Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

“I’m not giving up. I’m just trying to make you understand that the cure, if it exists, isn’t going to come out of the medical bay. It’s going to come from inside the alien artifact that caused all of this in the first place.”

His mounting weariness was becoming acute, and she now seemed aware of it as well.

“All right, Julian,” she said, seeming to draw on some inner reserve of strength. “Get some rest. I’ll take what you’ve just told me straight to Commander Vaughn. If there’s a cure anywhere aboard that artifact, I swear to you we’ll find it.”

He thanked her, then excused himself. Alone, he found himself momentarily lost on his way to the quarters he and Ezri shared, but quickly recovered and found his way.

Once the door was sealed behind him, he collapsed onto the narrow bunk and considered what lay ahead: a transformation from the educated, accomplished, nearly superhuman Julian Bashir to plain, slow, unmodified Jules.

Jules.

He had repudiated that name during his childhood, after his parents had, in effect, repudiated him—when they’d had his DNA illegally rewritten when he was only six years old. Whatever Jules might eventually have accomplished if left to his own devices had been rendered moot from that point on, forever after consigned to the shadow world of roads not taken. Inaccessible mirror universes.

After Adigeon Prime, the frustrating learning disabilities he’d suffered as Jules had slowly receded over the horizon of memory, banished to an obscure corner of some boarded-up cloakroom within his mental Hagia Sophia. Reborn, young Julian excelled intellectually, academically, and physically—but not spiritually. All too often he had felt like a created thing, an object designed to replace a child who hadn’t measured up to his parents’ lofty expectations.

Which, in a very real and undeniable sense, was exactly what he was.

He vividly recalled the day, three short years ago, when he had taken his parents to task over this. Facing the distinct possibility of dismissal from Starfleet because of his illegal genetic alterations, he had wished that Richard and Amsha Bashir had never taken him to Adigeon Prime, that they’d instead simply allowed nature to take its course with young Jules, for better or for worse.

That errant wish now appeared to be coming true—and the brutal reality of it horrified him. He realized now that it meant the loss of abilities and talents that he had come to take for granted over the better part of three decades. The loss of what he sometimes feared were the only things that gave him value as a human being.

The loss of self.

Bashir closed his eyes. But instead of sleep, he sought a cobbled street in Istanbul, where a flight of stone steps led him up to the front of the silver-domed Hagia Sophia. He stood for a moment just outside the main gallery of his memory cathedral, apprehensive about what might await him inside, but determined to survey the damage regardless.

He entered, expecting the series of chambers that curved around the dome’s interior to be disordered, ransacked, essentially empty. Instead, he saw a party of white-smocked men and women, busily constructing walls with bricks and mortar. He smiled, uplifted for a moment by the hope that they were here to make repairs, that their presence was evidence that he was somehow recovering his faculties, that he was going to make a recovery without recourse to whatever inscrutable powers had deconstructed him in the first place.

Then his heart sank like a burned-out star abruptly collapsed by its own gravity. The white-smocked men and women weren’t making repairs. They were walling off staircases, doorways, and vestibules. They ignored his screams, continuing their work as though he weren’t even present.

Brick by brick, they were isolating him from a lifetime of memories—and systematically robbing him of every skill he’d ever come to take for granted.

Vaughn sat in the command chair, listening to the various busy sounds of the bridge consoles. He quietly mulled over what Ezri had just told him before she returned to the medical bay to assist Candlewood and Richter with their quantum-scan analyses. Clearly, the Oort cloud artifact—which, according to Shar, the aliens regarded as either a place of worship or as a chamber of horrors—held the solution to the puzzle of what had befallen the shuttlecraft Sagan and her crew.

And he was determined to get his hands on that solution, no matter the cost.

Vaughn rose and approached the science station, where Shar was intent on a scrolling display of the alien text. Many more of the symbols were now separated into groups by variously sized ovals, rather than running in an uninterrupted sequence. It certainly looked promising.

“Making any progress?” Vaughn said.

Shar lifted his eyes from the display only for a moment. “It’s difficult to know for certain. I’m beginning to wonder if Ensign Cassini might have been a bit too optimistic about our chances of success.”

“At least we’re finally able to converse with our new friends,” Vaughn said. He gestured toward the main viewer, where an image of the D’Naali ship hung suspended against the stygian darkness.

D’Naali. Vaughn turned the name over in his mind as his eyes swept the long, tapering lines of their vessel. Relief warred with frustration within him. On the one hand, it was a relief not to have to refer to the insectoid creatures solely as “the aliens” anymore. On the other, Shar’s initial translations of Sacagawea’s speech had yet to shed any real light on the nature of the mysterious space artifact—or on the reason the D’Naali vessel had been chased and attacked.

The turbolift door slid open, and Vaughn turned toward the sound. Lieutenant Nog stepped onto the bridge, leaning heavily on a cane. His new left leg had grown considerably over the past day. At first glance, it was a perfect match for the right one and seemed to be getting stronger by the hour.

Vaughn still found it difficult not to glance at