Star Trek Deep Space 9 The Lives of Dax

“Tracing Dax’s footsteps through the centuries has the unmistakable feel of sitting around a campfire

under the spell of a master storyteller. ... Intelligent, thoughtful and—no less important—fun.”

—Heather Jarman,

author ofThis Gray Spirit

(Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—

Mission: Gamma, Book Two)

“Reaps its potential brilliantly.”

—Trekweb.com

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore Trill

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you

should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor

the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

This book consists of works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the

authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New

York, NY 10020

paperback in 1999 by Pocket Books

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-7434-5682-3

First Pocket Books mass market paperback printing January 2003

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster

Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 orbusiness@simonandschuster.com

Printed in the U.S.A.

Contents

Introduction.6

EZRI8

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens.9

“Second star to the right ...”.10

LELA..22

Kristine Kathryn Rusch.23

Jill Sherwin.24

First Steps.25

TOBIN..40

Jeffrey Lang.41

Dead Man’s Hand.42

EMONY..53

Michael Jan Friedman.54

Old Souls.55

AUDRID..66

S. D. Perry.67

Sins of the Mother68

TORIAS.77

Susan Wright78

Infinity.79

JORAN..87

S. D. Perry.88

Robert Simpson.89

Allegro Ouroboros in D Minor90

CURZON..100

Steven Barnes.101

The Music Between the Notes.102

JADZIA..116

L. A. Graf117

Reflections.118

EZRI130

“... and straight on ’til morning.”.131

About the e-Book.134

“In nine lives I’ve been a little of everything.”

—Ezri Dax

“The Siege of AR-558”

Introduction

DAX

Our baby ... would have been so beautiful.

And with that, Dax exhales her last breath and dies.

STRANGE AS ITmay seem, that was how it started. Back in April 1998, I read Ira Steven Behr and

Hans Beimler’s moving script, “Tears of the Prophets,” the finale for the sixth season ofStar Trek: Deep

Space Nine, confirming the rumors that had already been spreading for months. I read those words, and

that’s when I knew the book you now hold was going to happen.

Jadzia died, and something in the back of my mind just clicked.

Butwhy do a book about Dax? I mean, let’s face it, she doesn’t fit into the usual formula for a successful

Star Trek book—she’s not a captain, she’s not bald, and she doesn’t have pointed ears. The skeptics I

encountered were beside themselves: How could I possibly expect people to be interested?

And it wasn’t as if Jadzia’s demise meant I could do with the character as I pleased. When “Tears of the

Prophets” aired, I knew the death of one Dax would mean the birth of another. We all did, didn’t we?

She was aTrill, for cryin’ out loud—that was the thing that most defined her, that she (or he; we still

didn’t know at that point) would be back. It would be a different host, of course—the ninth—with the

memories of all the previous hosts, male and female, going back nearly four hundred years. Each new

personality was different from the one before it, each new life always striving to distinguish itself from the

last. I started to wonder about the periods inStar Trek history those hosts had lived through, the things

they might have done, the familiar faces they might have encountered. And then I grinned like an idiot.

“Why Dax?” Are you kidding? Whynot?

How could I ignore the storytelling possibilities implicit in the Dax character? The opportunity not only to

flesh out its past lives, but to explore the ways in which they’vealways played a part in theStar Trek

universe?

And then came the clincher—the inspiration that would, I was certain, make the project truly unique

amongStar Trek books. This wasn’t going to be a biographical novel, with one voice trying to capture

the entire scope of Dax’s life. I mean, think about it: Dax is a living anthology—a collection of stories.

The book would be one too.

So I went forward, and on the wayDeep Space Nine’saudience was introduced to a new Dax. Ezri

came on the scene as the ninth host, and to the delight ofStar Trek fans everywhere, myself among them,

she proved as popular as Jadzia—precisely because, true to the nature of Dax, she was completely

different from Jadzia! Wonderfully brought to life by Terry Farrell, Jadzia had been a strong, confident

presence, someone who’d spent her entire adult life preparing herself to process the diverse lives

embodied by the Dax symbiont. Ezri, masterfully portrayed by Nicole deBoer, was just the opposite;

having been forced by circumstances to become joined to Dax, she was completely unprepared at first to

balance the combined personalities of eight previous lives. We only got to watch her struggle for a year,

but what a year it was.

