Laren smiled back at Quark, apparently delighted by his gesture. The moment seemed to stretch out as they stared into each other’s eyes. Everything around Quark seemed to wilt out of existence, and he and Laren together seemed to make up the entire universe. Then a tall, ribbed metal mug came streaking down between them, slamming onto the bar and ending the moment.

“Yridian brandy,” said a loud, slurred voice belonging to the Yridian whose hand gripped the mug. Laren turned her head slowly toward the bleary-eyed drunk. Quark watched as she reached up and, just as slowly, slid the mug out from between them.

“Sorry,” she said. “Quark isn’t working right now. Find one of the waiters to help you.”

“But…but…” the Yridian stammered.

Laren reached out quickly as Grimp raced past, headed for the bar, a tray of empty glasses in his hands. She stopped him with a touch to his arm, and said, “Grimp, would you please find this—” She paused and glanced over at Quark, offering him a comic expression. “— gentlemana table to sit at.”

“Uh, okay,” Grimp said. “I just need to—”

“Do it now,” Quark ordered the waiter.

“Here,” Laren said, and she took the tray from Grimp, then passed it over the bar to Quark. Quark turned and put it down beside the recycle shelf, then turned back to see Grimp leading the staggering Yridian away.

“Thanks,” Quark said to Laren, and he knew that his gratitude carried well beyond her relocation of the drunk.

“Believe me,” she said in a soft tone, “it was my pleasure.” Then she asked, “Are you all right?”

Quark considered the question briefly, and then shrugged. “Not everything always turns out the way you expect it to,” he said. “And you know what? That’s not always a bad thing.” To his great surprise, he realized that he actually believed that.

“I think you’re right about that,” Laren told him. Then she leaned in over the bar, and Quark moved forward and leaned in himself. “Now then,” she said, “can I buy youa drink?”

Quark smiled again, already feeling intoxicated.

66

Vaughn was drowning.

He had struck the surface of the vortex and felt an immediate series of sensations. His body seemed buoyant within the gray eddies, as though floating in muddy light. Electrical currents streamed across his flesh, and blue jags of radiance filled the null vision of his closed eyes. Unexpected warmth surrounded him, and acceleration gathered him in its grip. The force, smooth and circular, carried him down and around—somehowpushed him down—until, at last, he fell from the universe.

And had continued falling. The warmth vanished, leaving him not cold, but empty. Gravity, too, disappeared, and still he fell. His lungs hungered for air, but feeling the void about him, he resisted the impossible attempt to breathe.

Vaughn had forced open his eyes. In the dusky absence of reality, he saw himself plunging down. The other-Vaughn tumbled away, unseeing, and thenhis eyes opened.

Does he see me? Vaughn had thought, and knew that the other-Vaughn could not. The other-Vaughn was from the past, from moments ago, had only just now opened his eyes.But what does he see? Vaughn asked.Another-Vaughn, from farther back in the past? Vaughn did not know, but he saw fear in the other-Vaughn’s eyes, and knew that it must also surely be in his own. He closed his eyes, unwilling to see.

Vaughn’s lungs had formed their own version of the void by then, and he exhaled in an explosive burst. His body went through the motions of breathing in, but there was no air here. His muscles moved anyway, trying to inhale, trying to help sustain him.

The gray existence had surged into Vaughn, through his mouth and throat, down into his lungs. Filling his lungs with the pseudomatter of the thoughtscape. A spasm closed his larynx.

Vaughn was drowning.

Vaughn was dying, but he did not wait to die. For almost as long as he could remember, he had gazed up at the stars and yearned to explore. And for nearly as long, he had been forced, had been requested, had been constrained, to fight. He could not say that the fighting had come to nothing, because it had not; it had been necessary, always necessary, sometimes for the greater good, sometimes for the smaller, and still other times, merely for survival. But now, in the end, he chose not to battle, for he saw no enemy. Instead, he would do what he had always wanted to do; he would explore.

Vaughn opened his mind. He threw off the walls, he threw off the secrecy, the denials and rationalizations. As his long day waned, he searched for the truth, for the essence of himself.

He opened his eyes again, and saw himself…

…setting the interdimensional devices around the vortex, ready to die alone, unable to have made peace—to have made a bond—with his daughter…

…on a battered starship, engaged with a mystical object that showed him how much death he had been privy to, and that death had been no companion to him…

…standing in a transporter room and watching the love of his life leave, pretending that she would return, knowing that she would not…

…leaning over the corpse of a person he had killed, in the name of saving others, and realizing in that moment that he had sealed himself off from the rest of humanity…

…listening to the words of the officer who had set him on his path, allowing himself to be extracted from the fellowship of the innocent…

…sitting in a sickroom, holding on to the hand of his mother, who had filled his world and left him too soon…

…being born into an existence that promised true connection—of the mind, of the body, of the heart—but in the best of circumstances, delivered isolation in almost every instant…

…and from all those moments, all those Vaughns peered back—peeredforward— at him right now, as he fell within the thoughtscape, gone from one universe and into another, alone as always, and yet alone as never before. Vaughn’s consciousness stretched across all those moments, existed at the same time in all those moments, and in all those in between. And he witnessed all at once, as he thought no one should, the extent to which he had existed, did exist, and would always exist, separated from every other being in the universe.

The loneliness extended from the instant of his birth, across uncounted—billions, trillions—of instants, to now. Not every instant, but almost all of them. The understanding crippled him.

Vaughn was dying, and now he would wait to die.

Waiting, Vaughn understood that the loneliness was a lesson, and he learned from it. He could not have done otherwise, not as he searched for the truth of a life that stretched away behind him. And not as the life that surrounded him, and occupied him, cried out in the pain of an isolation it had never known until inadvertent invaders had brought it the unintended gift of companionship—and then taken it away. The thoughtscape had considered the Prentara both invaders and saviors, Dax had said, and Vaughn now grasped precisely why. Even a tormentor could provide company.

Waiting, Vaughn considered the prison that the home of the Inamuri had become. Still existing in every moment of his life, he closed his eyes on the thoughtscape, and opened them on the morning he left home—after his mother had already gone, and really, had she not taken home with her when she had? Vaughn had always wanted to explore, and now he saw that he had left home a long time ago, and that he had been looking for it ever since.