In the Hands of the Prophets
“THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard says.
The Sisko walks with him by the cool waters of Bajor. “It does not, but it did,” the Sisko says. “Look around and see it for yourself.”
They stand together on the Promenade, the Sisko and O'Brien and twelve-year-old Jake with his bare feet and his fishing pole, and with Kai Winn and Vic and Arla Rees and all of them, and they watch the Promenade die exactly as it dies the first time, deck plates buckling, power currents sparking, debris and trailing strips of dislodged carpet spiraling into the singularity that is Quark's bar—where the Red Wormhole opens the doors to the second Temple.
“There is no second Temple,” Admiral Ross says.
He sits across from the Sisko in the Wardroom of Deep Space 9. Behind him, the casualty lists scroll endlessly as the war with the Dominion begins, ends, begins again.
The Sisko stands at the center of B'hala, in the shade of the bantaca tower.
“But there was,” the Sisko says.
“There is no was,” Kira protests.
“Then explain this,” the Sisko replies.
He is with them on the bridge of the Defiant as Deep Space 9 is consumed by the Red Wormhole and the ship is trapped in a net of energies that pull it from that time to another yet to be.
In his restaurant in New Orleans, the Sisko's father says, “That time is meaningless.”
On the sands of Tyree, the Sisko's true mother says, “And another time yet to be is more meaningless still.”
In the serene confines of the Bajoran Temple on the Promenade the Sisko's laughter echoes. “You still don't understand!” It is a marvel to him, this continuation of a state of being that should not exist without flesh to bind it. “I am here to teach you, am I not?”
“You are the Sisko, pallie,” Vic agrees.
The Sisko makes it clear for them. “Then . . . pay attention!”
The Prophets take their places in the outfield as the Sisko steps up to the plate.
“Not this again,” Nog says.
The Sisko is delighted.
“Again! That's right! You're finally getting the idea!” He tosses his baseball into the air. It hangs like a planet in space, wheeling about Bajor-B'hava'el, until there appears a baseball bat like a comet sparkling through the stars to—Interruption.
The Sisko is in the light space.
Jennifer stands before him, her legs crushed by the debris on the dying
Saratoga, her clothes sodden with her blood. “You keep bringing us back to the baseball game.”The Sisko takes her hand in his. “Yes! Because now it is you —” He looks around the nothingness, knowing they are all within it. “—all of you who will not go forward!”
Jennifer is in her robes of Kente cloth, as she wears them on the day they are wed. “There is no forward.”
The Sisko discovers he is learning about this place, as if when he falls with Dukat and his flesh is consumed by the flames of the Fire Caves, all resistance to the speed of thought is lost.
“If there is no forward,” he argues, “then why are we not already there? Why do you not know everything that I tell you?”
“You are linear,” General Martok reminds him, as if he could forget.
“So are you,” the Sisko says.
And for the very first time, the Sisko now forces them from the light space to a place he makes real, where from the mists of the moon of AR-558 Jem'Hadar soldiers advance and Houdini mines explode all around them.
“What is this?” they plaintively chorus.
“This is death,” the Sisko tells them. “This is change. This is the forward progression of time to an end in which there is no more forward. This is the fate of all beings—even your fate.”
“Impossible,” Kai Opaka says by the reflecting pool.
The Sisko leans against the bar on Space Station K-7, smiling as he looks down at the old gold shirt he wears with the arrowhead emblem that is only that, not a single molecule of communicator circuitry within it. “This is what has gone before,” he informs the smooth-foreheaded Klingons at the bar.
The Sisko stands on the sands of Mars, before the vast automated factories where nanoassemblers fabricate the parts for Admiral Picard's mad dream—the U.S.S. Phoenix. “This is what is yet to be,” he informs the Tellarite engineers at his side.
And now it is he who returns them to the light space. “And you are all part of that continuum from past to future, with an end before you as surely as you had a beginning.”
“What is this?” Arla asks in despair.
“It is why I am here.”
“You are the Emissary,” Nog agrees.
The Sisko shakes his head. “I am not the Emissary. I am your Emissary.”
“How is there a difference?” Grand Nagus Zek asks.
“Think to an earlier time. The first time I came before you.”
“You are always before us,” O'Brien says.
“I am before you now,” the Sisko agrees. “As your Emissary. As one who has come to teach you what you do not know. But before that first time—you must remember!”
The Sisko brings them all back to the baseball game.
“Here—this first time—you did not know who I was!”
Solok looks at Martok. “Adversarial.”
Martok looks at Eddington. “Confrontational.”
Eddington looks at Picard. “He must be destroyed.” The Sisko throws a ball high in the air, swings, hits one out of the park, and all the Prophets turn to watch the orb vanish in the brilliant blue sky.
“Do you see?” the Sisko asks. “How things have changed? The way you were then. The way you are now.”
The Prophets are silent.
Nineteen-year-old Jake steps forward from them all.
“This . . . does not happen,” the young man says.
“Maybe you're right,” the Sisko sighs. He sits at his desk in his 1953 Harlem apartment, pushes his glasses back along the bridge of his nose, flexes his fingers, then Bennie types on the Remington:
Maybe all of this did happen . . .
The Sisko stands on Bajor, gazing up as that world's sun reacts to the proto-matter pulse set off by the Grigari task force eight minutes earlier and goes supernova, claiming all the world and all its inhabitants on the last night of the Universe.
. . . or maybe none of it happened, Bennie types.
“But still,” the Sisko says as he tosses another baseball into the air, “you want to find out what happens next because, for now, you just don't know.”
“We know everything,” Admiral Ross says.
“Then answer me this,” the Sisko says as another fly ball clears the home-run fence. “When I first came to you, when you did not know me, why did you want to destroy me?”
The Prophets are silent.
“Then see this, and answer an even greater mystery,” the Sisko says, as he returns them all to the bridge of the Defiant just as Captain Thomas Riker delivers his ultimatum.
“What mystery?” Weyoun asks, clad in his vedek's robes.
“I will show you the fate of the people who pray to the Prophets as gods. But then you must tell me: To whom do the Prophets pray?”
The Prophets still do not answer.
But they watch as the Sisko continues his story. . . .