Jake grinned. "Nice pitch, Dad."
His father slouched back against the cushions, already looking less tired. "About as good as one of yours, judging from this." He held up Quark's bill on the data padd.
"Hey—" That remark brought a protest from Jake. "I wasn't pitching; I was at bat."
"Indeed?" His father raised an eyebrow.
"Well . . . yeah. Kind of." Jake realized that he had just been caught out. "Anyway, it's not exactly easy, you know, trying to practice inside a holosuite. And all by myself."
"What about your friend Nog?"
Jake snorted. "I don't think you're going to see any Ferengi in the big leagues soon."
"Well . . . you present a very reasoned argument." His father flexed his hand. The toss of the ball had been nothing, a literal throwaway. But Jake knew that his father had a pretty decent fastball; maybe the kinetic memory was still locked inside there, somewhere inside his dad's arm, through his elbow and all the way up into his shoulder. "Tell you what—I could use a little practice myself."
"You sure?" Jake regarded him with a mixture of hope and skepticism. "I mean, you've been busy a lot . . ."
"Only with things that don't even exist." His father closed his eyes again, rolling his head back against the sofa cushion. A different tiredness, a better kind, visibly moved through him. "And . . . they can wait."
Jake watched him for a moment longer, then slid off his fielder's glove and set it down on the sofa cushion between them. He stood up, glancing back over his shoulder as he headed to his room, leaving his father to his long-delayed rest.
"It could have been much worse."
She knew she didn't have to tell Julian that; as the chief Starfleet medical officer in this sector, he had been in charge of evacuating the ruins of what had been Moagitty. There had been more individuals left alive than they had initially expected, enough to overwhelm DS9's own emergency facilities; hospital ships and personnel from the closest navigational sectors had been routed here and into orbit above Bajor. Dax had observed, at first with a degree of surprise and then with a growing admiration, the organizational skills that the doctor had brought to bear upon the problem of coordinating the rescue effort's varied elements.
"Believe me, I know," replied Julian. His around-the-clock labors had left him looking more unshaven and ragged-edged than Dax had ever seen him before. He leaned back against the lab bench, kneading his brow. "It's bad enough as it is. If everybody had been found dead down there, we could've just performed a few regulation autopsies and been done by now."
Dax made no reply; she was aware that he was merely trying to get a reaction from her with a bit of gallows humor. She knew him better than that; he wouldn't be working himself to the point of exhaustion if his heart wasn't in perfect synchronization with the demands of his profession.
"I'd better be getting back." Bashir took a deep breath, letting his shoulders drop with its exhaling. "To the infirmary . . . the last few cases should be arriving . . ."
"No, Julian; you should get some rest." She forced a stern tone into her voice. "They can do without you for now—you've set things up well enough, for the others to carry on."
He shook his head slowly. "I don't know . . . there's so many . . ."
"Then it won't help anyone, will it, for you to collapse in the middle of it all. Julian, let the other medical personnel take care of things. The best course of action for you at this time is to go back to your quarters and get some sleep."
"Maybe you're right . . ." He pushed himself away from the lab bench. "Don't say any more." He held up a hand to ward off any further argument, managing a smile behind it. "Your diagnosis is, of course, correct. And the prescription." Julian turned and headed for the lab's door; he stopped there and looked back at her. "Perhaps later, when everything has finally settled down—perhaps we can talk then. There's a lot you haven't told me about yet."
As the door slid shut, Dax turned again to her own work. The matters that Julian wished to discuss with her, the question that he had left unspoken but that she knew he wanted to ask—the time for all of that might never come. Because she didn't know—or understand—the answers herself. Not entirely.
She looked across the instrument readings displayed on the computer panel. The station's remote sensors indicated no subspatial anomalies in this sector; the dark, shifting processes that the CI modules had unleashed, the erosion and collapse of the universe's underlying structure, had ended. Something had happened, something that Benjamin—in that brief, chaotic moment that had followed the strike of McHogue's fist—had accomplished. An act of Benjamin's will, a blow surer and more telling than McHogue could have defended against. But one that her own eye had been unable to see . . . and that Benjamin himself had been unable to elucidate to her.
The sensor readings only confirmed what she had sensed to be true, even as the Ganges had returned to the station. After a last, near-apocalyptic fury, the atmospheric storms had already begun dying out on Bajor's surface; in space, the runabout had encountered none of the turbulence that had made Benjamin's rescue flight so dangerous. There had been time, a respite of calm on their journey home, for Benjamin to attempt telling her what had happened. What he had done.
Benjamin had lain back in the seat beside her, as she had piloted the runabout back to DS9; he had looked exhausted from the rigors of his confrontation with McHogue. In a low voice, he had spoken of things at the limit of her scientific understanding. Language itself was inadequate for the purpose.
He forgot, Benjamin had whispered to her. McHogue forgot, that the world he'd created . . . it was inside our heads as well. In our thoughts and dreams. Because he'd put it there. That was where it was real . . . or as real as it could ever be.
That had been how he had defeated McHogue. The true backdoor that McHogue had left behind, an entry into the secret workings of McHogue's idios kosmos, his private universe.
All that had happened, the lashing storms on Bajor and the deeper, more threatening disturbances beneath the fabric of space itself—it hadn't been an effect caused only by the CI modules' operations. We made it real, Benjamin had told her. Just as we make . . . this universe real. He had raised his hand to point toward the runabout's viewport. It doesn't just happen out there. It happens in here as well. Then Benjamin had tapped the side of his head with a single fingertip. And what McHogue had made real . . . inside our heads . . . Benjamin had closed his eyes, smiling faintly. Then we could make it unreal again. If we just knew how . . .
In DS9's research lab, Dax reached out and shut off the computer panel's display. The scroll of numbers and graphs, the vital signs of the universe, indicated nothing now, other than that her old friend Benjamin had indeed known how. Even if he couldn't explain it to her in any terms that her rational mind didn't push away as being just too mystical.
The older part of her, the symbiont inside, was equally rational—but wiser; it reserved its judgment on these matters. It had known Benjamin Sisko longer than she had; long enough to assure her that he had indeed changed, in some way both profound and subtle. It had something to do with what had happened to him in the wormhole; what he had found in there . . . and what he had found of himself. Whatever it had been—and he had only made the most cryptic comments about it to her, allusions to mysteries even greater than what had happened to McHogue's real and unreal worlds—it enabled him to speak of the connection between the universes both inside and outside the humanoid mind, and as more than just metaphor. The return of the remote sensors' readings to normal levels proved that. Whether she wanted to believe that or not. Or whether she even could.