Cathedral Read online

  He knew that he couldn’t proceed without that kind of detachment.

  “The separator is now locking onto the fine motor bundles,” Bashir said, pressing on. Ezri’s fingers spasmed as the second nerve-fiber bundle separated. He withdrew the separator and closed his eyes for a moment.

  I’m killing her. Just as surely as if I’d tossed her out an airlock.

  “Symbiont vital signs are weak but holding steady,” said Krissten. “No sign of neuroleptic shock.”

  Forcing his self-recriminations aside, Bashir opened his eyes and focused on the umbilicus with renewed concentration. Next, he severed the monopolar neurons that coordinated autonomic neurophysiological exchanges between Ezri’s and Dax’s nervous systems. Then he cut the redundant autonomic glial-cell pathways. He paused for a moment to recall the correct order: major, minor, and ancillary nodes. Yes, that was right.

  Nearly done. God, let this be finished before I turn this thing on myself.

  Next, the separator’s laser bit into the RDNAL organelle, a construct that consisted of a long tube buried in the very core of the umbilical’s complex bundles of nerve fibers. Moving nimbly, Bashir sealed the organelle on Ezri’s end of the umbilicus, which fell onto her abdomen like so much discarded ODN cable.

  Jadzia’s voice haunted him once again. I’ve never felt so empty. He forced himself to ignore the memories—to ignore Ezri, who lay before him not quite dead, not quite alive, yet still gone forever.

  “Note,” he said, “that the symbiont is now completely free of the host’s body. There’s been no change in the symbiont’s vitals.”

  Krissten turned toward Nurse Juarez standing quietly by the door. “Edgardo, please ready the container.” Juarez approached the table, prepared to take the symbiont to the oblong receptacle which lay in the far corner of the room.

  “Krissten, please prepare a hypo with twenty cc’s of isoboramine. I’m going to inject it directly into the symbiont’s end of the umbilicus.”

  Krissten hesitated for a moment, then fetched the hypo and placed it in Bashir’s hand. She held the symbiont for him while he gently applied it to the tip of the umbilicus and pressed the plunger home. Bashir felt a wave of relief sweep over him as Krissten carefully handed the symbiont to Juarez, who in turn carried it toward the open, liquid-filled container in the corner.

  Krissten turned back to Bashir, a question in her eyes.

  “Yes?” Bashir said as he allowed his gaze to wander back to Ezri. He watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest, listened to the gentle sussuration of her breathing.

  “We tried this drug before,” Krissten said. “But it had no effect. Why the second injection?”

  Bashir gave his head a weary shake. “That was iso boramine, Krissten. This time I used boramine, which should stave off the symbiont’s growing necrosis and prevent delayed neuroleptic shock while it’s confined to the artificial environment.”

  “No, Doctor.”

  Bashir had never heard Krissten flatly contradict him before. He looked toward her and saw that her eyes had become immense. She appeared near panic.

  “Excuse me, Ensign?” he tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, but didn’t succeed completely.

  “Doctor, that injection wasn’t boramine. It was iso boramine.”

  Bashir felt as though he’d been slapped across the face. “What?”

  “That hypo contained thirty cc’s of isoboramine, sir. As you ordered.”

  A realization colder than the winds of Trill’s Tenaran ice cliffs suddenly ran up his spine. Boramine. Isoboramine. Somehow, he had confused them. The two substances had similar names, obviously. But they differed from one another as much as oxygen did from fluorine.

  And he knew that the consequences of mistaking one for the other could be every bit as serious.

  Bashir watched as Juarez knelt beside the symbiont’s medical transport pod and prepared to place Dax inside its life-giving purple liquid bath. Juarez stopped in mid-motion, frowning.

  He looked helplessly at Bashir and Krissten. “It’s…squirming.”

  “My God,” Bashir said, rushing to the nurse’s side with a medical tricorder. He made a quick scan. “It’s an isoboramine overdose. The symbiont is going into neuroleptic shock.”

  “I thought Trill symbiosis depended on isoboramine,” Juarez said.

  “It does,” Bashir said, still incredulous over the magnitude of his error. “But the symbionts can’t tolerate it in large doses.”

  “Is there an antidote?” Krissten asked.

