Текст книги "Cathedral "

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: Michael Martin
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Feeling helpless and utterly alone, she wept as the bizarre nonmusic swelled and crashed all around her.

Nog set the celestial music at an agreeably bone-jarring volume. To his somewhat surprised satisfaction, Shar made no objection as the darkened lab came alive with sound.

In Nog’s experience, the single place aboard the Defiantmost conducive to thinking was the stellar cartography lab. Particularly when it was doing what it did best—displaying the universe in all its infinite scope and grandeur. The room was dark save for their softly glowing padds, the fixed, jeweled pinpoints of distant stars, the dimly reflective iceballs of the local Oort cloud, the haze of the distant galactic plane, which gleamed like latinum wherever it wasn’t obscured by dark interstellar dust clouds—and the artifact.

In the middle distance, the alien construct continued its eternal tumble as the vibrational strains of several nearby icy bodies provided an eerie accompaniment. It’s guarding its secrets,Nog thought as he watched holographic simulacra of the thirteen Nyazen ships that blockaded the object. Gently tapping his new left leg, Nog wondered if he and Shar could really do anything about that.

And just how badly he really wantedto do anything about that.

Nog was seated at a table large enough to accommodate both himself and Shar while they ate their hastily replicated dinners. Or rather, as they worked while simultaneously picking at their dinners. The table, chairs, and food trays were the only things mooring either of them to the solid world of decks and bulkheads and artificial gravity. Everywhere else around them, the Gamma Quadrant blazed and beckoned.

A padd cast an amber glow across Shar’s pale blue features, turning them an almost Orion green as he stared intently at rows of figures. Nog noted that he appeared uninterested in his meal, something called paellathat Shar had agreed to try on Bowers’s recommendation. Nog saw that some of the dish’s ingredients looked enough like the tube grubs on his own plate to be almost appealing.

Shar set the padd aside, his eyes now riveted on the alien artifact that floated above them.

“It’s clearly a holy object to both the D’Naali and the Nyazen,” Shar said in a tone that struck Nog as nearly reverent. It reminded him of the times during his childhood when his father had told him stories about the Divine Treasury.

“And the text you recovered has to be some sort of scripture,” Shar continued.

“Scripture?”

“Sacred writings. A body of legend which may be based upon certain objectively true information. Or myth-driven ethical pronouncements, like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.”

Nog scowled at that, then instructed the computer to turn the music down by a few decibels. “Translating the alien text is no longer our top priority. Let the computers handle that. We still have to find a way around the Nyazen blockade. And the captain wants our report in less than two hours. Let’s meet with Senkowski and Leishman’s teams one more time and go completely through it all again. There must have been something we missed on the first two tries.”

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 boththe sons of Very Influential People? And aren’t we bothalways trying to keep that fact from swallowing us whole?”

Shar only nodded, looking miserable.

“So we’re bothoutworlders,” 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, Ido,” 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 Iactually got some goodluck 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 Defiantwhen 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 Saganwhen we found the artifact is somehow linked. He says that if I don’t go along, whatever Ezri and Dr. Bashir have lost will staylost.”

“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 terribleFerengi.”

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 myugly 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 loss 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 actuallymove.

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 anythingbut 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’tin 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 wouldbe 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 doling 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.

Acknowledging Quark’s entrance with a knowing nod and a worldly smile, Vic turned toward the stage, where a trio of tuxedoed humans struck up an expert piano-bass-and-drums accompaniment as Vic began warbling a bouncy musical travelogue whose recurring refrain was “Let’s Get Away From It All.” Just before beginning his performance, Vic mentioned that an Earth singer named Sin-Ah-Trah had made the tune famous.

Quark took a seat across the small table from Ro, realizing that he’d already missed the opportunity to pull her chair out for her. But that was all right. If she could learn to feel as comfortable in this alien milieu as he had become over the past few months, then perhaps she would lower her shields voluntarily. Quark recalled how he had once regarded Vic’s holographic establishment as unwelcome competition, until the upheavals of the Dominion War had taught him that ancient Las Vegas was really a refuge from troubles of every sort. A refuge that could be overused, as Nog had demonstrated during the months following the loss of his leg, but one that stood ready to offer solace at all times. Twenty-six/seven, as some of the hew-mons around here like to say.

As Vic concluded his number and took a bow before the applauding dinner crowd, Quark glanced at Ro, who seemed engrossed in the environment. Good,he thought.

Quark leaned forward and assayed his most nonthreatening smile. “You got here a little early.”

She nodded, a wry expression on her face. “I didn’t think you’d mind. I’m less accessible here than I am in the security office. Besides, after the dress shop finished sewing me into this costume, I realized I wasn’t exactly dressed for work.”

“There’s more to life than work,” Quark said, grinning.

She favored him with a silent that’s-easy-for-you-to-sayglower.

Sensing that something else besides the demands of her job was bothering her, he decided to change the subject. “How do you like Las Vegas so far?”

“It’s…interesting.” Her tone was noncommittal and her brow remained furrowed as she gazed around the room. The earring dangling from her left ear gleamed enticingly in the room’s subdued lighting.

Quark hadn’t noticed that Vic had taken up a position alongside their table. “Interesting,doll-face?” the crooner said with an urbane smile.

Ro cast a quick glance over her shoulder as though convinced Vic had to be addressing someone else.

“No need for the double take, sweetheart,” Vic said. “I was just wondering when your beau here was going to get around to introducing us.”

“I think maybe I need to have my universal translator checked,” Ro said.

