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'Finish, good lady, the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.'
Antony and Cleopatra
1. Elim Garak
Orchids, you see, are delicate things. They like heat, and moisture, and peace. It's also said that if you talk to them (softly, of course, murmuring secrets into their curled and intricate petals) they will hear you, and remember. Perhaps that's why I always liked to talk to the orchids, and perhaps, too, that's why I always thought I could hear voices, alone in the great glass conservatory of the Embassy with the spring rain drumming on the roof and the flowers whispering amongst themselves. And if I listen long enough, I sometimes think that I can still hear them.
2. Julian Bashir
I'd always thought that the Cardassians were supposed to be a meticulous, orderly people, but you'd never know it from looking at the jumble of items pushed to the back of the cupboards, and the mess they'd made of the records was indescribable. I would have complained to our sole local representative, but I hadn't spoken to Garak for a while now.
Given the chaos that the occupying forces had made of my Infirmary, I was occupying myself with an inventory when Dax came in. I muttered a greeting. Leaning against one of the couches, she watched me for a while, in silence.
'Can I help you, Jadzia?' I asked, straightening up.
'Yes, as a matter of fact, you can. Worf's test running the modifications they've made to the Defiant at the moment, and I'm at a loose end this evening. You can come and have dinner with me. It seems a long time since we've really talked.'
Talking was the last thing I wanted to do, but I could hardly refuse without seeming impolite.
'All right. What time?'
'Well, I can see that you can barely contain your enthusiasm,' she said, arching an eyebrow. 'How about eight?'
I nodded, reconciling myself to an awkward evening. It wasn't as though there was anyone else I'd be dining with, after all.
3. Elim Garak
Diplomats. I've never really approved of them. The older ones are too jaded to be of any use whatsoever and the young ones all have that 'why was I born so beautiful, why was I born at all?' air about them. So I can't say that my mission to the Romulan capital was a particularly appealing one. I won't bore you with the details: suffice to say that the mission progressed much as planned, and then it was decided - never mind by whom - that Virani T'Arek would have to be removed; her very particular talents were liable to cause too many problems. The Order was of course aware of my investigations into her Tal Shiar cell, and of my own experimental interest in her work. It was unfortunate that she had not come to our attention a little earlier, but on reflection I didn't think that this greatly mattered. I had all the information I needed.
As soon as the need for her removal became evident, therefore, I arranged to meet her in one of the conservatories that flanked the Cardassian embassy, sending out a false message under the name of one of her most close and secret associates. Stepping through the door, into the damp heat, I found her waiting for me among the flowers. She was a slight, elegant woman; they said she came from one of the old colonial families. I was, perhaps, merely the gardener to her. I smiled.
'Good afternoon,' I said.
She laughed, quite without surprise. 'Oh, I've wondered about you. And now I know. At least you've given me that satisfaction,' she said and then before I could move she stepped through the adjoining door, shutting it behind her and deactivating the screens which separated her from the orchids: not the rosy golden fronds of the Edosian blooms, but the night-coloured flowers with which I had become so uneasily familiar. 'Aren't they beautiful?' she said, still smiling. I could see the amused complicity behind her eyes. Wildly, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the orchids themselves had told her what I had been planning, a superstitious fantasy which I immediately rejected. With a last glance at me, she leaned among the velvety black flowers, so that their long tongues brushed against her cheek, and breathed their scent to steal her death from me. It didn't take very long after that. I simply stood there and watched her as she died, with an odd sensation of protectiveness. When I was sure she was dead, I raised the alarm under an assumed code, first making sure that I was a long way from the Conservatory. They put it down to a suicide. Later that night, I paid a secret visit to the mortuary and made quite sure that she was, indeed, gone. Her body was as still as stone, and colder. Even in death she smiled. So you see, I was certain she had really died. I never expected her to come back.
