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
