But Bowers didn’t look ready to celebrate just yet. “Remember, nobody here can read Genesis in the original Hebrew.”
“Perhaps he only needs some clarification,” Shar said, handing the translator off to Candlewood, then taking a padd from the table. He activated the padd’s display, which began mirroring the holographic text that still flowed past the alien’s rapt gaze. The padd tapped into the stream of data on syntax, phonology, and psycholinguistics now coursing back and forth between the translator and the main computer.
Parenthetical enclosures began to appear around certain regularly repeated groupings of symbols, isolating each such sequence inside an oval border. Shar recalled that the scholars who had interpreted the Rosetta stone’s hieroglyphs had referred to such markings as cartouches—discrete words or phrases, rendered in a language that might as well have been devised light-years away from Egypt.
These groupings of characters, of course, were no revelation to Shar—or to anyone else in the room, for that matter. The repetition of certain symbol strings was one of the first discoveries made during the initial computer analyses of the alien text. But absent a lexicon of any sort, these recurring character groupings had been utterly devoid of meaning.
Now, thanks to the newly enhanced translator, they at least had a potential means of interpreting the alien’s reactions to seeing those symbols.
Long minutes passed as the isolated strings of symbols continued scrolling past the alien’s watchful eyes, one after another. The alien sat impassively, saying nothing further.
Bowers’s wry comment finally broke the silence: “Looks like it’s all Greek to him after all.”
Shar’s certainty was finally beginning to fade in earnest. He could see no sign of recognition whatsoever on the creature’s face. Assuming, of course, that he was equipped to recognize such emotional cues in these beings, which he almost certainly wasn’t.
Suddenly, the alien spoke up, loudly. “Enti Leyza.”
The reconfigured translator, steeped as it currently was in quadrantwide linguistic comparisons, seemed to balk for a protracted moment. Shar typed a command into his padd, instructing it to display the translation of the alien’s utterance as text.
“Run the display in reverse,” Shar said, frowning at his recalcitrant padd. Candlewood moved the holographic text backward, very slowly.
“Enti Leyza!”The alien said as a particular cartouche hove back into view. He pointed toward it with a long, chitinous digit.
“Freeze it!” Shar said, then stared at the complex, symbol-strewn oval that was suddenly suspended motionless in midair.
“He recognizes that symbol,” Candlewood whispered. “There’s no doubt about that.” Shar had to agree.
Bowers grinned. “Gentlemen, I think we may have just found our guide to the scenic spots of this part of the Gamma Quadrant. Sacagawea, allow me to formally welcome you to the Corps of Discovery.”
“Sacagawea?” Candlewood said, looking puzzled. Shar wasn’t certain he placed the name either.
“In honor of the captain’s enthusiasm for the Lewis and Clark expedition in ancient North America,” Bowers said. Shar thought he sounded defensive.
“Until we can figure out what he actually calls himself,” Candlewood said with a shrug, “I suppose it’ll have to do.”
Shar continued concentrating on the string of symbols, perhaps as intently as the alien was. The bristling shapes within the cartouche struck him as both comforting and disturbing—and somehow familiar.
Then he wondered if their ancient author might have been playing an onomatopoetic trick. Acting on a hunch, Shar instructed his padd to display, directly in front of the alien, a holographic image of the mysterious deep-space artifact the shuttlecraft Sagan’s crew had encountered in System GQ-12475’s Oort cloud.
The resemblance between the cartouche symbols and the artifact’s oddly shifting spires suddenly became obvious.
“Enti Leyza! Enti Leyza!”Shar thought he heard something akin to fear in the synthetic translator voice, though he immediately dismissed the notion as ridiculous.
Still, the alien appeared to be cowering before the image.
“Do we have an English equivalent for Enti Leyzayet?” Candlewood asked, fairly bouncing with eagerness.
Shar glanced down at his padd, then nodded. Two words flashed in alternation on the display, as though each was trying to elbow the other aside. Their starkly contradictory meanings made Shar’s antennae rise straight upward.
“Enti Leyzatranslates either as ‘cathedral,’” he said, “or ‘anathema.’”
“Maybe it’s both,” Candlewood offered.
“Talk about your love-hate relationships,” Bowers said. “To be honest, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about organized religion myself. Maybe our guest here feels the same way.”
“At any rate, we know he recognizes at least one of these symbols,” Shar said, succumbing to the allure of a mystery that seemed on the verge of surrendering some of its secrets. “Perhaps his reaction demonstrates that this text is an archaic form of his own written language.”
Candlewood made a subtle adjustment to the translator, then raised it as though in benediction. “Now that we’re no longer forced to communicate entirely via charades and diagrams of the periodic table,” he said, “let’s just askhim.”
His pulse thundering in his ears, Bashir lay on his back on the diagnostic table, seeing the twinkling lights of the resonance imaging equipment from an entirely unaccustomed angle. He kept his arms at his sides, just the way Krissten had asked, though he found it difficult to resist the urge to withdraw into himself by wrapping them tightly across his chest.
He experienced a brief interval of heart-clenching fear—“dentist-chair anxiety” was how he thought his father might have described it—between the moment when Krissten began keying the activation sequence into the control pad and the appearance of the dim lights of the submolecular scanner. The intersecting, moving beams bathed his body in an eerie orange glow.
He calmed as the scan progressed, then felt a renewed jolt of terror as he recalled having been subjected to a similar procedure, nearly three decades ago, by the illicit genengineers on Adigeon Prime. He closed his eyes as the scan continued, trying to banish the unaccountable sensation of soldier ants crawling deep beneath his skin.
A moment later he became aware of Ezri at his side, holding his hand. He smiled weakly at her, not eager to let on just how unnerved he felt. “Didn’t hurt a bit.”
Ezri grinned, her earlier pallor now only a fading memory. “I’d be pretty surprised if it did. Unless your body’s individual molecules have suddenly developed their own nerve endings.”
Bashir sat up and saw that Krissten was studying an adjacent computer terminal, where the results of the deep-tissue scan were already slowly scrolling up.
“I took the scan down past the DNA level this time,” she said. “So we can do a cross-comparison with the scans we already made of Lieutenant Nog and Lieutenant Dax.”
“And of my weirdly healthy yet still disembodied symbiont,” Ezri said, gesturing toward a shelf across the room, where the Dax symbiont’s medical transport pod sat. Bashir heard a brittleness in her voice, a sense of loss that Ezri appeared to be trying to conceal beneath a bantering façade.
Her other hand was still in his. He squeezed it, and she squeezed back hard, as though life itself depended on maintaining her grip. Meeting her beseeching gaze, he whispered, “We’ll get to the bottom of this business, Ezri. I swear it.”
“You always did have a fascination for lost causes, Julian,” she said quietly. “But my body has rejected the symbiont. It no longer needs me. And apparently Ino longer need it.”