lapsed trekkie

“We’ve worked backwards, done the calculations,” he said. 

She snorted. She said, “Don’t lie to me.” She said. “I know your limits, no matter what you’ve sold to everyone.”

Yedrin stretched out his legs and put his hands in the cool grass. He looked up, too. 

“It is possible,” he said. “That some of us, most of us, will be remade.”

“You’re supposing a lot about the nature of this temporality.”

“Not more than you.”

“Yes, more than me,” said Jadzia. She smiled and it was broken. “I’m submitting to it, aren’t I? I’m not pretending to know the outcome.”

Yedrin knew himself, herself. He knew Jadzia, as well. That was him, his claimed person, a person in his care for life, and she was agreeing to this because she was admitting she couldn’t possibly know; the not knowing was the only way she could stomach it. 

“I was happy,” he said. “I—I missed Kira and the space station and—my work.” He rubbed the edge of his finger on his bottom lip. “I loved being with my children. I loved showing them, well, everything. That’s what I remember.”

Jadzia turned her chin down from the tree-boughs and hunched over instead. “Stop lying,” she said, quietly. 

“I’m not." Her heartbreak was his, hers. He curled over and held onto his shins and pressed his face into his knees. “I’m not lying.”

“Say it all.”

“I was sick,” he said, closing his eyes, dipping into the memory in the way his mother had taught him. “I remember feeling sick.”

“I know.” 

Then she launched to her feet. She paced back and forth, silhouetted by the field and the dark shrubs, her back always to the settlement to the east. She turned in snappy turns on her heel, shaking her hands. Yedrin watched her and was her and remembered this, this feeling, this specific meanness. She was angry, in that rare way. She was seething. She’d lifted the line and let the thing duck under her arm and come into her allowable expression. Yedrin remembered this. He’d felt this way when he was first rejected from the Symbiosis program, when he’d walked away from the balcony overlooking the last glimpse of Lenara’s back, when he’d watched Kira come to them all and say, “I’ll let it happen. I can die.”

“You’re not selfish,” he said, because she-and-he was thinking it. 

She laughed. She stopped her pacing and pushed her hands into her hair, messing up the puffed up slickness, the presentability, and she bent over and then stood back up and laughed. 

“Oh, I am,” she said. “I just am. You know why we’re here at all. You know what I did.”

“A mistake,” said Yedrin. 

“Stop lying,” she said. “Stop trying to convince me of anything. They’ve already done that work for you. You did it yourself. I’m convinced.”

Yedrin laughed, too. “Myself, yes, myself. As if I’ve ever belonged to me. I wanted this, you know? I wanted to be chosen, as the Joiner. There’s only one symbiont. It’s in me and I chose this. But only anyone descended from you can take it—only in someone where the Trill traits have been expressed enough. So really it was a narrow decision because someone has to take it. Someone has to remember. You think I like remembering this? Remembering you? I can even remember this now, maybe, this scene, with you standing there and me sitting here.”

“You’re imagining,” said Jadzia. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t know, I know I don’t, but I’m the only one who remembers, and everyone won’t let me stop. But I chose this, I chose you. They warned me, before I was joined. They warned me about you.”

“How fortunate for you, to be warned,” said Jadzia. “Do tell me what that is like. To be told beforehand.”

“Joran is still here, too, twice over,” said Yedrin. “But it’s you they made sure to tell me about over and over.”

She laughed again. “What’s a murderer to a frustrated girl?” 

Yedrin felt the words as much as heard them. Like a slap, cut like a gem. He shivered in the memory of being that “girl”.

“I was joined when I was too young to be joined,” said Yedrin. He remembered going from fifteen, open and free, to being a society in and of himself and twisting in the wealth like an animal in a thick and cloying mud. “I have been planning to trap you here for too long. I have been waiting for this moment to do this to you, even though I know what it is better than anyone.”

“What a misery,” she mocked. 

“But you did it first,” said Yedrin, angry, too. 

“It’s been made clear to me that this is thoroughly my fault,” said Jadzia. “It’s been expounded in triplicate.”

Yedrin put his hands in his hair and tugged. He stared at the dim horizon. “It’s not been fair to me,” he could only say. “My whole existence, the existence of everyone I love, depends on this—on doing this to you and to everyone—and I’m the one who has to know.”

