Star Trek: DS9: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack

Author:Una McCormack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

My dear Doctor—

We have come down from the heights, but we are entering an area that seems no less rarefied to me. I confess, Doctor, that I am rather in awe of the university. Such places have always been closed to me—my own education was rather narrowly focused and intent on producing some quite specific learning outcomes—and whenever I come to this place I feel slightly at a disadvantage. My defense is not particularly subtle, but it seems to do the trick: I wear my best clothes and I smile enigmatically, and that seems to persuade even these fine minds that I am a brilliant and sophisticated man. It was the same when I was young—all these clever young people, most of them from those rich or comfortable homes in Coranum and Paldar, all widely read, and able. They made me feel gauche and stupid.

Perhaps I do not strike you as the kind of person to feel tongue-tied, but it’s true. And, of course, this all worked in the Order’s favor. I was not alone in my feelings, and so it was easy to get our operatives to sneer at those young people filling their days with study and ask what contribution they made. We never struggled to find people willing to go undercover to the university, although we never had much success. I blame Natima Lang.

Does it give me some satisfaction, then, to have had a hand in the rebuilding of the university? I will not deny it. But it has not been motivated out of scorn or spite. What the university suffered at the hands of the Jem’Hadar was particularly grievous and now, when I think of that lost world, I regret those young lives that we made so difficult, and I can only applaud the courage they showed in trying to learn in the face of best efforts to keep them ignorant. Lang was committed to an idea of an institution as much as I was, I think, but she certainly chose a better one.

Still, I do feel like an intruder upon its turf, even as I desire the way of life it offers. In some alternate timeline, where we all of us live our best lives, I am sitting quietly in a room somewhere, reading.

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