor, Kira had celebrated the Emissary’s return from the Celestial Temple for the birth of his daughter, Rebecca, but a series of troubling events had followed. The massacre at the village of Sidau had distressed Benjamin, and that mass killing had ultimately led to the confrontation with the Ascendants, led by the deranged Iliana Ghemor. The awful episode on Endalla had taxed Benjamin, but there had also been a number of incidents that impacted him even more personally: the deaths of two close friends in a house fire; the abduction of Rebecca; the loss of nineteen of his crew when he captained U.S.S. New York during the Borg invasion; the irrecoverable and finally fatal brain injury suffered by Elias Vaughn; the death of his father; his separation from his wife and daughter; and the destruction of Deep Space 9. Kira didn’t understand how all of it fit together, or what she could or should have done differently to help mitigate either individual circumstances or the overall situation. She could not credit the idea that the Prophets had caused the many struggles that Benjamin had endured, but she did not doubt that They had foreseen them.