“Then surely you can find it in your heart to forgive her.”
“Actions such as hers are beyond my authority to forgive. Kira has taken it upon herself to affect Bajor’s spiritual well-being—without training, without warning, and without official sanction. To be blunt, this makes her simply too dangerous to keep within the faith.”
He expected Mika to react angrily to his plainspoken argument, as the Emissary’s wife had done when he had rebuffed her attempt to discuss lifting Kira’s Attainder. But instead, Mika merely seemed more resolute. “I understand,” she said. “I had to try. Still, there are others in the Assembly who may be less…inflexible about their Attainder votes.” She stood, readying herself and her sleeping child to leave. “Vedek Yevir, I hope that one day the Prophets will lead you to the forgiveness of Kira, and to Ohalu’s truth.”
Before he could react, Mika’s child began to fuss, pushing a small hand out of the robes in which it had been wrapped. The hand was chubby and slightly gray in color, its skin rough and leathery. From where Yevir sat, an absurd juxtaposition of the jevonite figure with the child made the baby’s arm appear to be growing out of the statue’s side.
Yevir stood bolt upright. “May I see your child, Mika?”
Mika’s eyes narrowed in response to his swift action, but she obliged him by stepping closer and sweeping the robes away from the child’s sleep-crinkled face. Yevir could see that the boy seemed larger than before, a toddler who looked to be about a year old, rather than an infant.
Yevir stepped to the side of his desk and reached out to touch the boy’s face. His skin had the same grayish cast as his limbs, as well as another, somewhat unexpected trait. On the slumbering boy’s nose was a fully developed set of Bajoran ridges, while his brow and forehead were framed by the raised scales of a Cardassian. An elevated oval on his forehead held a depression in its center, in the shape of an elegantly crafted spoon. The boy’s eyes, which had just opened, were of a crystalline black and seemed to watch the vedek with an intensity that matched Yevir’s own.
The vedek’s hand traced the ridges on the child’s forehead, and the boy grasped his finger, chattering happily. Yevir found himself smiling in wonder. Looking up, he saw that Mika was smiling as well.
The child is at peace. He has erased the tension we both felt, bridged our two worlds.
Yevir’s mind raced. He stepped back, gesturing toward the door. “Thank you, Mika. Your son is beautiful. I will consider your words. If you will consider mineas well.”
As the young woman turned to leave, she said, “I consider the words of many, Vedek Yevir. Wisdom and freedom can be fully gained only by opening one’s mind.”
She was quoting her uncle again. He smiled. “Walk with the Prophets.”
“And you,” she said. And then she was gone.
Yevir sat down behind his desk and immediately reached for the gold-hued jevonite statue. The figurine had come from the ongoing excavations at B’hala, brought to the Emissary’s wife by one of the prylars working at the site. Yevir wasn’t sure why he felt so strongly connected to the artifact. The figure was peculiar, bearing little resemblance to the more primitive art found elsewhere at the dig. It was a humanoid shape swathed in robes. Its eyes, though mere carvings, still managed to appear as though they watched anything in view. Its nose was ridged like a Bajoran’s, but its forehead also bore raised, scaly scar patterns. Its neck was long and gracefully sloping, held up in pride and unbowed by adversity. When Yevir had first laid eyes on the figure, he had wondered if it represented some millennia-dead Bajoran martyr or holy man, whose facial disfigurements bore testament to the trials he had endured in the name of the Prophets. But almost immediately he saw that it held a deeper, subtler meaning.
Using the same hand with which he had touched Mika’s child, Yevir now caressed the face of the small statue, and he became utterly certain, at last, what the object represented—the melding of a Bajoran and a Cardassian. The blending of the Bajoran nose ridge with the forehead scales of a Cardassian was unmistakable. And why hadn’t he noticed the subtle ridges running down both sides of the figure’s neck before? The statue was obviously the image of a mixed-heritage child like Mika’s, though it was carved millennia before the two planets could possibly have produced such a union. Before, in fact, either people had met or even known of one another’s existence.
Like the hybrid child he had just touched—and like Tora Ziyal, whose memory the Cardassians had resurrected in their overtures of peace—the statue represented a commingling of related species.
It is a symbol of unity.
Hope surged within Yevir’s breast, and his earlier feelings of despair vanished like mist over the fire caves. Replacing them were a cacophony of thoughts and plans, an epiphany of what he must now do.
He tapped at his comm panel, then remembered that Flin had gone for the day. That was fine. What he had to do was perhaps better done alone. Yevir called the spaceport most regularly used by the Vedek Assembly; although it mainly transported civilians, a few of its ships were always at the preferential disposal of the clergy. Using the after-hours automated system, he booked passage to Deep Space 9 on the next available transport, three hours hence.
Finished with the first step, Yevir reviewed his mental checklist of the probable whereabouts of his closest Vedek Assembly colleagues. Vedeks Eran and Scio would be in services now, ministering to the faithful. Kyli and Bellis would most likely already be in private meditation. That left Vedeks Frelan and Sinchante as the two among his inmost circle whom he was likeliest to reach on the first attempt. Yevir keyed both names into his comm panel, and swiveled to face the screen. He reached out with his other hand to touch the jevonite statue on his desk.
Both women answered on the split screen within moments of one another, and Yevir could see that each appeared to be alone in her respective chambers. Incense burned in braziers beside ornate prayer mandalas in both rooms, in honor of the evening temple services, from which the busiest and highest ranking vedeks were understandably excused. It occurred to Yevir only then that he had gotten so sidetracked by his encounter with Mika that he had completely neglected his own evening prayer rites.
“Something has happened,” he said after exchanging perfunctory pleasantries with his two old friends. “I have been seized by a notion so… radicalthat I can scarcely defend my thinking. And yet, I am experiencing a clarity of mind that tells me this notion can only be the truth.”
As both women simultaneously raised their eyebrows, Yevir began to outline his plan.
6
Ezri was gratified to note that none of the shuttlecraft Sagan’s critical systems had sustained mortal damage during the encounter with the enigmatic alien artifact. But because the little vessel was limited to impulse power during the trip back from the depths of System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud, the return flight to the Defianttook nearly forty minutes. While they were en route, Commander Vaughn supplied a quick briefing about the Defiant’s intervention in the fight between the two local space vessels, as well as a summary of the gravest injuries sustained by the crew of the less well armed—and currently crippled—ship. With the help of several hastily dragooned corpsmen, Nurse Krissten Richter was struggling to keep up with the very worst trauma cases.
Ezri hoped that Krissten wasn’t fighting a losing battle. Although she was better than competent, Julian’s assistant was only a medical technician, after all, not a doctor. Julian’s obvious anxiety was perfectly understandable.