In the Hands of the Prophets

JAKE SISKO breathed deeply the dry air of B'hala and, as softly as a kiss, blew it out again.

The finest particles of dust danced away from the standing stone, caught in the bright sunlight to swirl like stars in a distant galaxy, swept away by Jake's exhalation and the gentle sweep of his archaeologist's brush.

Jake knelt to examine more closely the last details of the ancient carving he had discovered and now revealed.

Among those details was a single, simple glyph of ancient Bajoran, more familiar to him than his own name.

“There,” he said, and the word hung in the still, silent air. He touched his finger to the stone, to trace out the worn but unmistakable lines carved by passionate hands long since turned to dust. Kasidy's shadow fell over him.

“Welcome, Emissary,” she said, reading the inscription as easily as could Jake.

Jake turned to her, smiling as he saw the child asleep in her arms. Her child. His father's child.

The child of Bajor, to whom even the kai bowed her head in reverence.

“There's no question now,” Jake said.

At the mouth of the cave on the outskirts of what once had been the first and oldest section of the city, Kasidy leaned down to peer more closely at the stone embedded in the rock. “But the way they're depicted, Jake. It's so different from the others.”

“Because it's the first time they were depicted.”

Kasidy's smile lit up her face. The expression came more easily to her face now than it had that first year, before the child was born. Before the new prophecies had been revealed. Before so many things.

“Is it?” she asked as she straightened up. “Or is it someone's idea of a joke?”

Jake understood why she asked the question. He couldn't blame her. Every other representation of the mystics of Jalkaree were almost identical in their presentation of three learned men.

But this carving, buried for millennia, clearly predated all the rest. It had been carved while the mystics had walked this world, before legend and tradition had compromised fact.

“Twenty-five thousand years ago,” Jake said, “this wasn't something the Bajorans could joke about.”

He pointed to the silhouettes beneath the glyphs.

“See? This is Shabren as he's always depicted.” The first silhouette showed the traditional stooped figure of an old man; above him, the hourglass shape of a Prophet's tear—the Orb of Prophecy. “But here, beside him, Eilin is clearly a woman.” The lines of the second silhouette made that obvious.

“Then how can you be sure it is Eilin?”

“Because she's at Shabren's right hand—where Eilin is always depicted. And it really makes more sense when you consider that to the Bajorans who inhabited this area when B'hala was founded, that's the position that would have been taken by an elder's spouse. And see here . . .” Jake lightly drew his brush back and forth across the weathered carving of the second great mystic. “Here's Eilin's bag of knowledge. It all fits, Kas. Shabren stooped with an Orb over his head—the symbol of the knowledge of the Prophets that he gave to Bajor. Eilin with the bag in which she kept her scrolls—the symbol of her knowledge of the world that she gave to Bajor.”

“But what about Naradim?” Kasidy asked. “Shouldn't he be carrying his abacus—symbol of the knowledge of mathematics that he gave to Bajor?”

Jake grinned at her formality. “Naradim didn't need an abacus. That came much later, as a way the Bajorans could keep up with him.”

“But look how much shorter he is. Doesn't that mean he's younger than the other two?” Kasidy asked. “And don't the texts say the three were the same age?”

“They might say that,” Jake said. “Or they might be saying that the three arrived at the same time. The old glyphs are . . . imprecise. The explanation could just be as simple as we see it here: He's not younger, just shorter. And see here . . .” Jake tapped his brush against the third silhouette.

“His hood is up,” Kasidy said. “That's traditional, at least.”

“But now we know why,” Jake said. “It had to be in that position so the Bajorans wouldn't know he was . . . from someplace else.”

Jake laid down his brush, stood up, stretched, scratched at the beard he wore.

The child in Kasidy's arms stirred, half-awake, half-dreaming in this lost city.

Kasidy stroked the child's head and timeless sleep returned.

“This makes things very complicated, don't you think?” she asked. “I mean, not just time travel but circles of events looping from one alternate time to affect events in another . . .”

“Maybe there aren't any alternates,” Jake said. He had spent long nights thinking of all this during his time in B'hala, during his voyage through the wormhole. One of his friends in Starfleet had hinted to him that this interconnection among different histories had been suspected before in events involving the Romulan Empire. “Maybe the way we see time as being quantum, as going either one way or the other, isn't the way it really is. Maybe all the different timelines are like the planets were to our ancestors. Individual worlds with their own existence. Their own destinies. And maybe . . . eventually . . . we'll learn to travel between them, instead of just stumbling around like we do now.”

Jake had no doubt about what could be used to travel among the timelines, the pathway that linked all times.

“Infinite worlds,” Kasidy mused. “And infinite times. An infinity of infinities.” She looked down at the child of Bajor. “So what about the timeline you saw? The future where everything ended.”

Jake closed his eyes and turned his face upward, toward Bajor-B'hava'el, savoring the heat he had come to associate with B'hala. The moment in his life that Kasidy was asking about, the journey into a future that now could never be, it was more like a dream when he remembered it.

“I think that was a warning,” he said. “For us or for the Prophets, I don't know. But it was a warning that had to be, so that . . .” Jake opened his eyes and looked down again, at the three silhouettes on the stone—Shabren, Eilin, and Naradim, to be sure. Picard, Vash, and Nog—who could say for certain? “So that the circles could wheel within circles. So that we could see that one time doesn't exclude another.”

“Another time,” Kasidy said beside him.

The child in her arms gurgled happily, still caught within a dream.

A sudden wind gusted up then, sending the dust at the mouth of the cave into a helix of shifting sparkles, glittering almost like an Orb, Jake thought.

And then the heat of the day vanished, and from deep in the cave, it was as if a light flickered somewhere far off.

A light that was obscured by a figure before it, one hand held out to them.

Kasidy stepped forward to the edge of the cave, its depths now shimmering, radiant, as if its walls were lined with Orbs.

The sleeping child's eyes opened wide, dark and lustrous, their shining surface reflecting the light from the cave.

And then the light was no more and the dust drifted downward in the still air as the heat of B'hala returned.

Jake reached out to Kasidy, took her hand in his.

They both knew what had just happened, who had been with them.

Who would always be with them.

“Another time,” Jake said as he released her hand. Then he crouched down to touch his fingers to the silhouette of Naradim, completing one circle, knowing an infinite number remained. “We should go home.”

The Station would be waiting for them at the entrance to the wormhole. The Gateway would be waiting at the entrance to the Temple. And for the first time, Jake truly understood that the one definition did not exclude the other. Circles within circles.

Jake gazed one last time into the darkness of the cave, then turned away into the sunlight to follow Kasidy, wondering who had walked this same path millennia before him and who would walk it after him.

But when he reached the campsite, he abandoned all his thoughts of past and future for a time much more important. The child was waiting, small fingers wrapped around a favorite toy.

“Heads up!” Kasidy warned with a smile.

And in that timeless moment, accompanied by the peals of laughter

of a mother and a child, Benjamin Sisko's baseball arched into the air of B'hala, spinning gloriously in the bright sunlight, a blur of scuffed white leather and frayed red stitches, launched on an erratic path that might take it anywhere.

As he had a thousand times before, and would a thousand times again, Jake leaped up to try to catch it . . .

And from the Temple, the Prophets watched as they always did.

But in this one timeless moment, as they had learned from their Emissary, even the Prophets wondered what would happen next.