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'An anthropologist,' Jadzia Dax said. 'Well, this is a good place to come. There's plenty to study here.'

'I agree. He should find it a positive embarrassment of riches. But he'll have to do without the fanfares, I'm afraid. I don't have either the time or the inclination to roll out the red carpet for visiting academics.' The Commander smiled at her. 'That's why I'm glad you find it an interesting prospect, since you'll be the one looking after Dr Palath.'

'Oh?' Dax said. 'Will I, now? So what's the subject of his study?'

'He hasn't told us. Apparently it might prejudice his research.'

'I see. And how long is he staying?'

'I have no idea. I do know that he's being funded by the Sorbonne, and he's on sabbatical. We'll just have to see how it goes.'

Dax nodded, without enthusiasm. Curzon's acerbic voice said, startlingly loud: damn professors, always turn up in the middle of a crisis and start plucking at your sleeve and asking stupid questions. And they always expect you to buy them drinks... *Oh, hush* thought Jadzia, before the clamour of voices could begin. Curzon subsided to a murmur in her head. It was like listening to a hive of bees, and beneath it all was the watchful presence of the symbiont. It was as though this inner, separate core lay at the bottom of a well, dreaming, living a different time, while Jadzia herself looked down. She sank towards its serene magnet and one by one the voices fell silent.

'Jadzia? I asked you a question,' Sisko said, gently probing.

'I'm sorry, Benjamin. I was light years away. I'm going to get some rest; let me know when the shuttle docks.' She gave him her luminous smile. 'After all, I want to be on my toes, just in case this anthropologist of yours is studying me...'

Sisko nodded.

'An enviable project,' he said, gallantly. 'But I'll let you know. Thank you, Jadzia. I'm grateful to have him off my hands. Now go and get some sleep; you must be tired. You've only just got back.'

'It's been a long trip,' she said, and so it had, all the way through the wormhole to a new world, an empty place they had named Tara.

'No more field trips for me for a while,' she said, yawning, and headed for her quarters and her bed.

Awaking, she stared for a moment into the darkness. Emony's vivid voice was saying something, but Jadzia did not understand.

'What?' she asked, drowsily. Alone in her quarters, she had a tendency to talk to herself; sometimes startled to hear another's thoughts emerging from her own mouth. Now, she lay still and let herself float down again towards the being within; repeating the images they had taught her. So many people...do you remember, Jadzia, before you were joined, when you lay in bed and thought: I'll never be alone any more, I'll always have someone with me. That longing was something she had tried to hide from the selection committee, but of course they had drawn it out of her.

'Perfectly normal,' Telari had said in that brisk way of hers. 'Don't think you're the only one. Everyone feels the same way.'

'Oh,' Jadzia had said, feeling a little flat that she was no different, no more sensitive than her peers. Now, she followed the unwinding spiral in her mind, travelling down through the turnings of her linked genetic code until there was calmness and Jadzia could come back again. She rolled over and looked at the clock.

Later, when she had dressed, the shuttle notification came. She waited by the shuttle bay as the passengers filed through. Not one of them was human. Jadzia glanced at the passenger manifest. Everyone seemed to check out: various Bajorans, a small self important Ferengi, a middle aged Cardassian. Jadzia touched the comm badge and said

'Benjamin? Your anthopologist doesn't seem to have shown up.' Sisko's disembodied voice said

'Oh? That's most odd. He was certainly booked on this flight.'

'Well, he's not here now. Never mind. I'll check up on him.'

'Rosiah Palath...I've heard of him,' the Major said. 'Now where have I heard of him?'

She stared around the replimat as though it might provide her with an answer. Jadzia shook her head. For someone with no formal education, Kira's enquiring mind picked up a great many startling fragments of information.

'I know where it was. He's an authority on Hebitian Cardassia. I remember reading some of his stuff, and wondering where the hell they went wrong. He stirred up quite a fuss - pointed out too much of a contrast between how they used to be and what they turned into. Anyway, I've got to go. See you later,' and she was gone. Jadzia stared after her with affection. Whenever she looked at Kira, she had the impression of speed; the imprint of a quick and forceful personality. She's not for you, Curzon's voice said, mocking, just inside her ear. *Go away* Jadzia thought in irritation, and then he and everything else were lost in a bright wave of pain. When she regained consciousness, her head was resting awkwardly on the table and someone was shouting her name in her ear.

