Gul Ocett was persuasive in her quiet and reasoned strength. Indeed, the irony, Doctor, is that she was espousing the very argument I had made to you any number of times. Even now there was a part of me that accepted the logic of her argument, especially when coming from someone who was neither a fool nor an opportunist. Gul Madred saw his opening.

“I think this is the moment to let Korbath Mondrig speak and explain what we have in mind as a strategy.” Madred nodded to Mondrig, a physically small man who had been listening very carefully.

“Thank you,” Mondrig said with a smile his closely set eyes didn’t share. “Unless, of course, others wish to express their views,” he graciously offered. The only people who hadn’t spoken were Nal Dejar and the disfigured man. Because of her training and naturally closed face, Dejar was hard to read. Not a flicker of recognition registered when she saw me. And the man’s face was so damaged and his body so still, he had almost no presence. Both of them remained silent.

Mondrig nodded. “It is an honor to be among people I consider heroes of the Empire,” he said.

“What little is left of it,” Evek muttered. Hadar sighed again, and Evek gave him a hard look but held his tongue.

“Yes, unfortunately, as Gul Ocett has said, we have been deeply wounded.” Mondrig’s tone was deferential, almost obsequious, but there was a mannered quality I didn’t trust. At that moment he looked right at me. “And I must confess that the presence of this gentleman surprises me as well. Forgive me,” he nodded in my direction, “but in our Paldar Sector he is associated with Ghemor and Parmak. If I’m not mistaken, you even held a rally for their Unity Project at your . . . memorial?” It was phrased as a question, but the intent was clear. The attention of the others now shifted to me.

“Reunion Project,” I corrected.

“Yes, of course,” he accepted the correction.

“How chummy,” Hadar commented.

“Yes, I hosted the rally,” I admitted.

“Why?” Hadar asked.

“I admire Dr. Parmak. I’d been working with him on a med unit, and when he asked if he could use my home for a rally, I agreed.”

“Why?” Hadar repeated with the satisfied look of a clever interrogator.

“Because I wanted to hear his point of view,” I replied.

“You’ve lived on a Federation outpost for how many years?” Hadar asked pointedly.

“I also went to school with Alon Ghemor, and I’ve always found him to be an honorable man.”

“A family of traitors!” Hadar concluded, looking at the others as if he’d made some damaging point about my character. I simply smiled at him, genuinely amused by his amateur attempts to discredit me. I was surprised by my responses. I was here to play the role of double agent, and I found that as the meeting went on I didn’t have the energy for the requisite guile and misdirection.

“What are you telling us, Garak?” Parn challenged. I smiled at him. It was so transparent, what they were doing. So predictable. Each sector was planning to choose a leader. A council would then be formed from the “elected” leaders of each sector, which would lead the city and most likely a reorganized union. Public sentiment for this democratic process was too strong to oppose, especially when there was no longer an army to throw against the heretics. The Directorate wouldn’t oppose the vote, but they would get around it by backing their candidate in each election, thus creating a council that would then become an instrument of their will.

“What are you telling us?” Parn repeated the challenge.

And then a strange sensation went through me, Doctor. I looked at the faces of these people. Here we are, I thought, sitting in the basement of a ruined civilization and conducting business as if nothing significant had changed. The enemies were still the same, somewhere “out there,” plotting how to “destroy our character” and colonize us with their political system. And we were down in the basement with our own plots and shifting alliances, tenaciously holding on to the very ideas that had brought us here. But what ideas, Doctor? There’s nothing left. Only fantasies of power. These faces with their masks. With the ironic exception of the disfigured face, the masks hadn’t changed. They reflected the usual range of hidden agendas, each competing for dominance and ascendancy with an energy commensurate to the amount of fear and self‑loathing that fueled and motivated that person. I started to laugh.

“Does my question amuse you, Garak?” Parn asked, his mask revealing the anger and the lust for power that fueled hisagenda. He didn’t even try to disguise his impatience with me. The ideology, the patchwork of old ideas and mythology was in place; the boundaries that determined what was sacred and received “truth” and what was heresy were set: all that remained was for him to arrange the power structure and assign each person his or her role in it. He was the deal maker, the broker–and he wanted to get on with the business of satisfying his lust.

I looked around the table, from face to face, mask to mask. Evek and Ocett were honorable soldiers who had dedicated themselves to the old ideals of Cardassian purity and superiority. But the failure of the system that had contained these ideals, and the ensuing devastation, had left them deeply troubled and confused. What was their responsibility in the breakdown? Who was this man Parn hastily reassembling these ideals into a system they both knew could never be the same? But their education, their conditioning, their having been bred to a society that answered all problems with a received set of answers enabled them to question only so far. Parn had skillfully used limits set long ago; beyond them was the demonized void dominated by Federation ideas waiting for the right moment to attack.

Unlike Evek and Ocett, Mondrig was a little man without a center, Parn’s propagandist and puppet, whose job was to stand in front of the people with a mask that would mirror our beliefs, our prejudices, our hopes, and our fears. He was the consummate politician who would deliver the message in a way that would never threaten or challenge us. He desperately aspired to belong to this group, the repository of Cardassian power, and the group only wanted to use him for the demagoguery that would further entrench its power.

Hadar was a degenerate. His mask, like the features of his face, was without the definition of a life that was lived and thought and felt. He accepted his privilege without question or gratitude to those forebears who had passionately struggled for their beliefs. He believed in nothing but his appetites. The ultimate parasite.

Madred had the same forebears, but his mask was sharper than Hadar’s because he still had the passion of his beliefs: he desired to maintain the old ways at all costs because anything else was inconceivable. He would even associate himself with Mondrig, a man he’d said he wouldn’t let “clean his shoes,” if it meant the old order could be restored. There was fear in his mask: the fear of change.

Nal Dejar’s mask was closer to home; she reflected my own religious dedication to the “secrets of the state.” We lived in the shadows, and our masks played with light and darkness, like the regnar’s skin. We passed through life like Tain’s “night people,” with no allegiances except to the secrets. And the more successful we were, the slighter and more invisible we became, until we easily occupied space the way a shadow falls across light.

And the disfigured mask, the most honest one in the room. . . . The one good eye, peering out at me from an interior prison of pain and bitter disillusionment, gave me permission to study his mask–and we made contact.

It washim, Doctor. It was Pythas.

“My friend,” I whispered. I think only Madred and Nal Dejar heard me.

“Are you willing to help us?” Parn asked harshly, his attention still focused on my loyalty to his cause. I remembered my conversation with Tolan about the price of “status.” “Or are you sympathetic with these people?”