Ds9#27 A Stitch In Time: Star Trek Deep Space Nine (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

by Andrew Jordt Robinson

He prepared a cup of Tarkalean tea, which made me think of you, Doctor. How ironic, another doctor pulls old Elim out of the muck of his despair, but this time he’s a Cardassian.

And yet, the moment Julian wounded me with his ridiculous weapon, everything changed. I thought it was a magnificent moment. He showed me that he had the spine to play the game as it ought to be played. But why then did he back off? Why couldn’t he go beyond that moment? Why did our relationship end?

That’s what they believe about themselves. Is it the ‘truth’? Are they really that way? I don’t know. Perhaps it is a lie. But what people lie about the most are themselves, and these lies become the stories they believe and want to tell you.” “As long as I’m smiling,” I mumbled.

“See?” Palandine suddenly addressed me. “You can do it.” “What?” I was startled by her delighted burst. “Smile.

Wouldn’t you tell someone with that smile everything he wanted to know?” she demanded. “The first time I met him—well, the second . . .” he corrected himself, “he had a smile that I wanted to wipe off his face.” He was referring to that early morning in front of the Central Gate. “But it wasn’t that smile,” Palandine insisted. “No,” he conceded. “Definitely not that one.” And the truth was that I could feel this smile throughout my entire body.

I was certain at the time that for each of us this silent gathering was a precious respite from the relentless strivings of Bamarren ambition.

I wanted my life to be arranged without need, to be totally self-sufficient, able to do my work for the Order and find fulfillment wherever I could—to accept my life as enough. But how could I, when my deepest involvement was with orchids?

Each of us accepts the amount of responsibility we are capable of bearing. Some accept nothing, and these people are quickly swallowed by their isolation, their insanity transformed into a rationalized evil. A smaller group accepts total responsibility, and their insanity is an unbearable burden that cripples and eventually grinds them down. The rest of us carry what we can and leave the rest. For myself, Doctor, when a corpse is too heavy to bury I try to remember to ask someone to help me.

But we have become these beings—are becoming, always in the process of becoming—on these other dimensional levels that are not limited by the measures of time and space. And the great determining factor of our becoming is relationship. Unrelated, I become unrelated. Alienated. Opposed, I become an antagonist. Unified, I become integrated. A functioning member of the whole.”

“You’re an amazing man, Garak.” “And my gratitude to you can never be adequately expressed. But I shall try,” I promised.

The Doctor was puzzled. “But what you just told me, that our dreams are just another way we relate . . . ?” “I had forgotten. That point of my life was perhaps the lowest. I had forgotten many things. When I ‘woke up’ and realized that because of you I was going to live—at that moment, I began to recollect some valuable information.” “About dreams?” he asked. “Yes. But specifically about relationships, and how they set the course of our lives. You not only ‘saved’ my life, you also made it possible for me to live it.”

Surrounded by the piles of debris, oppressed by the low leaden sky, I finally began to surrender to the loneliness and loss that has preyed upon my dreams ever since I can remember. Even nothing is better than the ideas that have brought us here.

As I said, I’m an unfinished man reassembling the pieces of a broken world, and I have asked you to be a witness because you would never judge me as harshly as I judge myself. You would never deny me the opportunity of a second chance.

Wherever I am along my fateline, Doctor, I no longer feel that my life is a reaction to the choices other people have made for me.