From her window slit—a concession to architectural sentimentality in an otherwise hermetically optimized habitat—Kira let her arm dangle against the thermal plating, eyes fixed on the dead gleam of the icefields beyond the city’s dome: obsidian plains, lightless and motionless, fracturing only where tectonic memory asserted itself. The air, recycled to parody warmth, wheezed against her skin like an old man's sigh—tired of pretending to be fresh. The humans had named the planet Aemnoa, a mangled relic of some Laotian word for “river,” though there was no water here, only static ice and frozen regret. Still, the name had delighted the human academic caste, for whom naming was equivalent to annexation: call it yours, and it is. That illusion of ownership—language as conquest—had always amused her until today. Today, she felt labeled, filed, mispronounced, and domesticated. Today, the name fit too tightly.
Ten floors above the curated bustle of Aemnoa’s sterilized boulevard, the air clawed its way through the building’s upper strata, carrying with it a soup of human detritus—each molecule a catalog entry in her olfactory archive: the carbon-smudged tang of combustion from their crawling machines, the faint alkaline sting of improperly neutralized body odors masked under synthetic florals, and the faintest tease of over-engineered roses and columbine from the hydroponic gardens, blocks away but forcibly circulated by the ever-breathing lungs of the environmental system. Somewhere beneath it all, always, the sour, recursive breath of the city’s buried ventilators—a reminder that survival here required machinery humming beneath one’s feet at all hours, or else death by planetary truth. Ten years she had lived in this closed circuit of human anxiety, catalogued and cherished by her handlers in the Velkuthar Project, Earth’s exotic pet wrapped in childhood trauma and sociopolitical insulation. She was safe—inasmuch as a specimen in a display case can be considered safe from knives.
Even if the humans—so proud of their moral architecture and performative benevolence—had opened the metaphorical door and announced her freedom with great ceremonial gravity, she knew the options waiting beyond that threshold would be as illusory as the gesture itself: starve without supplements, vanish into an Earth that feared her biology, or return to the ruins where her history had been amputated. Freedom, in this context, was just another variable in the control experiment. So she reminded herself, with clinical detachment, that captivity came in many flavors—and this one, at least, came with regulated climate, conditional affection, and the illusion of agency. There were worse cages.
She shifted her gaze from the phosphorescent lattice of the city below—its towers like glowing needles stuck into a sterile organ—and her pupils dilated reflexively, adjusting not just to dimness but to a different kind of seeing: the kind required to comprehend the cold, impossible geometry of the ice plains beyond the dome’s filtered transparency. Aemnoa's glacial wilderness sprawled outward in perfect silence, reflecting no light that didn’t already belong to it, like a memory too alien to process. Somewhere out there—beneath the frozen crust or inside it—was the shape of a question that had stalked her thoughts since girlhood, abstract and cruel: a truth she could not name, yet that refused to let her think of anything else. It pulsed at the edges of her cognition like a phantom limb. Whatever it was, it had been taken from her long before she had language to defend it—extracted during her abduction by smiling Earth physicians and humanitarian extractors with gloved hands and clinical lies. What she had lost was not information. It was alignment. And now, looking at the ice, she understood that careful thought would never retrieve it.
What have you lost?—the question echoed in her like a misfiring synapse, ungraspable not because it was too complex but because it was malformed, like asking the color of a vacuum. She felt around the idea like a blindfolded prisoner searching a featureless cell for a door that might not exist. Even the shape of the question eluded her; it throbbed beneath conscious language, slipping sideways every time she tried to seize it. Where do I begin? she asked herself—but even that presumed a direction, a coordinate system her mind no longer trusted. Her inner lexicon failed her. The absence wasn’t just of knowledge—it was of knowability.
She exhaled—slowly, methodically—as though venting pressure from some overtaxed inner valve, then lowered her gaze to the pale surface of her hand resting on the ledge, a hand shaped like theirs but not quite. To a human male, her face might read as attractively near-familiar: balanced features, soft symmetry, brown eyes too large to dismiss, the kind of curated strangeness that evoked curiosity rather than threat. Until, inevitably, his gaze settled on them—those fine, ordered ridges that ran horizontally across the bridge of her nose, like some forgotten ceremonial inscription carved into flesh. Not scars. Not deformity. Just... a different blueprint. A reminder. Because beneath her pale skin and the concealing architecture of similarity lay machinery that played by alien rules—organs with no analog, circulatory enzymes that oxidized differently, protein chains that mocked human immunology. They could map her genome and still not understand what governed it. The difference wasn’t visible. The ridges were merely a flag. The real divide was metabolic, architectural, molecular. Permanent.