'Are you all right?'

'What?' She blinked.

'Jadzia, can you sit up?' Gently the doctor raised her. 'Now, what happened?'

'I don't know. I just keeled over. I feel as though someone smacked me over the head.'

'Let me take a look.'

He led her back to the infirmary. Jadzia followed him obediently, still sick and stunned.

'Bashir told me about the incident in the replimat,' Sisko said. His impassive face was creased with concern.

'He couldn't find a thing wrong with me. I feel such a fool. One minute I was perfectly all right, and the next I was lying there like an idiot with my face practically in my plate.' Sisko said

'Jadzia, take some time off if you're not feeling very well. I don't want you soldiering on.'

'No, I know, but - oh, it was probably too hot or something. I'd rather just get on with it and see how I feel. We've still got to find this vanishing professor.'

'That is the last of my worries right now. At the moment, you are a rather higher priority.'

'It's all right,' she muttered. 'I'll be all right,' and abruptly she left his office.

They had told her at the Institute that her name was not, after all, legion. She was inhabited not so much by separate and distinct personalities, as by memories encased within the long, slow mind of the symbiont and it was these memories that assumed the voice of the remembrancer, making themselves real.

'Do you know yourself?' they had asked her, when she woke and found herself looking through changed eyes, and she had replied

'Yes. My name is Jadzia. Jadzia Dax.' The symbiont's singing happiness had flooded up through her, suffusing her with welcome.

'It shouldn't be a juggling act. You are not at war with yourself. Just let it settle down, and listen to the different songs, in harmony, playing upon the instrument that is the symbiont...' her mentors at the Institute had instructed her. Jadzia Dax had nodded. She already knew this, for the symbiont had told her; not in words, but in images, shards of illuminated sound, patterns of delicate emotion. For years now, there had been the familar resonance of different voices, and through it all the presence of the helmsman in her body, steering her through the shoals of presences. Now, there was something else.

'What are you?' Jadzia whispered. Within, the symbiont stirred in sudden agitation. She felt something slip from her mental grasp, very quickly, like a tail whisked through a crack. *What was that?* Jadzia said into the suden inner silence and the voices, returning, replied unhappily we do not know.

'So you're telling me that he checked in at Samora; his genetic boarding scan is on record, and somewhere between there and here he just vanished?' Kira glared at the face on the screen until it grew pink and flustered. The desk officer said

'I don't know where your professor's gone! He should have been on that shuttle. If he isn't sampling the delights of DS9 right now, then I'm very sorry, but I haven't the faintest idea where he's got to.'

Bareil had once said to Kira:

'Nerys, how is it that you always manage to accuse someone of something, even if you're just asking for the time of day?'

Remembering this, Kira bit her lip.

'I'm sorry,' she told the desk officer, with some effort. 'Perhaps it's a mistake at our end. I'll see what I can find out. Thank you for your help,' she added punctiliously, and closed the link. The shuttle had not yet departed. Kira touched her badge and said

'Odo? A moment of your time, please.'

6. **Jadzia was holding her father's hand in a tight, frightened grip. She had begged him to bring her, and now that they were almost there, she was terrified. She tried not to look down, for then there would be nothing between her and the glacier. Her father had explained that the transparent floor of the cable car was made of a plastic stronger than steel, but to small Jadzia it looked no more substantial than spun sugar. So she looked up, instead, to where the icy heights of the Tenarran ridge reached above the endless plains. Gently, the cable car rocked to a stop and everyone in it stared, expectant. Jadzia looked, too. The peaks seemed very clear and cold, and directly ahead she could see the Menet Gap, where a perpetual torrent of snow burst over the edge of the cliff and floated down to the glacier. The evening sun slipped a little further, hung suspended for a moment, and then a rosy blush spread out across the snow slopes. Jadzia's father squeezed her hand and said

'Look at that, eh? Just like a pink sorbet.' but to Jadzia it was the colour of rubies, or blood. She stared and stared, until the crimson light faded and fell, and then her father took her home beneath the stars. **

Someone said: tell me again. Tell me about the ice and the sky.

