“But the Kurlans were already extinct millennia before that,” Julian said. “Most exoarchaeologists believe they succumbed either to a plague or to biowarfare many centuries before the Trill became capable of interstellar travel. How could anyone believe the Kurlans are an offshoot of the Trill?”

“Let’s find out,” Gard said, then restarted the playback.

Ditrel resumed speaking, her gaze intense and locked directly on the visual pickup in front of her. “For millennia, the joined ruling class has covered up the fact that the parasites originated on ancient Kurl, during a long-suppressed prehistoric era of early Trill interstellar expansion.”

“ ‘Prehistoric,’ ” Dax repeated.

Julian shrugged and spoke in a stage whisper. “I suppose any previously unrevealed era of ancient Trill space colonization would have to be prehistoric, by definition. Of course, that begs the question of how anyone could possibly know about it today.”

“She mentioned old records of archaeological digs,” Dax said. “Maybe someone discovered—”

Cyl made a shushing noise as the woman on the screen continued. Dax immediately stopped speaking, and Julian looked as though he wanted to bite off a sharp reply to the general before subsiding into silence.

“…cording to the documents now in our possession, five thousand years ago, Trill colonists formed an exclusive society on Kurl in whicheveryone was joined to a symbiont. There was no ‘Great Unjoined’ underclass among these people. The Kurlans therefore fancied that their ‘joined-only’ civilization would be better than that of the homeworld, where the unjoined have always been in the majority.

“But this joined-only paradise failed. The humanoids of the Kurl colony used genetic engineering techniques on the symbionts, perhaps intent on increasing the symbiont population on their planet, or improving the rapport between host and symbiont. Instead, the Kurlans killed themselves off and released the parasites into an unsuspecting universe.

“The very same parasites that have been so determined to destroy us all—and whose genetic profiles match the few hundred thousand slugs who now quietly rule this world from the abdomens of their pampered and privileged humanoid slaves.”

Ditrel paused in an apparent effort to collect her thoughts. Then she fixed her intense gray gaze back at eye level. “The neo-Purist movement calls upon President Maz and the Trill Senate to stop trying to hide the truth about our world’s past. To stop perpetuating the lies and secrecies that have now begun to engulf other worlds besides our own. To stop concealing the connection between the symbionts and the parasites, which has only left us vulnerable to the parasites’ ancient vendetta.”

She’s talking about the hijacking of theGryphon, Dax realized. She knew that one of the parasites nearly succeeded in using the Akira-class starship to attack Trill, and that Kira was the main reason the attack had failed.

“Be warned: We will not permit any such thing to happen to our world again. We will stand vigilantly against the parasites and their so-called symbiont cousins. We will allow neither the joined nor the creatures who control them to lead us to destruction. In the defense of our world, we are prepared to take drastic measures.”

The screen went dark then, and Dax found herself standing in silence, considering the neo-Purist’s surprising revelations. Julian, Cyl, and Gard stood by, looking equally subdued and thoughtful.

“Do you suppose there’s any truth to this?” Julian asked, finally breaking the quiet.

“The neo-Purists obviously know about the link between the parasites and Kurl,” Dax said. “And that’s something we’ve verified. Maybe there’s something to the rest of their story as well.” She truly didn’t want to believe that the Trill government would conceal information of such vital importance to the homeworld’s defense against the parasites. But she had too much firsthand experience with Trill cover-ups to dismiss the idea out of hand.

“But the time line doesn’t add up,” Julian insisted. “The naiskosfragment we found is twelve thousand years old. If the Trill colonized Kurl five thousand years ago, how could an artifact more than twice as old as the colony come from there, unless—” Julian stopped, his eyes narrowing.

“What?” Dax said.

“The naiskoswere never native to Kurl,” he said slowly. “They were Trill artifacts all along. Don’t you see? All our assumptions about the age of the Kurl civilization were false, because so many of the artifacts we assumed were native to the planet were actually brought to Kurl by the colonists as treasures, works of art, keepsakes. They were imported!”

“Even assuming that’s true,” Gard said, “It makes me wonder how the neo-Purists came to their conclusions.”

“It’s pretty clear the radicals have infiltrated the government,” Cyl reiterated. “Perhaps they’ve also found their way into some long-forgotten section of the classified archives.”

“Forgotten?” Julian asked. “I thought the Trill revered and collected memories.”

“We do,” said Cyl. “But any society that collects and preserves its cultural and personal memories long enough can begin losing track of them. We Trill are no exception.”

Though Dax had never spent much time considering the matter, she had to concede that Cyl was right; she knew that the physical records of Trill history occupied uncounted kilometers of winding catacombs beneath Leran Manev and other Trill metroplexes. How difficult would it be to misplace whole epochs of deep time?

“But there must be important gaps in the radicals’ knowledge,” Julian was saying to Cyl. “Otherwise, I think they might have told us more. For instance, more of the details of the Kurlans’ alleged creation of the parasites. And why the government would want the story covered up in the first place.”

“It seems likelier that the radicals have taken the sketchy Kurl information they gleaned from this afternoon’s testimony and created embellishments out of whole cloth,” Gard suggested. “If they’re capable of planting bombs, they’re certainly capable of planting lies and propaganda.”

“Maybe,” Cyl said, though he didn’t appear entirely convinced. “But if part of their story checks out, then it’s at least possible that they’ve stumbled onto information that even you and I aren’t aware of. And if that’s true, things may be even worse than we thought.”

Dax was inclined to agree. Audrid’s memories nagged at the back of her brain, telling her there was more to this mystery than even the neo-Purists suspected.

Before leaving Trill forever, Captain Christopher Pike was speaking softly yet insistently to Audrid. “Your people’s secret, Doctor Dax. Is it that important? Was it worth all of those lives?”

Audrid silently considered everyone who had died as a result of the parasite’s hate-filled rampage. Chin, Milton, and Juarez from theTereshkova.

And poor Jayvin.

Tears came, and sobs wracked her shoulders. Pike waited patiently for the waves of misery to subside.

“I don’t know,” Audrid said after she finally recovered her voice.

“So we have to find out what the truth really is,” Cyl was saying, the steel in his voice dragging Dax roughly back to the here and now. “That’s really the root of our problem with these radicals.”

Gard had crossed to one of the windows. Several stories below, the crowd and the police were engaged in violent clashes, masses of people spontaneously forming eddies and whirlpools of panic-fueled Brownian motion. Dax saw the flashes of police phaser fire. Bodies tumbled to the street, where they were trampled by panicked feet, either advancing or retreating. Though the police weapons were no doubt set on stun, people were going to die anyway.