Cathedral Read online

  Shar turned to Bowers. “I believe we’ve just made a major breakthrough.”

  “You mean you understood that?” Bowers nodded toward the insectile alien, then resumed scowling at the translator in his hand.

  Shar shook his head, his antennae bobbing. “Not a word of it. But we’re finally hearing phonemes that humanoids can reproduce. We now have a starting point.”

  Shar knew well that language acquisition closely mirrored brain development. The brain of a preverbal humanoid child possessed twice the number of synaptic pathways as that of an adult, only to winnow out some connections while reinforcing others. As billions of neural circuits fell away, gradually collapsing a nearly infinite array of perceptual possibilities down to something more manageable, language emerged. Meaning coalesced as the still-growing brain pruned itself of excess capacity, honing and sharpening language and intellect in the process. In the absence of a clear linguistic key, Shar was becoming convinced that only a technological analog of this process could decrypt the aliens’ puzzling language.

  A thought flitted through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome: Would Thriss’s death hone him in similar fashion, or would it merely leave him forever diminished and incomplete?

  “Nearly a solid day of work,” Bowers said. “And all we have to show for it so far is a few syllables of Gamma Quadrant baby babble. Not to mention megaquads of untranslatable alien sehlat scratches.” He handed the translator over to Shar in a gesture of resignation.

  Bowers’s sentiments caused Shar to question, if only for a moment, his newfound certainty about their progress. How much of it was merely an attempt to cast off the crushing weight of grief that had lately settled upon his soul? Thriss was dead. Work was solace. Nevertheless, they were on the right track, Shar told himself. We have to be.

  The mess hall doors slid open and John Candlewood stepped briskly into the room, holding yet another iteration of the reconfigured Pinker-Sato phonology module up to one of the room’s overhead lights. He squinted for a moment at the translucent module’s almost indiscernible filigree of isolinear microfibers, then nodded to Shar in apparent satisfaction.

  “I think Cassini and T’rb got the replicator specs fine-tuned enough this time,” Candlewood said as he handed the fingernail-sized chip to Shar, who accepted it with laconic thanks. “This one’s loaded up with the main computer’s latest quadrantwide cross-linguistic comparison algorithms. Let’s hope this one doesn’t overload the translation matrix.”

  Shar nodded, noting that the mess hall still smelled of ozone and burned insulation from the previous attempt to, as Bowers had put it at the time, “hot rod” the translator by means of a high-speed link to the Defiant’ s main computer core. In the depths of that system, a sophisticated linguistic cross-matching program was currently busy comparing both the ancient text and the alien’s every recorded utterance with all known Gamma Quadrant language groups; cross-correlating disparate samples of speech and writing; seeking syntactical and phonological relationships; and methodically winnowing out what amounted to cubic parsecs of coincidental linguistic chaff.

  “I wish we could tear Senkowski and Permenter away from that alien engine room long enough to give this new chip a test-drive,” Bowers said as Shar snapped the new Pinker-Sato module into the translator’s haft. “After all the time they spent studying the hardware that translated the Vahni language, this assignment ought to be right up their street.”

  Candlewood cleared his throat, a look of friendly umbrage on his face. “I had a little bit to do with that, too, Sam—not that I’m trying to steal any credit from Nog’s people. But we had a little more to work with in that situation. Even though the Vahni language was completely visual, it still had a far greater overlap with other known dialects than what we’re working with here—and the Vahni already had their own translation equipment.”

  “Nog expects the alien ship’s most urgent repairs to be finished within the hour,” Shar said.

  “The aliens will be able to ship out then,” Bowers said, stroking his chin. “And I’ll wager they’ll insist on taking the last of our, um, guests with them when they do. I wish they’d given us access to something other than their engine room. It would be nice to know why they’re here and what their fight with the other alien ship was all about.”

  “Perhaps our guest will be able to tell us soon,” Shar said, nodding toward the alien, whose long and spindly body was splayed gingerly across two mess-hall chairs. “Though I don’t doubt that his people will wish to be on their way as soon as possible. But as Mr. Candlewood has pointed out—”

  “Call me John,” Candlewood said.

