"Thus, Moagitty itself," said Dax aloud. In the limited spaces of the research lab, without Bashir or anyone else listening, her voice sounded remote, almost disembodied. The time had come, she knew, with the careful working of her thoughts, that she would have to speak and let the station's computer record what she had discovered about McHogue and his world—and what she had determined her course of action to be. She didn't want to leave her working notes in disarray; there might not be a chance to straighten them out later. Not for her, at any rate . . .
"His own little world." She held out her hand, fingers just touching the invisible field of the CI module's radiation. "His own universe." Not here, aboard Deep Space Nine, but in his own self-willed, hermetically sealed environment, where nothing not of his own creation could intrude. And where, as in that ancient Earth story, The Masque of the Red Death, he could pull the great doors shut and let the grim revels begin, free of any interference from the outside.
"But you forgot one thing," murmured Dax. A back door to that world, that private universe, a door left open aboard the station; she could almost imagine it against her fingertips, waiting to be pushed wide enough for her to enter once again. All she would have to do would be to take a single step forward—and she would be there. Walking inside McHogue's head, the night and stars at the horizon of his skull.
He had forgotten about the one CI module left operable aboard DS9; operable, and connected to all the others by the subspace link they shared. So that made one world among them, the world that McHogue had created. Dax had wondered if, in his furious rush toward the fulfillment of his desires, that apotheosis named Moagitty, all that had preceded the city's rising upon Bajor had been heedlessly discarded behind him . . . or if McHogue had remembered, but had thought he'd succeeded in making the crossing of this threshold too frightening to contemplate.
For she was frightened; Dax had to admit that to herself. The memory of what she had seen before in that world haunted her. With every step taken in that dark vision had come the sure knowledge that more lay beyond its surface, things darker yet and wrapped around a heart concealing even greater violence. The apparition of Ahrmant Wyoss as a battered and abandoned child had been essentially saddening in effect; the weeping figure at the foot of those basement stairs had been no more than one of the holosuite's electronic echoes, and perhaps even less than that. An echo of an echo, the last fading vestige of that fragment of the hallucinatory world that had once been Wyoss's mind and soul. When Wyoss died in the world outside the altered holosuite, there was no one left to bear him from memory into eternity; McHogue, the god of the new world, had other business to take care of. Always rushing forward toward his own glorious destiny, leaving the broken corpses behind . . .
Rushing toward that bright doorway, the one that Dax had seen the last few times she had gone alone into the CI module's field, her humanoid neurosystem separated by the interference effect from the anchor of the symbiont. At first a spark, just at the horizon of that dark world; enough to cause her to suspect what it might be. And then, a discernible opening, from the oppressive, smothering night to a furious illumination. She could hear the voices and shrieking laughter from beyond. And this last time, from which she had just now stepped back, into the safety of the research lab and the enclosing station—the doorway had been bright enough, light spilling out to cast knife-edge shadows around her, so that she had been able to tell for certain where it led.
"To Moagitty." The fear that arose in the humanoid part of her kept the voice a whisper, throat tightened to just her breath. She could speak the name of the opening's destination, the luminous break in the artificial world generated by the CI module on the lab bench. It led straight to the interior of McHogue's city, into the shared hallucination that had grown so large as to consume the reality that held it. Into McHogue's world . . .
She had already decided what she was going to do. There wasn't time to consult with Benjamin. No time—plus there was the chance that as commander of the station, he would forbid any such action as she was contemplating. Dax could easily picture him telling her that the risk to her life and sanity was too great; they would have to find another way to forestall the catastrophe that was already reaching toward them.
Before coming to the lab, she had studied the latest reports at Ops's meteorological-observations desk. All the other crew members' attention had been focused on the storms battering the surface of Bajor; only she had noted the other numbers, the ionic discharge factors surrounding the upper atmosphere, the indices of positron emissions rippling through the fabric of space itself. The numbers were just a few degrees off normal readings, but she could see the direction in which they were heading. An exponential acceleration; soon enough they would hit the steep part of their slope, and that would be when Deep Space Nine would feel the first shock waves. The disturbances whose epicenter lay within the walls of Moagitty would have reached this far, like an ocean-bound tidal wave, one that gathered strength as it rolled outward. At that point, McHogue's private universe would have attained its own critical mass; there might be no way to stop the implosive subsuming of the outer reality into the voracious black hole he had created. Beyond that, Dax could not visualize; nothing in her symbiont's centuries of experience had prepared her for such an eventuality.
Or for what she had to do now.
"Computer—begin recording; append to research notes file."
It took her only a few minutes to bring everything up to date. That much was her duty as well; now, if for some reason she was unable to return to the lab—to DS9 and this world outside the CI module's field—someone, perhaps Julian, might be able to come along afterward and complete her work.
"End record."
Another voice, yet still her own, spoke inside her. Are you ready?
There was no need to answer aloud. Her symbiont knew the thoughts they shared, as easily as her left and right hands could bear a common weight cupped between them.
The decision had already been made, each part, the humanoid and the symbiont, aware of the needed actions—and the consequences thereof. One hand would have to carry the burden, and the other close tight . . . and wait. That was the lesson Dax had learned from the first time she had gone into the altered holosuite's illusory world; a Trill's shared consciousness had to be divided, the CI module itself forcing the symbiont's mind from the intermingled contact with the humanoid's, for the hallucination to take hold and become real.
Dax stepped forward, into the range of the CI module's field. The research lab disappeared from around her; she felt the skin of her arms grow chilled as a night wind brushed across her.
For a moment there was silence, and then a greater silence, heart-aching, inside her; she knew that the symbiont had already been torn from what had been their shared consciousness. Somewhere immeasurably far from her, part of her self had become an observer at her mind's perimeter.