4. Julian Bashir
'I've never read anything by him before, but I found it really impressive. The way he gets inside the character's head, lets you know everything Sirana's feeling even when you know that he's completely beyond redemption... Julian, are you even listening to me?'
'What?'
Dax sighed. 'People have been talking about you, Julian. Ever since we returned to the station - and they would have been discussing you before, if we didn't have other things to think about. I think it's fairly obvious why.'
'Is it? Do you think that? You don't know, Jadzia.'
'Someone who didn't know you as well as I do might think that it's simply that you don't have to pretend any more, play the fool. You don't have any skeletons in your closet, so why not let us all know how smart you really are? But it isn't that, is it? That revelation's actually changed you, not just the way you present yourself to the world.'
I didn't know what to say. Inside, a voice whispered: Yes, it's changed me. It's shut me down, closed me away, lost me the dearest friend I've ever had. But how could I say that to her? It was hard enough admitting it to myself. Dax was watching me, I knew, and I felt utterly at a loss. The same thing, always. I still couldn't comprehend how I could have the calculating power of a computer and yet understand so little about other people, or my own heart, but I didn't want to think about that any more.
'And then there's Garak,' she said.
5. Elim Garak
I don't really know whether I believe in a life beyond my death. Perhaps whatever light I have within me will flutter out when last I close my eyes, but it sometimes seems to me that other lives go on, moving like a shadow across the sun. My father was one; I saw him everywhere, in the weeks that followed his death, and then one day he was gone. I no longer turned a corner to feel the scales on the back of my neck rise up, as if he was watching me. I didn't wake any more, shaking and cold, to find that no-one was sitting beside the bed after all. The nightmares had evaporated into a daylight that I have not seen in years, and I had enough sense to know who was responsible for that: my most unlikely redeemer, Dukat's daughter. I knew that her affection for me was perhaps nothing more than a schoolgirl crush, but as I've said before, the young can teach their elders, sometimes. And for a man with my past, misplaced forgiveness and uncomprehending love can be very seductive. I think I'd even finally begun to believe that she might have been right. Perhaps I was someone worth saving, after all. But then, I'd believed that before, with regard to someone else who was beloved and young. It all turns to ash in the end; dust in the mouth.
You see, I thought we could compromise, Bashir and I. Whatever darkness passed between us, it seemed not to make a difference, until the day that I realised he was no longer seeking me out, that he was treating me with all the irritation and contempt of his Starfleet colleagues. And I didn't know why. I didn't know whether he'd been wearing a mask all along, casting it off when it no longer became necessary to fool the world. I found it difficult to believe that, but I had no other explanation. So I turned to Tora Ziyal, because I was tired, and it seemed simpler, until the day when she betrayed her father and myself, by dying and leaving us alive. After that, I was determined to do all that I could to honour her; reclaiming her for her Cardassian heritage in death if not in life. And so I waited, for the thirty days after her death, until the time was right to undertake the darkest ritual of all, and follow her.
6. Julian Bashir
'He loves you, doesn't he?' Dax said.
'I don't know.'
'I think you do. I've seen the way he looks at you. And I'm not the only one who's noticed it. Back on the Defiant - oh, he was very guarded, very controlled, but there were a couple of times when I thought we were finished and I saw it then - his gaze strayed back to you like a magnet. As though you were the last thing he wanted to see before he died. And is it the same for you?'
'No. No, never. That's not the way it is...'
My own voice always sounds fragile when I lie; as though it isn't my voice at all, but someone else's. But what else could I tell her? I don't know exactly why I turned away from Garak. It had nothing to do with a collapse of the trust between us. I think it was because I no longer knew who I was. I'd lived behind a facade for so long that when the need to maintain it wasn't there any more, I didn't know how to behave. I didn't even know if it had been a facade or not. It seemed best just to try to function, and ignore the messy, distressing demands of a personality at breaking point. I know I seemed cold and calculating, but it was the only thing that got me through the day. I really believed that it would have been easier if I'd died.
