One While he was still a young man, Rugal Pa'Dar experienced loss, separation, a brutal frontier war, and the attempted destruction of his species. Yet, if asked, he would say without hesitation that the worst moment of his life was when he realized he would not be returning to Bajor with his father. All the rest of it, that was simply the Cardassian experience. The Cardassian lot. Practically everyone else he knew had gone through it too, and at least Rugal was one of the survivors. But being taken away -- not wanting it, but being unable to do anything to prevent it -- that was the defining moment of his life. He was sixteen when it happened. The shock of it propelled him forward for the best part of a decade, before he came to rest.
Rugal and Proka Migdal had come to Deep Space 9 for the same reason that many people go on a journey: they were hoping to make a fresh start. Migdal -- Rugal would always think of him first as Father -- had, as a young man, been a policeman in a city that the Cardassians had chosen to obliterate. In the years that followed, oppression, poverty, and a regrettable tendency to end up in the middle of whatever fistfight was going on around him had left their mark on Migdal. He had lost his only child when Korto City had been destroyed, and he had lost his most recent job when a fellow construction worker had made a sly comment about his adopted son. Migdal had thumped him. The other man thumped him back, very hard, and Migdal, who was not a young man, fell unceremoniously to the floor. After he had been patched up, he was shown the door.
Neither his wife, Etra, nor his son was greatly surprised to see him back home so early. In all the burgeoning city of Ashalla, which seemed daily to be expanding as the Bajoran people woke up to their freedom and the opportunities it was bringing them, it seemed that only Proka Migdal regularly found himself out of work. His problem, Etra said, was that there was no going home for him. Some people were like that about a place. They could never settle down anywhere else. But Korto was gone for good. So they'd have to make the best of all that Ashalla had to offer.
"I've finished with this city," Migdal said.
Etra and Rugal exchanged long-suffering looks.
"It's turning into a bad place. Everybody's on the make. Nobody has time for anyone else. It's nothing like it used to be on Bajor. I blame the Circle, setting us all against each other like that."
Proka Etra was a sensible woman who had humored her husband's diffuse and not always well-informed monologues for many years. She was a seamstress -- properly talented, Migdal liked to say; her grandparents had all been Ih'valla caste, although that was something else that had changed on Bajor now, and not necessarily for the better -- and she made good money from piece work.
All these new arrivals in the city needed something to wear. Right now, Etra was barely on schedule and her mouth was full of pins. She made a soothing noise and carried on with her work.
"I was talking to Reco outside the temple last night," Migdal went on, "and he was saying that the place to be these days is that big space station the spoonheads put up...Prophets, what are they calling it these days?" He snapped his fingers, trying to recall the new name. "Why do they have to keep on changing everything?"
"Deep Space 9," Rugal offered, without looking up from his lessonpadd. He rubbed the ridge above his right eye and tried to concentrate again. He was studying for a school test on the causes of the Occupation and he did not find the subject easy reading.
"That's it! Deep Space 9! That's the place to be! More and more people passing through there every day, Reco said. I bet they could do with a good seamstress up there, Etra. What do you think? We've never lived on a space station."
Etra made what Migdal took to be an encouraging sound.
"I could go up, take a look round, see whether we'd like it. Rugal could come too, it'd get us both out of your way while you get all that finished." He was as excited as a boy with a jumja stick the size of his head. "What do you think, Rugal? A fresh start? Isn't that what we need?"
Rugal had reached a section in the text that was supposed to detail the role played by the Obsidian Order in the conquest of Bajor, but was in fact a series of lurid vignettes. "What we really need, Father," he replied, "is for you not to lose your temper once we've made it."
Migdal frowned. Etra stopped her work and gave her husband a fierce look. And since nothing was ever done in that small household that would make Etra truly unhappy, Migdal relaxed and laughed. Rugal put aside his books -- truth be told, he wasn't all that enthusiastic about school work -- and he and Migdal cooked supper while Etra worked.
