For his son.
Sisko turned, looking about the fields of yellowed grasses, the darker shapes of trees at the horizon; the sky blue and unclouded, as though no storm could reach into this perfect sanctuary.
Go, he told himself. Do what you came here to do. He knew that this world's eternity was an illusion; that time inched forward in another world, where his hands had risen, gripping the echo's wrists in futile struggle. You don't have forever. He started walking again, the tall, brittle stems tracing against his legs.
"What are you doing here?" A child's voice spoke. A child's face, scowling with suspicion, turned to look at him. The child's eyes were dark pieces of a starless night. "You're not supposed to be here. Not anymore."
Water rippled against the glistening rocks. Sisko shaded his eyes against the sun, the better to see the boy kneeling on a rounded perch in the middle of the stream. The fish that had been the target of the boy's attention splashed and darted away.
"I came here . . . to see you." The wet, pebbly sand grated beneath the soles of his boots.
"Why?"
This was the boy that his son Jake had come here, into this world, to be with. A boy . . . and something more.
Without turning around to look, without stepping away from the stream's bank, he knew that bones whitened beneath the trees' heavy shadows.
He kept his voice low, even kindly. "I came to tell you," said Sisko. "That it's time for you to go home."
"What?" The boy gazed at him in mocking disbelief. "You're crazy. This is my home."
"No . . ." Sisko shook his head. "It can't be. Not anymore."
"You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about." Anger darkened the boy's face. "Get out of here! I killed you once before, already—" The boy's voice turned sullen. "I can do it again."
"No, you can't." He could see even more clearly, when the boy's eyes deepened and hollowed, the face of McHogue before him. "You can't do what you want here, anymore."
"Huh?" The boy crouched on the rock, head lowered to watch his confronter. "Why not?"
"Because . . ." There was no way he could keep the words from sounding sad. "Because it's not your home now."
That was the truth, that Sisko had come so far to discover. The world that McHogue had created—this little part of it had come to exist inside his own mind. When he had stepped inside here, so long ago, to find where his son had gone so many times before. And had found his own lifeless eyes gazing up through the trees' interlaced branches. McHogue's world—McHogue's universe—had come inside him then. A piece of it . . .
And that was enough. To make it his own, in ways that even McHogue could not have known about.
To reclaim it.
"You're crazy." The boy's voice, taut with rage, broke into his thoughts. "Go away!"
There was no need for any more words. Sisko bent down and touched the water's surface. The tips of his fingers penetrated the cold, silvery currents.
"No!" The boy's voice was a scream now, more fear and surprise than anger. "Stop—don't—"
There was no water now. The bed of the stream was dry ground, cracked where the mud had begun to crumble into dust.
He straightened up, turning to see the other changes that he had willed to happen.
"No . . ." The boy moaned in terror.
Brown leaves scattered from withered branches. The wind twisted them, a lifeless flock, across the mottled sky. Clouds incapable of rain tinged the sun to a dimming sulfur.
The sweep of Sisko's thought moved across the fields. Blighting the thick stands of grass, the stems curling black and skeletal, as though scorched beneath an unseen fire.
Dust trickled from the gaunt flanks of the false world's bones, the exposed rocks splintering in turn. And below those . . . there would be nothing, he knew. He turned away; there was not much time left.
The boy was silent now, huddled into a ball on the rounded stone. Silent but for his broken and uncomprehending tears.
And even those . . . Sisko closed his eyes again, not wanting to see what happened next . . . even those would be gone soon.
Perfect silence. He opened his eyes, catching just a glimpse of something that looked like tattered rags, swirled by the wind to vanish with the leaves from the dead trees.
Slowly, he nodded. In a dead world; mercifully dead. So that the other world, the real one, could have life.
"No," he said aloud. "You don't understand."
There had been no need to step back through a door, from the false bright world to this one. He had always been here. And in that time, from one heartbeat to the next, breath had rushed back into lungs.
His echo gazed at him, with the same uncomprehending wonder with which the dying boy had. And in the same death.
Another transformation, the final one, had taken place. Sisko opened his hand, releasing the throat of his echo, the thing with his face broken in sudden confusion.
"I don't. . . understand. . . ." Its eyes flooded with tears.
Sisko watched as the echo's image slowly crumpled to the floor.
"How . . ." It lay in agony, the last of its false life seeping from its body. "I don't understand. . . ."
Pity moved inside Sisko. It was still a part of him, however terribly changed.
"McHogue lied to you." He knelt beside the echo. His own voice became gentle now. "Or else he never knew. There was one element that he couldn't take into account, in all his plans."
"What . . ." The echo's eyes had begun to flutter closed.
"The CI technology—its operations are all based upon the users' experiences, memories, perceptions of reality." Sisko kept his voice level, though he had the disquieting sense of watching a part of himself die before him. "The CI modules extrapolate from the real world—the real universe—to form all their hallucinations and fantasies. That was how McHogue made his universe—from pieces of the real one."
"But you . . ." The echo nodded feebly. "There was something more to you . . . to us . . ."
There was no time left; he could sense the last of the echo's life dissipating.
No time, and no possibility of explaining. What he had only now come to understand.
Prophecies and blessings . . .
The Kai had known. That there was another part of him, that no longer had its origin in the real universe. So long ago—a span beyond centuries, it seemed—he had gone into the wormhole, and had encountered things there beyond all knowing, beyond any universe's concepts of space and time. They, the ones whose very existences were mysteries beyond comprehension, had shown him only a little of what they knew.
But that had been enough to change him. Forever. To place a seed within, beyond all sentient reality. And beyond the reach of McHogue.
The echo died. Sisko laid his hands upon the sleeping image of his own face, and drew the eyelids shut. He stood up, looking over his shoulder as a noise of metal intruded upon the silence.
A jagged fissure ran through the bulkhead like a stroke of empty lightning. He could feel the illusory station tremble and shudder beneath his feet. An inanimate groan became a cry of agony as the buried girders began to separate from each other.
He turned, seeing black webs shatter across every surface. The ceiling broke apart above him, but the crumbling pieces didn't fall. Light and gravity had ceased. Spun from his balance, he raised his arms to protect himself as his shoulders struck and splintered open the wall behind him.
The last he saw was stars rushing in through the razor-edged shards of the viewport.
"We've got to get out of here—"