“Unfair,” said Jadzia, still with a veil of irony. “Unjust. Profane.” She laughed, tipping her close-eyed face to the starlight. Then she looked at him, down at him. “But I did choose it first. A mistake is a mistake. But I chose to yield first. That is what your existence depends on: my yielding, my choice. I chose the people around me before I chose the symbiont. I profaned.” She grinned and shook her head. “I’m doing it now, even. No matter what.”

She put her hands on her hips and stretched her gaze to distant mountains. The white-foam line of her gleamed in the dark. 

She was supposed to be his burden before anything, she and all the others. He was supposed to care for her and honor her and ensure she would continue on. He’d felt her burden and he’d confessed that weight to so many throughout his life, both before and after his joining. 

Yedrin remembered Worf’s pride unwinding in parallel with her own, as the long years stretched. The yawn of time had pulled the stiffness from his bearing and re-wrapped him in the hard, material colors of subsistence life: early dawn light, sunned-skin, lined hands and eyes. His face had grown darker and sweeter; the great adventure of his person, which had originally attracted Yedrin to him, had been smeared into a reliable comfort. And Yedrin had shifted with him, allowing motherhood to take on the vastness of her interest, producing person after person to carry on her back into the depths of the woods and hills, expanding the collection of selves she’d claimed in her young adult-hood to more. Where Worf, her husband, had put his personal pride into the hand-work of their subsisting life, allowing it to be sanded to silt and mineral, Yedrin had put hers in all their produced-people, spread it out across their children and grandchildren. Others thought she had softened—she had, instead, multiplied, could only ever look at it that way in order to accept it day by day. 

He could remember his love for her husband. He could remember the day he woke and realized he had long stopped feeling resentment for the fact that in some way this was Worf’s ideal existence while it was precisely the opposite of hers. When Yedrin had seen Worf for the first time, young, not the graceful creature he’d been in his shining old age, his heart had raced and he’d felt his warmth on his body, the rush of natural love, come naturally to all social things that needed each other, that were made to fall and keep love in the person lying beside them at night and feeding their children and embracing the carving knife of time as a unified team. And as an aftershock, the rush of Worf his stalwart father, Worf the gentle-handed grandfather, Worf the bent-over great-uncle: all people Worf had been to Yedrin, like a many-fingered hand, dipping all at once into the same stream of falling water. 

Harder, it had been, to remember the before of it all. But the memory was there and as real as all others from Jadzia’s life: Jadzia wasn’t sure of Worf at this point in her life, not as a long-committed partner. Jadzia, the person standing against the unlit sky now, was torn and terrified and choosing, as ever, to do her duty, as best she understood it, while still feeling as if she was choosing and understanding entirely wrong. 

“It won’t work,” said Jadzia. 

Yedrin looked to his dry nail-beds. “It already has. That’s what I’ve determined. It will all line up because it’s already happened. You don’t need to worry about the probability or recreating exact events.”

“Sure, that’s a good hypothesis.”

Yedrin flinched. 

“You’re a harder person than I remember being,” he said, pinched. “Than everyone remembers you.”

Jadzia shook her head. “Stop lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You could try facing it, looking me in the eye,” said Jadzia. “I’ve looked in the eyes of everyone I’ve had to carry. I may have chosen this and chosen you, this may all be my fault in a thousand different ways, but Curzon? Joran? I made them mine. Am I yours or am I not?”

Yedrin folded over his knees. He breathed in the grinding dirt.

“No,” he said, admitted. “You’re not.”

Jadzia laughed once more. “I once chose to let go of that honor, the honor of being remembered-in-flesh.” She sighed. “Lenara was right, I think.”

She walked away. 

****

The morning cracked fully open and Yedrin found himself walking with heavy steps back the familiar paths of his people’s settlement. The tiny, white starling blooms brushed against the breeze. He caught on their light and the light of the easy dawn. His choice was made and he could see the reminders of it everywhere he looked and in every sensation he grasped. 

“She’s angry with me,” said Kira, startling him in his path, appearing from the gathered crowd of flesh-ancestors on the hill. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her angry.”

He stopped in the dirt and took a step back in order to look up at her without tilting his chin too much. 