“This is 1962,” Vic said, his smile disarming. “Here you’ll have to pick up the lingo the old-fashioned way. By experience.” He turned toward Quark while making a courtly gesture in Ro’s direction. “So are you going to keep this vision you’ve found all to yourself?”

Quark realized he had been staring at Ro the entire time, drinking in her image. He shook himself as though from a dream. “Vic, meet Lieutenant Ro Laren, the station’s chief of security. Ro, Vic Fontaine.”

With the deftness of an expert stage magician, Vic somehow managed to take Ro’s hand and raise it to his lips—without prompting her to throw him bodily across the neighboring table. Charmed, I’m sure,Quark thought, feeling all the satisfaction of a man entering the finalstage negotiations of a killer deal.

Until he noticed that Ro’s forehead was still as wrinkled as her Bajoran nose.

Vic had obviously noticed as well. “If you don’t mind my mentioning it, you seem a little distracted for someone who’s here for a night on the town.”

“So are you a touch telepath as well as a singer?” Ro asked, her frown persisting.

Vic laughed and shook his head. “I never work Harry Blackstone’s side of the street. But I’d have to be a real Clyde to miss the fact that something’s really eating you. A farmer could scrub his overalls on your corrugated but otherwise charming forehead. I think I’d better expedite the drinks. First round’s on me.”

“Quark, I thought you might try to seduce me,” Ro said with a wry smile. “But I never expected you to subject me to some sort of…covert counseling program.”

Vic motioned to an improbably short-skirted waitress, who brought a small tray to the table, replete with a bottle on ice and a trio of champagne glasses. “It’s flattering that you think of me as some sort of professional head-shrinker,” he said. “But I’m just a humble holographic student of the human—I mean the humanoid—heart.”

Ro’s eyebrows shot straight up, momentarily smoothing away the striations of worry. “You knowyou’re a hologram?” she asked Vic.

Vic made an exaggerated bow. “Like a great man once said: ‘Know thyself.’”

“Of all the holograms in all the hospitality venues in all the quadrant,” Quark said, “Vic is unique.”

Ro examined the bottle the waitress had set down before her. “Spring wine?”

Vic shook his head as he began filling the three glasses. “No can do. It’s 1962, remember? I might be a self-aware hologram, but I’m also period specific. But Dom Pérignon isn’t too shabby as a consolation prize.”

Taking his lead from Vic, Quark raised his glass. Ro followed a moment later. “To the future,” Vic said, then took a drink. Quark and Ro did likewise.

But Ro’s dark expression returned almost immediately.

“Something wrong with the bubbly?” Vic asked.

Ro shook her head and regarded the contents of her glass, evidently transfixed by the continuous upward motion of its stream of perfectly uniform, nearly microscopic bubbles.

“Well, since the problem clearly can’t be the company,” Vic said in a bantering tone, “it has to be my toast.”

Ro’s contemplative scowl only deepened.

And Quark realized in a flash that Vic had, as usual, cut directly to the heart of the matter.

Vic seemed to realize it as well, and took that revelation as his cue to move on. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to your evening. Enjoy the show.” Handing his barely touched champagne to a passing waitress, he was gone, moving cordially among the other tables as he made his way back to the stage.

Quark let the silence stretch for as long as he could stand it. Then he said, “It’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What we talked about before Shakaar made his big announcement. The future.”

She nodded, looking bleak. “It’d help if you could convince me that there’s even going to bea future.”

Quark didn’t like the sound of that. “What, did you just get wind of some new classified Starfleet crisis that’s about to end the universe as we know it?”

She took another large swallow of champagne, her expression softening somewhat. She must have been warming up either to him or to the drink. “Things like that come and go. But the future is something else entirely. You’re stuck with facing it every day the universe doesn’tend.”

Quark had to agree. He had already told her of his misgivings about trying to make a living in Bajoran territory after the Federation came in and introduced its cashless, abundance-based, replicator-driven economy. He felt all but certain that he was about to lose everything he’d built here over the past sixteen years.

He wondered if the incoming regime would deprive him of Ro as well. A determination rose within him to prevent that from happening, though he hadn’t the faintest idea of how he might go about it.

It seemed hopeless on the face of it.

“So have you decided what you’re going to do after the Federation comes in?” he asked, taking the liberty of refilling both their glasses.

“As a matter of fact,” Ro said, throwing back a hefty quantity of the Dom Pérignon, “I think I’ve finally come to a decision.”

On the stage, Vic and his ensemble launched into a rendition of a centuries-old Earth standard that repeatedly asked the question “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”—and continually presented “I don’t” as the only acceptable answer. According to Vic, someone named Porter had written the song for a show called High Society,which apparently had starred this Sin-Ah-Trah person whom Vic seemed to regard so highly. But how a disdain for the acquisition of money equated with any so-called high society made absolutely no sense. Quark struggled to ignore the song’s patently offensive lyrics, while Ro didn’t seem to mind them. Or perhaps she hadn’t even noticed, having lived among impecunious Starfleet hew-mons for as long as she had.

Quark watched her throughout Vic’s performance, wondering if she intended to tell him what decision she’d made. He suspected it lay along lines similar to his own. “I suppose neither of us is considered a pillar of the community around here,” he said. “And under the Federation, it’s only going to get worse for us both. The new regime is never going to feel right for either one of us. Not as long as we’re outsiders.”

“It’s been made pretty clear to me today that I can never wear a Starfleet uniform again,” Ro said, as though talking to herself. “Not that I’d want to.”