soul, though he’d wanted to. Oh, God, how he’d wanted to break something in that runabout on that long trip back from Trill to DS9, when she’d let him go. Because it was too late for Julian, always too late: too late with Jadzia and then with Ezri. And yet how delicate he’d been, how so very polite because good, sweet, dear Julian was brought up not to make a scene because it might draw too much attention and then people would start asking the wrong questions. So he’d always been in hiding, all his life. Even in love because the truth was so dangerous. “Too late? What does it matter now what I say when Blate’s mind is made up?”
“Because it does. Don’t you see, Julian? I’ve been honest with you when I could’ve lied. Nothing impelled me to choose against myself by showing you everything. All my ugliness and all these mistakes, ones I made even when I thought I was doing good rather than harm. But I showed you because you are a person, not an animal. I did it of my own free will, and that is the last thing that separates me from the machine, but it is the very …last…thing!” She was weeping again, tear upon tear but only along one cheek, one. “A machine can decide, but it can’t think. Unless it is programmed to do so, it will not choose against itself nor make any other judgment other than what fact allows it to see.
“But then there’s this.” She put the flat of her palm upon his chest and over his galloping heart, and he gasped because that touch burned him like a brand. “There is faith,” she said, “and there is hope, and all the emotions that are the truths that bind us in a way that a machine can never know.”
“I…I…” His lips clamped together; despair vised his heart, and then because he knew that he would surely kill her where she stood, he spun away. “No, no, no, damn you!”
And then because he couldn’t stand any more—because he knew with a sudden, awful clarity what his fate was—he wheeled around, grabbed the microscope and hurled it across the room with all his might. It rocketed straight as a missile and smashed the glass with a tremendous bang! The glass exploded in a starburst, shattering with a sound like hard, ancient ice. The sound broke him somewhere inside, like a dam giving way, and he howled. His heart battered his ribs; and he was weeping, too, as much from fury as dread because he was, after all, only a man.
“I can’t! Please, please, don’t you understand? If I could, I would, but I can’t! I want to; believe me, you don’t know how much. Do you think I want to end up like them? Like those animals in those cages? Ask me something I can answer, and I will do it! Because however much I wish I could change this, change myself, you’ve asked for the one thing I just simply cannot do, and precisely because of this!” He banged his chest with his fist and then held it there, every beat of his savage heart shuddering through his living flesh because it was still his heart; it was his. “My faith! My heart! My hope and my truth! And I cannot part paths with any of that even to save myself because then I will no longer be a person I… recognize!”
And then it was like a cord snapped, like he was a marionette whose puppeteer had cut his strings. He broke off, turned away. Stumbled for someplace as far away as he could manage in that awful place.
“And so there’s your truth, Doctor,” he said, utterly spent. Swaying, he slid down the length of the far wall. His knees folded and he squeezed his roaring head between his hands. “It’s the only truth I know.”
He didn’t know how long he sat there like that. Maybe long enough to turn to stone. (Please, God, he wanted that because a stone can’t feel love or agony, or the chilling despair of knowing that there is absolutely nothing left—not even hope.) Certainly he sat long enough for his head to stop roaring and his breathing to quiet.
Then he heard a hesitant step, a crunch of
“Because it does. Don’t you see, Julian? I’ve been honest with you when I could’ve lied. Nothing impelled me to choose against myself by showing you everything. All my ugliness and all these mistakes, ones I made even when I thought I was doing good rather than harm. But I showed you because you are a person, not an animal. I did it of my own free will, and that is the last thing that separates me from the machine, but it is the very …last…thing!” She was weeping again, tear upon tear but only along one cheek, one. “A machine can decide, but it can’t think. Unless it is programmed to do so, it will not choose against itself nor make any other judgment other than what fact allows it to see.
“But then there’s this.” She put the flat of her palm upon his chest and over his galloping heart, and he gasped because that touch burned him like a brand. “There is faith,” she said, “and there is hope, and all the emotions that are the truths that bind us in a way that a machine can never know.”
“I…I…” His lips clamped together; despair vised his heart, and then because he knew that he would surely kill her where she stood, he spun away. “No, no, no, damn you!”
And then because he couldn’t stand any more—because he knew with a sudden, awful clarity what his fate was—he wheeled around, grabbed the microscope and hurled it across the room with all his might. It rocketed straight as a missile and smashed the glass with a tremendous bang! The glass exploded in a starburst, shattering with a sound like hard, ancient ice. The sound broke him somewhere inside, like a dam giving way, and he howled. His heart battered his ribs; and he was weeping, too, as much from fury as dread because he was, after all, only a man.
“I can’t! Please, please, don’t you understand? If I could, I would, but I can’t! I want to; believe me, you don’t know how much. Do you think I want to end up like them? Like those animals in those cages? Ask me something I can answer, and I will do it! Because however much I wish I could change this, change myself, you’ve asked for the one thing I just simply cannot do, and precisely because of this!” He banged his chest with his fist and then held it there, every beat of his savage heart shuddering through his living flesh because it was still his heart; it was his. “My faith! My heart! My hope and my truth! And I cannot part paths with any of that even to save myself because then I will no longer be a person I… recognize!”
And then it was like a cord snapped, like he was a marionette whose puppeteer had cut his strings. He broke off, turned away. Stumbled for someplace as far away as he could manage in that awful place.
“And so there’s your truth, Doctor,” he said, utterly spent. Swaying, he slid down the length of the far wall. His knees folded and he squeezed his roaring head between his hands. “It’s the only truth I know.”
He didn’t know how long he sat there like that. Maybe long enough to turn to stone. (Please, God, he wanted that because a stone can’t feel love or agony, or the chilling despair of knowing that there is absolutely nothing left—not even hope.) Certainly he sat long enough for his head to stop roaring and his breathing to quiet.
Then he heard a hesitant step, a crunch of
Similar Books
