He pushed back his chair and stood up. "We can continue this discussion when I return with Dax. Right now, I believe I have a runabout waiting for me."
Only two things were alive in this world. Herself and McHogue . . . and she couldn't be sure about him. Perhaps he had already transcended that state, and become something vast and impersonal as the galaxies that wheeled in the night sky. The points of stars glittered in the blackness at the center of his eyes.
"Yes, of course," said the smiling figure before Dax. "You're absolutely right to have such doubts." McHogue's image turned slightly away from her, an upraised hand gesturing toward the bare horizon. "It is rather an intimidating landscape, I admit . . . but not without a certain, shall we say, bleak attractiveness of its own. And one in which the seemingly animate—such as ourselves, my dear Jadzia—stand out all the more prominently."
That in a world of his making, he could step among her unvoiced thoughts, and pick each one up and examine it like a shell upon an empty beach, didn't frighten her. She had expected as much.
"It's not a matter of doubt," said Dax aloud. "In the absence of confirmable data, I'm more than willing to take an agnostic position on the nature of your existence."
What had laid a chill hand upon her heart, tightened the breath in her throat, was the visual content of this world; what McHogue had chosen to present as such to his visitor. Surely it would have been within his powers, if he had wanted, to unroll an infinite tapestry of the green, unending summer that had once flourished inside the station's holosuites, the world that Benjamin had told her about.
"Oh, certainly," came McHogue's comment. "But that would have been so boring, wouldn't it? We've seen all that. Time for something new . . . and stark."
She would have closed her eyes, if she had thought it would do any good; if it would have blotted out what had already been burned into the optical processors of her mind.
A world of corpses.
Bones whitening beneath a glaring sun, a fiery scalpel that cut away the last of the deracinated flesh upon the fingerlike spread of ribs and rounded skull. The walls of the city of Moagitty had been breached—it looked like centuries ago, judging from the crumbling edges and rusted metal girders—and strewn across a baked-hard soil. No green shoot could break through the planet's armor; the withered branches of the trees were skeletal hands clawing at the sky. No wind stirred; with the life of Bajor at an end, the breath of its air had been stilled.
The city of Moagitty, in that other universe she had left so far behind, had been built upon the level plains close to the capital city, so that its corridors and chambers could expand to accommodate all the patrons that would flock to it from across the galaxies. Or that had come here; that time might have been centuries ago, to judge from the silence that had enfolded the planet. Since then, the low places had been raised high, as though the bones of the rocks beneath the dead soil had broken through, sharp-edged as knives. She could see down the barren slopes, to the valleys of skulls, the empty gaze of each once-sentient species mounded upon its neighbor.
"A tribute to the pertinacity of the inveterate gambler, wouldn't you say?" McHogue's smile displayed the pleasure he took in his own macabre humor. "They came and wagered away all the money in their pockets, then they pawned the clothes in the manner so traditional in these places—but I did all my predecessors one better. I let these poor losers pawn the flesh off their bones."
Dax turned away from the view that stretched beneath the cliffs edge. "I find it difficult to believe that any of these met such a fate at your Dabo tables."
"Right you are! How very perceptive—I really should have expected no less of you. But then again, you've devoted so much time and effort to the study of my little . . . eccentricities. Rather a self-taught McHogue-ologist, aren't you? I'm flattered; I'm not joking when I say that."
She felt revulsion growing in her throat. "It wasn't anything," she said with a cold fury, "that I did for pleasure."
"Oh yes, of course." McHogue nodded in a show of sympathy. "I understand—rather more than you do, as a matter of fact. You set out upon the journey that eventually brought you to these stony shores, all with the intent of somehow finding a way to defeat me. Well? Did you?" The mocking smile returned. "What've you got in your pockets?"
"Nothing. . ." Dax slowly shook her head. "I have nothing. . . ."
"And now you're wondering if you should have come here at all. What a shame. Well, I won't hold that against you. As you can imagine, I'm feeling pretty good about myself lately. You might not think so, but things have really worked out well. Just the way I planned, as a matter of fact."
She peered more closely at his image. "The way you planned . . . or the way the Cardassians did?"
"The Cardassians?" McHogue gave a snort of disgust. "Those clowns. Gul Dukat and that whole flock of lizards . . . I played them all like a cheap harmonica. Though perhaps they got what they wanted; I wouldn't begrudge it to them, just because I had a different agenda. Access to the stable wormhole—that was the limit of the Cardassians' ambitions. That's because they have small minds, like all mortal creatures. Even your other half, Dax, the symbiont you left behind in the world between this and the one from which you started. A few centuries of experience is not really very much. Not nearly enough, not to begin thinking big with."
There was no need, Dax knew, for her to speak.
"How big? That's a very good question." McHogue turned toward the still landscape that lay on all sides of Moagitty's shattered walls. "Let's just say that at a certain point, the idea of limitations ceases to have any validity." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "And it's not all selfishness on my part, either, you know. I've always been a magnanimous individual. It's been my curse, I suppose; I was born to be the host of the universe. Everybody welcome. We never close." He shook his head in self-amusement. "Even here. We're not really alone, despite the way things look to you now. The dead are not dead . . . not in the way you would ordinarily believe."
She couldn't stop the words in her mouth. "I wouldn't have expected such mysticism from you."
"It's hardly mysticism, Jadzia. Though there is a certain poetry to the matter. For these—" He gestured toward the tangled skeletal remains. "—the storms of mortality have passed. All those well-known ills that flesh is heir to . . . that's all over for them. Just as well, really. Now they've found safe harbor . . . in me." The star-points at the center of McHogue's eyes shifted, brightening to needle glints. "In my world, Dax. In my mind."
The fields of bones might have spoken for her. "I can see what that world is like."
"No, you can't. Even as far as you've come, Jadzia, from one world and through another, you're still just standing at the doorway of this world. These others, those whose remains you think you see—they're the lucky ones. They're inside, where it's safe and warm, and the sharp breezes no longer cut their skin. All who came to me through the altered holosuites and the CI modules—they're all here." McHogue smiled and tapped the side of his head with a fingertip. "All still alive, forever, in their own way. My way, that is. Even poor old Wyoss—I know that you still feel sorry for him, tormented child that he was. Poor little murderer. You see, I freed him from all that pain. I understand him, Jadzia, him and all the others so desperate to be free of the terrors of existences, their lives and deaths all muddled together. Wyoss is part of me now. They all are."