Dax was staring at something beyond my shoulder, I noticed belatedly. I turned, and saw Garak. He was walking around the perimeter of the Promenade. I hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks and then it had been one of those embarrassed, averted eye meetings. He looked older, I thought, and there was something taut and closed about his face. Dax said something, but I wasn't paying much attention. I just wanted to run after him.
7. Elim Garak
I'd always wondered what it would be like to die, and this was the closest I was likely to come to it, before the actual event. The distillation was bitter in my mouth, and it seemed very cold, even though the phial had been standing at room temperature while the pollen diffused into the fluid. It didn't take effect immediately. I had time to sit and watch the candles burn down. Time seemed to be accelerating. The flames leaped and fell, like a spirit that passes. Ziyal was only the third person whom I had mourned in this way, and I had never gone this far before. My father was not someone whom I would willingly follow. She seemed very close, as though she'd waited for me.
'Ziyal?' I said, but when I looked up, Virani T'Arek was standing before me and the room was sweet with the scent of the flowers.
8. Julian Bashir
I couldn't sleep. That unsatisfactory, unfinished conversation with Dax kept replaying itself in my head, and there were other thoughts, too, unwelcome ones that I'd been trying to stifle for a long time now. It wasn't my fault, I told myself, again. He'd been the one who'd turned from me, who had pushed me away. He'd been the one to find another friend, making a fool of himself with that little girl. But that's not true, a voice said, deep within my mind. You just wanted him to feel obligated to you, the noble young medic making a lonely life more bearable. You didn't care about him. You just wanted to feel superior. And so he turned to someone who made real sacrifices for his sake. Even, in a way, her life. Is it any wonder that he shut himself away, to mourn her, in private? The only thing to marvel at is that you've never even tried to find out how he is.
I sat up and looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to midnight. Time, I thought, to make amends.
9. Elim Garak
'When you open a door,' she said. 'Who knows who may walk through?' Her hand brushed one of the orchids that were all around us now, releasing a cloud of hazy pollen into the air. 'I thought you'd given up gardening, Mr Tekar. Oh - I'm sorry. I don't think that's your name any more, is it?'
'You must be thinking of someone else. My name's Garak.'
'You're right. I was thinking of someone I knew many years ago, back on Romulus. But I think he must be very far away now.'
'Don't you know? Isn't that where you've come from - the halls of the dead? Through the iron doors, past the walls carved from sinew and bone, back out into the day?'
'That's a very Cardassian image. You know my people don't have such a concept of the afterlife. But you're right, nonetheless. I have come back from death, Mr Garak.'
'To send me to mine?'
'Perhaps. Do you think you're dreaming? Undergoing a hallucination caused by the distilled, transmuted poison of an Edosian night-orchid, in the ritual mourning for someone who has died? Did you think that this would be a purely metaphorical experience?'
'I don't know.'
'No...You're a rationalist, Mr Garak. You've too little understanding of your own people's beliefs. The orchid doesn't simply cause you to hallucinate. It carries you across the divide between life and death. What you're undergoing is real.'
She reached out and touched my hand. The room drew away, peeling back to reveal the underlying fabric of the universe itself, and we were through and falling.
10. Julian Bashir
When I reached his door I paused for a moment, then activated the door chime. There was no reply. Perhaps he was asleep. I waited, then repeated the process. Nothing. I don't think I was uneasy at that point; it was rather that having steeled myself to see him, I was determined to do so. I suppose it was selfish, but I didn't care. I over-rode the controls of the door and stepped through.
He was lying across the couch, one hand trailing down to the floor.
