STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Read online

  Ezri had no idea what the hologram meant by that, but she took his arm, using her free hand to keep his jacket tightly closed around her throat. “I don’t think I can walk much farther on this gravel,” she warned him.

  “Then why don’t you walk over there,” Vic said. Ezri looked where he was pointing and saw an expanse of grass edging the gravel right beside her. She set her shoeless foot upon it. It was soft, springy, and impossible to miss. But somehow, she had. Impossible, she thought. Unless ...

  “Did you do that?” Ezri asked.

  Vic guided her toward what appeared to be a large shoe, maybe two meters tall at the heel. In the moonlight, it had a metallic, silvery shimmer. “Do what?”

  “The grass. Aren’t all the simulation parameters set at the factory, or something?”

  “Hey, doll, do I look like a parameter?”

  Ezri didn’t believe it, but she felt embarrassed because she might just have insulted a hologram. Somewhere, deep within her, Tobin had memories of the earliest versions of what would become holosuite technology—the bulky encounter suits, the crude sensory helmets, the exceedingly clumsy feedback gloves. Four lifetimes later, Joran had found a disturbing new application for the emerging technology. But for all the memories of holographic environments shared by Ezri’s predecessors, each recollection carried with it the clear-cut knowledge that such artificially constructed environments were unreal.

  But not to Ezri.

  She had grown up with holoenvironments. As a child back home on Sappora VII, she had had a personal holoplayroom that had served as a welcome escape from her mother, for both her and her younger brother, Norvo. In fact, one of her first encounters with Earth had been in her favorite program, an extremely realistic simulation of an African veldt, complete with wildlife. Apparently, it was a classic.

  That early experience with holotechnology had made it easy for Ezri to adapt to Starfleet Academy’s extensive use of even more sophisticated simulations for training its young cadets. And now, since she had been joined with the Dax symbiont and her mind was constantly flooded with the memories of all of Dax’s previous hosts, objective reality had become an even more fleeting notion to her. There was no reason for her not to think of holograms as any more or less real than the thousands of individuals who populated her shared memories. In fact, since Vic Fontaine was by some quirk of programming a hologram who knew he was a hologram, Ezri felt she had even less reason to think of him as anything other than a real individual.

  “I’m sorry,” Ezri said. “I didn’t mean to ... you know.”

  “No offense taken, doll.” Vic stopped, then looked around the clearing in the midst of the graveyard as if he had arrived at a long-sought destination. “This looks like the place.”

  “What place?”

  “The place to rest those barkin’ dogs of yours.” Again Vic pointed ahead, and as if he had given a cue to some unseen stage manager back at his nightclub, a moment later the giant shoe blazed with lights, studded as it was by dozens of incandescent glass globes.

  Ezri blinked at the sudden brightness that flooded the clearing, wondering how Vic had known the shoe would light up just then, or if he had somehow been responsible for what it had done. Either way, now she could see she was surrounded not by bulky machinery and sculptures, but by signs.

  She saw individual letters that were a full two meters high, giant bottles poised over equally mammoth glasses, what looked to be a chorus line of dancing dabo girls frozen in midkick. Some signs were outlined by glass globes, others by glass tubes. For a moment, Ezri wondered if the map she had consulted was in error. This might not be a junkyard after all. It could be some type of art museum.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “YESCO,” Vic said with a dramatic flourish of his hand. “The Young Electric Sign Company. They’ve been making all the signs on the Strip since the whole big ball o’ wax got started.”

  Ezri still didn’t understand. “But these look broken. Is it a repair facility?”

  “Some things can’t be fixed, sweetheart.” Ezri watched as Vic regarded the derelict signs with holographic sadness. “The Silver Slipper. The Golden Nugget. Caesar’s ... All kaput. All finito. That’s Las Vegas for ya. A real Neverland. Home to lost boys, lost dreams, here today, gone tomorrow ...”

  “Wait a minute. What’s a sign from Caesar’s doing here?”

