Quark spread his hands. “Well, after all, every day is somebody’sbirthday.”
“True enough,” the commander conceded, raising the esaniflower to his nose and gently breathing in its fragrance. “As it happens, though, I have a prior commitment this evening. Some other time, perhaps. Thanks for the gift.” He gave Quark’s shoulder a friendly pat, and nodded to Girani as he strode out of the exam room. “Doctor.”
As Vaughn exited, Quark seemed to notice Girani for the first time, a new gleam forming in his eye. “Doctor! When’s your birthday?”
Hovath
Hovath awoke to darkness and the taste of blood. Pain nested behind his eyes, its sharp black beak stabbing his brain. His lower lip was numb and felt twice its usual size. His face was sore, and cold on one side. Through his cheek he felt a low vibration, one he recognized: the deckplate of a spacecraft at warp.
Light assailed him through his eyelids, an instant before his mind registered the sound of a switch being thrown, the echo reverberating off metal walls.
“Up,” a harsh voice demanded, just as he felt rough hands grab hold of his vestments and force him into a hard chair. Hovath struggled to open his eyes against the glare, saw that he was sitting at one end of a plain metal table in the midst of an otherwise dark room, a light on the other side shining directly into his face. The stabbing pain behind his eyes grew worse.
Then it all came back to him.
Shards of memory broke through the fog: alien faces, the heat of the explosion, the light of the village burning, screams of agony, the scent of death.
“Iniri!”The wail of grief tore itself from the rawness of his throat, sending him into a fit of dry, painful coughing.
I’m alive. Why am I alive?The crushing knowledge of what had befallen his people was proof that he wasn’t dead…unless death was not the thing his faith maintained. Though the concept of an afterlife defined by eternal loss and regret was alien to Bajoran thinking, Hovath knew it was powerful idea in human mythology. They had names for it. He knew one of them: hell.
“Ke Hovath,” another voice said, softer than the first, female. But not his wife’s. Iniri!
Then a different horror seized him: They knew his name! Prophets help him, they knew his name! They had killed everyone, his friends and neighbors, his family, they had burned the village to the ground—but they had taken him, kept him alive. They wanted him!
“Why?” Hovath found the strength to ask before another coughing spasm took hold.
“Let him drink,” the woman said. A second later, a sipstick touched his lips. Cool water flowed over his dry, leathery tongue, bringing some relief from the choking taste of ash. He began to drink greedily, becoming aware of two figures on his right and left, standing over him.
“That’s enough,” the voice said, and the sipstick withdrew.
Hovath looked up, squinting against the light, attempting to see the speaker through the glare. The most he could discern was a dark shape sitting on the opposite end of the table. “What do you want of me?”
“The same thing you want. Answers,” his captor said.
“I won’t help you.”
“I think you will.” The dark figure seemed to turn slightly to one of her henchmen. “Show him.”
The underling on his right—Hovath thought dully he might be a Nausicaan, though he was uncertain—moved to the nearest wall, where a viewscreen was set up. The alien activated it, and Hovath’s heart lifted.
Iniri was alive. She was slumped in the corner of a small room, her red-blond hair in dissaray, her clothing singed. She had her arms wrapped around herself and she appeared to be weeping. She looked as if she’d been beaten, and Hovath’s moment of relief turned to rage.
Then he felt the blood drain from his face as he recognized her surroundings. An airlock.
“As you can see, your wife lives. For the moment,” the woman said. “If you wish her to stay that way, I require your full cooperation.”
“Please,” Hovath moaned. “Let her go.”
“No. Not until you give me what I need. Otherwise Iniri dies.”
Hovath squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his hands into fists on top of the table, his mind searching for a way out of his nightmare. His teeth bit into his swollen lower lip until he tasted blood again.
“How can I possibly help you? I’m no one.”
“Oh, but that is hardly true.” the woman said. “Until this very morning you were the sirahof Sidau village. But that’s not all, is it, Hovath? You’ve also spent half of each of the last six years as a student in Musilla University, where you pursued what can only be described as an atypical course of study for someone of your upbringing, and published a rather remarkable document.”
From the far end of table, something slid toward him across the surface. His fingers caught it. A padd, but not of a design he’d ever seen before. Its little screen displayed the title, Speculations on the Architecture of the Celestial Temple.
His name appeared directly below it.
“I’ve become quite familiar with your work,” his captor said.
Tears streamed from Hovath’s eyes as he began to understand why all this was happening.
Hovath’s spirit had always been restless, distracted; it was for that very reason, he recalled, that the old sirahhad pushed Hovath so hard before his death, seven years ago. Hovath had stumbled during his first attempt to control the Dal’Rok.The old sirahhad felt Hovath’s pagh,and found him wanting. Enlisting the aid of two humans from the space station, he crafted a lesson whereby Hovath learned to commit fully to the duty for which he had been trained his whole life.
As the new sirah,Hovath served his people well. But the villagers needed his services as storyteller only for a span of five days each year. The rest of that time he was merely a scholar and sometime spiritual guide. Though he had mastered his role, his spirit remained restless, his mind thirsty for knowledge that had no place in the village. A year after he became the storyteller of Sidau, he announced his intent to spend Hedrikspool’s autumn and winter months each year in secluded study, away from the village. No one, not even his new bride, Iniri, had known where he went, or the controversial nature of his work: a single line of theological and scientific inquiry that had been circling round and round in his mind since the Emissary had first come to Bajor.
From the day of its discovery, the wormhole had excited him, captured his imagination. For the Celestial Temple to manifest itself in such a manner, it could only mean that the Prophets sought to be understood in ways apart from the wisdom of the prophecies. Or so Hovath believed. Come,he felt the Temple beckon. See what I am.
After the death of the old sirah,Hovath’s life walked two paths. On one he was the faithful storyteller of the village, Keeper of the Paghvaramand Foe of the Dal’Rok.On the other path he’d become a contemplator of Their Manifestation, seeker of secular truth, and student of the architecture of the Temple. He had believed that these two paths, while seeming separate and parallel, would in time converge into a single path of Truth on which he could guide his flock in Sidau, and perhaps others, toward a new enlightenment.