'Garak?' I said. He did not move. I shook him gently by the shoulder, but he still did not stir. The room was filled with an odd, pungent fragrance: sweet as jasmine, with an undernote of decay. I looked around, and saw the cause. The orchid was placed in a tall vase on the table. Some of the stamens had been removed and the surface of the table was dusted with pollen, but the black petals were intact, looking more like flesh than flower. Warning signals were going off in my mind: Those are poisonous. They can be fatal. You have to get it out of here... Nut it was already too late. I managed to touch the com-badge before I sank to my knees beside him, but if I spoke, I don't remember it.
11. Elim Garak
'Wake up,' someone said, and I opened my eyes. Tora Ziyal was crouching by my side, smiling down at me.
'Ziyal,' I said. I reached up to trace the arch of bone between her brows and she bit her lip as if suppressing some unbearable happiness. Her sudden appearance seemed to make complete sense, with the logic of dreams.
'Where are we?'
'In the mausoleum. Near Ghenret, on Cardassia Prime. Where else would we be?'
I looked up and there was the curve of the ivory ceiling above me, very pale and shining with its own light. In the shadows, something stirred.
'Who's that?' I struggled to rise, but there was a weight like the world on my chest.
'It's all right. They won't hurt you. Come on. It's time we went.'
'Where are we going?'
'Where you've always wanted to go,' she said, surprised. I found that it was quite easy to stand, after all; all I had to do was accept the hand that she held out to me. We walked through the portals of the mausoleum: first, the iron doors, then bone, and then the last door which was no more than a parchment screen. When I ran my fingers across its smooth stretched surface it had all the silky coolness of skin.
'It won't open,' I said.
'No. Not for you. Be patient, Elim.' - and she was gone. I was alone.
12. Julian Bashir
'Wake up,' someone said, and I wondered why they bothered, because the last thing I wanted to do was wake. My current state was far too interesting. The universe hung below me: an oceanic field of darkness. Stars were born at my shoulder, suns span by. I was unravelled until I was nothing more than a skein of consciousness stretched across the spine of the universe, and then I was travelling, drifting down to the small pale world far beneath me. I was resting on rock. There was the cool smoothness of marble under my cheek, the scent of rain on the wind, and when I raised my head, I was nowhere that I knew.
I got to my feet and looked around me. The ground was scattered with stones and the flowers grew amongst them, their long tendrilled leaves curling across the rock. A short distance away, on the slope of the hillside, was a building: a triplicate structure whose arching pylons reminded me of somewhere. Aimlessly, I began to walk towards it, and as I drew closer I could see that it was made of some sort of pale stone. It towered above me in a sequence of unnatural perspectives, disquieting to the human eye. There didn't seem to be a door. I touched its ash-coloured surface; it felt rough and familiar. Then I realised. It was made of bones, thousands of them, encased in a framework of metal.
'You have to open the door,' someone said. I turned. Tora Ziyal was standing at my shoulder, dressed in a long grey robe but otherwise unchanged from the girl she had been in life. Only her eyes were different: blank and sightless, the non-colour of the sky above me.
'It's you,' I said, fatuously.
'He's been waiting for you, you see. For a long time, for you to find him.'
'Garak's in there,' I said, with sudden understanding. 'How do I get in?'
'I don't know. But you do,' she said, and when I turned to stare at her, she was no longer there.
I walked around the building, but there seemed to be no obvious entrance. I stood back and began to calculate possibilities. The structural integrity of the building seemed intact: the only weak point that I could discern lay beneath one of the supporting buttresses. If I could somehow force apart two of the metal joists that constituted the base of the lower platform...but I had no tools, and no weapons. I had to think of something else.
I don't know how long I stood there, computing the various courses of action that I might viably take. Perhaps it wasn't very long, but it seemed like an eternity. At last, I came out of my trance and saw that the girl had returned. She was gazing at me with that translucent stare, and though her face was as blank as a mask I thought for a surreal moment that I discerned something akin to exasperation.
'I can't think of a way to get in,' I said.
She merely stared at me.
'Why are you here?' she asked me.
