Sore or not, the attack had left him determined to walk back to the Senate Tower rather than attempt to find public transportation.
As he was ushered past the ubiquitous police barricades by his official escort, Bashir relished the bracing chill of the predawn air. Though he knew that walking was not his safest option, the distance he had to cover was short. And he would be alerted if his most recent patient were to need him while a government hovercar was ferrying her from the sprawling hospital’s rooftop to the graceful Senate Tower.
Although the situation on the street remained chaotic, the size of the protesting crowds had diminished considerably throughout the long night, undoubtedly because of the high death toll—among both the joined and the unjoined—in the immediate vicinity of the neurogenic weapons detonations. The police were maintaining a substantial presence, but fortunately no one seemed overly eager to provoke them—at least for the moment. Bashir saw anger and resentment etched across so many faces that the emotions were becoming an almost palpable presence.
Half an hour later, he found himself gazing down at the streets of Leran Manev through the broad, polarized windows that encircled the Senate Tower’s top-floor observation deck. The sun was rising across Manev Bay, and its light dappled the government sector’s wide reflecting pools with traceries of purple and orange. Standing in silence, Bashir surveyed the chaos below.
Everything looked different from the top of the tower, prompting him to wonder if the unjoined on the streets below would ever see eye to eye with those who dwelled on the lofty parapets of the joined. He counted eight small fires guttering amid the piles of shattered window glass and the hulks of burned hovercars and skimmers. Several hundred people remained visible along the sidewalks, gathered in small, persistent clusters; they seemed to keep a wary distance from a nearby phalanx of equally vigilant armored police officers. He couldn’t tell if they were looters, protesters, or members of families seeking their lost loved ones.
To Bashir’s weary eyes, the crowd’s anger seemed as likely to reignite as it was to dissipate. Let’s just hope nobody down there does anything stupid before the president makes her address.He tried to see the reinforced presence of the police as a hopeful augury, a sign that the Trill government still functioned, regardless of the previous night’s upheavals. But he knew that they could just as easily be seen as symbols of oppressive, arbitrary authority.
How many people died yesterday because of the chaos down there?He wondered how many other Trill cities had experienced similar social convulsions, both from the unjoined rioters and the terrorists who had struck from their midst. Though he hadn’t yet taken the time to troll the newsnets for detailed information, he assumed that the worldwide death toll, including the radiation-stricken joined—the victims of more than a dozen separate clusters of neurogenic radiation bombs around the planet—had to be in the multiple thousands. He was grateful, at least, that the neurogenic radiation seemed to have had no lingering effects after its initial explosive release; other than the rioting and related “social fallout,” it was once again safe for the joined who hadn’t been exposed to the blasts to walk the streets of Trill’s cities.
The weird quiet of the distant street tableau was broken by the sound of purposeful footfalls directly behind him. He recognized their cadence immediately.
“Hello, Ezri,” he said before turning to face her. He took a step toward the woman he loved, almost surrendering to an impulse to gather her into his arms; once the comm channels had cleared up somewhat, he had learned how close he had come to losing her at Mak’ala. But the brooding shadows of her ice-blue eyes nearly froze him in his tracks, like the stare of a basilisk.
Clearly, her experiences in the deep caverns had had a profound effect on her. He sensed the gulf of centuries that yawned between them as never before, and it chilled him.
“The president is going to make a planetwide address in a few minutes, Julian,” she said, her hands clasped behind her back.
He nodded, suddenly unsure of what to do with his own hands. He realized that the past several hours had kept him so busy that he had received only the most cursory of briefings about the potentially incendiary discoveries Ezri had made at Mak’ala. But he knew the gist of it.
It also occurred to him that he knew even less about what she intended to do with the information she had unearthed.
“How much does the president know?” he said quietly.
“Everything,” Ezri said. “At least everything Iknow. I gave her a full report before she went into surgery.”
“Are you sure that was wise?”
She glowered at him, folding her arms across her chest. “Of course not, Julian. But as you’ve observed yourself on more than one occasion, our habit of secrecy hasn’t been very healthy for us.”
He could see from her defensive posture that now wasn’t the ideal time to second-guess her decisions. She was, after all, still in command of this mission. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize. I was just curious about the details.”
Ezri seemed mollified by that. “I told Maz all about the ancient Kurlan colony, as well as the disease that arose there. And the genetic engineering project that created the parasites. And…” She trailed off, casting a nervous glance at the observation windows.
“And the Kurlan genocide,” he said, knowing he was finishing her thought. Ezri answered with a somber but affirmative nod.
Bashir had found the tale of Trill’s hidden history almost incredible when Ezri had briefly summarized it for him immediately after her return from Mak’ala. Now the most powerful person on the planet knew the long-buried secret of why the parasites had harbored such an abiding hatred for the symbionts—as well as the fact that their malice was entirely understandable, given what the ancient Trills had done to them. It reminded him of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,whose eponymous scientist had abandoned his monstrous creation and thereby earned its undying enmity.
“How did the president react?” he asked.
Ezri laughed, but without a trace of humor. “Pretty much the way I expected. She didn’t want to hear it. At least at first. I really can’t say I blamed her for demanding to see some proof.”
“I don’t suppose anyone could ask for better proof than what came back with you from below the surface,” he said. Ezri had told him that once the immediate threat to Mak’ala had ended, Maz had, at Ezri’s urging, traveled to the pools to commune with the caretaker symbiont Memh, who had escorted Ezri safely back from the Annuated. By now, the creature was probably already back in the seclusion of Mak’ala’s deepest recesses, where it had no doubt returned to its task of caring for its even more ancient charges.
Now that the president had heard Ezri’s story—and had experienced compelling evidence of its veracity—she was about to deliver a speech to Trill’s entire population. Bashir could only hope that whatever she said would ultimately bring peace to Trill rather than further unrest.
He thought about the operation he had finished just before coming to the Senate Tower. That any joined Trill would voluntarily undertake such a radical procedure was remarkable, to say the least. He hoped that the fact that the patient in question had been President Lirisse Maz boded well for Trill’s future.
As he followed Ezri out of the observation deck, he realized with more than a little trepidation that they were about to find out, one way or the other.
Entering the third-level speaker’s platform immediately behind Ezri, Bashir saw that the president had already taken a seat behind a wide desk fashioned from dark, dense-looking wood, apparently from Trill’s low tropics. Standing on the other side of the desk, a serious-miened Hiziki Gard was speaking with her in low tones even as the president shooed a trio of aides out of the room. Bashir reflected again that for a man so accustomed to operating out of the shadows, Gard didn’t seem at all uncomfortable working in the very center of his world’s power structure. Maybe he had been forced to step into the breach because so many other government functionaries had been injured or killed during the previous night’s chaos. And perhaps Gard’s very high-profile assassination of Shakaar Edon, and his subsequent pardon for the deed, had permanently altered the man’s formerly covert way of doing business.