  Vic turned to her, his eyes wide with delighted surprise. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Well, this is Las Vegas, 1962, right?”

  “Don’t stop now, you’re on a roll.”

  Ezri paused, decided Vic’s colloquialism was some sort of food allusion, and ignored it. “But the gaming establishment known as Caesar’s Palace was still in operation as of 2053. For two months following the outbreak of Earth’s World War III, Caesar’s was the operational command center for Colonel Amber’s Regimental Volunteers. It was the site of the final battle of—”

  Vic said it with her, “—the Siege of Las Vegas.” He cocked his head at her, curious. “How’s a little girl like you know so much about things like that?”

  Ezri shrugged. “Well, that’s why I decided to come up here tonight. I was checking out this location for Julian ... in case he wanted to try out a new historical last stand. He’s got this thing for lost causes. ...”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place.”

  “No, no. If this is 1962—”

  “—or a reasonable facsimile thereof—” Vic added.

  “—then how can you know what’s going to happen after World War III, almost ...” She hesitated as she did the math. After lifetimes of thinking in terms of clear and straightforward stardates, Earth years were hopelessly perplexing in comparison.

  “Ninety-one years later?” Vic said helpfully.

  “Exactly,” Ezri said. “Isn’t that like breaking the rules?”

  Vic looked up at the stars, all but the brightest ones now hidden by the glare from the blazing silver shoe. He tugged on his shirt collar, loosening his thin black tie. “Depends on who makes those rules, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well ...” Ezri began uncertainly, “then that would be whoever programmed you in the first place. Right?”

  “My pal Felix. Great guy, but sometimes he’s been known to borrow a bit of code from this place and that. So out here, at the edge of the program, sometimes things get a bit muddled. Sort of like me, ya know.” Vic looked up at the stars, as if wishing he could reach for them. “Sure I’m strictly 1962, but I gotta tell ya, I know everything there is to know about that station you all say you come from, and that century.” Vic looked back at Ezri and tapped a finger against her nose. “Just between you and me and the Man in the Moon, I don’t think Felix has a good grasp of the importance of purging memory buffers. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. You’d be surprised what happens when programming mixes it up in here. Ya get all sorts of ... unexpected iterations. Not that a mutt like me has any idea of what I’m talking about.”

  Ezri gazed thoughtfully at Vic’s smoothly handsome face, framed in silver hair. He was an enigma among holograms, that much everyone on DS9 could agree on. He knew he was a hologram, he had the capability of entering other holosuite simulations, and he seemed to have some kind of ongoing existence even when the holosuites in Quark’s bar were offline. Jake Sisko had sometimes wondered if Vic might be a captive alien personality, somehow downloaded into the holosuites’ memory circuits. Chief O’Brien, when overly fortified by bloodwine, had once forwarded the theory that Vic represented the next step in the evolution of machine intelligence, like the eerily lifelike Emergency Medical Holograms that were becoming more common throughout Starfleet.

  “Vic, may I ask you a question?”

  Vic gave her a playful smile as if he could read her mind as easily as a Betazoid and knew what was coming. “Shoot, dollface.”

  “What’s it like being a hologram?”

  Vic laughed. “Answer me this first,�
� he said. “What’s it like bein’ a Trill?”

  “I think you mean, a joined Trill.”

  “ ‘You say tomato. ...’ ”

  Again with the food, Ezri thought. But she gave Vic’s question serious consideration, not because of anything in Jadzia’s or Audrid’s or even Joran’s past, but because of her own—Ezri’s—Starfleet training as a counsellor.

  “What’s it like being joined ... ?” she repeated. “In a word, confused.”

  Vic gestured with open hands held to the heavens. “What’s it like being a hologram? I couldn’t have said it better myself. Confused, with a capital con.”

  Ezri frowned, not willing to accept that answer for a Ferengi second. “What does a hologram have to be confused about?”

  Vic stared at her, open-mouthed, and shook his head once, exactly as Ezri had seen some Las Vegas comedian do, on an earlier date she’d had with Julian. Jimmy the Ranti ... or something like that.