Father and son were in high spirits when they went over to the spaceport the next day. Migdal was upbeat and optimistic, as he always was at the start of a new chapter. Rugal was glad to be getting out of school and grateful his father was so cheerful. Whenever they ended up moving on, Migdal always made it seem like an adventure rather than Rugal's fault. They enjoyed the journey out to Deep Space 9, and if anyone remarked upon a Bajoran man traveling with a Cardassian boy, they managed not to hear it.
Both Migdal and Rugal took to the station immediately. True, Bajorans were in the majority here, and Cardassians a very marked minority, but with all the other strange people passing through, it did seem that this was the kind of place where their odd little family could live in peace and without the constant comment about Migdal's Cardassian son that tended to result in his losing first his temper and then his job. Within a couple of hours, father and son were sure they would come to Deep Space 9. They went into the Ferengi's bar to celebrate their decision. It was a measure of Migdal's cosmically appalling luck, Rugal would later reflect, that almost the first person they ran into was Elim Garak.
Rugal did not find it difficult to explain why he bit Elim Garak's hand. Because it was on his shoulder. A Cardassian's hand, on his shoulder. From childhood observa-tion, Rugal knew how this was usually the prelude to a beating, if you were lucky, or an arrest if you weren't (arrest generally being an invitation to disappear). Rugal would be the first to admit that biting the Cardassian's hand wasn't the smartest thing he had ever done, but it certainly wasn't inexplicable.
There was another reason for biting him too, but Rugal didn't mention that to anybody else because it wasn't anybody else's business. When the stranger's gray hand had taken hold of him, Rugal looked down at it and, suddenly, he had a flash of memory -- of another gray hand there, pushing him forward, making him walk away from...from where? As a little boy, Rugal had sometimes had nightmares that ended at this point. The image came to him very rarely these days, and he preferred it that way because, in his heart, he had a feeling that it wasn't simply a dream, but a memory. He was afraid that this memory might be older than all the other, more important ones -- of Migdal and Etra and of being their child -- and he didn't want to know any more about it.
Rugal was prepared to apologize to the man he'd bitten at once, if it would stop the whole business going any further, but things moved very quickly after that. Someone going by the name of Zolan claimed to know the family, and he said that Proka was cruel to his son. (Migdal did know Zolan, in fact, from way back in Korto; Zolan had been selling medical supplies on the black market, not all of which had been properly labeled as unsafe for Bajoran physiology. Not that anybody asked Migdal.) Once the accusation had been made, a group of terrifyingly earnest Starfleet personnel appeared out of nowhere and took Rugal away from his father. They seemed to be under the ludicrous impression that Migdal -- his elderly, occasionally grumpy, perennially optimistic, and always very dear father -- had terrorized Rugal so much that he now hated Cardassians enough to bite the first one he saw. That was nonsense, but Migdal didn't seem to be able to make the Starfleet people hear him. Like many ordinary folk, he was frightened by these serious-looking people with their weapons and their uniforms, and he had no reason to trust them. The Cardassians had also said they were only trying to do what was best for Bajor.
Rugal did despise Cardassians, but it hadn't taken Proka Migdal or even his history lessons to make him do so. Rugal only had to look round Bajor to find a reason to loathe Cardassians. They had destroyed cities that people loved, so that they could never go home again. They had murdered people's children. And they had abandoned their own children, who then had to grow up knowing they embodied everything that the people around them most despised. Life had not always been easy for Migdal and Etra, because Rugal was Cardassian, and there were plenty of Bajoran orphans they could have adopted instead. Migdal and Etra had done a good thing, taking in Rugal and calling him their son. He tried to explain some of this, but nobody was listening.
By now, more people, with their own agendas, had crawled out of the bulkheads. Chief among these was a Cardassian gul who seemed very concerned about the plight of the Cardassian orphans who had been abandoned on Bajor. Rugal didn't believe a word of this. If this gul cared so much, where had he been all these years? There was a friendly Starfleet engineer called O'Brien who was the only person who took Rugal seriously when he said -- again and again -- that he just wanted to go back to his father. But O'Brien didn't have the authority to do much about it. Most alarmingly, there was the big Cardassian man, tall and stooping and anxious, who came clutching a handful of holopics and claiming that Rugal was his son.
It took Rugal a while to work out exactly what was going on, partly because most people were talking over him...
