Base Nine

Posted on Mon 21st Sep, 2020 @ 1:46pm by Yuliette Marayan Dr. & Lieutenant Commander Lanis Dhuro MD

2,185 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Brown Sector, The Zodiac: Gutzman Memorial Library
Timeline: MD15 Evening

Yuliette returned to the Gutzman Memorial Library, depositing her borrowed books back to the impassive Yridian at the collections desk, who scanned them back in languidly and hummed one note of indifference. Yuliette liked him for some reason. He seemed such a fixture of the place that she found her imagination was challenged to picture what the Yridian's homelife was like after the library closed. He seemed the kind of person that must collect some kind of thing— like crystal etched plates in a series, or ceremonial masks— and log into some kind of questions and answers forum for fun; some place where he could begin all of his responses with "Actually..." and then proceed to correct the other posters.

She walked past the outdated computer terminals, the ones which served as her only means of communications now, having no computers or comm link of her own. Instead, yesterday she had created a general message box and from there had reached out to Purulence so there wouldn't be a need to send her sweetheart along as a messenger about meeting for the hand modelling session, and she'd also messaged Dhuro Lanis, the doctor who had offered to teach her Cardassian. He'd returned the message almost instantly, and agreed to meet that same evening at the library.

There were study tables in the back and sure enough, Lanis was there, waiting for her. Yuliette took up the chair across the table from Lanis. "I feel wildly unprepared." Yuliette confessed. "I haven't got a study padd or text or anything." She was accustomed from her years of study to hefty homework, charts, drills, memory devices and massive amounts of hypertexts and research.

"It's better to learn the handwriting with pen and paper, anyway," Lanis said, producing a couple of spiral notebooks and an actual felt-tip calligraphy pens for her. "It helps your brain to remember what you're writing better." He gave Neone a wry look. "Besides, Cardassian writing is kind of blocky; I don't much care for it. I saw some beautiful examples, though. The doctor I worked for--When he wasn't writing medical things, his handwriting was very precise and legible."

Yuliette uncapped the pen and scrutinized it. She'd been writing on displays with styluses most of her life. She laughed lightly. "The last time I remember using anything like this, was... uh, drawing on someone." On a patient, before surgery. She tested it out on the corner of the paper, making a few hesitant marks and varying the pressure. She drew a circle and admired the way it naturally formed thick and thin with the chiseled angle of the felt tip. "You worked for a Cardassian Doctor?"

"Mm-hm, from age 12 to 16," Lanis said. "When I was 16, my folks, ah, left. I never saw him again. I very much hope I made the most of those four years. I tried to."

"You admired him." Yuliette had been trying to digest the hatred she sometimes encountered in Brown Sector. She'd been doing a little history reading about Bajor and trying to understand where people were coming from. "You weren't made to work for him or something? Coerced?"

"I was most definitely his slave," Lanis said. "But he discovered me while I was suturing an injured mine worker's arm. That interested him. So he took me out of the mine work, and I mostly lived in his quarters. I kept his home clean and his clothing laundered and mended. He figured, if I could suture, I could mend clothes. If my stitches were sloppy, he'd send the garment back and tell me to redo it. I learned to make his breakfast. Compared to the mines, it was quite tolerable work." Lanis shot Neone a wry look. "It became even more tolerable when I started to sneak peeks at his books. I'd already learned to read some of the Cardassian signage at the camp and to pick up their language."

Lanis' account was closer to the reality Yuliette was experiencing. Not that she'd ever relate to enslavement or mining. But the messy, irreconcilable reality of being glad for something patently awful. Lanis had obviously come away better for it, even if it was detestable as a situation. She wanted to be able to understand how he framed that in his mind and came to peace with it. At least he had the demeanor of someone who had made peace with it. "You were hungry to learn." She leaned in on her forearms. "What were the first things you read?"

"Well, he didn't own anything that was simple," Lanis said. "He mainly owned medical books, medical journals, and Cardassian novels. The first books I looked at were the things he happened to be reading at the time. Whatever was on the screen of his reader device when I turned it on. So the things I read weren't ever coherent from one day to the next. I was always missing something, and I'd often be reading about neuro exams one day and be somewhere in the middle of a novel, the next. So I realized pretty quickly that I'd better figure out the numbering system so I could put the page back to where he had it when I started. That way, I could start at the beginning of a book and keep working at it until I understood things. I also had to limit myself to one page a day--sometimes only half a page if it was slow going--because I still had work to do. Then I had to learn how to quickly operate the reader, so I could reset it to the page he was on, turn it off, and put it where I'd found it in case he came home unexpectedly."

Yuliette had a sad sparkle in her eye, imagining this older gentleman a pre-adolescent sneak, stealing into his own education. "So things like numbers, return, first, last, next, title, settings, home, search, index, on, off... He never caught you at it?"