“Who?” he asked, cowardly. 

She folded her arms. He sighed and looked at the dust on his shoes. 

“Might be good to give her some space,” said Yedrin. 

“For how long?”

Yedrin swallowed past the discomfort he’d been feeling from the moment the Defiant had crashed. He didn’t want Kira and Jadzia to speak. Jadzia was yielding but there was no telling if that would hold long enough for it to be too late. 

He gave a middling gesture, signifying little. Kira grimaced and marched away. 

Yedrin continued on his path home. 

His kitchen and living room were empty. He’d been unattached for a long time and some nights it ached but most days it felt right. He sat at his table, watching the dust float on sunlight beams, waiting for the day to get warmer. He listened to the bustling of all the people settled around him, rejoicing that the entirety of their existence was not about to be unwritten by taking their time breaking their fasts, savoring the sensations of it all. 

Yedrin glanced at the sky through the open window, tinted blue by the air, beyond which was so much dark. It gave him a difficult feeling. 

There was a knock on the door. When he answered it, he bit into his cheek. 

“Yedrin Dax,” said Worf, gracefully stepping into the entry way. “Have you seen Lieutenant Commander Dax?”

Yedrin closed the door and fell slowly back against it. “Not for a couple hours or so.”

Worf worked his jaw. “Very well. I will keep looking for her. We need to review the flight plan”—

“She knows the flight plan,” said Yedrin, a simple calm weaving into his voice. “She worked through it immediately after the decision was made.”

Worf raised an eyebrow. Yedrin said: “I remember.”

Then Yedrin laughed and heard Jadzia’s pre-dawn laugh, full of cold, in it. “Rotten thing, sometimes: remembering.”

Worf moved to him so swiftly Yedrin missed most of the movement with a blink. He placed a hand Yedrin’s shoulder and pressed briefly down before removing it. Yedrin’s breath came easier. 

“You have been brave,” said Worf.

“You as well,” Yedrin managed. 

Worf glanced away. He worked his jaw again. In the bright morning, he shimmered. 

Then he said, bluntly, “I feel that I am going to lose her, as she is now.”

Yedrin did not ask 'who' as he had with Kira. This was all close. 

“You’re both going to change,” he offered slowly, still a little dizzy from Worf’s closeness and dizzy from the enormity of his situation. He looked at the ring of sun glinting on Worf’s earlobe and it was suddenly too much. 

“I will love you for the rest of my life.”

Worf was surprised. But then he settled his brow and studied Yedrin. Yedrin let him. After a few quiet moments, there was a shift. Worf allowed, as if by premonition, as Jadzia’s late husband had only when the day’s work was done, the gleam of tenderness to show in his eyes, his face. Yedrin’s heart burst. He moved closer. He lifted a hand to Worf’s jaw and the shock of the presence and the memory aligning drove his breath faster. Worf stared down at him, heavy and scared. 

Yedrin’s line had already broken so many joining sanctities, had already changed shape of the altar, had already given the symbiont to family inheritance rather than honored it for the great plurality it was supposed to be, and their whole society was made up of lines that perhaps shouldn’t ever be crossed but frequently were: what was one more transgression?

He lifted onto the balls of his feet just slightly, to bring them level, and kissed Worf's warm mouth. He tasted of a long, enduring, complicated life. Worf wrapped his arms tight around Yedrin’s middle. He moved into Yedrin’s embrace. Yedrin felt the muscle of his jaw move under his palm. He felt the dooming morning bloom over Worf’s shoulder, like a smelting of silver on a coronated-prince. Then they released each other together to breathe. 

“I’m so glad,” said Yedrin, broken-voiced. “To know you again.”

Worf visibly pulled his structure back to his self. He said, “Thank you.”

Then he nodded, opened the door, and turned away towards his future.

*****

Kira stormed into Jadzia’s quarters an hour after the Defiant made landfall at Deep Space Nine. Jadzia was on her back on her bed, legs crossed, toying with the portable game-rig she’d made for the Altonian brain teaser. She’d been deciding whether or not it’d be good for her to see evidence of the state of her mind, because she couldn’t quite sort through it with traditional means. The last time she’d felt this awash and swaying, like sea surface waves, was the first week after her joining. It’d been a pleasant experience all around. She didn’t want to rein in all her city, all her selves, just yet. But the pleasure of drifting among the multitude was something she wondered at potentially feeling some shame for. 

