The Lives of Dax PDF
Preview The Lives of Dax
“Tracing Dax’s footsteps through the centuries has the unmistakable feel of sitting around a campfire under the spell of a master storyteller. ... Intelligent, thoughtful and—no less important—fun.” —Heather Jarman, author of This Gray Spirit (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine— Mission: Gamma, Book Two) “Reaps its potential brilliantly.” —Trekweb.com POCKET BOOKS New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore Trill The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.” This book consists of works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 1999 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Originally published as a trade paperback in 1999 by Pocket Books STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures. This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 ISBN: 0-7434-5682-3 First Pocket Books mass market paperback printing January 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or Contents Introduction EZRI Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens “Second star to the right ...” LELA Kristine Kathryn Rusch Jill Sherwin First Steps TOBIN Jeffrey Lang Dead Man’s Hand EMONY Michael Jan Friedman Old Souls AUDRID S. D. Perry Sins of the Mother TORIAS Susan Wright Infinity JORAN S. D. Perry Robert Simpson Allegro Ouroboros in D Minor CURZON Steven Barnes The Music Between the Notes JADZIA L. A. Graf Reflections EZRI “... and straight on ’til morning.” About the e-Book “In nine lives I’ve been a little of everything.” —Ezri Dax “The Siege of AR-558” Introduction DAX Our baby ... would have been so beautiful. And with that, Dax exhales her last breath and dies. STRANGE AS IT may seem, that was how it started. Back in April 1998, I read Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler’s moving script, “Tears of the Prophets,” the finale for the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, confirming the rumors that had already been spreading for months. I read those words, and that’s when I knew the book you now hold was going to happen. Jadzia died, and something in the back of my mind just clicked. But why do a book about Dax? I mean, let’s face it, she doesn’t fit into the usual formula for a successful Star Trek book—she’s not a captain, she’s not bald, and she doesn’t have pointed ears. The skeptics I encountered were beside themselves: How could I possibly expect people to be interested? And it wasn’t as if Jadzia’s demise meant I could do with the character as I pleased. When “Tears of the Prophets” aired, I knew the death of one Dax would mean the birth of another. We all did, didn’t we? She was a Trill, for cryin’ out loud—that was the thing that most defined her, that she (or he; we still didn’t know at that point) would be back. It would be a different host, of course—the ninth—with the memories of all the previous hosts, male and female, going back nearly four hundred years. Each new personality was different from the one before it, each new life always striving to distinguish itself from the last. I started to wonder about the periods in Star Trek history those hosts had lived through, the things they might have done, the familiar faces they might have encountered. And then I grinned like an idiot. “Why Dax?” Are you kidding? Why not? How could I ignore the storytelling possibilities implicit in the Dax character? The opportunity not only to flesh out its past lives, but to explore the ways in which they’ve always played a part in the Star Trek universe? And then came the clincher—the inspiration that would, I was certain, make the project truly unique among Star Trek books. This wasn’t going to be a biographical novel, with one voice trying to capture the entire scope of Dax’s life. I mean, think about it: Dax is a living anthology—a collection of stories. The book would be one too. So I went forward, and on the way Deep Space Nine’s audience was introduced to a new Dax. Ezri came on the scene as the ninth host, and to the delight of Star Trek fans everywhere, myself among them, she proved as popular as Jadzia— precisely because, true to the nature of Dax, she was completely different from Jadzia! Wonderfully brought to life by Terry Farrell, Jadzia had been a strong, confident presence, someone who’d spent her entire adult life preparing herself to process the diverse lives embodied by the Dax symbiont. Ezri, masterfully portrayed by Nicole deBoer, was just the opposite; having been forced by circumstances to become joined to Dax, she was completely unprepared at first to balance the combined personalities of eight previous lives. We only got to watch her struggle for a year, but what a year it was. We caught glimpses of the other hosts over the years, too, most notably Joran and Curzon. Every once in a while the show would drop a tantalizing new detail about one of the others, but for the most part they were little more than names and professions. It was enough to create a rough time line, and from there, the book just took off. And it’s entirely fair to say that this collection wouldn’t have been possible without the innovative ideas that never stopped coming from the talented writers and producers of Deep Space Nine, who gave us such incredible characters to build upon. So to Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Hans Beimler, Rene Echevarria, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Peter Allen Fields, and the many others who helped to shape Dax along the way ... I gratefully raise my glass to you all. I was also privileged to gather together a talented group of professional authors who, as I’d hoped, proved to be as eclectic as Dax’s hosts, and as enthusiastic about the project as I was. The tales they wove are thrilling, touching,
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