Nearly done. God, let this be finished before I turn this thing on myself.

Next, the separator’s laser bit into the RDNAL organelle, a construct that consisted of a long tube buried in the very core of the umbilical’s complex bundles of nerve fibers. Moving nimbly, Bashir sealed the organelle on Ezri’s end of the umbilicus, which fell onto her abdomen like so much discarded ODN cable.

Jadzia’s voice haunted him once again. I’ve never felt so empty.He forced himself to ignore the memories—to ignore Ezri, who lay before him not quite dead, not quite alive, yet still gone forever.

“Note,” he said, “that the symbiont is now completely free of the host’s body. There’s been no change in the symbiont’s vitals.”

Krissten turned toward Nurse Juarez standing quietly by the door. “Edgardo, please ready the container.” Juarez approached the table, prepared to take the symbiont to the oblong receptacle which lay in the far corner of the room.

“Krissten, please prepare a hypo with twenty cc’s of isoboramine. I’m going to inject it directly into the symbiont’s end of the umbilicus.”

Krissten hesitated for a moment, then fetched the hypo and placed it in Bashir’s hand. She held the symbiont for him while he gently applied it to the tip of the umbilicus and pressed the plunger home. Bashir felt a wave of relief sweep over him as Krissten carefully handed the symbiont to Juarez, who in turn carried it toward the open, liquid-filled container in the corner.

Krissten turned back to Bashir, a question in her eyes.

“Yes?” Bashir said as he allowed his gaze to wander back to Ezri. He watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest, listened to the gentle sussuration of her breathing.

“We tried this drug before,” Krissten said. “But it had no effect. Why the second injection?”

Bashir gave his head a weary shake. “That was isoboramine, Krissten. This time I used boramine, which should stave off the symbiont’s growing necrosis and prevent delayed neuroleptic shock while it’s confined to the artificial environment.”

“No,Doctor.”

Bashir had never heard Krissten flatly contradict him before. He looked toward her and saw that her eyes had become immense. She appeared near panic.

“Excuse me, Ensign?” he tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, but didn’t succeed completely.

“Doctor, that injection wasn’t boramine. It was isoboramine.”

Bashir felt as though he’d been slapped across the face. “What?”

“That hypo contained thirty cc’s of isoboramine, sir. As youordered.”

A realization colder than the winds of Trill’s Tenaran ice cliffs suddenly ran up his spine. Boramine. Isoboramine. Somehow, he had confused them. The two substances had similar names, obviously. But they differed from one another as much as oxygen did from fluorine.

And he knew that the consequences of mistaking one for the other could be every bit as serious.

Bashir watched as Juarez knelt beside the symbiont’s medical transport pod and prepared to place Dax inside its life-giving purple liquid bath. Juarez stopped in mid-motion, frowning.

He looked helplessly at Bashir and Krissten. “It’s… squirming.”

“My God,” Bashir said, rushing to the nurse’s side with a medical tricorder. He made a quick scan. “It’s an isoboramine overdose. The symbiont is going into neuroleptic shock.”

“I thought Trill symbiosis dependedon isoboramine,” Juarez said.

“It does,” Bashir said, still incredulous over the magnitude of his error. “But the symbionts can’t tolerate it in large doses.”

“Is there an antidote?” Krissten asked.

Bashir gently took the creature from Juarez and cradled it in his arms. The symbiont convulsed in his hands as though about to burst. His mind raced to find an answer to Krissten’s question. Why was it becoming so hard to think?

“Yes,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Fortunately, there is a counteragent.”

Krissten grabbed another hypo and stood attentively, awaiting his orders. It was only after the moment began to stretch that Bashir realized that this time he wouldn’t need to drop a scalpel to endanger a patient’s life.

All it would take was a lapse of memory.

“Doctor?” Krissten was beginning to sound panicked.

His head began to pound, as though he were in the throes of severe raktajinowithdrawal. He closed his eyes very tightly, willing the throbbing pain to pass.

“Give me a moment to concentrate,” he said, trying hard not to display his own rising alarm. The small, helpless bundle that contained the essence of the woman he loved continued to heave and shudder in his arms. He could feel intuitively that it was beginning to die.

“Doctor?” said Krissten, now clearly worried.

Bashir ignored her. He thought instead about the miracle to which Vaughn had attributed Nog’s new leg. And the cathedral-like alien structure that had clearly caused the miracle.

What better place than a cathedral to go looking for miracles?

And in his mind, he was no longer in the medical bay. No longer aboard the Defiant.No longer even in the Gamma Quadrant. His mind’s eye opened as he slipped into the stretched null-time of memory. Before him stood four great, russet-colored buttressed arches topped by a thirty-meter dome. The silvery structure gleamed under a clear desert sky, resplendent in the late-afternoon sun.

Shortly after his parents had taken him to Adigeon Prime for genetic resequencing, Bashir had discovered that he’d needed to find ways to cope with the torrential flood of information his agile mind had begun absorbing and retaining. At the age of eight, Bashir read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, from which he had learned an appealing and useful mnemonic trick. Using the same care he had lavished on some of humanity’s greatest masterpieces, Leonardo had constructed a vast, detailed cathedral entirely within his formidable mind. Every vestibule, gallery, staircase, foyer, and chamber was carefully catalogued in the polymath artist’s memory, every sculpture and painting placed just so, every bookshelf, book, and page painstakingly arranged, indexed, and preserved for virtually instantaneous access.

All Leonardo had had to do to retrieve any specific fact he’d previously placed within his “memory cathedral” was to close his eyes, stride the great basilica’s wide corridors, and enter whichever carefully catalogued vault contained what he sought.

Young Julian Bashir had chosen a much simpler, though still impressive, design for his own mnemonic citadel—that of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s great sixth-century cathedral. In all the years since, he’d never been tempted to move his personal treasury of memory into a larger, more complex structure, probably because of his father’s preference for the gaudier Baroque- and Rococo-period architectural styles of a millennium later.

In the self-contained universe of his own mind, Bashir bounded up the Hagia Sophia’s stone steps and ran through the arched doorway, through the vestibule, and into the wide aisle surrounding the central basilica. Of course, it had been years since he’d had to resort to using this mnemonic trick so directly; he’d long ago learned to place his memorization skills on a kind of intellectual auto-pilot, until his subconscious information retrieval had become virtually error-free, almost an autonomic function, like breathing.

He turned right and found the staircase he’d installed at the age of ten, the year he had first begun seriously organizing pharmacological information in his cathedral-of-the-mind. As he ascended, he noticed that the fifth step made an echoing squeak as he put his weight on it, just as he remembered. He recalled how he’d deliberately installed several such things throughout the building, as mnemonic self-tests. He smiled as he continued upward.