Kira interrupted the wondering. 

“It was Odo,” she snapped, breathless, coming to stand at the foot of Jadzia’s bed, hands on her hips. 

Jadzia bent her neck to meet Kira’s gaze but otherwise didn’t move. 

“Hmm?”

“Odo,” said Kira, sharply. She was pink and sweaty and in her white undershirt and lightweight pants. She'd probably just come from a hard training session and found a feeling she couldn't tie up. “Odo changed the flight—it was him.”

Jadzia, still feeling loopy with all the people in her head, could only respond, “Interesting.” 

Kira opened her mouth to rage but Jadzia turned her gaze back to the ceiling. 

“Dax,” said Kira. “Are you serious? Is that all you have to say?”

Jadzia put her arms under her head. The ceiling was a kaleidoscope of sensation. She really needed to pull her people back under her sole perspective. 

“Dax.”

“I thought it might have been me,” said Jadzia. “But he didn’t.”

“What?” 

Jadzia wanted to indulge in her too-many memories and minds just a little longer. Kira came to stand at the side of her bed, radiating confusion and disappointment. 

“What are you talking about?” she asked. 

Jadzia looked at her. Kira was always so singular in Jadzia’s gaze. None of her past lives had known a Bajoran, let alone Kira. None of them could shape much how Jadzia saw her. Kira was something singular of Jadzia’s life she would be able to preserve. 

“Are you upset you’re alive?” asked Jadzia. “Sad you couldn’t finally die for a cause?”

Kira clenched her fists. 

“Still scared, I see,” she volleyed back. 

Jadzia looked away. 

“Did you know?” asked Kira. 

“No,” said Jadzia. “I didn’t. I was perfectly content to send you to your grave and commit us all to abandonment.”

“They were real, Jadzia. They were alive. Eight-thousand people—they were real.”

“They were suspended in a non-autonomous potentiality. They were never going to be actualized.”

Kira dropped heavy onto Jadzia’s torso, knees on either side of her ribs, grabbed Jadzia’s forearms, and squeezed, looking for a bruise. 

“I would love to be able to talk to you, Jadzia,” she snarled. “And not your many layers of irony.”

Jadzia breathed in and out to feel the press of Kira’s legs. She licked her lips and remembered their specific shape, as well as the inside of her mouth. She began to pull them all back, all her people-selves, shuddering under the drag of their immaterial fingers. Kira watched and waited. Kira appeared personally devastated by what she had learned. Kira had only very recently decided she had to die. 

“It’s a classic ethical question,” said Jadzia eventually, softening her voice as much as Kira deserved. “The competing needs of others versus the autonomy of the person.”

Kira’s eyes were red-rimmed. Tears threatened. 

“He did it because he was selfish,” said Kira. “Because he’s in love with me.”

Jadzia breathed out. “Oh, Nerys.”

“He expected me to be grateful.”

“I don’t think he expected that. I think Odo knows who you are.”

Kira released Jadzia’s arms and sat back on her stomach, pushing her fingers through her limp hair. 

“I just,” she exhaled, frustrated. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m glad he did it,” said Jadzia. 

Kira snapped her gaze to hers. “What?”

“I’m glad,” said Jadzia. “Tomorrow I’m going to shake his hand.”

Kira’s chest rose and fell. “What?” she said again. 

“I didn’t want to stay there, Nerys.”

“But all those people”—

“I know you’ve made a lot of work on not letting yourself divide the cosmos of living things into ‘should live’ and ‘acceptable sacrifice for the greater good’, but you have to see how that situation was untenable. More untenable than the proto-universe coming into being. It was a paradox.”

“Jadzia”—

“And I did not want to live in it. I would have. I said I would. I had hoped he might”—

Jadzia cut herself off, turning her head to look out the window. She was lucky enough to have an outward facing glass, turned away from the space station ring, towards everything else. 

Kira's warm and rough hand pushed onto her face and turned her back. “Might what?”

“Let us go,” whispered Jadzia. “Let me go.”

