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Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Volume Three

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Mass-Market Paperback / February, 2005
0-7434-8353-7

"Satisfaction is Not Guaranteed" written by Keith R.A. DeCandido
"Olympus Descending" written by David R. George III

Excerpt:

The strange beast descended on vast gossamer wings, coasting gracefully down through the atmosphere as though deciding whether or not to allow gravity to take hold of it. Its simple, relatively small body--no larger than a runabout--appeared little more than a cytoplasm-filled pouch. The primitive mass hung from the juncture of the membranous extremities, dwarfed by them as they blanketed the twilit sky with their filmy reach.

Odo perceived the unfamiliar creature not by way of his own senses, but via those of the Great Link. He drifted through the changeling deep not unlike the way the unusual being floated through the air. Odo's metamorphic body, protracted into countless planes and tendrils, many only a single cell through, stretched through the commingled volume of his people, a part of the whole. Connections formed and dissolved with contact and separation, passed from one to another, from one to many, from many to one. Fluid shapes arose sporadically in the living ocean like silhouettes in a lightless room, then slipped away, shadows uniting with the dark.

Communication occurred among the changelings as both control and reflex. Discourse and dialogue took place, willfully directed, while the experience of form flowed involuntarily from one to another, a spontaneous response of tangency. Emotion and perception fell somewhere in between. Odo sensed the mammoth creature through his interface with other Founders. Those whose cells blended to fashion the surface of the Link conveyed their observations of the winged being as it glided downward through the sky.

Odo withdrew into himself, away from the joining. He moved, fluttering the wisps of his body and propelling himself upward through the liquid assemblage of his people. As he did so, he felt their communal unease, which seemed now to grow. When Odo had returned to the Great Link a month ago, he'd been welcomed back eagerly, but in addition to that enthusiasm, he'd also distinguished an undercurrent of restiveness. He'd attributed it at first to his homecoming after having been away for so long, but as time had passed and the Founders' anxiety hadn't lessened, he'd eventually concluded that some other impulse drove their collective state of mind. He had just begun to explore what that might be when he'd become aware of the huge, diaphanous beast dropping toward the planet.

A sliver of Odo's body reached the upper limit of the Link and touched the air above it. His transitory form possessed no humanoid sensory organs at the moment, and so he did not see or hear, smell or taste. And yet he experienced sensation, comprehensive sensation, and with it, an awareness, a perception of the external universe.

Odo regarded the skies, and now identified not just one bulbous projection depending from the center of the creature, but three. He also discerned that it had decreased overall in size; its quartet of wings, which had initially extended almost from horizon to horizon, now traversed less than half that area. As the creature dropped, the diminution continued, its aerial appendages rippling in patches as they contracted, the sheer, delicate flesh shimmering a metallic-golden color there. Abruptly, Odo recognized the being.

Gathering his body, Odo set off through the Great Link, a finned, undulating missile traveling at speed. As he raced toward the two-peaked islet that rose out of the glistening changeling sea, he noted the mixture of anticipation and concern building higher in his people. But while he could understand their expectancy, and felt excited himself at the return of another Founder--and perhaps three other Founders--he felt disappointed and isolated that they had not divulged to him the original source of their disquiet.

He slid swiftly along, images from those at the surface of the Link confirming what he'd foreseen: that the trajectory of the arriving changeling would bring it down onto the islet. As Odo approached the same location, he slowed and looked inward. In his mind, he called up visions of tides, rolling waters embodying motion, progressing inexorably through time and space. Within the tides, he summoned the circular movements of vortices, and within the vortices, their unseen but quantifiable derivatives: points without length or depth or breadth, measuring instantaneous rates of change.

Odo began to alter as he visualized what he would become. He saw with precision the contours of the body he would inhabit, felt the exact limits of the physical frame he would take. The path to change had not always been like this for him, so clearly definable. For a long time, he had pictured a result he lacked the capability to fully assess. His cells would adjust and shift, but not as he'd wanted, not entirely, and in the end, his form would be left only a close approximation of his conception. But now, after months of guidance from his people, what he envisioned, he became.