  Bashir gently took the creature from Juarez and cradled it in his arms. The symbiont convulsed in his hands as though about to burst. His mind raced to find an answer to Krissten’s question. Why was it becoming so hard to think?

  “Yes,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Fortunately, there is a counteragent.”

  Krissten grabbed another hypo and stood attentively, awaiting his orders. It was only after the moment began to stretch that Bashir realized that this time he wouldn’t need to drop a scalpel to endanger a patient’s life.

  All it would take was a lapse of memory.

  “Doctor?” Krissten was beginning to sound panicked.

  His head began to pound, as though he were in the throes of severe raktajino withdrawal. He closed his eyes very tightly, willing the throbbing pain to pass.

  “Give me a moment to concentrate,” he said, trying hard not to display his own rising alarm. The small, helpless bundle that contained the essence of the woman he loved continued to heave and shudder in his arms. He could feel intuitively that it was beginning to die.

  “Doctor?” said Krissten, now clearly worried.

  Bashir ignored her. He thought instead about the miracle to which Vaughn had attributed Nog’s new leg. And the cathedral-like alien structure that had clearly caused the miracle.

  What better place than a cathedral to go looking for miracles?

  And in his mind, he was no longer in the medical bay. No longer aboard the Defiant. No longer even in the Gamma Quadrant. His mind’s eye opened as he slipped into the stretched null-time of memory. Before him stood four great, russet-colored buttressed arches topped by a thirty-meter dome. The silvery structure gleamed under a clear desert sky, resplendent in the late-afternoon sun.

  Shortly after his parents had taken him to Adigeon Prime for genetic resequencing, Bashir had discovered that he’d needed to find ways to cope with the torrential flood of information his agile mind had begun absorbing and retaining. At the age of eight, Bashir read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, from which he had learned an appealing and useful mnemonic trick. Using the same care he had lavished on some of humanity’s greatest masterpieces, Leonardo had constructed a vast, detailed cathedral entirely within his formidable mind. Every vestibule, gallery, staircase, foyer, and chamber was carefully catalogued in the polymath artist’s memory, every sculpture and painting placed just so, every bookshelf, book, and page painstakingly arranged, indexed, and preserved for virtually instantaneous access.

  All Leonardo had had to do to retrieve any specific fact he’d previously placed within his “memory cathedral” was to close his eyes, stride the great basilica’s wide corridors, and enter whichever carefully catalogued vault contained what he sought.

  Young Julian Bashir had chosen a much simpler, though still impressive, design for his own mnemonic citadel—that of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s great sixth-century cathedral. In all the years since, he’d never been tempted to move his personal treasury of memory into a larger, more complex structure, probably because of his father’s preference for the gaudier Baroque- and Rococo-period architectural styles of a millennium later.

  In the self-contained universe of his own mind, Bashir bounded up the Hagia Sophia’s stone steps and ran through the arched doorway, through the vestibule, and into the wide aisle surrounding the central basilica. Of course, it had been years since he’d had to resort to using this mnemonic trick so directly; he’d long ago
learned to place his memorization skills on a kind of intellectual auto-pilot, until his subconscious information retrieval had become virtually error-free, almost an autonomic function, like breathing.

  He turned right and found the staircase he’d installed at the age of ten, the year he had first begun seriously organizing pharmacological information in his cathedral-of-the-mind. As he ascended, he noticed that the fifth step made an echoing squeak as he put his weight on it, just as he remembered. He recalled how he’d deliberately installed several such things throughout the building, as mnemonic self-tests. He smiled as he continued upward.

  In a few moments he’d remember how to save Dax’s life.

  A heavy oaken door stood before him at the top of the staircase. He pushed on it, but it was evidently locked from the inside.

  He frowned. It should not have been locked.

  He pounded on the door with his fists.

  The door abruptly vanished, and he tumbled forward into a large, curving room that conformed to the Hagia Sophia’s exterior shape. The place was stacked to the ceiling with massive-looking wooden bookshelves. Waning sunlight streamed in through the gauzy drapes.

  A dark-haired woman in a Starfleet uniform stepped into view from behind one of the nearer bookcases and approached him. She was human, and appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She smiled and extended a hand, helping him back to his feet.

