"Then you're still there . . . out there on that moon in the Gamma Quadrant."
The Kai raised her hands, palms upward. "I'm here with you, Benjamin. Or enough of me is; this part that your eyes have enough wisdom to see, though your touch still doubts. What does distance matter? You step through the wormhole as though it were a door from one chamber to another, and light-years of distance are vanished in the blink of an eye. Did you believe the Gamma Quadrant, and all the stars and worlds it contains, to be an illusion?"
"But the wormhole is real." Sisko knew why he was trying to argue her away. It had been crushing enough to discover that the Kai wasn't physically aboard the station; if he were to accept even the least part of his perceptions as true, and then wake from a dream or brief mental lapse to find himself alone . . . that would be too much to bear. "And a vessel that goes through the wormhole," he persisted, "is real. In every world."
"Benjamin . . ." The voice of Kai Opaka's image turned even gentler. "Is it not too late, for you to worry about what is real and what is not? Even as you and I speak with each other—however we do so—that which you were so sure was an illusion, a world of illusion held within a small chamber, that false world seeks to destroy the world of the real. Destroy it, and take its place. What would be real and what would be illusion, then? All the distinctions you have so carefully made between one world and the other would have been for nothing."
"Very well." Sisko clasped his hands together before him. "I've seen enough apparitions inside the holosuites—and outside them—that turned out to be real in a way that I wasn't ready for. You, at least . . ." He smiled ruefully. "You had the courtesy to ask me to sit down." From over his shoulder, he glanced toward the living quarters' short corridor. "Perhaps I should try to speak more softly; I wouldn't want to wake my son."
"Don't worry, Benjamin." The image laid its hand on Sisko's forearm, though nothing could be felt. "He'd know he was dreaming."
He closed his eyes for a moment. "Why did you come here? Surely it wasn't just to show me that things could be real and not real at the same time."
"I came to warn you, Benjamin. Is that not what a ghost—even a ghost of the still living—should do? There are such expectations within you; it would be a pity for them to become disappointments."
That much was true; in some ways, he would have been surprised if it had been otherwise. Since the first time he had met the Kai, he had been aware of having entered a universe where things happened with the logic of dreams.
"Of what could you possibly warn me?" He studied the Kai's image beside him. "That I don't already know about?"
"You know of many things—more than when we made our acquaintance with each other, so long ago. Yet there are still aspects of your own being that remain beyond your grasp. You will need to find those things—find the truth, Benjamin—if you are to walk through the storms that have already broken."
"Storms? Do you mean what's happening on the surface of Bajor?"
The Kai nodded. "There—and elsewhere. In the worlds of falsehood and of truth. The storms have unleashed their fury, and what you have been able to see so far is but the least of that wrath. The very rocks and air of Bajor are suffering the consequences of the unholy alliances to which General Aur has bound my people . . . but there is worse to come."
He had never heard the Kai, in all the time before she had traveled through the wormhole, speak in such a manner. Her soft voice had changed into another, that of a prophet bearing fire and its scathing redemption. The gaze of the image pierced him like a weapon that brooked no resistance to the message inscribed on its shining blade.
"In the new city, the abomination that has been built upon the soil of Bajor—"
"In Moagitty," said Sisko. "That's what it has been named."
Anger moved across the Kai's face. "It has another name, an ancient one, that cannot be spoken. Just as the evil it represents is an ancient one—did you really think, Benjamin, that such things have not been encountered before, although in different guise? Though the dark gift of time, the shadowed mirror of the possibilities that your kind has brought to Bajor, is to make this manifestation of that evil stronger than it has ever been. Perhaps that is what the more foolish of your blood would call progress—that dizzying rush to potentiate and enlarge that which was already dreadful enough before."
Her words chilled him, as though an icy cloth had been drawn across the skin of his shoulders and arms. He remembered the first time he had encountered McHogue, in the bright summer world of the altered holosuite, a landscape that had once been no more than his son's daydreaming and had become a nightmare of red-soaked earth beneath the trembling leaves. Even then, he had sensed the dark radiation emanating from the smiling figure, as though from an inverse sun, a shadow that swallowed warmth and life. McHogue's dark eyes, optical black holes, had also shown in the face of the boy, the child who had knelt on the stream-washed rock, glittering knife in his grasp. And with the same smile, that looked inside whatever stood before it and found a silent brother there. A sleeping twin, that could be woken and coaxed into an annihilating life of its own. That was what had struck a blow to Sisko's heart, deeper than any blade could have reached: when he had come upon the holosuite's echo of his son Jake and had seen those dark, dead eyes looking back at him, judging and condemning . . .
"I'm sorry," he said aloud. "Perhaps you'd be right, if you believed that it would have been better if all the universe beyond had never touched Bajor. Better for your people, and for everyone else. But it's too late for that. I'd only want you to remember that some of us at least meant well. We still do."
"There is no need for any apology. How could Bajor have kept the universe outside its walls, when it is a part of that same universe? Be assured, Benjamin, that this too was foreordained. There is yet a great blessing, for the people of my blood and all others, that the conjunction of the great and the small will bring about. But at this moment, Bajor's fate and the fate of all the worlds beyond is threatened. That which is at stake is past all your present imagining; that is the burden you carry, Benjamin, and the destiny you must bring to light."
Slowly, as though that world had been placed back upon his shoulders, Sisko nodded. "What must I do, Kai Opaka?"
She raised her hand, palm outward, a few inches from his brow. "Know first, that what you have perceived of storms upon the surface of Bajor is only the external manifestation of this evil's consequences. The storms, the lashing of the soil by wind and furious rain, is but the planet's own cry of pain at its violation. I heard that outcry, at a place far from here—how could I not, when Bajor and I are part of one another? I heard, but did not understand how such a wound could have been inflicted. Not until my meditations brought me here again, to gaze upon that world of suffering—then I saw, and knew. This being you call McHogue—he is an ancient enemy, one who wears this man's face as a mask, the better to deceive those who see only with their eyes and not with their hearts."
The Kai's words brought back a memory, something Sisko had almost forgotten. Of what had been reported to him, of Quark's odd perception of one who by all appearances should have been recognized as his old business partner. It was somewhat humbling to realize that the Ferengi had had more insight into the truth than anyone else could have realized.