Elias Vaughn lay on the ground, arms at his sides, eyes closed. He could have been asleep or unconscious or dead. Dax understood that the beings had perceived the commander like this, doubtless down on the planet’s surface, obviously sometime within the last couple of days.
Dax strived to delve past the image of Vaughn, to contact the beings that had seen him. But communication continued to prove impossible. For Dax, access came for ideas and echoes, but not for a direct link to the minds behind them. Dax could vaguely perceive the beings, but could not apparently be perceived by them.
And so Dax searched the ideas, seeking to understand the intentions of the beings. None were revealed. Dax stumbled mentally, weakening, finding it difficult to maintain the drive to penetrate this alien society. But Dax battled on, turning to the echoes—
Memories, Dax suddenly realized.The echoes are memories.
Dax dived down, pushing into the echoes, watching, listening, perceiving. A wall rose up, infinite and impenetrable, but on this side of the wall, Daxsaw: this had all begun with the invaders…with the saviors…with the Prentara.
The Prentara had once populated the world around which the sea of clouds now circled. They had discovered the other realm, and had been astonished by it. Sights and sounds, scents and tastes, sensations and emotions, all had followed with the Prentara, carried along by technology, and all had been magnified. An avalanche of emotive and perceptual experience spread across a universe in which none of this had previously been known. A battle to push outward from the strange realm ensued, and the Prentara fought for their lives.
Just as Ezri fought for hers right now, Dax realized.
The symbiont swooped down into the echoes, hunting for memories and collecting them up. Somewhere, images of Prynn and Shar down on the planet appeared. Representations of Vaughn also arose, although they seemed confused—Vaughn at an ancient launch facility, on a battlefield, on a ship with dead Bajorans and Cardassians. There were the Prentara too, wired in to their machines, wired in to the other universe.
And then Dax pulled back. Drifted upward, floating, swimming, pushing. Again, it was time to find Ezri.
Lieutenant Bowers waited patiently for her to begin, as did Julian. Ezri lay propped up on the diagnostic bed, a glass of water raised to her lips. She sipped, finding the act of drinking both refreshing and strangely foreign, as though she had never done it before now—a consequence, she knew, of Dax’s exposure to the other universe.
Ezri handed the glass to Nurse Juarez, who stood beside her. Julian and Lieutenant Bowers waited just past the foot of her bed, and somewhere, Nurse Richter also worked in the medical bay. Ezri took a long, deep breath, gathering herself for the coming conversation. She had reintegrated enough with Dax to have assimilated the symbiont’s experiences, but interpreting the images—the echoes—had taken some time. Even now, not everything Dax had perceived had bowed to reasonable analysis. Still, she thought that she understood enough that Bowers and the crew had to be told.
As had been the case after her first contact with the object, Julian had wanted her to rest immediately after she had regained consciousness. Again she had insisted on remaining awake, and this time, on speaking herself with Lieutenant Bowers. Julian had relented at once, accepting her claim that she had vital information to impart.
“I saw…I experienced…another universe,” she began. She looked to her left, to where she had brought her hand down into the dark gray substance, but both it and the stand on which it had sat had been removed.
“Could you explain that?” Bowers asked. Ezri looked at him, then raised her hand to her forehead and rubbed at her temple.
“Are you all right?” Julian asked. He moved toward her along the side of the bed, glancing up at the diagnostic panel.
“I’m okay,” Ezri said, dropping her hand back onto the bed. “It’s just that there’s so much in my head right now…I need to find a coherent way to tell this.”
“Take your time,” Bowers said. But of course they all knew that time weighed heavily on them right now. As far as they could tell, they were less than a day away from the next pulse.
“Some time ago,” Ezri started again, sorting out her narrative, “a humanoid race lived on this planet.” That was not new information; the crew had been able to draw the same conclusion from the readings of cities that the probe had returned to Defiant.“They called themselves the Prentara, and they developed a sophisticated virtual-reality technology.”
“Virtual reality?” Juarez said. “Like holosuites?”
“No, not like that,” Ezri said. “They tied powerful computers directly into people’s minds.”
Julian raised his eyebrows. “That can be very addictive,” he stated. “Very addictive, and very dangerous.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ezri said. “But I do know that, sometime later, Prentara scientists discovered this other existence, a pocket universe outside our own that…that…it was…” She grew agitated as she struggled to express the concepts in her mind.
“Easy,” Julian said, resting a hand on her upper arm. “Easy.” She looked up at him, and he offered her an effortless smile. His obvious support meant a lot to her.
“I’m all right,” she told him, and she put her hand atop his. “This other existence that the Prentara found, it was a universe of the mind…the very fabric of it supported and nurtured and… augmented…mental activity. The scientists who discovered it reported amazingly profound experiences.”
“Like a mind-altering drug,” Julian suggested.
“Yes, like that, I think,” Ezri agreed, “but far more powerful. They called the other universe the thoughtscape.”
“Let me guess. They used it to enhance their VR technology,” Bowers said.
Ezri nodded. “They wired their virtual-reality equipment into the interface they had opened between this universe and the thoughtscape. It enhanced their experiences beyond their imaginations, and it worked for them for years. But then something happened.” She paused, still coming to understand the horror in what she had learned. “They found out,” she went on, “that the thoughtscape was alive.”
They all looked at her without saying anything. Even Nurse Richter, across the room, stopped whatever she had been doing and peered in Ezri’s direction. The sudden silencing of their voices left the medical bay throbbing with the beat of Ezri’s diagnostic scanner. Finally, Julian spoke.
“Did the Prentara know?” he asked. The expression of revulsion on his face reflected Ezri’s emotions. The notion of somebody forcibly tapping into another mind, usingthat mind—it was rape of the lowest order. “Did they stop?”
“They did stop,” Ezri said, actually relieved about that part of the story. “But I don’t know if they ever knew that the thoughtscape was composed of living beings.”
“Then why did they stop using it…using them?” Juarez asked.
“They stopped when the first pulse emerged from the interface,” Ezri explained. “The force of it thrust outward, leaving the planet intact, but we’ve seen what the pulses have done to the rest of this solar system.”
“And to the Vahni’s system,” Bowers added.
“The Prentara tried to close the interface, but the pulse had widened it considerably and they couldn’t do it,” Ezri went on. “A substance also came out of the interface with the pulse, and it began forming the cloud cover around the planet. Except that those aren’t clouds.”
“Is that a manifestation of the thoughtscape?” Bowers asked.