Reading Up

Posted on Wed 15th Jul, 2020 @ 6:25am by Yuliette Marayan Dr.

738 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Brown Sector: Zodiac
Timeline: after post titled "Anyone"

Yuliette kept her head down under her red hoodie as she left the library, armload of books in the crook of her elbow. If there was one way she knew how to manage in life, it was through diligent study. And the Gutzman Memorial Library had no shortage of titles concerning Bajoran history and tradition. She had five such volumes in hand. It was a little more difficult to find anything about Cardassia. She’d never studied about it at all. It was clear on the other side of the Federation, and apart from half of her Genes originating there, Cardassia had never seemed to factor at all in Yuliette’s life.

It wasn’t lost on her that she was equally as culturally ignorant about Cardassia as she was about Bajor. On top of her pile of books was her handwritten list of cardassian colonies gleaned from her computer search and the average ticket cost to ferry her across the UFP to arrive on any of those distant, alien shores. She might look like them, more or less, but would that be enough not to end up an outcast there as well?

She climbed the stairs to her apartment and was a little better today at matching and working the three keys. Once inside she locked up again, pushed back her hood, put her bag on the nail in the wall, and set her pile of books on the metal crate, which made the unit a triple duty piece— stool, chair, shelf. She’d gotten her money’s worth. She didn’t bother with the effort of being offended by the rotten odor anymore, but just put the smear of peppermint oil under her nose and carried on. She took her library pamphlets and a book to the balcony, sat cross legged and read.

"Peldor Joi!" Announced one of the flyers in her hand, inviting her to enjoy a festival full of music food and cultural celebration of Bajor.

She turned to the index and followed her pointer finger down the page alphabetically to Peldor Joi, pages 4, 12, 97, 286.

As she read, she gathered that Peldor Joi was a very ancient tradition, which was part of a very ancient faith, in a very ancient society. But like everything old, the tradition had evolved over time and was practiced differently in different sects. The more she read, the more clear it became that The Bajoran religion had one mainline, but many branches of the faith. The book she was reading was written in standard and was old, seen from a removed, secular UFP lens. The tone seemed both cool and intellectual, standing apart from the Bajorans while trying not to say what it really thought of the “performance of long held religious traditions.”

That was the way people talked about the natives of Rho Saro. As if they were too dumb to modernize, clinging to outdated things proven wrong. But when she got to know the natives personally, she found the matter was far more nuanced. Yuliette wondered if it might be more helpful to attend a Bajoran religious service herself and see what it was really about.

She reached for one of the library pamphlets to use as a bookmark, but as she stuck it into the page gutter noticed that it read:


Station 109 Brown Sector essential meal program
Proof of residency required
Members of Gutzman Library qualify with your pass
Allotments supplied from Deck 2245, Office of Brown Sector Relief Programs
See hours and details on reverse


Could it be that simple? No official UFP ID required? She pulled her new library pass from her pocket. It wasn’t identification proper enough to let her on a flight, or to allow her to practice medicine legally… but it looked like it might at least get her three square. She blessed Tamrinch for looking the other way when he rented her this nasty hole in the wall. He’d given her space to exist, for a time.

Yuliette looked at her list of prices for one way trips to Cardassian Colonies. With her food costs possibly covered, she would just need to figure out two things: how to earn that many credits, and how to acquire or fake an ID to spend those credits on a boarding pass.

She folded the free meals flyer into her pocket and used a leaflet for the community pool to mark her place instead.

 

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