  “You think being confused is something that can only happen to your kinda people?” Vic asked. He tapped both hands to his chest beneath his loosened tie and open collar. “I’m a twentieth-century hologram in a twenty-fourth-century world. Sometimes I have to ask myself if I’m the only real McCoy on the face of the Earth and all you people are mathematical constructs being generated by some big number-crunching hunk of transistors and vacuum tubes out in the great beyond. Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart. I love my life. But still, sometimes I wonder where it is I’m going, and worse yet, where I was before I was here.”

  Ezri caught herself replying with more than a touch of Jadzia the scientist. “Those questions are merely a common function of any self-aware intelligence attempting to build patterns from the past in order to anticipate the future.” She paused, grimacing at how cold she had sounded. “What I meant to say was, how confusing can life be for you if you’ve been programmed to mesh perfectly with your environment? I mean, you know where all the grassy parts are. You know when the lights will go on. It’s ... a perfect match.”

  “Perfect?” Vic raised his eyebrows skeptically. “It doesn’t work that way, dollface. But from my side of the street, I’m looking at you, saying, How confusing can it be for her? She can go anywhere in the whole wide universe, see anything, be anyone, for real.”

  Sudden fatigue swept over Ezri. She looked around for someplace to sit. “It doesn’t work that way for me, either.”

  Maybe he really can read my mind, Ezri thought as she watched Vic drag a large metal box out from beside the glowing silver slipper. The grimy container looked as if it had once held electrical connections, back in the days before transtators.

  Vic brushed off the top surface of the box, sending puffs of holographic dust into the air. “Park it here, doll,” he said.

  Ezri took that as an invitation to sit, and did, wincing as the sudden chill of the metal made itself known through the thin fabric of her gown.

  Vic swung a foot up on the corner of the box, rested an elbow against his knee. “So, you’re not convincing me.”

  “About what?”

  “About you not having it better than me.”

  Ezri tried to find a blunter way to put it. “I didn’t choose my life.”

  “Join the club, sweetcakes.”

  “But ... but ...” Ezri sputtered.

  “Take it easy, doll. Sounds like you’re having trouble getting started.”

  “I’ve heard you sing, Vic. You’re good.”

  Vic nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe not as good as Frank, but I won’t give you an argument on that one.”

  “Which makes me think you enjoy what you do.”

  This time, Vic’s smile transformed his face. “Oh, yeah. To be up at that mike, belting out pure gold, holding that audience in the palm of my hand. ...” To Ezri, Vic seemed to be staring away at someplace, sometime, other than the Young Electric Sign Company junkyard. “What can I tell you? Like the man said, ‘baby, it’s witchcraft.’ ”

  “Exactly. So at the end of the day, no matter how you got here, is there anything else you can imagine that would be more fulfilling than being a nightclub singer in 1962 Las Vegas?”

  Vic smiled at her, clutched his chest just above his holographic heart, and said, “Ya got me.” Then he took on a more serious expression. “Which makes me think, there’s something else, somewhere else, you’d rather be.”

  Ezri looked off at the surrounding signs, none of them fulfilling their functions anymore, no longer pointing the way to anywhere. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation with anyone, let alone a hologram. But then, maybe the fact that Vic was a hologram was exactly why she could have this conversation with him.

  “That’s the problem,” Ezri said softly “I can’t answer that. I ... I never got a chance to find out what I wanted. Not on my own. Not before I was joined.”

  Ezri could see that Vic, whatever algorithms fueled his awareness and his personality, appeared to sense the sudden serious mood that had enveloped her, drawing her into her own personal wormhole of despair.

  The hologram sat down beside her. The metal box creaked a bit under his illusory weight. When he spoke, his voice was softer, more deliberate. “I gotta tell you, I’m not up on all your fancy twenty-fourth-century Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers atomic-ray rocketship you-name-its.”

  Ezri stared at him blankly, having no idea what he was saying, but trusting he’d mention something familiar eventually.