We caught glimpses of the other hosts over the years, too, most notably Joran and Curzon. Every once

in a while the show would drop a tantalizing new detail about one of the others, but for the most part they

were little more than names and professions. It was enough to create a rough time line, and from there,

the book just took off.

And it’s entirely fair to say that this collection wouldn’t have been possible without the innovative ideas

that never stopped coming from the talented writers and producers ofDeep Space Nine, who gave us

such incredible characters to build upon. So to Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D.

Moore, Hans Beimler, Rene Echevarria, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson,

PeterAllen Fields, and the many others who helped to shape Dax along the way ... I gratefully raise my

glass to you all.

I was also privileged to gather together a talented group of professional authors who, as I’d hoped,

proved to be as eclectic as Dax’s hosts, and as enthusiastic about the project as I was. The tales they

wove are thrilling, touching, suspenseful, funny, provocative, even chilling at times. But you needn’t take

my word for it. Read their stories. Experience them for yourselves. More than anyone else, they deserve

the credit for this book, because right from the beginning, they believed in it. They saw the possibilities.

And that, after all, may be the truest spirit ofStar Trek.

Marco Palmieri,

New York City,

July 1999

EZRI

“She’s a Dax. Sometimes they don’t think. They just do.”

—Benjamin Sisko

“Penumbra”

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens first sat at the Replimat ten years ago to eavesdrop on Odo and

Quark as part of their research forThe Making of Deep Space Nine, the first of four behind-the-scenes

books they have written aboutStar Trek film and television productions. They are also the authors of

three classicStar Trek novels, including the groundbreakingFederation, as well as the epicDS9 trilogy,

Millennium, about the catastrophic discovery of the Bajoran system’ssecond wormhole. In addition, the

Reeves-Stevenses are co-writers with William Shatner for the ongoing series of bestselling novels

chronicling the continuing adventures of Captain Kirk after his “apparent” death inStar Trek

Generations.

The Reeves-Stevenses’ other novels include theLos Angeles Times bestsellerIcefire —hailed by

Stephen King as “the best thriller of its type sinceThe Hunt for Red October” —andQuicksilver, which

Publishers Weekly proclaimed “a warp-speed technothriller.” The Reeves-Stevenses are also the

authors of the classic sf/fantasy crossover trilogyThe Chronicles of Galen Sword, available from

Babbage Books, and are supervising producers and writers for the hit syndicated sf/fantasy series,Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

“Second star to the right ...”

Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

SHE WAS LOST.Surrounded by the precariously stacked, cast-off debris of an antique alien city.

Beneath unfamiliar stars and a single bloated moon. Her feet swelling from the stored daytime heat of the

sand and gravel she had crossed, from the endless walking, from the ridiculously contorted shoes Julian

hadinsisted she wear. It was enough to make a person sayEnd program and go back to her quarters

and—

“No,” Ezri Dax said aloud.

She was many things.Many to the power of nine, she thought. But she wasn’t a quitter.Well, Tobin

was a bit of a quitter when it came to dealing with Raifi. And Audrid always believed she could

have done more to save Jayvin. And Torias ... well, okay, Ezri reluctantly admitted to herself,Torias

wouldn’t have gotten lost in the first place. But there was that time when ...

“Aggh,” she said to break the relentlessly unpredictable connective thread of interaction and reflection

that stitched together all the lives she had lived, that at least a part of her had lived. “I’m doing it again.”

She sighed, breathing in the night’s cool desert air, shivering as she hugged her sleeveless arms to her

chest. The tiny disks of reflective plastic sewn to the fabric of the long, midnight-blue gown she wore—

almostwore—scratched the flesh of her arms. Across her exposed back, there was only a chill breeze

on far too much bare skin. One more time she wondered why she kept letting Julian talk her into these

bizarre historical costumes and adventures from Earth’s past.

She shook her head determinedly, as if that’s all it would take to clear more than three centuries’ worth

of cobwebs, then put her hands on her hips and, with renewed resolve, looked about the graveyard of

oddly angled broken glass and twisted metal. She deliberately ignored the dainty, indigo-sequined

evening bag dangling from her wrist. Somehow, its triviality seemed especially inappropriate, considering

the seriousness of her situation.