Odo's body mutated, spinning into a contained whirlpool, swirling in upon itself, and upward, counter to gravity. He hurled himself free of the Great Link and into the open air, and then over, in that direction, toward the scrap of land, and down, onto the ragged rock. He felt the mercurial potential of his physical being, and strived to construct reality out of mere possibility.

And so: the transformation, proprioception made conscious thought, surging through the process in reverse, from the fluxion of the dimensionless instant, through vortex upon vortex, wheeling in retrograde eddies, incorporating into the internal current, growing focused, and so: the transformation.

He became the humanoid Odo.

Standing on the small island, he looked skyward, just in time to see the returning changelings' wings fold in on themselves in an iridescent rush. The three teardrop-shaped pouches, deprived of their means of flight, dropped the twenty or so meters onto the center of the islet. Each less than a quarter the size of a runabout now, their pliant bodies spread on the bottom as they landed, absorbing the impact. Odo expected all of them to morph immediately into other forms, but only the one in the center did so. It climbed upward, straightened and narrowed in a coruscation of orange-gold, then solidified into a humanoid figure with a broad chest and wide shoulders: Laas.

"Welcome--" Odo started, and then hesitated. He'd been about to say "Welcome home," but found himself choking back the second word. He nodded, and began again. "Welcome back," he said.

Laas paced forward until he stood directly in front of Odo, making no move to link with him. Though having proven adept at learning from the Great Link the practice of perfectly mimicking other life forms, Laas still took on the approximate, somewhat unfinished appearance that he'd worn during his two centuries with the Varalans. When Odo shapeshifted into humanoid form, as he just had, he did likewise, choosing to manifest not precisely as a Bajoran, but with the same smooth features he'd established during his forty years with them.

"'Welcome,'" Laas responded, practically spitting the word. His deep-set eyes narrowed beneath the fleshy ridges that ran across his brow. Odo, several centimeters shorter, peered up and studied his features: the slight, V-shaped bulge of his forehead; the pronounced cheekbones; the mouth curling downward at its edges; the flanges of skin connecting his nostrils to his face. He wore an expression of unmistakable anger. "I do not want to be welcomed," he declared. "I want to know why the Hundred were sent out. I want to know why we were sent away."

Odo met Laas's stare for a long moment, unimpressed by the vehemence with which he'd delivered his words. As chief of security aboard Deep Space 9, Odo had often been confronted with belligerence, and he'd always tended to react to it impassively. He did so now, stepping casually to the side and around Laas. "It's good to see you as well," he said.

"I have no quarrel with you, Odo," Laas said, turning toward him. "You are one of the Hundred. You are one of us." He gestured past Odo, at the other two changelings. Laas, who'd had no knowledge of the Founders prior to meeting Odo in the Alpha Quadrant almost a year and a half ago, had joined the Great Link after the end of the war. The Founders had cured him of the slow-acting disease engineered by Section 31, but he'd stayed only a few months before leaving on a personal quest to locate more of the Hundred.

"You know why we were sent out," Odo said. "I told you about it when we first met."

"I know what you told me," Laas snapped. "Now I want to know the truth." He stalked past Odo, heading toward one of the other changelings.

"I've told you the truth," Odo insisted.

"Have you?" Laas challenged him, spinning to face him. "Do you even know the truth?" Holding Odo's gaze, he stepped backward to the center of the islet, into the space between the two amorphous changelings. "Tell me again then. Tell me why the Great Link sent out a hundred of their own--a hundred innocents--to endure loneliness, and suffering, and death."

"What are you talking about?" Odo asked. He looked at one of the unformed shapeshifters, and then at the other. Only then did he spy the small mound of ashes sitting between the two, the grainy, charcoal-gray substance difficult to see against the dark rock. Laas must have carried the material with him, depositing it on the islet when he'd landed. Odo had seen such a sight just once previously--nearly five years ago, aboard Defiant--but he knew it at once as the remains of a dead changeling.

"Yes," Laas said, apparently noting Odo's recognition of the unmoving ashes. "That's what I'm talking about." His heated tones filled the islet. "So tell me again: why were we exiled from our people? For what good purpose did this happen?"

And suddenly, staring at the desiccated reliquiae of a fellow changeling, Odo no longer had an answer.

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