'What?' Jadzia whispered. 'Who are you?'

you tell good stories, Jadzia Dax. Another. Tell me something more.

- but then she was in Ops, standing mesmerised before her console, and everyone was looking at her.

'I think I'm suffering from hallucinations,' Jadzia said. 'I keep hearing voices.

This struck her as such an absurd thing to say that she began to laugh.

'Jadzia,' the doctor murmured. 'You have to tell me. When did all this begin?'

Still laughing, she shook her head.

'Only the last couple of days. Ever since I got back from Tara. But there was nothing there, Julian, it was an empty world, no life at all. I don't know what it is...It feels as though it's something outside myself. I keep remembering things, as though I'm awake and dreaming, and it just rips them from me. When I sleep, I can feel it circling the edges of my mind...It's as though something is sipping at me. And I feel so tired all the time.'

Bashir said

'I haven't found anything yet. But that doesn't mean that I won't keep looking.'

'Have you found anything?'

'No, I have not. And if I stay down here any longer, my knees will wear out.'

Gratefully, Kira accepted Odo's outstretched hand and clambered to her feet with a grimace.

'Must be a sign of age,' she confided.

'Oh, surely not.' Kira looked suspiciously at the Constable, but his face was as bland as an egg. 'I'm going to step up the scan. I don't think we're looking at the right level.'

Holding the scanner before her, she moved slowly through the little ship. Odo turned in response to her triumphant yelp.

'Got it!'

'Where?' Odo followed her into one of the cabins. She waved the scanner at him.

'It's only a trace, but it matches Palath's DNA. We've found some of our missing professor, anyway.'

'And whose cabin was this, I wonder?' Odo gazed around the walls as if seeking illumination.

Kira checked the passenger list.

'Seems it was occupied by a Tenes Gelar. The Cardassian. Well, well. There's a surprise.'

**The lace at Lela Dax's cuff fell in a series of graceful folds as far as her fingertips. Impatiently, the child tugged at it.

'No, leave it alone,' she said, laughing. 'Your poor mother can't stay and play, much as she'd like to.'

'Why not?'

'Because I have to go and do ever-so-boring legislative things, my darling, and so your aunt Zhuliya's come to look after you for a little while.'

Outside, the rain poured steadily from the guttering. Lela moved to the window and drew the wooden shutters closed.

'What a day, Zhulie. Still, the garden needs it, I suppose.'

She stood with her sister and her daughter and watched the rain. Inside, the symbiont squirmed in excitement. Oh, come now, you've seen rain before, Lela told it, amused. Zhuliya threw open the doors and the child was out and running across the wet lawns. The symbiont watched it wistfully, through Lela's eyes; another young thing in a new world.**

'All the way back to the beginning, back to Lela, the first host,' Jadzia said. 'Every little part of the past. It's ransacking me.' Inside, Curzon said:

*it's after your memories, but in taking them, it depletes you. Stalk it, Jazdia! Turn hunter, be cunning.*

*But how can I do that if I don't know what or where it is?*

Curzon's voice, receding through a sea of neural static, said:

*tell him to put you under for a little while. Buy some time. Tell him - *

and was gone. Jadzia relayed this to Bashir.

'I'm not too happy about that,' the doctor said. Gently, he placed his hands on her dappled shoulders. She wondered whether he could see that the habitual amusement had left her eyes, to be replaced by fear.

'I'll tell you why,' he went on. 'I'm worried that you might lose what little control you have over it if I put you out. We don't know what it is, and until we can find out, I'm reluctant to start experimenting. But - if Curzon thinks it's the right thing to do - well, who am I to argue? He's in there, after all.' Jadzia whispered

'Thank you. For believing me. For not calling me mad.'

'What? No, I don't think you've gone mad, Jadzia. I think something's getting at you.' He spoke lightly, and this reassured her. He was preparing the hypo as he spoke.

'There we go. Are you ready?'