  It took him a moment or two to place her. “Dr. Lense?” Bumping into the woman who had narrowly beat him to the position of valedictorian of his Starfleet Medical graduating class, here in his own personal memory cathedral, both unnerved and perplexed him.

  Elizabeth Lense smiled. “Don’t worry, Julian. It’s only natural that you’d wonder why I’m here.”

  “So you’re telepathic. No wonder you got ahead of me back in medical school.”

  She laughed, a pleasing, liquid sound. “I got ahead of you because even the best memories can hiccup once in a blue moon. Besides, I don’t need to read your mind, Doctor. I’m only a figment of your mind.”

  He immediately felt foolish. “Of course. So why did my mind choose this moment to, ah, channel you?”

  “Channel me? I’m not a ghost, either, Julian. I suppose you’re thinking of me because of an accidental confluence of tangentially related information.”

  Of course. I remember. She’s serving aboard the U.S.S. da Vinci now. A ship named for the man who inspired me to build this place.

  Her smile widened disconcertingly. “One thing’s for sure, Julian. You’ll never confuse a preganglionic fiber with a postganglionic nerve ever again.”

  That had been the one exam question he had got wrong. That single error had cost him the privilege of giving his graduating class’s valedictory address. That all-too-rare failure of his prodigious recall skills would have remained etched into his memory forever, Leonardo or no Leonardo.

  He had to force himself to stay focused on his current problem. Dax was dying. An antidote existed, but if the symbiont didn’t receive it within the next minute or two, then nine lifetimes would all be for naught.

  Because I let myself get confused and distracted, Bashir raged at himself.

  He shouldered his way into the room, brushing Lense aside, and made his way to a particular three-meter-high bookshelf cut from dark, tropical hardwood.

  When he reached it, he was surprised to find the book spines in noticeable disarray. It looked as though many of the volumes had been taken out, rifled quickly, and then tossed haphazardly back onto the shelves. More than a few were out of order, misfiled slightly to the left or to the right of their correct locations. Many looked tatty and shopworn.

  He started when he felt Lense’s hand on his shoulder. “Julian, please explain something to me,” she said. “Why did you bother to come all the way here just to look up the fact that ten cc’s of endomethalamine will counteract twenty cc’s of isoboramine inside a Trill symbiont’s vascular tract?”

  Endomethalamine! He recognized the name of the correct counteragent as soon as he heard it. Of course!

  “Doctor!” It was Krissten’s voice.

  The memory cathedral vanished like so much smoke, and Bashir was once again conscious of nothing but the medical bay’s operating room, where Ezri lay, inert, barely breathing. Krissten and Juarez both stood staring at him, their faces portraits of worry.

  Bashir felt the symbiont writhing and twitching in his hands.

  “Doctor, are you all right?” Krissten said. The last time he’d heard her sound so fearful, the station had been under full-scale attack by the Jem’Hadar. “We need to get that counteragent into the symbiont.”

  Bashir nodded, his full attention once again focused on the crisis at hand. “The counteragent is…” For a harrowing moment the knowledge faded, then just as quickly snapped back into place. “…endomethalamine. Please administer ten cc’s of endomethalamine, Krissten. Directly into the symbiont’s umbilical orifice.”

  Bashir held the thrashing symbiont steady while Krissten performed the injection. A moment later, the symbiont grew quiescent. Krissten used her tricorder to check its vital signs. Then she took charge of the symbiont as Juarez helped her place it into the medical transport pod, securing the box’s seals and activating the biomonitors on its side. It took only a moment to ascertain that the symbiont was out of immediate danger.

  No thanks to me.

  Bashir suddenly recalled the question the faux Elizabeth Lense had asked him inside the memory cathedral. Why hadn’t he simply asked the computer for the information he needed to save Dax? That clearly would have been the expedient solution. Perhaps he had become too used to his facile memory. Or had placed too much blind faith in it.

  But he also wondered if something more fundamental was happening to him. If his judgment was failing along with his memory.

  An even more alarming thought followed: What if my entire intellect is disintegrating?

