After Gard had left, Ro sank back into her chair. She realized that she was still blushing; it had been aeons since anyone had flirted with her so overtly—and so charmingly. Most of her earlier romances had been quick wartime dalliances with other freedom fighters. Her time among the Maquis had afforded few opportunities for true emotional sharing. With Jalik, Kyle, and even Dana, there had been time only for brief physical intimacies, vital affirmations of life that punctuated an endless series of bloody engagements with the Cardassians, and later, the Jem’Hadar.
After draining the last of her tea, Ro noticed that Quark was appraising her from across the bar, though no longer glowering. Clearly, that was an expression he was keeping in reserve for Gard. With no small amount of wonder, she reflected yet again on how much she was actually beginning to like the little scoundrel, even though she acknowledged that she still didn’t entirely trust him. Who would have seenthat coming?
But as she made her way back onto the Promenade, planning on visiting Hatrim Nabir’s dress shop to prepare for her date with Quark, she found that Gard’s bewitching smile still lingered in her thoughts.
10
Chief medical officer’s personal log, stardate 53577.8
I woke up soaked in sweat, and as tired as though I’d just come off a double shift. I realized with a start that I was lying on one of the biobeds. Fewer things are more disconcerting to a ship’s doctor than suddenly finding himself horizontal in his own medical bay.
But suddenly remembering that you recently almost killed three of your patients is far worse. Krissten noticed my agitation immediately and offered me a sedative to help me rest. I mustered up as much courage as I could and tried to reassure her that after being unconscious for the past several hours, what I needed most was to get back to work and try to get to the bottom of what had happened to all of us who had been aboard theSagan. I pressed her with questions about my patients, and she reassured me that Nog, the Dax symbiont, and my accidentally wounded alien patient were all doing well—and that Ezri had returned to duty on the bridge. Ezri was already on her way down to see me, apparently at least as worried about me as I was about her.
As I began trying to calibrate the scanning equipment, Krissten noticed the unsteadiness of my hands and pitched in to help. Actually, she ended up handling the task essentially on her own. I was grateful for her help, but unsure how much of my own unsteadiness stemmed from simple fatigue and how much I could chalk up to my obviously deteriorating mind. I felt as though I’d stepped into a thick fog.
Over the course of perhaps an hour, I noticed that the mere act of thinking through technical problems was growing enormously wearying. As my fatigue mounted, I thought about the sedative Krissten had offered me and realized that Morpheus might as well be the Grim Reaper. If I risked going to sleep again before finding a solution, how much worse off would I be the next time I awoke?
“Den D’Naali.”The alien said, its vertically cleft mouth parts wrapping awkwardly around the sounds. Shar was surprised at the pure, almost crystalline quality of the synthetic voice issuing from Bowers’s hand-held universal translator unit. “Den D’Naali bu kereve. Croi Ryek’ekbalabiozan’denlu bu Nyazen den. Enti Leyza.”
Shar’s antennae pitched forward in the alien’s direction. Thanks to the ministrations of Dr. Bashir and Ensign Richter—to say nothing of several miniature antigrav units now strapped to various points around its body—the creature seemed healthy and strong—and apparently eager to communicate. Shar suddenly felt certain that they had finally broken the linguistic impasse which had so far thwarted all but the crudest attempts at communication. With Shar’s certainty came a surge of unalloyed joy, the heady rush of imminent discovery. It reminded him of why he’d joined Starfleet in the first place.
Another realization startled him then: This was the first time he’d experienced this sensation since he’d learned of Thriss’s suicide.
Shar turned to Bowers. “I believe we’ve just made a major breakthrough.”
“You mean you understoodthat?” 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 sehlatscratches.” 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 wereon 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.”