'As I'll ever be,' she said bleakly, as the needle entered her arm.

'Never seen him before in my life,' the tailor said.

Odo snorted.

'In that case, doubtless Tenes Gelar will turn out to be your long lost brother.'

'Now, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?' Garak's eyes widened into limpid innocence. 'But I'm afraid I've no idea who your Cardassian passenger is. I don't recognise the name, and if that's anything to go by, we don't even come from the same planet.'

'Very well. I will choose to believe you.'

'Your epistemological caution does you credit, Constable.'

'I'm glad you approve.'

'Tell me, what exactly is he supposed to have done?'

Ignoring the question, but evidently feeling that some explanation was called for, Odo said

'He's apparently been living on one of the more remote colonies since his early childhood. He's decided to return to Cardassia Prime to spend his last years in his native home.'

'Odd. Why would he suddenly choose to leave one life and assume another? What's the focus of your investigation?' Garak persisted.

'That,' the Major snapped, barely restraining her impatience 'is none of your business.'

'You'll excuse my justifiable concern if one of my fellow citizens is suspected of having shoved an eminent academic through the nearest airlock en route.'

Kira's eyes narrowed.

'What makes you think that?' 'Oh, really, Major. I'm simply embroidering my limited stock of facts, as usual. A critic of the current regime gets onto a shuttle at one end, shares the flight with a Cardassian citizen, and fails to emerge at the other. Even I am capable of putting two and two together and making five.'

'Odo, we'll get nothing here. Let's go.'

'Of course, if you'd like me to have a quiet word with him, I'm more than happy to oblige. People tend to confide in me, you know. I suppose they must trust me.'

He blinked in mild azure surprise. The Major drew a deep and ominous breath.

'I'll consider it,' Odo said hastily, and ushered her from the shop.

When nervous or embarassed, Tobin Dax tended to take refuge in mathematics. Lips moving silently, eyes closed, he would retreat into the abstract world of number, running down the primes and subsidiaries, stalking the shining truth at the heart of the equation. Unsure of himself in the social arena, he had found a sanctuary in the certainties of mathematics. Now, a century or two later, safely enclosed in a different body, his refuge remained the same. Jadzia , drawn by the light in the darkness, joined him; reciting theorem and proof in an attempt to hold the unknown intruder at bay. It found her all the same.

'Get Bashir down here,' Kira snapped. She felt along Tenes Gelar's ridged jaw for a pulse. 'He's alive, but only just. No sign of any injuries - good, there you are!'

Ignoring her, the doctor knelt by the side of the unconscious Cardassian and began scanning.

'All right....Now, tell me what happened.'

'This is the man who's implicated in Palath's disappearence, the man who was on the shuttle. We wanted to talk to him, but we couldn't get a reply from his quarters, so Odo over rode the door controls and we found him like this. I don't know how long he's been out for, or what caused it, or anything.'

'Get him up to the infirmary,' Bashir said.

'This is the last thing we need right now.'

'Have you heard from the Symbiosis Institute?'

'No. They're going through their records -' the sudden blur of the transporter interrupted him and he continued as the walls of the infirmary came into focus around them.

' - I was hoping they'd say, oh, yes, must be her *whatever* cycle that she goes into every two hundred years, some perfectly normal Trill condition, but they were as clueless as we are. It's damned frustrating...Help me get him onto the couch; I'll take a closer look.'

Garak had not seen the doctor for a little while but this was the day on which they normally had lunch together and so, using the excuse, he made his way down to the infirmary. Business was slow, as usual, and he had nothing better to do. The thought of seeing Bashir warmed him, and he sighed. He was wary of these random pleasures, of measuring out his life between one point of contact and another, but he had little enough of comfort.

'Doctor? Good afternoon,' he said, stepping through the door of the infirmary. From the state of things, Bashir had his hands full. The infirmary resembled the last scene of - what was that play? Oh, yes, Hamlet. There seemed to be bodies everywhere. Jadzia Dax was stretched waxen and motionless across one couch, and the other was occupied by an unknown Cardassian, twitching in uneasy sleep. The doctor was poised in immobility over the Cardassian's body, staring at the scanner as though he had never set eyes on one before.