  Reminding himself once again of the human penchant for informality, Shar nodded and displayed his best synthetic smile. “As John has pointed out, Senkowski and Permenter wouldn’t be likely to decipher this language any more quickly than we can.”

  “So we’ve got maybe an hour, tops, to do the impossible,” Bowers said. “Otherwise, our new friend goes home without helping us puzzle out the alien text. And whatever it has to say about that Oort cloud artifact.”

  “We’re lucky he’s even still here,” Candlewood said. “If his own medical bay hadn’t been wrecked when his ship was attacked, he’d probably already be gone.”

  “And if we fail to return him by the time the aliens are ready to leave,” Shar said, “we can’t rule out a hostile reaction on their part.”

  “So we’re back where we started,” Candlewood said. “We may have a few phonemes, but we’ve still got no syntax or semantics. And no Rosetta stone to bail us out.”

  Nodding, Shar recalled what he’d read about the Rosetta stone at Starfleet Academy. That artifact, discovered nearly six centuries ago in the Terran town of Rashid, bore inscriptions of identical texts in Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only a prior knowledge of Demotic and Greek had allowed the stone’s translators to comprehend the enigmatic Egyptian picture language. Without the Rosetta stone, those obscure inscriptions might have remained unreadable, their authors’ voices forever stilled.

  Shar surmised that whatever Rosetta stone the Gamma Quadrant might hold had spread itself across whole sectors ages ago by the slow process of inter-stellar cultural and linguistic diffusion. It would take all the processing power the Defiant’ s computer could muster to reconstruct those ancient language migration patterns—in effect sweeping up and reassembling the local Rosetta stone’s billions of metaphorical shards.

  “Display the alien text,” Shar said.

  Candlewood responded by giving the computer the appropriate command. A parade of large, cryptic characters, pictograms consisting of undulating lines, asymmetrical polygons, crosshatches, and intersecting and broken shapes, coalesced in the air above the table. There were no perceptible spaces between the symbols, nor anything resembling punctuation marks.

  The alien’s deep, oil-drop eyes watched the lockstep march of the pictograms without any evident recognition.

  Bowers cast a doubtful glance at Shar. “Think we’ll actually find out what he knows this time?”

  “I believe,” Shar said, activating the translator, “that we have only one way to find out for certain.”

  Shar discreetly angled the translator toward the alien, not eager to have his action mistaken for an attack. But the creature showed no sign of noticing, evidently engrossed in the parade of airborne text.

  “Old, very, perceives me, self/ego,” came the translator’s melodious voice, the alien’s speech-surrogate. “Perceives me not old very merely. Indeed, but is oldoldold.”

  Bowers startled Shar by suddenly launching into what appeared to be a brief victory dance. Candlewood grinned broadly, evidently expressing similar sentiments.

  The text is not simply old, Shar thought, too intent on the unfolding mystery to join in his colleagues’ jubilation. The alien recognized it as very old.

  “Maybe it’s his people’s equivalent of the Book of Genesis,” Candlewood said, his thoughts obviously movi
ng along lines similar to Shar’s.

  But Bowers didn’t look ready to celebrate just yet. “Remember, nobody here can read Genesis in the original Hebrew.”

  “Perhaps he only needs some clarification,” Shar said, handing the translator off to Candlewood, then taking a padd from the table. He activated the padd’s display, which began mirroring the holographic text that still flowed past the alien’s rapt gaze. The padd tapped into the stream of data on syntax, phonology, and psycholinguistics now coursing back and forth between the translator and the main computer.

  Parenthetical enclosures began to appear around certain regularly repeated groupings of symbols, isolating each such sequence inside an oval border. Shar recalled that the scholars who had interpreted the Rosetta stone’s hieroglyphs had referred to such markings as cartouches—discrete words or phrases, rendered in a language that might as well have been devised light-years away from Egypt.

