Sisko kept his eyes on Rebecca. “What makes you think I can see the future?”
“Then what do you wantto happen next?” Kasidy asked earnestly. “You must have some hopes for how you want our lives to unfold, or it doesn’t matter whether you can see the future or not.”
He rolled off his belly, onto his back, watching the frantic ministrations of a mother bird delivering squirming insects to her nest of young in the branches above. “What I want,” he said soberly, “is to be here with you and the baby. But you know the truth: It’s never going to be about only what I want. I still have a duty.”
“To whom?”
Sisko stared out over his tessipates of land, the miasma of variegated greens and browns garnished with straw-colored seed clusters ripening as midsummer approached. He inhaled deeply, drawing in the scents of moldering leaves, the scents of the river, deep into his lungs. In a split second of awareness, he knew the insects gnawing through the tree bark, the schools of fish darting around the water lilies, the plump seed grains burgeoning with life, the katterpod seedlings twining up the garden arbor. The land infiltrated the marrow of his bones, binding him. Just as the sky still did.
“To the Bajorans,” Sisko said. “To these people who have placed their trust in me. To the Prophets who allowed me to return here. To Starfleet. And to those others…”
“What others?” Kasidy asked, her voice rising with emotion. “Who else is there who’s more important to you than your family?”
Scooting back to sit beside her, Sisko threaded his arm behind Kasidy’s waist, drawing her head onto his shoulder. The baby heard him coming and, head wobbling, turned toward her father’s voice. “My dear love,” Sisko said softly, touching her knee, “none of them is more important than my family. But consider this: What do you think we need to do to protect our daughter?”
Kasidy’s eyes, which had been growing red-rimmed, suddenly narrowed. “What do you mean, Ben? Do you think someone is going to try to hurt Rebecca?”
“No,” Sisko said, trying to keep his voice low and reassuring. “Not specifically for Rebecca, but, yes, something is coming. The Prophets tried to explain it to me.” He shook his head. “I wish I could be plainer than that, but it’s difficult. The way they communicated—when I was there with them it all made sense, but now, here, meaning fades.”
“But it’s something that could harm Rebecca?” Sisko saw the fierce gleam in his wife’s eyes.
“It’s something that could affect us all, every Bajoran, yes.”
“Bajoran, Ben? Is that what we are now?”
Sisko held her eye for several seconds, then smiled. “Aren’t we?” he asked. He nodded at the world around him. “If Rebecca could answer, what would she say about this place?”
Kasidy looked. Sikso followed her gaze. The tree branches curved to form an archway over the dirt road; wildflowers, a riotous burst of color, carpeted the beds around the house; trails of cloud tufts lazed out over a luminous blue sky. And the house: He had designed it, Kas had built it.
“It’s home, Ben. It’s our home.”
“Yes, it is,” Sisko said. “And if we need to defend it…”
“…We’ll do what we must.”
He kissed her on the forehead, then quickly scrambled up to his feet. “I hear that gumbo calling to me.”
Kasidy chuckled, and the sound made the baby jump, then hiccup, a bubble of milk exploding on her lips. Her mother wiped the baby’s mouth, then called out to her husband again, suddenly serious. “So what do we do now?”
“First, we should have lunch,” Sisko said, pausing where he stood and meeting her eyes. “Then, when we’re done, I think we should begin to plan a dinner party.”
Rena
Rena awoke distressingly early the next morning, a full ten minutes before the house computer was programmed to chime. What could have awakened her? Noise from the street? Unlikely. At this hour, most of the fishermen had been out in their boats for a couple of hours, and few of them lived this far up in the Harbor Ring hills, preferring that their houses be close to the docks. Marja would already be downstairs in the bakery, which was on the other side of the house, and Rena knew from experience that Marja would have to drop one of the biggest mixing bowls or—unthinkable!—slam an oven door for her to hear it up on the third floor. So the question remained: Why was she awake?
Guilt, perhaps. Her stomach knotted as she contemplated the looming confrontation with Marja. When she had arrived, yesterday afternoon, Marja had been at services. By the time her aunt had returned home, Rena had already fallen asleep and was just now waking up for the first time in fourteen hours.
Images from night before last swam up from memory: Jacob. He might be in Mylea now. Would she see him again? Not that he would wantto see her, or she him, for that matter. To think she’d been with the son of the Emissary all that time and not known it! Thinking back, she couldn’t honestly say he’d lied outright about his identity, but he’d certainly withheld it. In retrospect, there had been clues in some of things he let slip, and the fact that she hadn’t put the details together before was now a source of embarrassment.
She remembered the single holo the newsfeeds had been permitted to take of the Emissary and his newborn daughter—the Avatar, as some believed. Many, many images had been taken of Sisko over the years, but the press had been cooperative about not taking images of his family, a privacy demand the media had no choice but to comply with. Sisko had made it clear: If one newsfeed ignored his request, all the others would be cut off. Perhaps that’s why she hadn’t recognized Jacob the way Halar had. Halar had spent most of her middle years digging through the comnet, saving every file and picture she could find, becoming an expert on all things Sisko in the process. If it hadn’t been in the headlines, Rena hadn’t bothered, being more concerned with her art and Kail. It seemed appropriate now that they were adults that their childhood obsessions still defined them: Halar was studying to become a prylar, Rena was still painting and with Kail—sort of. Or maybe neither.
Rena sagged back against the narrow bed, sighed, hauled herself up into a standing position, and wobbled across the cool wood floor to her tiny ’fresher.
After pulling her wiry black hair back into a loose knot, Rena quickly scrubbed her face, took her allergy medicine, and cleaned her teeth, not thinking about any one thing, but letting a dozen stray thoughts course through her consciousness. After the initial foundation work was completed, she worked up the nerve to look herself squarely in the mirror and was pleased to see that things could be worse. Her complexion, naturally creamy brown, masked the bags (with a little help from a little powder), but the lines around her eyes were difficult to disguise. Scrunching up her eyes, she stared at herself and recalled her grandfather’s comment: It’s not the years; it’s the distance traveled. Only last month, she had plucked the first silver hair from among the black and she could see another growing in its place. Marja had told her that her sister, Rena’s mother, had gone completely gray by thirty. Rena hoped that environment had been a factor: her mother’s life had been much more difficult than hers had been.
When she was a young girl, Marja and Topa had told her tales of her mother and father, Lariah and Jiram, so many times that they were, to Rena, like characters in a story. Their tale went like this: Her mother, Lariah, and her father, Jiram, had grown up during the Occupation. By day, Jiram had fished, like most of the men, and Lariah had worked with Topa and Marja in the bakery making Cardassian scorca,the flat bread the Occupation troops craved. “They were the bravest people in town,” Topa had told her over and over. “They could have been like everyone else and just done what they were told, but they wanted life to be better for everyone.”