  “But the one thing I do know,” Vic said kindly, “is that this being ‘joined’ megillah, it’s not something that sneaks up on you, is it? I remember Jadzia talking about it once. Training for years. Selection committees. Only one out of a thousand qualifies, and even then that don’t guarantee you a place at the table. Isn’t that how it really goes, dollface?”

  Ezri rubbed at her eyes, wondering why she didn’t just call it a night. She could go back to her quarters—or to Julian’s—have some tea, fall asleep, and when she woke up, Julian would be there beside her, to take all these questions from her.

  But that would be quitting, too, she thought.

  “You’re half right, Vic,” she said quietly. She was dimly aware of tears building up in her eyes, though she had no idea why. “That’s how it goes for every Trill ... except me.”

  She made an effort to smile up at him. The hologram’s silver hair was almost luminous in the bright lights of the slipper, as if his head were surrounded by a glowing nimbus of radiance. The image seemed to evoke some faint echo of recognition in her, something or someone or even a symbol from one of the other lives her symbiont had led. But she couldn’t bring up anything more concrete. For an unsettling moment, it almost felt to Ezri as if the Dax part of her were gone, or asleep, or somehow standing back from what she was doing now, as if this moment belonged only to her. Could belong only to her.

  “I don’t get it,” Vic said. “What makes you so different?”

  Such a simple question, Ezri thought. With such a simple answer.

  But it still kept her up at night, staring into the endless darkness of the ceiling, whether Julian was beside her or not.

  She realized then there was no holding back. She had gone this far with the hologram—no, with Vic—that she might as well see it through to the end.

  “I never wanted to be joined,” she told him haltingly, the very words a sacrilege against everything her world and her people held dear.

  Vic nodded slowly, knowingly. “Riiight. Now I remember. When Jadzia bought it. The symbiont heading home. Something goes wrong. It has to be joined or it’s lights out forever. And you were the only Trill on the ship.”

  Ezri opened her mouth to give her rehearsed answer, the one that had been drilled into her by Starfleet and the Symbiosis Commission and by Dax and all the previous hosts now sharing her consciousness. But the words wouldn’t come. Not here. Not now.

  “I wish ... I wish it had been that simple,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  She saw Vic study her, int
rigued, and his expression made Ezri smile. Isn’t that why they were here having this discussion? Artificial being and joined Trill, both wrestling with their respective confusion?

  “You mean,” Vic said, “that’s not how it happened?”

  “No,” Ezri said. “That’s exactly how it happened. But ... that’s not all that happened.”

  For long moments, hologram and Trill held each other’s gaze. Then Vic reached into his back pocket, pulled out a flat silver flask, and twisted open its stopper. “I’ve got a crazy feeling we’re going to be here a while,” he said. He held out the flask to Ezri. She took it, smelled some kind of Earth brandy she couldn’t identify. Took a swallow and felt it burn so far down her throat Dax shivered in her abdominal pocket.

  “Badda bing,” Vic said, as if he had felt the symbiont move himself. Then he took a swallow of his own and moved closer to Ezri so they were side by side. He sealed the flask, put it behind them, then slipped an arm around her as if to make sure his jacket was as snug as it could be.

  Ezri didn’t protest, didn’t feel the least awkward, enjoyed in fact the feeling of inner warmth from the brandy and the security of Vic’s arm around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder, looking up at those few stars bright enough to outshine the silver slipper, alien stars that reminded her just how lost she was.

  “So what’s your story?” Vic asked.

  Ezri laughed, feeling strangely better than she had for months. “Stories, That’s more like it.”

  Vic gave her a squeeze, protective, nothing more, but just enough. “Not their stories, doll. Your story.”

  “My story,” Ezri said. “My story.” That first word sounded odd, because the way she said it, she wasn’t talking about Ezri Dax, she was talking about Ezri Tigan. The person she used to be before she became ... the persons she was ... were ... damn these pronouns, she thought.

  “We’ve got all night,” Vic said soothingly. “As long as you need. As long as you want.”