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“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 tu
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 di
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 i
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 ru