Kira frowned down at her, thinking. She trembled a little and then, with care, descended onto Jadzia’s chest, tucking herself under Jadzia’s chin, sliding her wiry arms around her shoulders. Jadzia, with a blink of hesitation, returned the embrace. 

“I was so heavy to carry, it turns out,” said Jadzia, still in a whisper. 

“No,” said Kira. “It was all heavy to carry. And he had to remember the most. He remembered me.”

“You died because of me.”

“I died because something unpredictable happened.”

“I saw there wasn’t something right before we went down to the planet.”

“You don’t know that for sure. You’re affirming it in hindsight. You weren’t sure.”

“I could’ve been more careful.”

“So what? Jadzia, I’ve put bombs under civilians. I’m not the right person to talk to about careful.” 

Jadzia pulled her closer, held her hard. 

“I’m so relieved,” said Jadzia. 

Kira didn’t say anything for a longer while than Jadzia would’ve wanted. But eventually she said quietly into Jadzia’s neck: “I’m glad I’m not going to miss your wedding.”

Jadzia snorted. 

“We’re taking a break,” she said, drawing her fingers up and down Kira’s back. “I—I’m—I’m just”—

“You’re scared,” said Kira. 

“He’s going to want children,” said Jadzia. “Especially now that he’s met so many of his super-posed descendants.”

“He already has a kid.”

“He’ll want more.”

Kira sighed. She slid her hard nose into Jadzia’s skin. 

“Don’t be strange about this, because I still hate this and I feel sick,” she said. “But I’m...relieved my death might not be so ridiculous, now.”

Jadzia snorted again. Then laughed. “A heroic noble death in battle is still a possibility. For this, we can rejoice.”

“Odo might be disappointed in me for that.”

“Odo’s opinion is often beneath my notice. But I think I agree with him on the preciousness of your life, Nerys.” Jadzia swallowed. “Have you ever given yourself leave to consider a life after the war?”

“There’s going to be another war, Jadzia.”

“Even so. What do you imagine?”

Kira shifted to Jadzia’s side, curled a hand on Jadzia’s chest, and settled. “I don’t know. What do you imagine?”

Jadzia put her lips briefly to Kira’s forehead. Then she turned back to the ceiling. She flipped on the Altonian puzzle and the multicolored sphere mutely appeared above them. Jadzia closed her eyes. She ran her tongue over her teeth. She dipped into the pleasurable cascade of people in the most well-protected part of her mind. She focused on the sensation of Kira’s weight against her. She thought of Yedrin and the impossibility of having to will a certainty. 

She opened her eyes and the sphere had turned to inky black, opaque, one whole color, a solution written as a depth of un-seeing. Jadzia smiled and held Kira closer. 

Baseball isn't the most popular sport in the U.S., not now or in the 90s when DS9 aired, though it was the most popular in country's history at some point and that popularity has embedded itself in the American vernacular and given the sport itself such a sheen of nostalgia that most Americans have convinced themselves that it's a sport of the midwest, of the country and cornfields, of an idyllic past. The most americana-elegiac film ever made, Field of Dreams, features not just the spirits of old baseball stars from past ages, but the spirits of baseball's greatest villains, the 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw games in a gambling scandal that disgraced the franchise: in the film, in the fields of Iowa, they were cleansed of their sins against the game and allowed to play again. It's a powerfully sentimental mythic treatment of the sport, when the MLB was declining in popularity especially in comparison to the NFL or NBA. But the pastoral elegy is a false history--baseball's origins are in the urban, in the working class neighborhoods of industrial cities of the northeast, and it was spread to other parts of the country mostly during the Civil War among Union camps. But the prime image that people conjure regarding the game is one of pastorality, history, and nostalgia, all of which is also helped along by the fact that baseball is a summer sport and a slow-moving one at that. The play of baseball, composed of long stretches of tension followed by quick bursts of action, not timed, will go as long as needed, ends up being figuratively linked with the cultural-feel of the game, as a past-time now passed into an idyllic mythic past.