'Garak's taken some sort of organic-derived neurotoxin. I was trying to wake him up, but I must have inhaled it and this is some sort of hallucinogenic epiphenomenon - probably because the neurons which constitute my psychoactive responses have been stimulated.'
'Why are you here?' she said again, patiently, as though talking to a child. Frustration welled up within me, and with it, anger.
'I just wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I was sorry -' I snapped, and a door opened. Garak stepped through, out of the bone palace and into the desert, and the flowers were all around.
'I don't understand,' I said. Suddenly, I felt very tired. I sat down abruptly on the stony ground.
'Doubtless,' my friend said, tartly. 'I must say, for someone who supposedly possesses enhanced faculties, you've been remarkably obtuse of late.'
'I don't know who I am any more...' My words were a whisper.
Garak sat down by my side and said with a sigh: 'What's that human expression? Join the club.'
'I've spent so long pretending to be someone else - at least, I'm not even sure about that. Maybe that's what I'm really like. Maybe -'
'Look,' the Cardassian said, impatiently. 'Stop thinking so much. And anyway, does it matter? When you love someone, you compromise your self. Between you both, someone else is created. And when you think you've lost them, you feel as though part of you has been torn away.' He paused and added painfully, 'Don't you find that?'
'Elim,' I said. I could no longer see him. He was just a voice out of the darkness, but he was holding me close now. I could feel his breath against my cheek.
'Listen to me,' he whispered. 'I used to be like you; thinking that you can't allow yourself the luxury of feelings. I used to think they were a sign of weakness. And now I realise that everything I've done was driven by emotion: love, fear, hatred. Don't repeat the mistakes I've made. After all -' the tart note was back '- I'm older and wiser than you are. And I ought to know what I'm talking about, even if I've never practised what I preached...'
The darkness was all around us now. I reached out and my hand brushed the soft petals of a flower, releasing its scent.
'Edosian orchids,' Garak said into my ear. 'I've always been rather fond of them. Of course, you really need to be careful with some varieties, but these won't kill you. On the contrary, in fact... Come back with me, Julian. Make new mistakes. Come back and live.'
'Wake up,' the voice said.
'Elim?' I asked again.
'No. Julian, it's me. It's Jadzia.' The dim ceiling of the infirmary seemed very far away. 'How are you feeling? You gave us quite a scare, you know, both of you....'
13. Elim Garak
'You're awake,' she said. I raised my head to look at Ziyal. The room was dark, but I could see her clearly, outlined against the stars.
'Thank you,' she said 'For mourning me. But you don't have to, you know. It's really for the best. I'm home, at last.'
'Ziyal... Did you come all this way, do all of this, for me?'
'Why not? You were so unhappy. And it really isn't so far away.'
She took my hand. Her fingers were warm as they gripped my own, but they grew cooler and lighter until they rested against my palm like air, and then she was gone.
'Garak?'
I blinked. The lights in the infirmary were, as usual, too bright.
'Doctor?'
Bashir, clad in a patient's gown, sat heavily on the side of the bed. There was something I knew I should remember, but it remained just out of reach.
'What am I doing here?' I asked him.
'Harmaline,' he said. He seemed oddly nervous.
'What?'
'It's a hallucinogenic empathogen. Back on Earth, it was derived from a vine - ayahuasca, or banasteriopsis. Shamans took it in order to cross from one world to the next. There are a variety of sources across the Alpha Quadrant: on Cardassia, Edosian orchids contain it, for example, as well as more toxic compounds. In the twentieth century, some researchers christened it 'telepathine', because it was supposed to stimulate the relevant areas of the pineal gland. Of course, we now know that they were wrong - '
I remembered now.
'You came to find me,' I said, as I said to Ziyal, who had also loved me. 'All that way...The mausoleum, and the flowers.'
His eyes widened. 'I thought I was just hallucinating.'
'Don't you remember what I told you? Don't think any more, Julian,' I said, and reached for him. 'At least, not for a little while...'
THE END