To Bashir, he said, “I trust your medical judgment, Doctor.”
“Well, I guess somebody has to.” Vaughn and Bashir both looked toward the door on the other side of the medical bay, where Lieutenant Dax had just entered.
“You keep talking like that,” Bashir said as the lieutenant walked over, “and I’ll have grounds to declare you mentally unfit for duty.”
“And you can write those orders from the brig,” Dax retorted. Vaughn enjoyed the lively banter, a welcome change in tone for him from the last few days.
“I like the brig,” Bashir joked, checking the diagnostic panel again and making a note on his padd. “Less work to do.” He held up the padd, obviously to demonstrate how overworked he was. He finished what he was doing, then discreetly withdrew across the room to a console, leaving Vaughn and Dax by themselves.
“How are you feeling, sir?” Dax asked.
“Like an old man.”
“Hmmm,” Dax said. “That doesn’t really fit with the crew’s view of you as being indestructible.”
“Indestructible?” Vaughn said.
“Prynn and Shar were at least wearing environmental suits when we recovered them,” Dax explained with a smile. “You made it through two universes in a torn Starfleet uniform and a field coat older than most of the crew.”
“Take my word for it, Lieutenant, there are better ways to travel,” he said. Then, curious, he asked, “What’s the status of the thoughtscape?”
“It’s difficult to know for sure without direct communication,” Dax said, “but it appears to have transformed a great deal of matter into a form that it can inhabit in our universe. So far as we can tell, the entire thoughtscape emerged through the interface and now surrounds the planet, in normal space and in several other dimensions.”
“It’s been trying to do that for centuries,” Vaughn said. “The energy clouds were the mechanism for that. The thoughtscape—” Vaughn searched for the right word. “— pushedthem through the vortex…the interface.”
“And the energy released with each push was the pulse,” Dax said.
Vaughn nodded. “And each time, the interface widened,” he went on, “allowing the thoughtscape to push more through the next time, and faster, which increased the size of the pulse. But it hadn’t yet been able to get enough energy through to transform enough matter…not until Nog’s devices widened the interface.”
“You know all of this from communicating with the Inamuri,” Dax said. Though she had phrased it as a statement, it was clearly a question.
“I wouldn’t say ‘communicating,’” Vaughn told her. “I liked your word, Lieutenant: communing.Except that where you only seemed to have a one-way communing, I seemed to have had it in both directions. Obviously, I was able to make the Inamuri understand the danger to Ensign Tenmei and Ensign ch’Thane.”
“And to yourself,” Dax noted. “It was quite a sight to see the holes in the shell around the planet, especially when we found the three of you at the bottom.”
“I’m sure it was,” Vaughn said. “I also sensed that, when Defiantand Chaffeewere hit by energy from the clouds, the Inamuri wasn’t attacking.”
“It was trying to communicate,” Dax surmised.
“Yes,” Vaughn confirmed. “As we both found out, the substance of the clouds also functioned as a conduit for thought.”
“When I…when Dax…communed with the thoughtscape,” the lieutenant said, “it wanted to keep that connection…it cherishedthat connection.” Vaughn nodded, understanding the terrible loneliness of the Inamuri, and how desperately it craved companionship.
“What about the fragment of the clouds aboard the ship?” Vaughn wanted to know.
“It’s gone,” Dax said. “As best we can tell, it withdrew into another dimension and…rejoined…the rest of the clouds.” She paused, then asked, “What about the Prentara? How did they die?”
“I’m not sure,” Vaughn said. “But my experiences on the planet…I still don’t know if the Inamuri was trying to communicate its sense of loss to me, or if somehow the feelings of loss in my own life caused the experiences. Either way, I think that same sort of thing must have happened for every Prentara, every day. And living with that sense of loss, being faced with it all the time…I can understand how that could have driven them to their own destruction.”
Dax stood quietly for a moment, no doubt contemplating the enormity of it all. Finally, she said, “I sent your message to Starfleet Command.” Vaughn had earlier asked the lieutenant to contact Starfleet, detail what had transpired here, and request that they immediately send a scientific team in order to find a means of communicating directly with the Inamuri.
“Did you tell them the promise I made?” Vaughn asked.
“I did,” Dax said. “I also contacted the Vahni Vahltupali and explained to them as best I could what happened here. They’re going to try to make contact with the thoughtscape.”
“Good,” Vaughn said. “Thank you, Lieutenant. You did a good job up here. You took risks, but they paid off. Your actions in attempting to contact the Inamuri not only saved it, but saved the away team and the Vahni.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “It was a challenge, but…I like command.”
“I knew you would,” Vaughn said. “When we return from the Gamma Quadrant, I intend to recommend you for the Pike Medal of Valor.”
Dax smiled. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Now, unless there’s anything else, Lieutenant, I think I’d like to get some sleep.”
“Certainly, sir,” Dax said. She crossed the room to speak with the doctor for a moment, then left the medical bay, presumably headed back to the bridge.
Vaughn adjusted his position on the bed, trying to make himself more comfortable. His body still ached from everything he had been through. That ache is nothing,he thought, compared with what the Inamuri has been feeling for centuries.He did not regret the promise he had made to the strange being, despite that he had taken it upon himself to speak for the Federation. And he vowed to himself to make sure that Starfleet kept his word.
We’ll be back,Vaughn had promised. And we won’t let you be alone.
Vaughn sat in a chair in his cramped quarters, a padd in his hands. He read the last sentence that he had written— The joy of life is connection—and then erased it. It was not quite right. And he wanted to get it right.
A hundred years old,Vaughn thought, and I’m still learning.
And what he had learned now had come from those hundred years, from the immeasurable number of moments he had lived within them. What had happened to him within the thoughtscape had been both a curse and a gift. He remembered that he had somehow been conscious, all at once, in every moment of his life, and though he could no longer feel precisely what that had been like—and was thankful for that—he understood that he still carried the loneliness of that experience within himself, and that he probably always would. The curse had been sensing the extent to which he had been alone— without connection—in so many moments of his life. The gift had been in the understanding that had come with that, the realization that the moments when he had made a connection—to Ruriko, to his daughter, to his friends and coworkers, to the human race itself—had redeemed the aloneness. Each moment, he now saw, came with a choice, and too often he had not chosen to connect.
Vaughn looked at the padd again, then dropped it into his lap. Dr. Bashir had released him this morning from the medical bay, but had suggested that he not work a full shift today. Vaughn still felt tired, but the fatigue was an emotional fatigue, not a physical one, and he knew that he would simply have to bully his way through it. He would follow the doctor’s advice and work a half-shift today, but he would resume his full schedule tomorrow.