Dr. Bashir—her appointed warden of the psyche, though he preferred the term therapeutic advisor—had recently published, with smug academic precision, a series of exchange essays with an Earth-based reproductive physiologist on the subject of her—not her name, not her person, just her, the anonymous alien case study. Among their favorite discoveries: that her gestational cycle, should it ever become more than theoretical, would not begin with nausea but with sneezing—uncontrollable, vascular-shock-inducing sneezes, a charming little quirk Bashir described with the same clinical relish he used for enzyme cascades. Conception to birth in five months, not nine, owing to an extraordinary vascular interlock between mother and fetus—intimate, beautiful, and utterly incompatible with interruption. No abortion protocols. No separation surgeries. Any attempt to extract the fetus late-term would rupture tissue and circulatory bridges so thoroughly as to kill one or both—preferably both, the papers implied, with the sterile objectivity of scientists pretending not to notice the horror they were describing. She, of course, was expected to be fascinated. Grateful, even. A marvel of biology with no reproductive autonomy. A walking thesis.
Label: woman. Was it accurate? By all available metrics, yes. She had breasts—biological, functional, not ornamental—and external genitalia that, while unfamiliar in minor topology, passed anatomical muster under a human medscanner. Her endocrine profile charted unmistakably along the same hormonal gradients Earth science defined as “female,” and her psychosocial imprinting—such as it existed—had revolved around maternal memory, not paternal archetype. So yes, she was a woman. Unequivocally. But what did that even mean to her, outside the clinical affirmations and the polite gender boxes on her weekly reports? Gender, to humans, was a doctrine disguised as biology; to her, it had been background noise until the scientists started diagramming her body with such reverent fascination. As a child, she had neither context nor concern for the rituals of adult taxonomy. Now, she understood just enough to be disturbed.
She could name the two Earth-derived proteins that kept her alive—Keplerase-A and Histolytin-D, invented, patented, and delivered intravenously by the same species that had abducted her for her own good. She could sketch their tertiary folds from memory, annotate the bond angles like a savant reciting the architecture of her own cage. Once, when she was very young and still soft in the mind, she had simply ceased to function—withdrawn from language, from food, from the perpetual poking and pleading of the humans—and folded in on herself like a dying star. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was rejection. Systemic. The catatonia lasted weeks. By the time the Earth survey ship docked again at Aemnoa’s orbital lab, she was skeletal, febrile, nearly lost. But they saved her. They had to. You don’t collect a relic only to let it decay. They needed the girl’s body—but only if the mind came with it. They resuscitated both, not out of love, but out of continuity. A museum exhibit must be whole to be of value.
She could recite the enzyme’s chemical structure like scripture—every chain, bridge, and folded cleft laid out in her mind with obsessive precision—yet even the senior biochemists, the ones with medals and acronyms stapled to their names, admitted they had no idea why it worked. Their miracle molecule, engineered with smug elegance to suppress her cyclic fevers, had saved her twice—just barely. Each time, her body had convulsed against its own blood, as if remembering something it had no words for. The drug tamped it down, tricked her cells into compliance, but never explained the mechanism. And the humans, ever the artists of improvisation, simply called it “effective” and moved on, congratulating themselves on their cleverness. Cleverness in place of understanding—that was their style. That, and ownership. Stop this, she warned herself, catching the swell of anger before it broke open. Emotion had no place in a clinical specimen.
At the beginning—when the trauma was still raw and her neural maps hadn’t yet been overwritten—she had nearly escaped, not physically, but deeper: into the soft black interior of her own mind, into a world without humans, without examinations, without names. That refuge, her private void, had been hers alone, a sanctuary constructed from absence and numbness. But they wouldn’t let her keep it. The humans, with their relentless therapies and unearned tenderness, their pharmacological kindnesses and sanctioned invasions, had dismantled her dream-world brick by brick. They wheedled her back into the visible spectrum with lullabies and neurostimulants, punished silence, rewarded eye contact, flooded her with affection whenever compliance emerged. Eventually, she emerged from her bunker of dissociation—not because she chose to, but because survival had calculated the odds and folded. She had to accept their rules, their architecture of reality, even if the geometry of it hurt. The scientists recorded every stage of her reintegration with clinical glee, diagrammed her grief into stages, compared her to Earth children—always Earth children—as though nothing alien could grow except by their metaphor. And so she became what they needed her to be: not healed, not whole, but interpretable.
