Epilogue

Spring came as a surprise to Andak, and it surpassed all expectations. As each day dawned a haze would settle on the mountains, softening their edges, and for an hour or more they would be sheathed in cool, translucent gray. Then the rain would fall—clear showers of pure water that came punctually mid-morning, and that freshened the air for the whole of the day. Spring had come to Andak, as it had never done before, smoothing the shift from harsh winter to stark summer; a third season, a proof of change.

Keiko watched all of this progress, and she marveled at it. In the plains to the south of the base, a gentle but ineluctable transformation was being wrought, as the barren yellow fields became fertile and grew. The first shoots of the crops they had planted were appearing. Monitored every minute, both day and night; surely nothing had been watched so proudly, discussed so thoroughly, nurtured so tenderly? The models from the physicists, the projections from the statisticians, the data from the geologists and botanists, the sheer bloody hard work of them all, as Miles put it—all these complex strands had been woven together, and now the plains of Andak were embroidered green.

The gardens at the settlement were growing too—and this made the houses seem less temporary, as if their roots were finally taking. Here, it had to be admitted, lay one of Keiko’s few regrets—that she had not planted her meya lilies last year. But even I didn’t think that there would be so much water…! And it seemed to Keiko that even this lack was more like a promise—a promise that there would be a second year of growth at Andak, and that it would be remembered as the spring that meya lilies blossomed in the Cardassian desert.

Keiko sat up from where she had been kneeling, stretched her back, and then tucked her legs under her again, watching closely the work being done in front of her.

“Is this right?” the girl next to her asked, tentatively dripping water on the row of sprouting green. Keiko leaned in and checked the moisture levels.

“They’ll cope with a little more,” she murmured. “And you’ll need to watch them—they’ll need watering each day throughout the growing season.”

The girl nodded, and poured from the container much more abundantly. Having enough water for all their tasks still took some getting used to, particularly for the Cardassians here. Keiko set down her measuring tool, and wiped at her forehead with the back of her hand. Then she looked around the square.

The evening was golden, the light soft and warm. Children were out playing, Molly among them—or, rather, at the head of them. Even Yoshi was out, sitting near one edge of the square, down on the south side, where it was quiet. He was fingering the leaves of the aramanth bushes that stood there. These were already showing their first bright yellow buds. Feric and the other members of the Oralian Way, under Keiko’s tutelage, had planted these—two lines of bushes, four in each line, meeting up in one corner of the square. A small, secluded grove, set right at the heart of the busy settlement. In an hour or so, judging by the quality of light and the shadows being cast by the mountains, the Oralian Way would be coming out to hold their meeting there. Feric’s plan for later in the spring, he had told Keiko, was to put something permanent at the point where the bushes met. He had spent what time he could spare during the winter months working on a carving, chipping away slowly at a large piece of black Andak stone.

For the winter had been long…and there had been points during it when Keiko had come close to despair. Even when the aftermath of the drama in autumn had died down, even after the work at Andak had been financially secured, there had still been the not inconsiderable matter of making the project a technical success. Once the politics were out of the way, there was still the science to be done.

Keiko had been warned repeatedly—by Feric, by many others among her friends at Andak—that the winter would almost certainly be harsher than she was expecting. “Whatever you’re thinking it’ll be like, Keiko,” Feric had told her, “double it. Triple it.”

And they had all been right. She would never have imagined that a place this hot could become so cold. Most of all, she would never have guessed how quickly the winds could whip up and in from the plains. Miles upon miles of flat, open land across which they could pass without hindrance, gathering speed and vengeance until they came to a sudden, whirling halt as they hit the mountains—and the settlement, huddled below. Winter had seemed to Keiko to consist of nothing more than day after day of salvaging and fixing broken equipment that had been ripped up in the gales; week after week of looking out at the plains and wondering whether anything of what they had planted there could possibly stay alive through such an onslaught. Winter had been long, bleak, and barren. Each day she had wondered how anything could survive it.

And not all of the community had come through. Naithe, for one, had gone well before the year turned. “Frontier life, my dear director,” he had said to her—and to anyone around who was willing to listen—“has turned out to be rather too exhilarating for my tastes, I’m afraid.” Keiko would have liked to think that Naithe had left here a little sadder and a little wiser—but at a conference she had recently attended, she had heard someone say that he was dining out on the story of how, when he was at Andak, he had single-handedly talked down a Cardassian terrorist. She had no idea how he was managing to spin a story like that out of the real events of that day…but some people would never change. At least he was as irrepressible as ever, she thought—and found that she could remember him almost fondly.

Tela Maleren and Nyra too had gone, of course…bound for the capital, at first, Macet had told her; it seemed that there were many people there who wished to know all that Nyra knew. Keiko had had no news of either of them for months now. For all she knew, they might well no longer be on Cardassia—and she was not sure who, or even if, she ought to ask to find out more. And others had left Andak in their wake—mostly friends of Tela and several among the staff who had been sympathetic to her views. There had been no overt antagonism that Keiko knew of—and certainly there had been no formal requests from others for them to leave. It seemed they had gone entirely of their own accord.

“We have to be realistic about this, Keiko,” one had said to her, regretfully. “After all that happened—how can we possibly stay here? What credibility do we have? Who would ever trust us?”

Keiko knew that many people at Andak had welcomed these departures, but she herself viewed them with ambivalence. She was honest enough to admit that on some level she was relieved that the divisions which had once threatened to undermine the settlement would no longer be there. But these losses were the source of her other, main regret too—that all the very different people that had come together at the outset, all with such great hopes and plans, had not been able to reach an accommodation. Not everyone who had made the journey out to Andak had found they had a place there.

Keiko had had no trouble filling the posts that had been left empty, at finding people willing to come out to this remote part of the planet. There were still too few places like Andak on Cardassia; too few places where such highly trained people could use their skills, and live an almost normal life, rather than scratch around for survival. And, these days, Andak was a byword for success. It signified hope. It signified the future. Keiko looked around the square again, at the gardens and the labs, at the kids playing and the people working, at the grove and at the mountains, and she felt proud of all that she could see, of all that had been done and would be done. She thought of the rain that would fall in the morning, sweet and clear…. And, before she could quite stop herself, she thought too, as she still sometimes did, of that day when it looked like everything would be lost; the day when the whole place seemed about to go up in flames….

Keiko turned back to the girl still working alongside her.

“That should be enough for now,” she said. “We’ll come out and water them again tomorrow.”

* * *

A file is closed and set upon a table. “Well, gentlemen. I think that’s done.”

* * *

“Fade to black…and hold…and cut.”