“Dad?” she said when the standing and staring was too much to keep doing. He didn’t answer, so she said it again.

“The Crenshaws aren’t going to make it this season,” Joseph Sisko said without turning. “Some kind of grubs been chewing at the roots. Gaby tries hard, but she can’t stay ahead of them.”

“Grubs need to eat, too,” she said.

Dad nodded. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

Then Judith heard something she hadn’t since she arrived from Portland a few days earlier—a laugh. Slight, but it was there.

“Nice to hear you laugh.”

“It’s just strange not to hear someone nag at me about getting out of this room.”

“I would if I thought it’d do any good. But you’ve always known your own mind.”

“Finally, one of my children shows some sense,” Dad said.

“You’re still thinking about Ben, aren’t you?” Judith asked. She’d hesitated mentioning her brother’s name before now, dancing around it whenever possible, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to be able not to mention him forever.

Dad continued looking out the window. Several minutes passed before he spoke again. “You know, I’ve always worked that garden with my hands, from before you were born. With all the technology in the world—and believe me, I appreciate it all, in its place—that was the one place where nothing aside from water, sunshine, and time could make a difference. When Ben was a little boy, he used to go out there and wiggle his toes in the dirt. You, too, as I recall. It never seemed like those days would end.”

“Ben knew the risks that came with his job, Dad,” Judith said gently. “We all did. The day he left for Starfleet Academy, we knew we might have to deal with the possibility that he’d never come home.”

“Don’t talk to me about risks,” Dad snapped. “He wasn’t killed by the Tzenkethi or vaporized by the Borg or blown to hell by the Dominion. Even that I could accept. I could make peace with it and move on. But he was taken from us, Judith. That damn planet and those so-called prophets took him away from everything he loves, and everyone that loves him. And still they weren’t satisfied. They had to take my grandson, too.”

“We don’t know that, Dad. What happened to Jake, wherever he is, it may have nothing to do with Ben.

He scowled at her. “Maybe you can convince yourself of that. I can’t. The boy’s ship disappears the moment it leaves for Earth, and you want me to believe it has nothing to do with that damned thing…that wormhole?

Her father shook his head, muttering, “I told him not to take that assignment. Seven years ago, I told him. Stay on Mars, I said. Build ships. At least you’ll be close to Earth. Or forget Starfleet and just come home. He wasn’t over Jen’s death. He needed more time. But he went anyway, and what’s worse is that he took Jake with him to that floating junkyard. Now they’re both gone.” He buried his face in his hands. “God forgive me, sometimes I wish Ben had never been born.”

“Dad, you don’t mean that—”

“Sometimes I do,” he confessed, eyes welling with tears as he spoke. “I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. They did it, Judith. They made him. Used me and Sarah both just so we’d bring Ben into the world, so that years later they could use him.Like they used me. Like they’ve used all of us.”

Judith took her father’s head in her hands and pulled him close as he wept. He seemed so much smaller now, so diminished.

She recalled when her father had come to see her in Portland over a year ago—an unprecedented visit—just so he could try to explain the bizarre story he needed to share. How her late mother Rebecca had actually been Dad’s second wife, and not Ben’s mother at all. How Ben had learned the truth, that his birth mother Sarah had been the vessel for one of the alien entities who supposedly lived in the Bajoran wormhole, just so that Ben could be born to fulfill his destiny on the other side of the quadrant. It seemed impossible, even in a universe already teeming with unlikely wonders. Judith had not been sure she could believe it. But as her father told her his tale, she knew that hedid.

Ah, Ben…How do I make sense of this?To her, Benjamin Lafayette Sisko was nothing more or less than her gawky older brother: adorable as a child, infuriating as a teenager, a source of pride as a man. But there was nothing supernatural about him. He was the obnoxious brat who pushed her into the creek when she was nine. He was the mechanical genius who helped her construct their robotic skeleton float for that last Mardi Gras before he enrolled in the Academy, then blamed her when it fell drunkenly against the ornate wrought-iron railing on one of the balconies that lined Bourbon Street. (She never did get him to admit that he’d overloaded the servos, causing the float to veer off course as it walked.) And he was the awkward Starfleet ensign introducing his fiancée to the family for the first time. Judith remembered thinking she’d never seen a man so nervous as when Dad launched into stories of Ben’s mischievous youth…or a man more in love as Ben kissed the heads of Jennifer and their nursing newborn son the morning after Jake was born.

When Jennifer died…Judith had known it was a wound from which Ben would never completely recover; it had been too brutal, and too closely tied to his life as a Starfleet officer for him not to believe he bore some responsibility for her death. After his reassignment to Utopia Planitia following a brief stint supervising construction of habitats in orbit of Earth, Judith made a point to visit him and Jake during her annual tour with the Martian Philharmonic. He’d been so distant, and she worried that the old connection between them was lost forever, as so much else had been lost when Jennifer died. But then after Jake had turned in, he came out to see her on his apartment’s observation deck, and as they both stood watching the red planet rotate overhead, he started talking.

“I’ve been reassigned,” he began.

She looked at him, knowing from the way he’d said it that he hadn’t meant he was going back to Earth. “Where are you headed?” she’d asked.

“Bajor,” he’d said.

“I don’t think I know it.”

“No reason you should,” Ben told her. “It’s a Cardassian subject world. The Cardassians are withdrawing after fifty years of occupation. Now the Bajorans have petitioned the Federation for membership and invited Starfleet to help them administrate a space station the Cardassians are abandoning, for use as a Federation starbase.”

“Cardassia…” Judith had repeated. That was a name she’d recognized. Ben’s new assignment would be taking him to the fringes of Federation space.

“I’m to be the station commander,” Ben elaborated. “Starfleet needs someone to work with the Bajorans, help prepare them for entry into the Federation. They’re promoting me to full commander for the job.”

“Why you?” Judith had asked.

Ben had smiled grimly as he watched Olympus Mons come into view. “I’ve been asking myself the same question. I suspect one reason is all those years working with Curzon. They have this misplaced idea I’ve learned the fine art of diplomacy.”

Judith had decided to ignore Ben’s modesty. “Is there another reason?”

Ben sighed, then turned his gaze toward an EVA crew working on the hull of a nearby starship nestled inside the surrounding lattice of a repair scaffold. “I think they feel I’ve been back in drydock long enough.”

“Have you told Dad yet?”

Ben shook his head.

“When do you leave?”

He met her eyes for the first time that evening. “Jake and I ship out in three days.”

“Three days?” she’d cried. “Were you even going to tell me if I hadn’t come to Mars? Ben, what the hell are you waiting for? How can you spring this on Dad with only three days’ notice?”