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
