Kira was incredulous. “You’re saying it’s my destinyto support the Ohalavaru?”
“Call it what you will,” he said, shrugging. “But we both know that your support would greatly influence whether or not Solis becomes the next kai. Unless you prefer to see Yevir in that position. Remember, he’s a relatively young man. He could be kai for the rest of your life.”
Kira couldn’t dispute the general on most of these points. But it all still felt fundamentally wrong to her.
After taking a long, silent moment to compose her thoughts, she said, “I simply can’t risk dividing Bajor any further. Especially not so close to Bajor’s official entry into the Federation. Until Bajor’s admission, the Emissary’s work here is incomplete.”
It was Lenaris’s turn to appear incredulous. “The Emissary? Benjamin Sisko. Nerys, I have nothing but respect for your former commander, but he is part of the past. You should embrace the future instead.”
“That’s precisely what I’m trying to do, Holem. If the Ohalavaru would simply stand back, be objective, and try to look at the bigger political picture, they might be able to see that now isn’t the best time to open up political rifts. Surely Vedek Solis can understand that.”
“It was Vedek Solis who asked me to speak with you today.”
Kira let out a weary sigh. “Has either of you considered the Bajor–Cardassia talks?”
“As little as possible,” he said with another shrug. “What about them?”
“The talks are stalled at the moment. What chance will we have of restarting them if we’re preoccupied with our own religious squabbles?”
Lenaris was clearly unmoved. “If the talks with Cardassia are stalled, then you can rest assured that the cause is Cardassian intransigence. Nothing that’s happening on Bajor now or in the future will change that one way or the other.”
But Kira knew better. She had already spoken at length about this very topic with Shakaar. And as far as she was concerned, the first minister could make a nice living conducting master classes in intransigence.
“General, I’d like you to speak to Solis for me,” Kira said after another lengthy pause. “Ask him to be a little gentler in pushing the Ohalavaru agenda. At least until the current business with the Federation and Cardassia is resolved. There really is a bigger picture to consider here, Holem. Bigger than Solis. Bigger than Yevir. And certainly bigger than either of us.”
Lenaris rose and set his empty cup on her desk. He looked sad, deflated. “You’ve changed, Nerys.”
She bristled. “Yes. I’ve become a bit wiser about doing what’s right for my people.”
“You worry about dividing Bajor,” he said with a bitter laugh. “But that sinoraptor’s already jumped the fence. That happened the moment you uploaded Ohalu’s suppressed prophecies onto the Bajoran comnet. The only question we ought to be asking now is how best to manage that division.”
“I’ll leave that to wiser heads than mine, thank you.”
“Whoseheads?” Lenaris walked over to the painting that hung on her wall, idly examining it for a moment before turning back to her. “Yevir’s? Vedek Scio’s? Vedek Eran’s? The other hard-liners? This ‘division’ you’re so frightened of might actually be the beginning of Bajor’s future unity, Nerys. The start of a transformation into something with more vision than the current orthodoxy has. Something truer to the plans of the Prophets.”
Kira’s thoughts wandered back to the pivotal battles she had fought on behalf of the ancient Bajora after she had been thrown thirty millennia into her planet’s past. She hadn’t hesitated to get involved then. But grappling in the same way with the future seemed an altogether different matter.
“Let history make those decisions,” she said. “Not me.”
His voice rose in both passion and volume. “Nerys, you arehistory. Wasn’t it you who introduced us to Ohalu’s truth after the vedeks tried to destroy it? Wasn’t it you who created this ‘division’ in the first place?”
“I’m not proud of it. I just did what had to be done to let our people make up their own minds about their faith. To keep Yevir from short-circuiting those decisions by suppressing Ohalu’s prophecies.”
A triumphant smile spread slowly across the general’s face. “You acted to defend prophecies which have turned out to be utterly, perfectlycorrect. Not just some of them. Allof them, Nerys. Given those facts, how could Ohalu’s writings be anything butthe inspired words of the Prophets? And isn’t your first duty to them?”
Kira couldn’t avoid the ring of truth his words carried. How easy it would be to simply go along. To use the Ohalavaru as a weapon against Yevir and his ilk. But at what cost to Bajor’s future? Other than her Orb experiences, she had never claimed to have any special knowledge of the minds of the Prophets. But surely such convulsions couldn’t be part of their plan.
“No,” she said quietly, her voice pitched almost in a whisper.
The general nodded, then took a different tack. “Do you think you might be more kindly disposed toward us if we were to convince the Vedek Assembly to reverse your Attainder?”
She decided that she had had just about enough of this. Friendship and rank would go just so far. “Why not just tow all fourteen planets in the system into a straight line?” she said. “It would probably be easier. Besides, my religious status is something personal, between me and the Prophets and—”
“—and none of my damned business,” he said with a chuckle, interrupting her. “Forgive me, Nerys. I overreached myself.”
The general moved toward the door, which opened for him. Then he turned around on the threshold and faced her. “It’s clear to me now that you’re not ready to come along with us on this. At least not just yet.”
With that, he bid her a warm good-bye and departed. Alone in her office, Kira recalled how tenacious a fighter her old friend had been during the bad old days of the Occupation.
And she was absolutely certain that she hadn’t heard the last of the Ohalavaru. Or of their agenda for Bajor.
15
Taking care to tread quietly, Ezri entered the quarters she shared with Julian. She wanted to look in on him once more before preparing for the tactical briefing.
“Hello, Julian.”
He was sitting cross-legged on the bunk, his usually immaculate hair disheveled, his uniform jacket torn and askew, his eyes closed as though he had been deep in meditation. When they opened, she saw a momentary whirlpool of confusion in their brown depths.
Then he smiled at her.
She smiled back, relieved. She hadn’t startled him this time. And he wasn’t throwing things. Or screaming.
“You’re quite pretty,” he said, his voice sounding like a kilometer of gravel-strewn road. Her smile wavered as she looked into his eyes. Did he even recognize her?
Her gaze was drawn to the uneven lettering that Julian had evidently burned into the bulkhead during one of her absences. Beside a few archaic Terran words was scrawled Voice and nothing more.
Was that how Julian saw himself during his lucid moments? Ezri found the idea difficult to understand. She had come to believe in his steady judgment, his rock-solid humanity, the way a mathematician accepts a geometrical axiom. She found the phrase Julian had carved to be a far better description of herself. Nothing but appearances, she thought. Pips on a uniform that’s no longer even the right color.
She recalled her counseling training. “Impostor syndrome” was how the texts had described the feelings she was having. The irrational conviction that one’s continued presence in a given job is somehow fraudulent. What frightened Ezri most about the notion was that it felt completely rational.
Because she knew it was the truth.