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A letter came back.
It wasn’t prompt, but a letter came back. It returned as a rod, emerald-green, with no decoration, no box, and no celebratory flourish.
Dear Julian Subatoi Bashir,
Please pardon the delay.
I will admit to you—and you can believe it or not—that your message to me was unexpected, in several respects. I found myself considering your words for some time. I took none of them lightly.
First of all, I should remind you of the importance of the Central Record Bureau. It is one of the Union’s most essential databases, surviving even the bombardment. (There were backups, as it happens, on Omekla III, if your Federation had ever thought to look.) It was my first stop. There, as I confirmed, Tain’s date of death was listed as 2371, meaning some diligent bureaucrat completed the full documentation. Tain would have needed to go to the Bureau’s headquarters on Cardassia Prime to personally correct the record, but—as both of us know—that proved beyond him. As such, the record is final.
That is to say, the Union maintains that Tain was dead by the time you met with him in Camp 371. That he was living at the time matters not remotely; is is no more than a curious detail. There are records of his acts through 2373, including his allegiance with the future Klingon Chancellor, which, despite his being alive, occurred after his death and that is the fact of the matter.
By Cardassian standards, you killed no one. You cannot kill a dead man; no one can be killed twice over with no relief in between.
(This removed a duty to reciprocate and kill you.)
My father never ‘returned to life’, and that's because of you. But, as a good citizen, one can—one must!—draw a distinction.
I don’t mean to imply it’s something I can easily dismiss. To a human, family is fungible and subject to any number of qualifications. Cardassians are, if you’ll permit me, somewhat more precise. There are words that humans use and phrases humans say which are, to our perhaps-inferior ears, stranger than confusing life and death. Enabran Tain was my father and it was momentous and profound when I could, at long last, proclaim it publicly, even though by alien standards it’s been a gross stain and a miserable burden. I am, you’ve insinuated, loose with the truth, but that lie I practiced only by necessity.
I might even say it is the only one that ever really weighed on me. Perhaps you know what it means, to have a secret like that.
As for Tain, well…. Tain’s mind remained, to all of us, somewhat inscrutable, but I do not find myself believing this was a test. He took pride in it, his survival. He took some satisfaction in having not been killed. (Are you familiar with Bayesian statistics? … Never mind.)
I choose to believe that it would be some small consolation to him, that it was all due to the misguided but ruthless trickery of an esteemed officer, in presumed service to his son. He didn’t love ironies, but any good Cardassian respects them.
… All that to say, I cannot bring him back, you cannot bring him back, and I won’t be bogged down with needless counterfactuals. You worried I’d be overly proud of you. To put your mind at ease: I’m not. I’m not a fool; I can see why the decision was made—the rational choice, my dear—but I’ll never be grateful for it. There are things I’ve done you will never be grateful for which were, for all your puling, also the rational choice. We were condemned to make important choices, you and I.
You may have expected me to be more circumspect, given how plainly I delivered my assessment, particularly considering the questionable security of any and all conveyances from Cardassia Prime—even from me. Rest assured, I am unconcerned. You can consider Enabran Tain’s name thoroughly discredited, with each modern coalition having formulated a bespoke justification. However, it is only to your credit, doctor, that you dispatched both the former head of the Obsidian Order and, if ongoing intelligence is to be believed, the head of the Federation’s old Section 31—one Luther Sloan. Taken together, it’s a reputation you'll be disappointed to know that I envy.
You have changed, my dear, but there is no need to be humble. Anything that’s been done twice is prime for a repeat performance. Resolve like that never goes out of fashion—not here. Perhaps, at last, I can be confident that Cardassia is a world you would survive. … Help me to survive, perhaps. Family serves that function here, on this world.
They say it’s is a terrible thing to be alone. For us, family is everything. I am still ready—I am still willing—to extend that to you. I think a man like you would like to see it, Julian; things are growing here now.
If you come, and I hope you do, I have only one condition. This, my father’s passing—that subject, you never broach with me again.
Always some form of waiting,
-- ELIM GARAK