“Okay ... ,” she addressed herself firmly. She looked up at a towering construction of colored glass

tubes and wire and metal to her side. In the soft light of the full moon, she could see it formed a caricature

of a humanoid male with a vacant grin and narrow mustache, wearing a circular black hat with a disklike

brim, one hand held up in an eternal wave of greeting—or awarning to go no farther. “... I sawyou from

the front gate,” she said to the impassive giant, “and you were on my ... left.” Ezri peered into the dark

labyrinth of other twisted tangles of glass and metal, thin rods and shafts jumbled and interlocked in what

Jadzia might recognize as enormous metallic crystals grown at random. “So the gate should be

somewhere in that direction ... on my right.” She gazed above the ragged black silhouettes that formed a

fractal horizon of debris in that direction, but the desert air was so clear she could detect no distant glow

of the blazing lights of the city she sought. The stars were as stark and bright in every direction. The

space between them as impenetrably black. Wherever she was, wherever she had to go, her

surroundings were offering no clue as to what her direction should be.

“I just have to ...” Ezri faltered, having utterly failed to convince herself of her logic.”... go straight down

there and ... ugh, why do I even pretend I know what I’m doing?”

She kicked viciously at the gravel beneath her, sending up a pale cloud of dust in the moonlight, at the

same time thoroughly wedging a small, sharp stone under her cramped and crushed-together toes.

“Aggh,” she said again as she hopped awkwardly on one foot, trying to twist off the open-toed shoe to

free the stone.

But hopping on gravel in a high-heeled shoe was next to impossible. And when confounded by the long

tight gown she wore, not even all of Emony’s gymnastic skills could come to Ezri’s rescue.

With a strangled cry of frustrated rage, Ezri toppled backward, braced herself for the impact of sharp

gravel along her bare back—

—then gasped in surprise as a pair of strong hands caught her and gallantly restored her to her feet.

“Julian?!” she said as she spun around to face her rescuer, arms already reaching out to embrace him.

But the blinding smile that greeted her didn’t belong to the chief medical officer of Deep Space 9. “Sorry

to disappoint ya, doll.” It was Vic Fontaine. A holographic simulation of a quintessential Las Vegas

nightclub singer from Earth, circa 1962 A.C.E. He gave her a wink.

Ezri dropped her arms. Vic smiled as if he could sense the change in her mood.

“I was going to ask what a broad like you’s doing in a dump like this,” Vic said, “but I think I get the

picture. The boyfriend’s a big no-show, am I right, or am I right?”

Ezri shifted uncomfortably on the gravel, one foot still in bondage to its shoe, the other resting

uncomfortably on the rough stones. “Actually, Julian doesn’t know I came up here.”

Vic shot her a sideways look. “What? You two lovebirds have a spat?”

Ezri shook her head, almost lost her balance again. “No. We had a date, down on the Strip. .. .” She

waved her hand around, vaguely trying to indicate the direction of Las Vegas, three simulated kilometers

in ... some direction or another from here, but gave up. She had no idea where the city was anymore.

“But he got called into emergency surgery.”

“Son of a gun,” Vic said. “Hasn’t been a lot of that since the Big One.”

Ezri nodded. The station had been quiet in the past few weeks since the Dominion War had finally

ended. Life had been almost normal, or at least it appeared to be when filtered through Jadzia’s

memories. Ezri herself had been on the station for just less than a year, and only knew it in its wartime

state of operations. And in the aftermath of war.

But even Ezri knew the end of the war hadn’t brought total peace to the station. Colonel Kira was still

brooding over Odo’s departure, and was stubbornly refusing most of Ezri’s offers to provide counselling.

Instead, as the new commander of the station, she seemed to be sublimating all her frustrated emotions

into convoluted plans to catch Quark red-handed at something—anythingillegal, or even questionable.

But at least all that attention had given Quark a new purpose in life. Except for those two weeks when

the Ferengi barkeep had fled into hiding on Bajor after some bio-acceleration concoction he had peddled

had succeeded in growing hair on every part of Morn’s bodyexcept the prune-faced alien’s head, Quark

had been the station’s sole source of excitement.