"It is astounding how careful you can be when you are terrified of literal death if you are ever found out," Lanis said. "I was very careful--until getting away with it for several months made me complacent. One afternoon, I was picking my way through a description of a thoracotomy to insert a chest tube to treat a tension pneumo--Ah, that's an incision into the chest between the fourth and fifth ribs to insert a tube to release air from the chest so the patient can breathe after suffering a penetrating chest wound. It's an emergency procedure. I really, really wanted to understand it, and I forgot to keep track of time." Lanis shook his head. "I was still puzzling through the words when he came home."

"Were you punished?"

"Oh, yes," Lanis said. "Dr. Morketh was furious. First, he thrashed me but good. Then he locked me in a bedroom for two days. No meals the first day. I drank water from the bathroom sink faucet, but that was it. The second morning he brought me a bowl of rice with yamok sauce for breakfast but wouldn't speak to me. I spent those days staring at the window, in a dither as to whether I should break it and get out of there.

"Finally, that evening--late that evening--he let me out and took me into his study, and there we had a talk. I was frankly trying to figure out why I was still alive. I kept expecting him to shoot me with one of those spiral-wave disruptors they use."

Lanis crossed his arms on the tabletop. "Dr. Morketh wanted to know why I hadn't run off, as I could have easily broken out the window. I told him that, yes, I knew I could have, and I'd almost done that, several times. But where could I have gone? The natural first place for me to have gone would have been back to my people, to get supplies and then run away. What would have happened then? His people would have searched through mine like sifting sand from flour, and they would have killed anyone who'd helped me escape the camp or hidden me. I didn't want to risk that. Besides, in all likelihood they'd have killed me as I tried to get out of the camp. From my reckoning, it was pointless. Better to let Dr. Morketh kill just me so that no one else would have to die."

"Dr. Morketh looked at me from the other side of his desk, gave me an odd little smile, and said, 'Thank you so very much for deciding to let me kill you.'" Lanis quirked a smile at the memory.

"It turned out he--didn't want to kill me, though he would have, if I'd gone out that window. And perhaps he also thought to turn me into a collaborator; I'll never know. I might have tried that, had I been in his position. In any case he decided that, since I already understood some Kardasi and had demonstrated that I could halfway read it--he'd checked his reader's activity history and had found out what I was reading--that he might as well teach me properly. And that's what he did for the next three years."

Yuliette sat riveted. She had so many things running through her head— one of the foremost being how Lanis was able to, at least on reflection, empathize with his captor and reason out the Cardassian doctor's own choices and ethics *had he been in his position*. Yuliette hadn't really thought of the Cardassian perpetrators as themselves having been in a *position* in the same way.

"Do you think it was out of mercy? Or pragmatism?"

"Back then, I considered it unlooked-for, extreme mercy," Lanis said. "As I got older and became a father, I came to regard it more cynically. Now--I regard it as both mercy and pragmatism. Morketh wasn't cruel by nature. Given his way, he wouldn't have harmed a child--any child. I think he respected my reasoning. He said to me, 'You are loyal to your state as I am loyal to mine.' Except, to be honest, I think Dr. Morketh was a bit of a rebel. He didn't approve at all of Gul Dar He'el's massacre at Galitep.

"The pragmatism might also be termed covering his own butt. I didn't know it at the time, but he could have faced reprimand, demotion, or even execution for the fact that I could somewhat read and speak Cardassian. By teaching me, he made me complicit in keeping his secret as he kept mine. And yet, I don't think it was just pragmatism. I think he came to enjoy it. He taught me and discussed with me things that no Bajoran slave had a need to know--poetry, literature, Cardassian history. I think he wanted me to understand and to love it as he did. I learned more about the way Cardassians think from observing how he lived and thought than I could have if I'd been a trained spy."

"How is that? I mean, how is it Cardassians think? I thought I knew my father and then... I'm not certain I know anything about him at all now."

Lanis hesitated. "Given the caveat that I've only closely observed one Cardassian, so I can only properly say I came to understand how he thought--I'd say that the most important things to Cardassians are family and the government--and appearances. I've seen and heard stories of Cardassian fathers caring for children their own society would have told them to discard. I've heard of acts of honor and expiation that have stunned me. I mean--completely unnecessary expiation freely given, for the sake of honor. As for appearances, there's a saying that no proper Cardassian would ever admit to not loving their family or their state, and that of the two, not claiming love for family would leave them only slightly less dead." Lanis shrugged. "Presuming your father was typical of his people, I suspect you were the jewel of his regard. Morketh used to go to great expense to communicate with his family weekly."

Yuliette was tearing up, unbidden. Everything she felt was one big knot of undefinable things. She didn't know what to do with a monster's love. And she'd loved him so long and had so truly looked up to him that now... it was harder to hear he might be genuine in his feelings towards her than to be told he'd likely faked them. She rubbed the tears back quickly, but it only smeared the feelings everywhere and didn't erase them. "Maybe we should just, um, just start with counting," she said.

"All right. The first thing you need to know--which you might know already-is that Cardassians use a base-nine numbering system...." Lanis began writing out the numbers, speaking them as he wrote them on a tablet. Inwardly, he sighed. He had told Neone the gentlest, best, true things he knew of Cardassians. It pained him that so much else was worse.

 

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