Ezri looked up at Julian, her smile vanishing instantly. “My isoboramine levels were low?” she asked. Isoboramine, she knew, was a neurotransmitter chemical essential for a joined Trill; it functioned as a medium for the transfer of synaptic processes between host and symbiont. If the amount of the chemical dropped below a certain level, the symbiont would have to be removed in order to keep it alive; in such a case, the host would die.
“Yes, they were,” Julian said apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spring the information on you like that.”
“I know,” she said, reaching over and squeezing his hand as a sign of reassurance. “But tell me what happened.”
“Actually, I’m not entirely certain,” he said. “But I used the standard benzocyatizine treatment. It didn’t work initially, but once your vital signs stabilized, it took hold.”
“And all of this,” Ezri asked, attempting to make sense of what had happened to her, “because I touched the creature we found in the Jefferies tube?”
“Well, I’d still hesitate to say that the substance is alive,” Julian said, “but your contact with whatever it is seems to have been what injured you.”
“If it’s not alive, then what is it?” she asked. “And whether it’s alive or not, how did it do what it did to me?” She brought her hands down on the bed on either side of her body and pushed herself off, hopping onto her feet. She held on to the bed for a moment, making sure that she could stand after what she had been through, and after having been on her back for hours. Julian took hold of her upper arm, steadying her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, lightly brushing away his hand. “I’m okay.” She walked unhurriedly across the medical bay. Ensign Richter turned from a console on the other side of the room, saw Ezri’s slow progress, and started to rise out of her chair. Ezri waved her away, and the ensign hesitated, then returned to her seat. “What is it?” Ezri asked, turning to Julian and repeating her question about the substance.
“We don’t know yet,” Julian said, following her across the room. He passed her and went to the console where Ensign Richter sat, picking up a tricorder there. “But we did learn some things about it, thanks to you.” He walked back over to her.
“Thanks to me?” she asked.
“Yes. Let me show you.” Julian motioned to a companel in one wall, and the two of them strode over to it. He opened and worked the tricorder, then keyed a sequence of touchpads on the companel. On the larger display, an image appeared of the section of the Jefferies tube in which they had found they substance. The gray pool sat draped from the location Ezri had last seen it and out across the floor of the tube. Oddly, the seemingly liquid material did not drop through the metal grating.
“This is the substance as it appears right now,” Julian said. He touched a control and a white line traced the edges of the free-form shape. “After you mentioned being in another universe, I thought about the incomplete sensor readings we’ve been getting, and it occurred to me that perhaps the substance exists in more than what we consider ‘normal’ space.” He touched another control, and a second, red line appeared, drawing an amorphous shape that abutted the first.
“This is a part of the substance in another universe?” Ezri asked, pointing at the area on the display bounded by the red.
“Not in another universe, no,” Julian said. “But in another stratum of our own. This portion of the object—” He indicated the same area Ezri had. “—exists in subspace. We’ve found other parts of the substance in other areas of space, which explains why we’ve had such trouble taking meaningful scans of it. It might also tell us similar things about the energy pulse.”
“You think they’re related?” Ezri asked.
“Well, we had the same sorts of difficulties taking sensor readings of the energy pulse and the energy in the planet’s cloud cover,” Julian said, “so it may be that the energy also extends into other domains within our universe. The engineering and sciences teams are now taking that into account as they try to find a means of stopping the next pulse.”
Ezri nodded slowly, and thought, What does this all mean?“I have another question,” she said, attempting to piece together all of the strange facts. “If my isoboramine levels were affected, then that means that the link between Ezri and Dax was compromised. Is it possible that happened because another connection was established, one between the symbiont and the substance?”
Julian wrinkled his brow. “That would presuppose that the substance is alive,” he said, “and we really have no significant evidence of that.”
“We have my experiences,” she said. “I—that is, Dax—sensed a consciousness in another universe.”
“Or maybe you or the symbiont dreamed that,” Julian suggested.
“Maybe,” Ezri said, and she had to allow for that possibility. “But I didn’t dream the reduction in my isoboramine levels. Maybe that allowed Dax to communicate with, or at least sense, this other mind.”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” Julian said. “But I’m not sure how we could ever prove that, or make use of it.”
Ezri paced away from the companel and across the room, back over to the bed in which she had awoken. Something she felt she needed to know dwelled just beyond the horizon of her memory. Maybe because it’s not your memory,she thought. She raised a fist and tapped her forehead, as though she could physically dislodge the missing recollection from its hiding place. Ezri wondered if Trill initiate training would have helped her integrate not just the memories of Dax’s former hosts, but also those exclusively of Dax—because that seemed to be what she required here: access to the recall of the symbiont. Something important had happened when she had been in that coma, something Dax knew. Since being joined, she had experienced many confusing thoughts and emotions, but she had never felt like this, isolated from what had become the other half of her mind and heart.
Ezri touched her fist to her forehead and held it there. She closed her eyes, and at once, a gray wave seemed to wash over her. The soothing waters of the Caves of Mak’ala, she thought at first, but then another interpretation came to her: the dim, energy-filled clouds surrounding the planet below, and the substance spilling across the surfaces in the Jefferies tube. And finally, she had what she was looking for.
She turned around and faced Julian across the room. “I have an idea,” she told him.
38
Quark strode out of the turbolift and onto the Promenade, his mood as dark as a Jem’Hadar’s hearts. He listened and could tell immediately, even before he reached the bar, that his fortunes had not improved much. If the proverbial wise man could hear profit in the wind, Quark wondered what sort of a man that made him. Besides poor,he thought. As he walked toward the bar, his ears told him the approximate number of customers there—too few—and the number of those playing at the dabo table—several more than at any time during the past couple of weeks, but still not enough.
I should have stayed in my quarters,he thought. Except that even an afternoon spent foraging through the quadrant’s financial and commodities exchanges had not held any fascination for him. It vexed Quark to see his idiot brother’s so-called reforms being implemented on Ferenginar, crippling so many of the markets. But even Quark’s anger at Rom could not keep his mind occupied for very long.
Quark only glanced at the floor as he slipped behind the bar; the last thing he needed to see right now was just how close his employees came to outnumbering his customers. He looked at the mess Frool and Grimp had managed to leave—remarkable, really, considering the dearth of business—and grabbed a rag. He began to swab the surface of the bar, wanting to occupy himself. But as he concentrated on the simple task, with his eyes cast down, his ears still remained open. And he did not hear her.