The mental chemists—those priestly custodians of the psyche—hovered over her with the same antiseptic devotion the biochemists once applied to her blood, each group desperate to prevent collapse, though neither fully understood what they were preserving. The former studied her dreams, her silences, her behavioral metrics, ever-vigilant for the telltale tremor of madness—their madness, refracted through her alien frame—but never recognized the grotesque irony of their own pathology: the obsessive cataloging, the need to quantify grief in percentile scores, to distill loneliness into diagnostic codes and publishable insights. They feared her fracturing, but never once questioned the fractures in themselves, as though the compulsion to dissect a child’s mind and call it healing was not itself a kind of meticulously credentialed lunacy.
She stepped back from the window, letting her gaze settle on the curated artifacts of her containment chamber—cheerful bedspread selected by committee to evoke comfort, the utilitarian desk with its blinking viewer terminal always hungry for data, and the carefully neutral wall projections depicting Velkuthar glyphs and temple scenes, sanitized for colonial consumption. Raised in the shadows of scientists obsessed with ruins—their ruins, as they called them—she had absorbed their fervor for the extinct Phorix Velkuthar the way other children inherited lullabies. She had studied the glyphs, traced the architectural anomalies, combed the survey telemetry for patterns, longing—against her better judgment—for a flash of recognition. But no such resonance came. The Velkuthar were not her ancestors. No matter how desperately the researchers tried to graft her onto their hypotheses, no matter how many speculative papers positioned her as “genetic echo” or “living remnant,” she knew the truth. The visions—unbidden, luminous, and terrifying—spoke of an origin Beyond, past the mapped stars, past the edge of Velkuthar space where even the sensors lost interest. She told no one. Secrets, after all, were the last currency left to the observed.
She made a desultory effort to return her attention to the Velkuthar bas-reliefs—those dense, low-carved panels of alien stone that reminded her, unsettlingly, of Khmer temple friezes: impossible creatures coiled through ornate latticework, celestial huntresses with twelve fingers dancing above spiraling lotus columns, serpents wearing crowns of starlight. They pulsed with some hidden syntax her subconscious almost understood but refused to translate. The computer terminal blinked impatiently beside her, insistent and sterile—demanding data, demanding her. The Project’s weekly form lay dormant beneath the flickering interface, its questions as intimate as they were absurd: digestive rhythms, hormonal fluctuations, self-esteem quotients reduced to Likert scales. A confessional booth redesigned by behaviorists. She, the compliant anomaly, was expected to quantify her soul. The novelty of being both subject and scribe had long since worn off. She hadn’t completed last week’s report. This week’s would remain equally blank. Let them extrapolate emptiness. Let them run regression analysis on defiance. With a kind of soft, intentional rudeness, she turned her chair back toward the window, the stone gods behind her silent and watching.
Some of them—colleagues, assistants, visiting scholars drunk on their own credentials—seemed genuinely astonished that Kira could perform acts of cognition, as if sentience itself were a parlor trick, and she the simian novelty pushing the right sequence of glowing glyphs to earn a sugar cube of praise. Their astonishment was never directed at her intellect, not really; it was wonder masquerading as tolerance, the same patronizing marvel one reserves for a dancing animal that doesn’t realize it’s on a leash. She often felt like both: the beast in a too-bright ring, and the one who knew there was no audience, only surveillance. That sense—of isolation wrapped in spectacle—never quite left her. She suspected Bashir encouraged it subtly, passively, with his sideways glances and his quiet corrections, reinforcing her exceptionality just enough to secure his centrality. Without Kira Nerys, Julian Bashir would be another well-meaning psychiatrist spinning articles into the void. With her, he was indispensable. His Project had a face. A narrative. A trapped girl made articulate. And now, that narrative twisted around her again as she stared into the black shimmer of the ice plains, the stars jittering like code above the dome. Where? she thought, the question surfacing unbidden. I know you. From where?
Lately, her sleep had begun to fracture—no longer the flat, dreamless drift that had characterized her early years under sedation and surveillance, but a landscape of vivid, barbed imagery: dreams that surged upward like ancient rivers breaking through a concrete dam. The Naga came first—serpents crowned and sacred, not malevolent but watching, their coils draped around jungle thrones, their tongues tasting the air of old kingdoms. Then came the others: moon-eyed priestesses with hands of flame, lotus-faced warriors carved in spirals of gold, and the great bird Garuda soaring between stars like a wrathful thought. These were not borrowed images from Earth mythology; they were known to her in a way no scientist could explain—internal, inherited, like old songs written into marrow. She struggled to parse them—shapes too symbolic for language, too potent for dream logic. Often, they began in beauty: pale blossoms in a still garden, under the eye of a high star that seemed impossibly close. But always, the serenity collapsed—flowers turned to bone, the garden to ash, the star to a lidless eye. And she would wake, heart thundering, dread pooled under her tongue like venom.