  With that fearful notion came a profound fatigue, rolling irresistibly over him like the fogs of Argelius II. And with that fatigue came a sad, certain knowledge. He now knew beyond all doubt that he hadn’t escaped the bizarre, unpredictable influence of the alien artifact. He, too, had been aboard the Sagan when it had crossed the object’s transdimensional wake. Just like Nog. Just like Ezri.

  Ezri.

  He crossed to her biobed, where she lay like some moribund princess from a fairy tale. But he knew that no kiss would be potent enough to rouse her. He took her hand, placing it between both of his. It felt cool and moist. He checked her vital signs, which were weak but holding steady for the moment.

  He bent down and gently gave her that fairy-tale kiss. “Good-bye, my love,” he whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered open. She smiled at him.

  “Ezri?”

  Her voice was weak but steady. “Dax…is gone…”

  He couldn’t believe it. So weak, so close to death, there was no way she could have regained consciousness. Bashir noticed that Krissten had run over to the other side of the biobed to check Ezri’s readings.

  “Doctor, you have to look at this,” said Krissten, a stunned expression on her face.

  Bashir glanced up at the biobed monitors. Every indicator, from neurological to metabolic to cardiovascular to pulmonary, was up significantly. Impossibly, Ezri was getting stronger. She was returning to normal, as though she’d never been joined to a symbiont in the first place.

  “The symbiont,” Ezri said, her voice stronger, though her expression was desolate. “Julian, how is the symbiont?”

  Bashir finally realized his mouth was hanging open. And his eyes were welling up with unshed tears. “The symbiont is fine,” he said, his voice cracking like an adolescent’s. “It’s safe in the artificial environment. But you…Ezri, I think we may find a way to get you through this after all.”

  It’s impossible, he told himself. Joined Trill hosts simply didn’t recover after losing their symbionts.

  She smiled up at him again, look
ing as tired as he felt. “This is the second time I’ve been at death’s door since we came to the Gamma Quadrant, Julian. I think I’ll wait until I’m strong enough to walk again before I actually step through it.” Then she drifted off to sleep once more, her smile lingering.

  Perhaps I found Vaughn’s miracle after all, he thought, finally daring to believe it. After all, was Ezri’s survival of the loss of her symbiont any more miraculous than the regeneration of Nog’s leg? Or were such things really miracles? He found himself wondering abstractedly whether the alien artifact might really be a super-advanced medical facility, the product of brilliant, unfathomable alien minds.

  Abruptly, his fatigue overtook him. He collapsed to the deck beside Ezri’s biobed, visions of the ancient spacebar artifact vying with Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia for the attention of his unconscious mind’s eye.

  9

  The passengers of the Bajoran ship-of-state Li Nalas were barely jostled during the hookup to Deep Space 9’s docking ring. In the vessel’s control room, the two pilots checked and double-checked switches and panels, making sure that the airlock seals were correctly aligned. In the center of the ship, a pair of young Bajoran assistants arranged the traveling bags for easy disembarkation.

  First Minister Shakaar Edon and Second Minister Asarem Wadeen sat astern. Until moments ago, they had been meditating. Asarem had asked for silence, making the excuse that she wanted to prepare her mind for the coming day’s events. Truthfully, she was still trying to figure out what Shakaar’s motives were for forcing her to stonewall the peace talks with Cardassia. She had not been able to bring herself to discuss the matter with anyone, including her closest aides; Shakaar’s reticence of late led her to believe that this was a political secret of which only the highest-ranking officials might be aware.

  Asarem knew that Colonel Kira Nerys was aware of Shakaar’s actions, since they had already discussed the matter aboard Deep Space 9 a few weeks earlier. According to Kira, Shakaar had almost gloated about the impasse to which he had brought the negotiations, an uncharacteristic action for someone who desired secrecy. What was to stop the colonel from revealing his political subterfuge? Asarem could only assume that Shakaar’s power had kept Kira in check. The woman had already been cast out from the Bajoran faith—Attainted—and her military commission was the only power she had left. Shakaar could easily have that stripped from her as well, if she were to cross him, leaving her with nothing. Still, Kira was a deceptively strong woman. Her years in the Resistance, and the time she had spent fighting alongside Starfleet officers and Cardassian resistance fighters during the Dominion War had undoubtedly left her with more reserves of strength than Shakaar probably imagined.