  These groupings of characters, of course, were no revelation to Shar—or to anyone else in the room, for that matter. The repetition of certain symbol strings was one of the first discoveries made during the initial computer analyses of the alien text. But absent a lexicon of any sort, these recurring character groupings had been utterly devoid of meaning.

  Now, thanks to the newly enhanced translator, they at least had a potential means of interpreting the alien’s reactions to seeing those symbols.

  Long minutes passed as the isolated strings of symbols continued scrolling past the alien’s watchful eyes, one after another. The alien sat impassively, saying nothing further.

  Bowers’s wry comment finally broke the silence: “Looks like it’s all Greek to him after all.”

  Shar’s certainty was finally beginning to fade in earnest. He could see no sign of recognition whatsoever on the creature’s face. Assuming, of course, that he was equipped to recognize such emotional cues in these beings, which he almost certainly wasn’t.

  Suddenly, the alien spoke up, loudly. “Enti Leyza.”

  The reconfigured translator, steeped as it currently was in quadrantwide linguistic comparisons, seemed to balk for a protracted moment. Shar typed a command into his padd, instructing it to display the translation of the alien’s utterance as text.

  “Run the display in reverse,” Shar said, frowning at his recalcitrant padd. Candlewood moved the holographic text backward, very slowly.

  “Enti Leyza!” The alien said as a particular cartouche hove back into view. He pointed toward it with a long, chitinous digit.

  “Freeze it!” Shar said, then stared at the complex, symbol-strewn oval that was suddenly suspended motionless in midair.

  “He recognizes that symbol,” Candlewood whispered. “There’s no doubt about that.” Shar had to agree.

  Bowers grinned. “Gentlemen, I think we may have just found our guide to the scenic spots of this part of the Gamma Quadrant. Sacagawea, allow me to formally welcome you to the Corps of Discovery.”

  “Sacagawea?” Candlewood said, looking puzzled. Shar wasn’t certain he placed the name either.

  “In honor of the captain’s enthusiasm for the Lewis and Clark expedition in ancient North America,” Bowers said. Shar thought he sounded defensive.

  “Until we can figure out what he actually calls himself,” Candlewood said with a shrug, “I suppose it’ll have to do.”

  Shar continued concentrating on the string of symbols, perhaps as intently as the alien was. The bristling shapes within the cartouche struck him as both comforting and disturbing—and somehow familiar.

  Then he wondered if their ancient author might have been playing an onomatopoetic trick. Acting on a hunch, Shar instructed his padd to display, directly in front of the alien, a holographic image of the mysterious deep-space artifact the shuttlecraft Sagan’ s crew had encountered in System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud.

  The resemblance between the cartouche symbols and the artifact’s oddly shifting spires suddenly became obvious.

  “Enti Leyza! Enti Leyza!” Shar thought he heard something akin to fear in the synthetic translator voice, though he immediately dismissed the notion as ridiculous.

  Still, the alien appeared to be cowering before the image.

  “Do we have an English equivalent for Enti Leyza yet?” Candlewood asked, fairly bouncing with eagerness.

  Shar glanced down at his padd, then nodded. Two words flashed in alternation on the display, as though each was trying to elbow the other aside. Their starkly contradictory meanings made Shar’s antennae rise straight upward.

  “Enti Leyza translates either as ‘cathedral,’” he said, “or ‘anathema.’”

  “Maybe it’s both,” Candlewood offered.

  “Talk about your love-hate relationships,” Bowers said. “To be honest, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about organized religion myself. Maybe our guest here feels the same way.”

  “At any rate, we know he recognizes at least one of these symbols,” Shar said, succumbing to the allure of a mystery that seemed on the verge of surrendering some of its secrets. “Perhaps his reaction demonstrates that this text is an archaic form of his own written language.”

  Candlewood made a subtle adjustment to the translator, then raised it as though in benediction. “Now that we’re no longer forced to communicate entirely via charades and diagrams of the periodic table,” he said, “let’s just ask him.”