She came often now—the pale goddess of Kira’s sleep, not clothed in metaphor but in ritual truth: Devi, or something older than the name, kneeling by the black waters of a still lake that reflected no stars of its own. Her skin was white, not with the sickliness of absence, but with the ascetic radiance of ash-smeared temples and moon-bathed statues; her arms, bare and strong, moved with the precision of sacred mudra as she tilted an urn—an elegant, impossible vessel—from which spilled a slow, glittering stream of stars, each droplet falling not into the lake, but into the Void itself. Behind her, a vast storm of hair blended into the heavens, a shroud of creation and dissolution. Her eyes were half-lidded in the manner of meditating apsaras, neither seeing nor unseeing, and her lashes—long and weightless—framed a darkness that was not absence but potential. She smiled—not at Kira, not for her, but as an act of cosmic detachment, and yet that curve of lip held such unbearable gentleness that Kira’s breath caught in her throat. She longed—not rationally, but with full-body ache—for those eyes to open and see her, to recognize her, as if in that gaze might lie the answer to her entire unspoken ancestry.
The presence of the white-skinned goddess—The Dancer, as Kira called her with instinct rather than evidence—left her mind not with clarity, but with something stranger: a serene fullness, as if the hollowness inside her had been momentarily irrigated by meaning too vast for conscious retention. She awoke from those dreams trembling, not with fear but with the disorienting aftertaste of revelation. The Dancer is important, her thoughts insisted, over and over, though no chain of reason connected the goddess to anything she knew. In a later dream, desperate for understanding, she sought out the Naga—her serpentine dream-companion and oracle of riddles—and asked him directly about the Dancer’s origin. The question ignited a kind of primal fury in him. His coils tensed, his golden frills flared wide, and he vanished for three dream-cycles without explanation. When he returned, he was evasive, elusive, performing the linguistic equivalent of a celestial chhau dance—smiling with too many fangs, deflecting with riddles, contradicting himself with every phrase. When she pressed him, he turned on her—no longer a serpent of wisdom but a predator of myth—chasing her through a forest of moving trees and flickering shadows until she fled, sobbing, into false waking. And yet—beneath the terror and betrayal—she saw it clearly: the Naga, for all his posturing, didn’t know either. The Dancer was beyond even his cosmology. That alone frightened her more than his fangs.
She sometimes thought it strange—dreaming in the visual grammar of ancient Khmers, her imagined companions draped in sampots and crowned in tiered headdresses, walking through bas-relief palaces where monkeys held court and gods danced atop crocodiles—but perhaps it was not strange at all. The coincidence had been seeded early, courtesy of Ben Sisko, her accidental guardian and hopeful human anchor, who had surrounded her from the beginning with iconography that blurred the line between the Velkuthar and the Khmer: sandstone apsaras mirroring alien priestesses, nāga balustrades indistinguishable from the serpentine motifs etched into the ruins of Ciravis and 17Q1 Phorix. Archaeologists spoke with barely disguised awe about the uncanny aesthetic overlap—two civilizations separated by parsecs and epochs, both obsessed with cosmological ascent, temple-mountains, deific multiplicity. Ben had recognized her attraction to the carvings not as scholarship, but as survival—a child clinging to pattern in a world that made none. So he filled her nursery with prints of Angkor Wat, copied inscriptions from Velkuthar ziggurats, played her ancient chants from both Earth and Aemnoa as if, in the interweaving, she might find herself. And, impossibly, she did. It was not history. It was resonance.
Ben, in his pedagogical mode—equal parts mythmaker and pedant—had once explained, perhaps too eagerly, how the Khmer emerged from collision: the first wave of migrants sailing out from the Indian subcontinent, burdened with sacred texts, bronze tools, and caste assumptions, had not conquered but interwoven with the local tribes of the Southeast—forest-dwelling peoples who spoke in tonal clusters and carried their own gods in tattooed skin and oral map-songs. The result was not a replacement, but a fusion. Neither wholly Indian nor purely native, the Khmer became something third: their language twisted into new vowels, their blood cross-woven like jungle vines, their architecture lifting Indian mandalas into humid stone spires wrapped in serpent guardians and open-lipped dancing women. It was admixture as identity—not dilution, not domination, but paradox sanctified. They had rewritten ancestry as architecture, encoded ancestry into god-form. A people born from two roots but loyal to neither. Ben had seemed proud of that. So had she.
