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

be seeing you,” he thought he heard Taran’atar say in an incongruously clear tenor voice, “in all the old familiar places.”

And just before consciousness fled him, Nog realized that he could probably deal with that.

All at once, Dax became aware that something in its environment had changed. The blind and deaf creature was well acquainted with the curious tingling sensation of being disassembled and reconstituted by a transporter beam—even harrowing, rather rough beamings such as the one it had just experienced. But this current feeling of sudden change was subtly different.

Dax still enjoyed the same euphoric freedom of gentle, aqueous suspension it had been experiencing for the past day or so, ever since its abrupt removal from Ezri Tigan’s body. What was different and perplexing was where the symbiont now found itself floating. It made no sense, but there could be no denying the water’s distinctive salinity and mineral factors. Even the limited sensorium of a symbiont could never mistake this particular place for any other.

Mak’ala. Somehow, I have been brought home, all the way from the hinterlands of the Gamma Quadrant.

With that recognition came an ominous tingle of dread. Dax had never enjoyed spending extended periods here. The symbiont had always taken great care to prearrange as brief a recuperation interval here as possible while between hosts. Floating in the complex network of caves for too long had always brought on a curious, and admittedly irrational, feeling of vulnerability.

After returning to the pools briefly following the death of Lela, the first Dax host, the symbiont had dreamed of predators—eyeless creatures who trolled the caves until their hyperolfactory abilities guided them unerringly to some unsuspecting symbiont. Then these inescapable horrors of unhinged jaws and serrated teeth would pounce. Scores of lifetimes would end, suddenly and ignominiously, in some brute’s foul gullet—

Stop it, Dax told itself. Such things did not exist. The humanoid Trills who tended the pools had seen to that long ago.

Yet the apprehension lingered.

Dax wished there had been an opportunity to arrange a new joining before being disassociated from Ezri Tigan. But the separation had come without any warning. How long would the Symbiosis Commission take to assign a new host? Not long, Dax trusted. The Commission knew that Dax’s lifetimes of experience were too valuable to the Federation to be allowed to languish for long.

Dax wished Ezri well. It had no desire to see her come to harm because of the sudden collapse of their joining. And it appreciated all the painstaking, after-the-fact preparation Ezri had done to accommodate their ad hoc symbiosis, once it had become a necessary and unalterable fait accompli. But the encounter with the alien artifact had caused that symbiosis to fail, or had at least catalyzed its failure. That aborted joining was now part of Dax’s lengthy past, and was likely to remain so. And although it shamed Dax to admit it, being free of Ezri’s sometimes disorderly thought processes was a real relief. The portion of Dax that recalled Audrid’s love of peaceful walks in the woods exulted in this newfound freedom.

Dax reached out into its liquid environment with its limited physical senses, probing around itself with insubstantial electrolyte filaments. It perceived immediately that other symbionts were in the pool, which was as expected. Willing itself forward, Dax probed to the pool’s boundaries, sensed the limits of its rocky walls in every direction. It was a finite, though by no means cramped, space. But Dax knew that this would be the extent of its universe until its next joining. The wider, less confining worlds beyond were far more inviting.

The symbiont sensed that a narrow passage lay in its path, seeming to beckon. The notion of entering such a restrictive space raised the wise apprehension of Audrid and Lela. But the inquisitive natures of Tobin and Jadzia immediately overruled this initial cautious impulse. Dax undulated forward, eager to encounter whatever lay ahead.

Entering the constricted passage, the symbiont began picking up speed, reacquainting itself with Emony’s love of kinesthetic motion. The narrow channel soon widened again, and Dax found itself delighting in the freedom of yet another large underground pool, this one seeming to stretch into infinity. Reaching out with its limited sensorium, Dax detected other shapes floating in the distance.

But they weren’t symbionts. Tobin’s fear rose as the shapes approached, but the battle-tempered courage of Curzon and Jadzia deftly parried it.

The shapes grew larger and more complex. While they weren’t limbless symbionts, neither were they razor-toothed predators. Feeling relieved, Dax quickly ascertained that they had arms and legs, heads and torsos. They were humanoids, all of them as naked as symbionts. There were nine of them, all swimming about him, and all apparently emotionally agitated, judging from their movements. The rhythmic flailing of their limbs set up chaotic, overlapping waves throughout the pool, vibrations that reminded Dax of the celestial music produced by the Oort cloud bodies near the alien artifact. Dax probed at the faces of each of the humanoids with gentle, bioelectrical fingers.

Moving from one face to the next, Dax recognized each and every one of the humanoids. Though it knew this was impossible, Dax also knew that their identities were unmistakable.

“You’ve known about what’s coming for the past century,” Audrid said, somehow speaking directly into the symbiont’s mind. She was obviously completely unmindful of the absurdity—no, the utter impossibility —of her presence here.

“It’s more like the past century and a quarter,” Torias said, floating beside her.

“But it still hasn’t done anything about it.” This came from Lela.

“All those years,” Torias said. “All those lifetimes. And you spent most of them assing around the galaxy.”

“Why haven’t you at least tried to warn anyone, Dax?” Emony said, her words dripping with bitter accusation.

Dax felt genuine confusion. I don’t know what any of you are talking about.

“Perhaps you don’t.” This voice belonged to Joran Belar, a man whose sense of aesthetics had been matched only by his psychotic bloodlust. Dax had been well rid of that joining, late in the previous century.

You’re