  His pulse thundering in his ears, Bashir lay on his back on the diagnostic table, seeing the twinkling lights of the resonance imaging equipment from an entirely unaccustomed angle. He kept his arms at his sides, just the way Krissten had asked, though he found it difficult to resist the urge to withdraw into himself by wrapping them tightly across his chest.

  He experienced a brief interval of heart-clenching fear—“dentist-chair anxiety” was how he thought his father might have described it—between the moment when Krissten began keying the activation sequence into the control pad and the appearance of the dim lights of the submolecular scanner. The intersecting, moving beams bathed his body in an eerie orange glow.

  He calmed as the scan progressed, then felt a renewed jolt of terror as he recalled having been subjected to a similar procedure, nearly three decades ago, by the illicit genengineers on Adigeon Prime. He closed his eyes as the scan continued, trying to banish the unaccountable sensation of soldier ants crawling deep beneath his skin.

  A moment later he became aware of Ezri at his side, holding his hand. He smiled weakly at her, not eager to let on just how unnerved he felt. “Didn’t hurt a bit.”

  Ezri grinned, her earlier pallor now only a fading memory. “I’d be pretty surprised if it did. Unless your body’s individual molecules have suddenly developed their own nerve endings.”

  Bashir sat up and saw that Krissten was studying an adjacent computer terminal, where the results of the deep-tissue scan were already slowly scrolling up.

  “I took the scan down past the DNA level this time,” she said. “So we can do a cross-comparison with the scans we already made of Lieutenant Nog and Lieutenant Dax.”

  “And of my weirdly healthy yet still disembodied symbiont,” Ezri said, gesturing toward a shelf across the room, where the Dax symbiont’s medical transport pod sat. Bashir heard a brittleness in her voice, a sense of loss that Ezri appeared to be trying to conceal beneath a bantering façade.

  Her other hand was still in his. He squeezed it, and she squeezed back hard, as though life itself depended on maintaining her grip. Meeting her beseeching gaze, he whispered, “We’ll get to the bottom of this business, Ezri. I swear it.”

  “You always did have a fascination for lost causes, Julian,” she said quietly. “But my body has rejected the symbiont. It no longer needs me. And apparently I no longer need it.”

  Bashir wasn’t fooled by her flippant tone. He knew, of course, that Ezri had never wanted to be joined prior to the emergency that had brought Dax into her life, when the symbiont had been near death during its brief stay aboard her ship, the U.S
.S. Destiny. But during the past eighteen months, Ezri’s formerly neurotic personality had begun to flower, and Bashir attributed that fact largely to the influence of the Dax symbiont. He had watched, sometimes with alarm, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with satisfaction, as she had made continuous progress integrating her own personality with that of Dax and those of the symbiont’s previous eight hosts. And he knew that having all those lives, memories, and talents summarily ripped from her psyche had to be a trauma of unspeakable proportions.

  “It’s not a lost cause just yet,” he said, putting on his best confidence-instilling smile, though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. “We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the Persian army yet. So we’ll keep right on defending Thermopylae. That’s a medical order.”

  His reference to the holosuite “hopeless battle” scenarios of which they had both become so fond lately succeeded in bringing a faint smile to her lips. “So we hold the mountain pass. Then back to Sparta, either with our shields or on them.”

  Bashir gently disengaged his hand from hers, rose, and crossed to Krissten and the medical display. He watched the chaotic rising and falling of the indicators.

  And suddenly realized that he wasn’t at all certain how to interpret them. He felt a surge of panic, then reminded himself that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen peculiar readings. It would simply take a little time to figure them out.

  Of course.

  A deep frown creased Krissten’s brow as she evaluated the display. “I just overlaid your quantum signature scan onto the ones we took from everybody else who was on the Sagan.”

  The readings didn’t look right, but he couldn’t quite say why. “There’s something else there,” he said.

  “That’s an overlay of the quantum resonance scans that Ensign Tenmei took of the Sagan itself.”

  “And your interpretation, Ensign?” Bashir said. Nothing was making sense.

  “You can see it for yourself, Doctor,” she said, raising an eyebrow at him. “Look at the way the aberrant quantum profiles line up on each and every one of these scans.”