According to the fractured, half-mythic memory that passed for Khmer origin—the kind of origin story no ethnographer could fully disprove and no believer would ever revise—their lineage began not in conquest, but in collision. Kaundinya, a Hindu warrior-prince of ambiguous historicity and potent dreams, was told in sleep to sail eastward from India with his bow, his javelin, and his imperial certainty. The dream did not mention the river. Or Soma. But there she was—Moon-daughter of the Naga King, sovereign of the wetlands, radiating serpentine authority—waiting at the Mekong’s edge, flanked by armed women who fought him with the elegance of dancers and the efficiency of storm surge. She failed to repel him. Or perhaps she chose not to. Either way, the myth arranges it neatly: attraction followed assault, desire replaced war, and the Naga King—who could swallow oceans and raise mountains—drank the river dry to bless their union, leaving fertile ground for rice and empire. Kaundinya ruled, yes—but Soma possessed. She was the land; he merely stamped it. It was a myth with teeth, scales, and gender geometry the humans rarely understood, no matter how many carvings they cataloged.
Ben, in that familiar cadence of academic enthusiasm tempered by paternal hope, had once explained to her—perhaps too eagerly, perhaps precisely when she needed it—that the Naga King, father of Soma and father-in-law to the dreaming war-prince Kaundinya, was a serpent deity of protean anatomy: sometimes five-headed, sometimes seven, sometimes uncountably crowned, depending on which temple you asked and how humid the season. In the reliefs of Chiang Mai, the Buddha sat beneath him, untouched by rain. At Angkor, the Naga lined the balustrades like muscular infinity, nine heads flaring outward in symmetrical menace and grace. Ben told her how, according to the Khmer telling, the serpent was not conquered but wed—a sacred union, prince to goddess, to birth a people who were neither invader nor native, but synthesis incarnate. Then, almost as an afterthought, he pivoted—smiling, conspiratorial—to the Velkuthar. What if, he mused aloud, Garaduka, the Velkuthar’s Lord of Radiant Boundaries, had likewise descended to Phorix 17Q1 aboard a blackship of harmonic geometry, found some coiled deity in the jungle ruins of Amonk Het, and bred a civilization out of star-blood and scale? He pulled up the holograms—grainy reconstructions from Ciravis Site Alpha—of the six colossal gods etched into the Grand Gopura: Garaduka, Izzuthen of the Mouthless Face, Virei-Ma, Keeper of Curved Time, Sennavar the Hunter of Seeds, Dalemash with her thousand hands, and the silent twin-statues of Vel-Korr and Vel-Thir, facing opposite directions but carved from the same stone. Ben gave them human stories because that was what humans did—bastardizations of Gilgamesh and Valkyries, dreamtime myths and Celtic sea-lamentations. It didn’t matter. Kira recited each name perfectly, eyes flickering. Because what mattered wasn’t the stories. It was that someone, somewhere, had once carved gods she could recognize.
Later, as he stood beside her bed and waved his arms theatrically, evoking the magic of the Naga King, his residence in the depths of the Underworld, and other realms beyond while she lay wide-eyed, watching him, she understood that she must've spent hours reading about myths, typing them out meticulously, and solidly preparing in secret for that night's narrative. He had struggled mightily to find a way to lift her out of the slumber that continued to engulf her in her severe despair. To the doubtful astonishment of the Project, he had also succeeded. Later, when she was older, Ben had abruptly stopped telling her bedtime tales, offering lame justifications and urging her to pursue more serious studies. She had a suspicion that Dr. Bashir, at the time a recent arrival to Aemnoa, had interfered because he disapproved of dreams and fantasies.
In order to escape the intrusive gaze of the humans who were studying her, she had found solace in her own solitary play. She had recreated Ben's heroic play-creatures, denying her captivity and her isolation in endless imagined adventures, where the mighty Kaundinya had become a fierce and protective lover, strong and crafty, where the rakasaha (Hindu demons) had been implacable enemies to challenge and outwit, where Soma and the Bird King, the Celestial Dancer and Queen Lotus Flower, all joined in the high drama, while the last Khmer king drew his sword and made war on the first Thai kingdom, Sukhothai, in a vast jungle clearing. As intimately as she knew the actual people in Aemnoa's real world, she knew all the kings---and usually preferred them despite their fierceness.