There’d be more excitement to come soon, though, Ezri knew. What with Kasidy Yates expecting

Captain Sisko’s baby and half the religious leaders on Bajor debating the significance of that birth in light

of the mysterious rash of new visions being experienced by those who used the Orbs. On top of that, the

Cardassian reconstruction effort was finally hitting itsstride and even Bajor was contributing supplies and

personnel to restore that battered world, making DS9’s loading docks work at full capacity, twenty-six

hours a day. And—

“You’re shivering,” Vic said.

Ezri came out of her reverie as the hologram wrapped his black sports jacket around her bare shoulders.

“I did it again,” she said crossly.

“Ya gotta give me more than that to go on, doll.”

“Rambling,” Ezri said. “It’s ... I think one thought, and that makes me think of another, and it’s not as if I

only have one lifetime of memories to remember, I’ve got eight, so ... so everything I think reminds me of

something else, and the next thing I know ...” Ezri paused, distracted by a sudden recollection of how

Curzon had once had a similar conversation with Ben Sisko at Utopia Planitia. It was late at night, after

Sisko’s shift was over. Curzon had added healthy dollops of Saurian brandy to theraktajino . “I hate

raktajino ,”Ezri said to Vic’s bafflement. But Jadzia had enjoyed the beverage. Which made Ezri

remember one night when Jadzia and Sisko had been talking late at Quark’s, after Sisko’s shift was over.

... “Aghh!”

“Don’t tell me,” Vic said kindly. “Rambling.”

“Especially when I’m upset.”

“Such as, when a certain young doctor gets called off for emergency surgery on a Saturday night.”

Ezri studied the hologram, suddenly confused. “It’s not Saturday ... is it?”

Vic shrugged with a patient grin. “Hey, doll. It’s not Saturday, this isn’t Las Vegas, and it’s sure not

1962.There’s a holosuite wall not ten feet in front of you. But why spoil a beeyootiful evening with cold

hard facts?” He offered her his arm. “C’mon, you look like you need to take a load off.”

Ezri had no idea what the hologram meant by that, but she took his arm, using her free hand to keep his

jacket tightly closed around her throat. “I don’t think I can walk much farther on this gravel,” she warned

him.

“Then why don’t you walk over there,” Vic said. Ezri looked where he was pointing and saw an

expanse of grass edging the gravel right beside her. She set her shoeless foot upon it. It was soft, springy,

and impossible to miss. But somehow, she had. Impossible, she thought.Unless ...

“Did you do that?” Ezri asked.

Vic guided her toward what appeared to be a large shoe, maybe two meters tall at the heel. In the

moonlight, it had a metallic, silvery shimmer. “Do what?”

“The grass. Aren’t all the simulation parameters set at the factory, or something?”

“Hey, doll, do Ilook like a parameter?”

Ezri didn’t believe it, but she felt embarrassed because she might just have insulted a hologram.

Somewhere, deep within her, Tobin had memories of the earliest versions of what would become

holosuite technology—the bulky encounter suits, the crude sensory helmets, the exceedingly clumsy

feedback gloves. Four lifetimes later, Joran had found a disturbing new application for the emerging

technology. But for all the memories of holographic environments shared by Ezri’s predecessors, each

recollection carried with it theclear-cut knowledge that such artificially constructed environments were

unreal.

But not to Ezri.

She had grown up with holoenvironments. As a child back home on Sappora VII, she had had a

personal holoplayroom that had served as a welcome escape from her mother, for both her and her

younger brother, Norvo. In fact, one of her first encounters with Earth had been in her favorite program,

an extremely realistic simulation of an African veldt, complete with wildlife. Apparently, it was a classic.

That early experience with holotechnology had made it easy for Ezri to adapt to Starfleet Academy’s

extensive use of even more sophisticated simulations for training its young cadets. And now, since she

had been joined with the Dax symbiont and her mind was constantly flooded with the memories of all of

Dax’s previous hosts, objective reality had become an even more fleeting notion to her. There was no

reason for hernot to think of holograms as any more or less real than the thousands of individuals who

Star Trek Deep Space 9 The Lives of Dax

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: