But there wasn’t time to think as the footfalls grew near. The orderlies, their young charge between them, passed Julian along a perpendicular corridor. He heaved a sigh of relief as they went by without noticing him, then quietly shadowed them through several turns. Luckily, they never turned to look behind them, and the sounds of their passage covered whatever noise Julian’s pursuit was making.
Peering from around a corner, Julian watched as the two large men shepherded young Jules through a door to what appeared to be some sort of lab or infirmary. Moments later, the two men emerged again into the corridor—this time without the child—and walked away, taking no notice of Julian as they disappeared around another bend in the hallway.
Responding intuitively to some vague ghost of a memory, Julian saw that this had to be the place. The place where the doctors changed me.
He moved quietly to the unlocked door, pushed it open, and stepped into the room.
The boy sat in a too-large, swept-back chair. His slight body all but lost in his bulky hospital gown, the child’s slippered feet dangled several centimeters off the sterile floor. His small hands were in his lap, clutching at one another as though each were competing for the protection of the other. Little Jules was facing in Julian’s direction, while a trio of graceful, birdlike Adigeons—evidently doctors or surgeons—handled hypos and tricorders, their white-smocked backs to the door, apparently oblivious to Julian’s presence. The boy, though he clearly had noticed Julian’s entrance immediately, said nothing. He made no sign that might serve to alert the Adigeons.
Clever child.
Julian stood in silence, studying the boy’s dusky eyes—the same eyes that once studied him from the other side of his father’s old-fashioned looking glass—for what seemed like minutes, seeking some justification there for his parents’ fervid desire to remold and remake him. The child’s eyes, though betraying a hard edge of fear, nevertheless smoldered with something irrepressible. This boy seemed to be anything but the afflicted alter ego his parents had assured him that he was so much better off without. Young Jules bore scant resemblance to the cautionary specter that had followed him ever since the day when fifteen-year-old Julian Subatoi Bashir had learned the far-reaching extent of the genetic enhancements his parents had secured for him on Adigeon Prime. The child looked more like the bright if slightly learning-disabled doppelganger who sometimes stalked Julian’s dreams like the ghost of a murdered twin.
Despite the accelerating deterioration of his own intellect and perceptions, Julian knew that he could believe in one simple, objective truth about young Jules simply by meeting his gaze—somebody was in there, a tenacious soul stoking an inner fire.
A pointed question suddenly jolted him: Would his parents’ well-intentioned interference douse those fires?
Julian fell out of his reverie when he noticed that one of the three Adigeons had turned to him. The creature glared at him, its feathery neck ruff rising in agitation. “How did you get in here?”
The other two Adigeons turned to him as well. “Don’t worry, Doctor,” said a second one. “Don’t you recognize him? He’s the mature version of the youngling we’re treating.”
“I see,” said the first Adigeon, scouring Julian from top to bottom with one of its side-mounted, lidless eyes. “Well, we certainly do seem to have made a botch of things, haven’t we?”
“I’ll call the large humans back in to remove him,” said the third physician. “If he interferes with these procedures, even accidentally, who knows what will happen to this child as it matures?”
Who knows?Julian thought, wondering whether he would have fallen so far had he never been forced to climb so high in the first place. Still, what these doctors wanted sounded like what he should want as well. As though it were the whole point of his having come to this place. He wished he could remember more than that.
And that the boy’s pleading eyes didn’t make the whole endeavor feel so completely wrong.
Young Jules sat, watching in silence. But Julian sensed that the boy wasn’t simply staring vacantly. He seemed to be paying very close attention to the tableau before him. Discordant music played quietly in the background, echoing down some distant corridor.
The first Adigeon approached Julian until he could smell the creature’s cool breath. Its aroma was an incongruous mixture of buttered popcorn, peppermint, and Tarkalean tea. “You’re not supposed to be here,” it said.
His arm suddenly tremulous, Julian pointed to the boy—the person he had once been, so long ago. And without being certain why, he came to an utterly visceral decision.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the Adigeon repeated, raising one of its taloned hands threateningly.
“Neither is he,” Julian said, and then rushed the delicate alien, bowling him over into the other two Adigeons. Surprised, they collapsed in a heap of flapping limbs. Julian knew they wouldn’t stay down long. He only had seconds.
He moved quickly to young Jules, whose eyes had widened in either fright or awe, or perhaps both. The child offered no resistance when Julian took his hand, pulled him to his feet, and marched him through the laboratory door.
They stopped for a moment in the corridor, regarding one another appraisingly. “Thank you,” Jules said. Julian grinned down at the boy. Thankme, he thought. And then they ran together down the corridor.
Past the orderlies, who gave chase but swiftly fell behind, waving lollipops in the air in their impotent rage.
Past a very surprised Richard and Amsha Bashir, whose confused, angry shouts died away as they sprinted across the waiting room, knocking over a potted plant from which sprays of royal red, heart-shaped flowers spilled.
Past the astonished-looking members of the Starfleet Medical oral examination jury. The Vulcan’s mouth made an O of surprise as Jack’s top hat fell from his head.
Julian felt a stitch in his side and stopped to catch his breath. Jules came to a halt beside him, standing in companionable silence. Julian looked up. The Adigeon Prime hospital was gone. Seemingly kilometers above their heads, the wildly intersecting interdimensional geometries of the alien artifact soared, appearing somehow inside out.
Because I’ve been inside the thing all along. All of us from theSagan have been inside it.
He could feel that everything he hadn’t been able to remember was flooding back to him. He stared up into the artifact’s ever-shifting skyscape of counterintuitively constructed beams, braces, and spires as he felt his body and mind surge with every genetically enhanced talent he’d feared had been lost forever. Turning his eyes back to young Jules, Julian regarded the child for a long moment before speaking.
But he was completely at a loss as to why.
“My God,” he said. “What have I just done?” Unearthly crystalline sounds, like those he’d first heard aboard the Sagan,began reverberating gently in the middle distance. Or perhaps they were coming from light-years away.
The boy smiled. “You finally recognized me.”
“I think you mean I rescued you. And it was a stupid thing for me to do, considering that it should have made whatever the artifact did to me permanent.”
“No,” Jules said with a solemn shake of his head. “It was the act of a simple but decent man.”
“But I prevented you from…having the ‘procedures.’ Where does that leave me?”
“You’ve merely cut a tether to an unhealthy part of your past,” Jules said, then pointed straight up. Julian’s neck and eyes followed the gesture. “Consider your love-hate relationship with me resolved.”
The gilded dome of the Hagia Sophia now arced majestically over their heads. The discordant yet not unpleasant music swelled through the basilica in long, reverberating strains. The cathedral’s gallery stretchedout to a remote vanishing point, restored to its full sixth-century splendor. Every painting, every tapestry, every sculpture appeared to be back in its appointed place and repaired to its original condition.