Fantasy, but perhaps it was fantasy that had kept her sane during those formative years when she had no defenses. And fantasy that comforted still. A smile appeared on her face.
She thought, gracefully coiling her hands over her head and fluttering her fingers. "I am the Naga," she thought as she inverted her hands into a Hindu-like prayer. "I am King of the Birds and the mount of Lord Vishnu. I am Soma, the Moon, Lady of the Mekong and daughter of the Naga King. Caution, Kaundinya! You will perish if you throw your javelin into my turf. As Soma ordered her troops to assault the haughty Brahmin, she walked once more in her small circle while violently gnashing her teeth. She then sat quietly down as Kira Nerys once more, pale and attractive but still unusual among people. Reality: Who owns it? She had received various labels from the Khmers, many of which she preferred. She contoured the index finger and the thumb of her right hand into a "C" shape again, invoking Soma.
She said to Dr. Bashir, "Beware. You'll be the first to be disemboweled when I'm let loose in your world."
She felt guilty as she heard the hiss of the exterior door in the adjacent room, but as soon as she heard the footsteps and recognized them, she relaxed. Bootheels rang twice on the tile of the hallway, stopped as Ben looked through the fax mail in the garbage, and then started moving slowly in her direction. The recognizable tang of his cologne, the fragrance of his dark skin, the mints he enjoyed chewing, and a hint of coffee mist in his hair and eyebrows all preceded him. Even if others also possessed them, their fragrances were still uniquely his. She moved away from the glass and faced the entrance, raising her lips in greeting.
A middle-aged Negro person with too much excess flesh and facial wrinkles, Ben filled the doorframe with his gaze bent on the mail in his square fists. With the exception of inquiries concerning his alien foster-daughter, his motions and confidence remained steady despite the graying of his black hair (what was left of it). Ben Sisko, a renowned archaeologist with expertise in linguistic analysis, overflowed with deference to Dr. Bashir on that persistent other matter because he secretly believed he lacked a necessary quality in a father, just as he felt responsible for an earlier failed marriage that he rarely talked about. Even while she occasionally sensed a disconnect from Ben, as she usually did in all of this human place, she occasionally hoped she could convince him of a few things because of his human nature.
After finishing his perusal of the mail, he glanced up, his brown eyes gleaming. He feigned to complain, "I never catch you staring out that window. You are always aware of my presence."
"Correct."
Moving slowly, he entered the space. " I stopped experimenting with slipping in covertly, as you may have observed."
"Months ago."
He gave her one of the texts and said, "Right," agreeing absentmindedly. "Dr. Crusher wants us to attend her ship party."
Kira scrunched up her nose, the ridges appearing to merge into a single line as she did so. "No way."
In frustration, he snorted. "This is a gathering of friends. You have to go. You won't be able to complete your teenage socialization otherwise."
"Is that the objective? Socialized?" she questioned in a harsher tone than she meant to. "Or has Dr. Bashir once again been worried about my social index?" She gazed back out the window as she turned her shoulder to face him.
He remarked, seeming perplexed, "I thought you loved Beverly Crusher. You can converse with her about bas-reliefs. She's intrigued by your concepts." Ben shuffled his feet while Kira stayed silent and avoided eye contact with him. "And, Kira, Dr. Bashir means well." After pausing, he gave a throat clearing. "I think you need to go."
She hunched her shoulders, knowing he would not give it up easily. Ben loved her in his own way, but sometimes it seemed like an absentminded love, like a reflexive habit: he cared equally---or more---about other things, and his choice to be her parental figures had been made by Kira and others, not sought by himself. For ten years Ben had postponed his own ship assignments on Phorix survey, contenting himself with the videos and artifacts brought back by others, consulting frequently with Dr. Bashir about how to parent an alien child. He took his duty seriously.
"You have to go."
"Ben...."
She never called him "Father," for all Dr. Bashir's cagey encouragement, stubborn in that also. Ben had not seemed to mind, had not even inquired why.
He leaned over her and took the flimsy from her hand. "I'll send our acceptance," he said with a note of finality, and turned to leave.
"I like Dr. Beverly," she declared without looking at him. "I don't like Dr. Bashir."
Ben sighed feelingly land left the room. Kira thumped her fist on the windowsill, then stared at the dark plain beyond the dome, hoping the fixed attention might bring it into her dreams. Ben's scents lingered in the room for several minutes, distracting her, then blew to vague fragments on the city breeze. She stared at the plain until her vision sparkled with jagged spots, then blinked tiredly. She buried her face in her arms.
