“Silence, exile, and cunning.” An expression which comes from a human someone urged me to read. His writing was too childish for my taste, but the expression always had meaning for me. Silence. Exile. Cunning. After all, we do have to get on with our work, however we can and in whatever circumstances. If mending the garments of our military occupation was the work designed for my survival in this time and place, then it would not be terribly cunning of me to refuse it. No, I decided that I was not going to sacrifice myself to Dukat’s desire for revenge. I would do this work; I would do it so well as to become indispensible to the station . . . and I would survive. I refused to be buried alive in this humiliation.

For the first time since I had arrived on Terok Nor, I felt an energy, an appetite for meeting this challenge, and I began to construct a course of action. Once the computer was up and functioning, I could get all the necessary information and guidance, but I still lacked state‑of‑the art tools. I quickly discovered that there was only one person on the station who could help me procure what I needed: the Ferengi publican, a Mr. Quark.

I found Quark’s establishment noisy and tiresome, filled with people looking for quick fixes and easy answers. And yet, here I was, looking for a shortcut of my own. I certainly didn’t come for rewarding conversation.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Quark,” I asked a Ferengi barkeep.

“And who’s looking for him?” he replied with unpleasant suspicion.

It turned out to be Quark himself. As I made my proposal, I was somewhat unsettled by the unblinking avarice in his eyes and the metallic assault of his voice. But as we got further into the negotiating details, I found him to be a reasonable man. Quark makes no pretense about his priorities, and woe to the person who enters into negotiations with him who doesn’t have his wits about him. And who doesn’t have a capacity for the drink Quark liberally pours during the haggling. But he delivered, Hadar paid, and I was soon set up with the tools of my new career.

Entry:

I pride myself on being a quick study, but even I am pleased with the progress I’m making in learning the tailoring craft. Indeed, I’m able to use many of the qualities I developed in the Obsidian Order: patience, precision, the ability to calculate how each part fits into the whole pattern. I suppose I should be grateful Enabran didn’t have me assigned to the ore‑processing center.

But the best part–which nearly drove me mad at the beginning–is the solitude, the silence in which I work. Although I did my best to use this work to blot out every thing and person from my past, I couldn’t help but recall that initial joy I found in the Mekar Wilderness. For it’s in this silence, as I cut and sew and measure, that I’m relearning how to listen. Not to the prattling of others, certainly not to the fantasies that my memory provokes when I try to rewrite history. But to the deeper voices in myself. What is pain, for example, but another voice to be listened to? Don’t identify. Keep your distance. But listen! There’s information that can help me find the missing piece to any puzzle; that can save me from this waking nightmare. Because it’s in this silence–as I listen to these voices–that I’m learning how to reinvent myself.

As my tailoring skills increase, so do the interruptions of my solitude by people who throw their garments at me as if their imperfections were my fault. Dukat has spread the word that I am a disgraced traitor, and I have become the receptacle for any ill will that walks into my shop. But I say nothing. These are only more voices that command my attention. I pick up their garments and mend them flawlessly. When they complain that the price is steep (because I’m treated like a slave doesn’t mean I’m going to start undervaluing my work), I just give them the smile–the smile shetaught me. It somehow tranquilizes them while I pick through their psyches. Oh, they pay, one way or another. When Quark found out how much I was commanding for a simple alteration he asked me how I was getting away with it. I assured him that I didn’t know what he was talking about . . . and smiled while he poured another glass of kanar.

But the silence in which I reinvent myself (out of whole cloth, as it were) is not easy. For someone who values the art of conversation as much as I do, establishing a new life based on the power of silence requires a cunning of which I never dreamed. But it’s my only chance to reassemble the mosaic. So I sit here, day after day, and work and watch and listen . . . trusting that sooner or later all the information I need to return home will come to me.

2

We live in an eternal twilight, Doctor. Because of the wind currents, the dust clouds produced by the innumerable detonations all over the planet have joined and created an unbroken atmospheric cover. For a while it seemed that the clouds covering the city were lifting and dissipating, but it was only a temporary clearing as they were soon replaced by others that had grown thicker and larger from their travels. We are now as gray as Romulus, but without the mitigating lushness.

Now that the thoroughfares have been cleared, I have resumed my long walks. Just in time, I might add. My dreams have become increasingly disturbed of late, and I wonder how much my involvement with what Gul Madred calls my necropolis has to do with it. And then there’s the invitation Madred has extended to me to join him at the next meeting in order to meet his colleagues . . . and my old schoolmate. Could it be him? After my exile, both Pythas and Palandine dropped out of sight. No matter how hard I tried to track them during my time on Deep Space 9, I could get no information. Either my attempts were stonewalled or I was told that they’d been victims of internecine warfare during the Dominion Occupation. At this moment I am almost afraid to discover that they’d survived. A part of me has wanted to bury that part of my life. The defenses I set up to survive my exile are obviously still intact.

I am often joined on my walks by Dr. Parmak. He’s a charming conversationalist, with a first‑rate mind. His perspectives are always provocative. He does, however, have a tendency to proselytize for Alon Ghemor and the “Reunion Project” (the name they’ve given their group to remind people of the principles that formed the original Union). Whenever we encounter other pedestrians along our route, Parmak engages them and attempts to win them over to the Reunion side. This often makes for spirited exchanges, and although I am subjected to the opinions of people who should be given a new brain, I rather enjoy this peripatetic politicking. It’s something I would never have done on my own. In some respects he is so much like you, Doctor. If I’ve found someone’s opinion insufferably boring, he’ll kindly but sternly lecture me on the value of tolerance.

“ ‘Reunion’ is about bringing together allpoints of view, Elim.”

“So we can spew forth whatever nonsense comes to mind?”

“In a context, my friend. There must be a political context, so that one opinion doesn’t dominate to the point of shutting out all others,” he patiently explained.

“The ‘anarchy project’ would be a more apt name for your group, Doctor,” I replied.

“Oh, my dear Elim,” is his favorite expression, usually delivered with a sigh and a sad shake of his head. But I listen to him because it’s bracing to have a genuine voice of optimism in the midst of this dust and devastation.

One day I asked him how he had been brought to Enabran Tain’s attention. He never struck me as being a dangerous radical. It turns out that he was Tain’s personal physician, and that the great man had him interrogated because, the Doctor assumed, “he was concerned that I was in an ideal position to assassinate him.”