“I think we should call for additional help from Starfleet. This situation is quickly getting out of hand.” Bashir glanced up to see a large group of rowdy-looking teens moving quickly out of the darkness toward him. All of them were dressed in baggy, dark clothing, and they seemed to have been roughed up in the protests.

“I suspect President Maz won’t support that idea,”Gard said, shaking his head. “But I promise to pass it along when I find her.”

Bashir wondered if he heard a hint of derision in Gard’s voice. “Can you patch me through to Lieutenant Dax?” Bashir asked, turning slightly and stepping back against the wall to allow the group of teens to pass.

“Not now. I’ve got larger concerns,”Gard said. Then the screen went blank.

“Of all the—” Bashir was about to curse Gard, when a fist connected with his jaw, knocking him back against the wall. Before he could react, he felt a second fist strike his midsection, while another blow glanced off his ear.

Dazed, he was barely aware that the teens were grabbing his medical kit and tricorder. Red stars burst across his vision after one of them kicked him in the ribs. He doubled over in pain, coughing and spraying blood onto the sidewalk.

Barely conscious, Bashir heard the gang members laughing as they ran away, melting back into the shadows.

9

“Of courseI’ve questioned it,” Dax said. “Even if my symbiont hadn’t lived through nine hosts, two of us have been Starfleet officers, and one of us was a Federation diplomat. It’s inevitable that we’d have a wider view of things than most. That we’d question the status quo more.” She was sitting behind the controls of the Rio Grande,one hand guiding the vessel on a swift suborbital trajectory over the Ganses Peninsula toward the Caves of Mak’ala. Her other hand, the one that still sported an angry red phaser burn, absent-mindedly played with the fragment from the Kurlan naiskos.The pain in her hand was tolerable, though she wished she’d taken a moment to treat it with a dermal regenerator before beaming the runabout’s medical equipment down to Julian.

“So what makes you different from the protesters?” Cyl asked, sitting next to her. He appeared more relaxed than he had back in Talris’s office. But Dax knew he was a military general, and therefore a soldier. She surmised that he was really as tense as she was, if not more so.

“Questioning and exploring aren’t quite the same as anarchy and outright defiance of authority,” she said, a touch of defensiveness rising within her. She was reminded briefly of Curzon’s wry observation that anarchy is better than no government at all.

Cyl nodded, his mouth forming a small smile. “So it’s a matter of degree, not necessarily a question of the goal. And you would never defy the authority of accepted morality by say…reassociation?”

Dax’s eyes narrowed as her mind flashed back to the brief time that Jadzia Dax had met Torias Dax’s previous wife, Nilani Kahn, whose symbiont was then hosted in the body of Dr. Lenara Kahn. Dax had been willing to break the taboo forbidding reassociation between joined Trills who had been intimate with one another during previous lives. Kahn, however, decided ultimately not to pursue their renewed relationship.

“Point taken,” Dax said after a moment of reflection. “But it sounds to me that you’re either finding reasons to excuse the actions of these neo-Purists, or you’re painting anyone who disobeys the rules with the same broad brush you’d use on the radical fringe.”

Cyl’s smile widened. “I’m doing neither, Ezri. Or maybe both. This is a confusing time for Trill, and no matter what comes in the next days and weeks, we are allgoing to have to reexamine our values and beliefs. Our traditions and laws may be open to change, and we’ll be forced to decide if our society shouldchange, or if we should remain anchored to the past. Evolution itself is about change, after all. Do we allow our society to evolve? And if we examine the mistakes and secrets of our past, how will that affect the evolution of our future?”

Dax checked the course of the runabout on the instrument panel, then looked back over at Cyl. “You’re certainly not Audrid’s little girl Neema any longer. You’ve become quite the warrior-philosopher.”

“The accumulated experiences of six hosts tend to do that sort of thing to a person,” Cyl said. “Not that I need to tell you,Para.”

The word hit Dax harder than she thought it might have in any other context. “Para” had been Neema’s childhood name for her mother, Audrid Dax, lifetimes ago. Now Dax was a part of a twenty-seven-year-old Starfleet officer, and Cyl existed as a fifty-something-year-old military general. The familial bond they had once shared remained strong in Dax’s memory, but the physicality of their current hosts made such recollections feel strange and confusing. Such mnemonic turmoil no doubt accounted, at least in part, for the Trill people’s cultural taboo against reassociation.

Dax looked at the Kurlan fragment she was holding and turned it over in her hands. “I don’t regret it, you know. Reassociation, I mean. I don’t regret what happened with Lenara Kahn. Just as I don’t regret my decision to reconnect with my friends on Deep Space 9, or getting reacquainted with you.”

“Maybe not yet,” Cyl said, a wry grin appearing on his face even as his eyes grew sadder and older. “Give it time. I can be quite the tyrant.”

Dax returned the grin. So could Neema.

She looked up at Cyl. “Do you suppose that a part of the taboo against reassociation is to keep the joined from sharing too much of the past? I mean, it seems as though that concept is against everything we’re taught about revering memory and history. Did we decide somewhere along the line that reassociation could spark some kind of…atavistic racial recollection of early Trill?” She held up the Kurlan object so that Cyl could see it clearly. “Or of some horrible truth we’ve kept buried deep in our past?”

“Why don’t you ask Audrid?” Cyl said. “True, the Cyl symbiont is older than Dax, but Audrid was the head of the Symbiosis Commission for over fifteen years.” He hesitated, then looked away. “But then, Audrid always excelled at keeping secrets.”

Dax and Cyl had danced around that subject time and time again. How Jayvin Vod, Neema’s father and Audrid’s husband, had been taken over by one of the parasites, in the icy interior of a rogue comet. How Jayvin had been allowed to die because of the irreversible psychic damage the Vod symbiont had suffered. How, in order to keep the existence of the parasites quiet, Audrid had lied to her children about the actual circumstances of Jayvin Vod’s death, thereby estranging Neema from her for years. How Audrid had eventually told Neema the complete truth about her father’s death, including the facts about the parasite, a creature supposedly stricken from Trill’s earliest historical records, buried and forgotten.

More than a hundred years and a lifetime later, the pain of Audrid’s betrayal of her daughter’s trust evidently remained an open wound for Taulin Cyl.

Dax reached out and took Cyl’s hand, squeezing it. He looked at her, his eyes uncharacteristically soft and imploring. “I’m sorry, Neema,” Dax said, her voice taking on Audrid’s measured cadence. “I would give anything to change what happened that day.”

“And that is the difference between us and the powers that we serve,” Cyl said, nodding. “We should not reassociate. We should not remember the bad. We should cover up our sins. That is what the governing body of Trill wants.” He chuckled slightly. “Perhaps neither of us is really very different from the people who are crying out for radical change.”