'I take it lunch is off, then?' Bashir's mouth was slightly ajar; the tailor had to resist the temptation to go and tap it shut.

'What?' Bashir murmured.

'I presume this is the Cardassian who's involved in this business over the academic? The missing anthropologist?' *Oh, well done, Elim, another lightening deduction*, he told himself. The doctor's head swivelled towards him almost mechanically.

'This *is* our missing anthropologist.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'The genes...they match. This isn't some Cardassian businessman returning to his long lost home. This is Professor Palath.'

Sisko said

'Run that by me again, doctor.'

There was by now quite a little audience assembled in the infirmary.

'When I started running more in-depth tests, I found - well, that this Cardassian is Rosiah Palath. He's had some very expensive reconstructive surgery, of course, and I also found this.' He picked up a small, blue phial. 'This is an enhanced mnemonic stimulant. It's the same kind of thing that Kira had when she was taken by the Obsidian Order. I understand that it's the kind of thing that the Order specialises in.'

'So they got Palath at last,' Kira spat. 'Your people just never give up, do they?'

Garak said, rather stridently

'If you think the Obsidian Order has nothing better to do than go to the considerable trouble and expense of physically and neurally altering a perfectly innocuous university professor whom no-one in Cardassia has ever taken seriously, then you must think that they have a paucity of interests with which to occupy their time. No. This is something that Palath must have done to himself. The Obsidian Order keeps its secrets very well, but once something is invented, it is impossible to contain, especially drugs. You can buy almost anything on the black market these days...'

The doctor said

'Even a whole new life? A new identity?' Elim Garak gave him an ambivalent smile.

'Many people would regard it as the most desirable commodity money can buy. All the memory transformatives - anachytin; mnemosynine; stelazipan - all work in a similar manner, as I'm sure you're aware. They transform the memory matrices of the neural cortex into a temporary tabula rasa, on which a prepared set of information can then be imprinted. The only difference between them is the strength of the 'memory'. Mnemosynine will give you fleeting impressions; anachytin will cause you literally to forget who you are. Usually they use real memories, copied from a living subject. The stuff that's sold for medical usage is fairly rigorously controlled; but all it takes is one ingenious and entrepreneurial research chemist and you have a whole range of options.'

'You know a lot about this, don't you?' Bashir asked, curiously.

'Call it an aesthetic interest.'

'All right,' Sisko said. 'So our anthropologist had extensive modificatory surgery and then took a dose of, let's say, mnemosynine, to provide himself with a Cardassian identity. I still don't understand why...'

Garak murmured

'If you're a senior academic past the pinnacle of your success, and your only published piece for years has been an edited rehash of past glories in the Frankfurt Anthropological Review - I did some checking, by the way - I would imagine that you might go quite some way to rehabilitate yourself. What academics want most of all is a new angle, to get the jump on their colleagues. And if the whole point of your discipline is to immerse yourself in a culture or a species in order to study it, there's no better way than to become a member of that culture. He's taken his theories to their logical conclusion. He's actually become a Cardassian, as far as he can, which would negate his status as an alien observer. I would think that the dosage of the drug he's taken is designed to wear off after a set period: maybe six months or so. Then he could just take himself back to Earth, have the surgery reversed and write up his findings.'

'That's a hell of a long way to go just to prove a point.' Kira remarked, doubtfully.

'But you, my dear Major, are a natural participant. I would imagine - I don't know, of course - that there's very little difference in a way between being an anthropologist and a spy. Both cases require as great a degree of invisibility as possible. Do you really think the good people of Cardassia would unburden themselves to a Federation critic? But they might do so to some extent to the prodigal Tenes Gelar, returning home after so long an absence.'

Sisko shook his head in brief wonder.

'Let me know when he recovers consciousness. I'd like a word with Professor Palath.'

'God!' the doctor said, when they had all filed out of the surgery and only Garak remained. 'What a day.' He slumped wearily onto the nearest chair. 'And we're still no further to finding a cure for this one.' He looked unhappily at Jadzia's still form. He looked up as the light pressure of the Cardassian's hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, and Garak said into his ear

'Ah, but I think you're wrong, you see.' Reaching out, he took the phial of mnemosyne from the display unit and put it in the uncomprehending doctor's hand.

