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

Nog recognized Shar’s primary evasive maneuver immediately. “Shar, why do you always answer a personal question with one of your own?”

“Please, Nog. Tell me how you felt.”

Nog sighed. Sometimes Shar could be as stubborn as Uncle Quark. “All right. I felt…incomplete. It never occurred to me that I’d end up permanently scarred by the war.”

Shar nodded, rocking quietly in his chair. Then, almost inaudibly, he said, “That is precisely how I feel, Nog. Incomplete. Permanently.”

“I don’t understand.”

There was another pause. But this one was suffused with tension rather than evasion. Nog waited, sensing that a floodgate was about to open.

Finally, Shar said, “It’s Thriss.”

“One of your bondmates,” Nog said, well aware that this was an extremely awkward conversational topic for Shar. A Jem’Hadar torturer would have had a tough time extracting such stuff from Shar.

“Yes. She came to the station with Dizhei and Anichent shortly before we left for the Gamma Quadrant. To try to persuade me to return to Andor with them, to marry. Instead, I left on the Defiant.”

“I remember them. I just wasn’t sure exactly why they wanted to see you.”

Shar made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a cough. “Now you know.”

Nog’s throat went dry. “Something’s happened since we left.” Nog knew it had to be something terrible.

“Yes.” Shar’s eyes became as icy as one of the local comets. He dropped his padd on the table, rising to his feet and placing his hands behind his back as though unable to find any better use for them. “Thriss is dead, by her own hand. Our quad is sundered forever. I have no future. And I am solely to blame.”

Shar’s words struck Nog like a body blow. He knew he had never experienced anything remotely comparable to Shar’s loss—even taking the battle at AR-558 into account. Nog knew that in spite of the loss of his leg, he could always marry and have children—and that he didn’t need to be in any particular hurry to do it. But what little he’d studied about Andorian biology had made it clear that members of that species couldn’t afford to live at such a leisurely pace. They had to contend with two extremely unforgiving biological constraints: four sexes and a narrow window of reproductive opportunity.

Nog quietly rose from his chair and approached Shar, following the curvature of the table until the two were less than a meter apart. He watched Shar’s impassive face, well aware that he could offer no words that might assuage Shar’s pain. All he had to offer was his presence.

Acting on a sudden impulse, he offered that presence, stepping toward Shar and drawing him into a gentle embrace. He felt Shar’s body stiffen as though responding to an attack. Then the Andorian relaxed, evidently overcoming the violence that came so naturally to Andorians in dire emotional straits. Shar seemed to be accepting Nog’s gesture as it was intended.

Seconds or perhaps minutes later, Nog disengaged himself and took a step back. I want to help you through this. If only I had the words.

As Nog took another silent step back, Shar broke the lengthening silence. “Nog?”

“Yes?”

“Watch where you’re going. You’re about to step into your tube grubs.”

Still lying on the table, Shar’s padd suddenly began emitting a rhythmic, repeating bleep. Nog felt a surge of gratitude for the interruption. Shar immediately got busy tapping at the padd’s controls.

“The automated linguistics protocols seem to have finally translated a few large chunks of the alien text,” he said, his voice still slightly quavering.

Nog thought Shar sounded apologetic for having even raised the subject when the problem of the Nyazen blockade still remained unsolved. But Nog hadn’t ordered Shar to ignore his computer alarms. And, though he didn’t have time to think much about it at the moment, he had to admit that he was probably every bit as curious about the alien text as Shar was. Maybe the text could even shed some light on defeating the blockade. Nog allowed himself the faint hope that the text might contain just the lucky break he needed.

“Well? Any major mysteries solved?”

Shar’s eyes were rapidly skimming back and forth across the padd, his face a mask of fascination. “Maybe you’d better see for yourself.”

Chief medical officer’s personal log, stardate 53578.6

Part of me knows that the size of the room isn’t really changing. The quarters Ezri and I share are small—cozy, she would probably say—but I know that the bulkheads can’t actually move.

Still, I’d be willing to swear that they do. When I lie on the bunk and close my eyes, I sometimes sense the ceiling dropping slowly toward me.

But I can live with it, at least for now. At least there’s nobody here to witness what I’m becoming, except for the times when Ezri drops in to check on me. I smile and search for clever, reassuring things to say to her. There’s still enough of me left in here to tell that she’s anything but reassured. Just how clever my remaining words are I can’t say. Nor can I understand how she can ever look at me the same way she used to. The Julian Bashir she loves simply isn’t in here anymore. When the rest of whatever it is I’ve been my whole life finally finishes boiling off, what will be left for her to love?

Then there are what I’ve come to call my “red periods.” When I was an intern, I once treated a severely autistic eight-year-old child. She didn’t like to be touched, and if anything in her environment changed too quickly, she would succumb to fits of blind rage, lashing out with fists, feet, and teeth.

Now, at least some of the time, I think I understand how her world must have looked from the inside. Especially when I can’t remember some simple thing. Some ridiculously common bit of knowledge, like a word with more than three syllables. Or the moment when I realized that I no longer could read, speak, or think