When she was younger, she could pretend she belonged in this place. Confused, she could pretend Ben was her real father, others a kind uncle or cousin, all the adults the warmth of welcoming arms she remembered from the before-time. But maturity now brought insistent dreams that denied that reality, disjointed her, filled her with an aching loss. Her people could not tolerate outsiders well, she believed, and tried to ignore Dr. Bashir's insistence that her recent obstinacy was a failing, a reproof, an ingratitude. She chose to be obstinate. She had tried denial, acceptance, cooperation and endurance. But nothing had filled the void inside her for long. Didn't flexibility and intelligence go hand in hand? Why not obstinacy?
He had such clever words, did Dr. Bashir, and Ben trusted him. If she confided in Dr. Bashir, she knew from experience, the psychologist would only cluck his disapproval and offer twelve other reasons to confuse her, then mark his charts and pull at his chin in ostentatious thought, unaware that she knew how much he detested her alienness, a primal fear of the Other he likely denied even in his secret thoughts. The Naga King had told her that about Dr. Bashir; she believed it. Yet he did not wish her to be human, for all his cajoling; he had too much of a vested stake in her difference, Earth's only alien child, a foundation for an alienist's career, much better than mysterious crumbling stone and centuries-dead civilization. A living trophy could perform, could be truly owned.
Stop this, she told herself. Stop thinking about it.
The warm air riffled her hair, tickling her cheek, and surrounded her with the scents of Aemnoa , teasing at her. From the distance she heard a metallic chiming she could not identify; it reminded her of the iceflowers, the last memory untainted by the humans. Her dreams sometimes began in that garden on Ciravis, surrounded by carved stone and a silent city: she focused on the memory, allowing it to calm her.
I wish I could sleep, she thought. I wish I could sleep forever in that garden, waiting for the Black Starship. And my mother would walk toward me through the blooms, her face alight, all sternness and despair erased in her joy, and she would gather me close to her, glad in the welcoming. The others would crowd around us, happy with her, and together we would go to the Black Starship, our home. I so wish....
It was a familiar wish. She raised her head and stared for several more moments at the dark plain beyond the dome, then got up to dress for Dr. Crusher's party.799Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQN6RE0eByz
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"Good evening, Kira," Dr. Beverly Crusher said as she took Kira's hand, squeezing it warmly. A tiny red-haired woman in her early forties, Beverly Crusher had a high social index that Kira envied, one that easily included aliens at any party. She sniffed at Dr. Beverly's flowery perfume, a bit overwhelmed by the heady scent, and caught fainter underscents of bath oil and scotch. Dr. Beverly's scents, she thought, her answering smile unforced. In another five years, Ben had told her, he expected Dr. Crusher would leave her post as head of Bas-reliefs at Ciravis, and become the Phorix Project's overall director. Kira hoped so.
"That's a beautiful outfit," Dr. Beverly said. "Red becomes you."
"Thanks."
"Hello, Ben. You look like your usual self. Smart of you to let Kira outshine you."
"What?" Ben asked absently, and then looked sharply at Dr. Beverly down his flat nose.
Dr. Crusher laughed and pressed Ben's hand, then led them into the apartment foyer. A gaggle of voices issued from the room beyond as glasses chinked and Dr. Crusher's guests talked a combination of gossip and shop. One Aemnoa, with a population of scientists obsessed with the mystery of the Dalek ruins, one could go anywhere and overhear voices in affable argument about glyphs, technic structure, and xenobiology. Kira recognized representatives of the Ciravis, teams in the room: Metals, Urban Map, BioSurvey, and Glyphs. She had met a few of Dr. Beverly's guests now and then, seen fax-photos of several others in article bios.
For 15 years, first at the smaller Dalek mining outpost on Phorix 17Q1 , the first ruins discovered by the Aemnoan probes, and then at the larger ruins on Ciravis, the scientists of Earth had plunged into the exploration of an alien culture, the first and only alien culture---save Kira herself, of course, in all her different mysteries. Though the Earth legislature debated the expense every year, sometimes in rancorous dispute with the other colony governments who had their own agendas, every year the Project got what it asked for in ships and support and money, with a suitable smaller largesse for an archaeological subproject named Kira Nerys Sisko. She and Ben lived well, as did Dr. Bashir. She glimpsed Dr. Bashir's portly figure in the far corner of the next room. He was laughing jovially with a group of admiring friends, gesturing with the drink in his hand as he told his story. She winced and looked back longingly at the door.