'Now, I have an idea...'

Jadzia could see them through the darkness. They did not appear as they had in life, but as emblems: symbols of personality and soul. Very far away, she could see Lela, legislator, dead these three hundred years and more. Then Tobin, afraid, and Emony, taut as a whip. After these three came Audred, watchful, and Torias, who had lived for so brief a time, and mad Joran, raging. Finally there was Curzon. The flow of the symbiont's life ran beneath them all, inevitable as a river, linking past and future.

*Jadzia* they said. *Listen to us.*

*Tell me what to do.*

*In a little while we will be gone. It is dessicating us of life, sucking us dry.* 'But there has to be something we can do' Jadzia said, aloud, and another voice answered, cool and amused

'Lieutenant, you will simply have to learn to lie.'

They were memories, but they were not Dax's own. She was standing on the city walls, beneath the insidious television eye. Across the city, the grey dawn was rising and she whispered to herself:

*it's a new day, at last, and I thought the night would never end*.

Another memory, then: on the bridge of a hoverer, crossing the straits between Deluet and Mora, the bridge arching high over the bleached water and the sunlight catching in its spires. And more, until she stood in the interrogation chamber and hear her own rasping voice say

'Enough. I'll tell you what you want to know,' and there was that same cool voice in her ear saying

'Good. A wise decision.' just before they drained the memories from her and left her a blank and empty shell. Beneath this overlay of memories not her own, Jadzia looked within and saw the alien, the predator parasite, feeding on this new feast of information. Now, she was no longer that unknown Cardassian whose past had been synthesised and sold on the black market. She was Jadzia Dax, intact and whole, and she watched the violating presence stretch and burst like a bubble in the sun. She opened her eyes. She was leaning back in someone's arms. She twisted round, and met the clear eyes of the torturer.

'It's you,' she whispered. 'I know you.'

'Yes, of course you do, lieutenant. It's Garak,' he said, patiently.

'No...I remember you. I had memories, but they weren't my own. They were somebody else's. A Cardassian's...and you were there, in the room with me.'

There was nothing but polite interest behind his eyes as he said

'Oh? How remarkable. I wonder who the original owner of Palath's cut-price Cardassian personality could have been. Do you happen to recall anything else?' he asked, softly. His voice, and his hands steadying her, were gentle, and the intruder was gone from Jadzia's mind, but she shivered as he held her.

*Learn to lie, Jadzia Dax.*

She said

'What? I can't remember - no, it's gone. What was I just saying, Garak?'

'Nothing of any importance, my dear,' he said and surprisingly he bent and kissed her speckled brow, just as the doctor came back into the room.

'Jadzia! You're awake! How are you feeling?'

'I'm all right,' she told him, leaning back into the Cardassian's arms. 'I'm fine.'

'It wasn't my idea,' Bashir confessed, modestly. 'It was a flash of inspiration on Garak's part. All we were hoping to do was inject you with Palath's black market memory serum, the one he'd used to enhance his assumed persona, and buy enough time to come up with a solution while the neural parasite fed off the implanted memories. Like throwing a bone to keep a dangerous dog occupied. But the drug seems to have got rid of the thing permanently. Unless it just died of its own accord.'

'I've still no idea where it came from,' she said. 'My guess is that it was something I picked up on Tara. I'm glad it's gone. Remembering a few hundred years' worth of events is an effort, you know.'

He patted her hand affectionately.

'Scheherazade, that's who you are.'

'Who?'

'Oh, she's a queen, in Persian legend. She married a man who insisted that she should tell him a different story each night, otherwise he'd have her killed. Well, she told him the most extraordinary stories, fantastic tales, every night for a thousand and one nights, and when she eventually ran out of stories he decided to let her live, because he couldn't bear to let such dreams, such vast experience, go to waste.'

Jadzia thought back, down all the years and all the lives, and said with a smile

'I think I could keep going for a bit longer than that. A thousand and two, maybe.' and within her the voices slept, silent now, for a little while.

THE END

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