STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax by Marco Palmieri Editor

Author:Marco Palmieri, Editor [Editor, Marco Palmieri,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-07T14:18:00.817000+00:00

It sounds like some childish attempt to avoid responsibility, but I didn’t mean to lie to you. I was adrift in my own pain, and wanted only to ease yours. I told you what I thought would save you from the intensity of loss that I felt, and by the time I understood the magnitude of what I’d done, I didn’t know how to take it back. And by then, I had constructed the foundation of denial that has been with me ever since.

Seven years later, you found out, and our estrangement began. As I said before, I found ways to rationalize, my position, my work—but politically, at least, nothing had changed. The powers that be had moved on to other matters, and I’d all but given up trying to convince the few council members who knew of the incident to take any kind of action. There is no official record of the parasite’s existence anywhere on Trill, no autopsy report, nothing. The council saw to that. I imagine that the records were destroyed along with the creature’s body, or all of the evidence was filed away somewhere, a dusty box in a dusty room, purposely forgotten.

And it seemed that Starfleet, too, had decided to treat the disastrous mission as an isolated event. I tried to contact Pike, more than once, but I couldn’t track him down; only a year after we met, he was badly wounded in some kind of radiation accident, and disappeared soon after. No one could even tell me if he was still alive.

As far as I know, the parasites have never resurfaced, but every day for the last fifteen years, I’ve watched and listened, doing what little one being can hope to do. I tried communicating with the symbionts, to ask them about the creature, but the younger ones knew nothing. And the oldest among them seemed not to hear my questions.

I am alone in my vigil, I believe, and am always praying that the thing was lying. That it was one of a kind. But surely I tell myself lies, too. You decide.

Four days ago, on my fifty-sixth birthday, I stepped down as head of the Trill Symbiosis Commission. For weeks, I’ve known that I would write this letter to you, that I couldn’t continue to use my position as a shield. That I wouldn’t. I’ve let too much time slip away already, my Neema, too much time regretting my mistakes and not letting myself understand that I was making a much worse one. When Gran died five years ago, never knowing any of this, I thought I would tell you then—that we would find comfort in each other, and the truth would have to come out—but somehow, we managed to avoid each other. To hold on to our own private sorrows, sharing nothing. Time now for me to end this loneliness, or at least to try.

I’ve accepted your anger as some kind of penance, as though I deserved to be hated by you for surviving.

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