Inserting this particular game into a story about a man consistently reckoning with his relationship to a place of beyond-causality, who is ultimately consumed by this place and forced to abandon the material of time as he was built to understand it, characterizes Sisko with an underlying structure of elegiac reflection. As a character, he, frequently enough, engages with traditional knowledges and practices, sometimes with a sheen of nostalgic yearning, mostly with an ethic of celebration and respect. He cooks and passes down his particular subculture's food, he builds a starship based on ancient Bajoran epistemes in a rhetorically decolonizing effort, his favorite game is one that has technically died out. He also is sometimes angled in his personal relationships towards the past: reaching emotionally for his dead wife; his closest friend being a re-version of an old friend from his youth (Dax); being wrenched away from a love-interest by the nature of an established system trying to maintain. He's centered as the voice of a primary speculative ethic in an episode surrounding a nostalgic-futurism, a mid-twentieth century speculative fictive frame of imagining grand explorations for any and all people in a time where half the U.S. was living in an apartheid state: the character is in many small character-detail ways and large narrative-theme ways a character of historical reflection and temporal consideration.

The narrative conclusion for the character is to, in a way, leave behind this depth of signifying through temporal matter. At the end of his story, the wormhole-people he had so reached out to and explained himself to through baseball, a nostalgia, who had confronted him with the lived-reality of grief, another form of yearning for the past, fully claimed him and he entered entirely into the space where time was such that everything that characterized him up until that point had to be redefined on a fundamental-matter level. The story-end for Sisko was a full subsumption of the self. Narratively, it can be argued, because it's Sisko and because he is characterized the way he is throughout the series, because from the very first episode his character is set up in a friction through which he is frequently prompted to handle and/or solve time itself, the story claims that Sisko was uniquely positioned to be the figure so subsumed and changed. He both had to have the rich-causality (a growing temporal and creative son, a new love with progressive thought and movement, a new child still in the process of becoming, a traditional and nostalgic bend to him, a lifelong interest in a forgotten game) and he had to leave exactly all of this in order to materially change the outcome of an existential fight for his pluralistic civilization. It's a competing tension resolved by the fact of leaving causal understanding.

One can read that by the end of season 6, start of season 7, Sisko's character is fully committed to rewriting the depth of his temporal significance. He lost the first re-version of his friend Dax, a character whose specific relationship with time both reifies Sisko's and challenges it, and meets the second re-version of the "old man", and, in a sense, this change represents the tension at the center of Sisko both losing everything and gaining everything, reformed at a fundamental matter level, by the end of the series. Sisko's religious posture in-narrative for the Bajoran people becomes more and more substantive to his lived-reality and the expression of his person. He becomes the messenger, the "emissary", the wing-footed carrier of temporal significance, handing over the character-specific and narratively-thematic composition of himself over to the people beyond the threshold of causality. It's not so much that he leaves anything behind but that he takes with him every rich temporal aspect in order to satisfy the story-tension of a place with swapped-time-and-space existing without enough narrative weight: to the imagination of the audience, the wormhole nexus, where conscious beings live and affect the cosmos beyond them, is an impossible/improbable place. To solve it, the character who has been its agent and, in equal depth, the agent of the changing, historical reality outside its bounds, must enter it and claim its episteme and affect for the whole story.

Sisko leaves behind but also, through his substance, carries: his son whose in-narrative power is storytelling, a wife who is associated with building and futuristic progressive hope, an old friend of constant death and rebirth and memory, another friend of equal pluralistic leadership to whom he also leaves his baseball.

As episode one demonstrates, baseball has no place outside of causality so of course the object Sisko can't take with him is the ball itself. But due to how Sisko's presence has manifested in the story, many times referenced through that object, Kira picking up the baseball at the end of the series is the still-presence of Sisko and thus a portrayal of how Sisko has remade himself to be both atemporal and omni-manifest. Baseball, the forgotten sport of the past, can only be played now by the characters because Sisko sank himself into it and swallowed its temporal reality and put that substance into a position where future-and-past are right-and-left. He reformed the mythic nostalgic yearning of the sport into the memory of his self and into the metaphor of his self and life as he entered into a differently-woven plane of reality. No longer occupying one point in time, Sisko has presenced baseball and himself and made a game of temporality and looking-back and myth-making simultaneously a way of speculation and futurism and progressive-movement by forcing the game's cause-and-consequence across the threshold of linearity through the matter and narrative-nature of his being.