"Come along, Kira," Ben said.
"Yes, Ben."
I hate parties, she thought rebelliously.
In the larger inner room, several groups of people gathered in different parts of the room talking, several voices already too loud from alcohol. To Kira's sensitive hearing, the noise rose to a painful level, but she tried to ignore the clamor as she reluctantly followed in Ben's and Dr. Sisko's wake. As usual, Kira's presence attracted immediate covert glances: though she looked nearly human, her pale complexion and different nose structure, the odd brownish shade of her eyes, the sheen of her reddish hair, even the way she moved, Ben had told her once, were sufficient to attract attention. Many of the adults in the room had known her for several years and the others from video and a wide academic literature, but they still looked, usually askance and then quickly away. She tried to ignore that, too, practicing the vague social smile that made her look dimwitted. Sometimes when she looked stupid enough, nearly everyone left her alone; she wished to be left alone tonight.
I don't want to be socialized, she thought, gritting her teeth. Maybe I could tell that to Dr. Bashir and give him grist for another paper. Alien child alienated! Right. Learned doctor makes new discovery, he announced today...
Dr. Bashir noticed her and turned to smile unpleasantly, then said something to his group with a vague wave in her direction. Two in the group swiveled to look at her; she ignored them and him.
Dr. Crusher took her elbow and guided her to a sofa by the wall, but her choice of social companion for Kira showed too many years away at Ciravis. The brown-skinned boy on the couch looked up warily.
"Here's Virgil Bashir, Kira," Dr. Crusher said pleasantly. "Why don't you two get some punch from the table and have a good time?" She patted Kira on the shoulder and then turned as the door chime sounded faintly, announcing another guest. "Ben, there's Dr. Picard waving at you, wanting to argue. Why don't you oblige him?"
As Dr. Beverly and Ben moved off in different directions, Virgil stared up at Kira for a long moment, then put on his familiar mocking half smile. Slowly relishing the moment, he mouthed his favorite taunt.
Freak. His grin widened.
"Mushbrain," Kira retorted, glaring back at him. "Why don't you stuff your head in an air compressor? It might improve your intelligence."
"Tut, tut," Virgil said, tipping his head to the side, one of his father's common gestures. "Is that a nice thing for an alien freak to say?"
"You should know, being one. Is your father here?"
"Naturally. You are. Wherever you are he is."
"If you've got jealousy problems," she said brutally, "solve them yourself. Don't ask me to help you."
"Oh, tut at that," Virgil cried. "I'll tell Father about that comment. He's sure to drop your social index way down." Virgil stood up and moved closer to her, stopping only when his face was inches away. "Tut!"
She felt herself flush despite herself. Virgil Bashir had led the group of children who chose to taunt her in school, ignoring every lecture from the teachers in his systematic campaign to make her life a living hell. Finally, Ben had taken her out of school for private tutoring, and even Dr. Basher had admitted defeat in getting the colony children to accept her. But somehow that, too, had become more Kira's failing than theirs
Virgil fluttered his eyelashes, mocking her, then opened his eyes wide to stare ostentatiously at her alien face. Virgil knew all about her dislike for stares, had known it from the start with a bully's infallible instincts. She studied his thin Semitic face, her anger rising inside of her like a cold flame.
"Bug off, Virgil." She looked away.
"Crinkle-nose!"
She turned back to face him and narrowed her eyes angrily. At this distance, Virgil's scent filled her nostrils, an acrid pool of odor in the odor-laden warm air of the room. The noise of the party rose around them, assaulting her ears and starting the slow dull throb of a headache.
"Crinkle-nose," Virgil whispered, drawing out the word in a long hiss, taunting her.
Kira smiled and hit Virgil squarely in the face, putting unearthly strength into her fist. The blow caught Virgil totally off guard and lifted him clean off his feet, then bounced him neatly on and off the couch. Virgil yelped as he landed hard on the floor, sprawling, and every conversation in the room stopped as all eyes swiveled in their direction. Kira stood still, smiling down at Virgil, as Ben and Dr. Bashir arrowed in from different directions.
"She hit me!" Virgil declared to his father, his outrage maybe half real. He fingered his nose gingerly and winced, then looked up at Kira in genuine astonishment. Kira's smile widened with intense satisfaction.
"Did you really, Kira?" Dr. Bashir rumbled.
"Did you really, Kira?" Ben said at almost the same time. She turned to Ben and smiled up at him, batting her eyelashes.
"Can I go home now?" she asked brightly.
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