Chapter Text
The tailor shop smelled of pressed linen and the Cardassian black tea Garak brewed himself rather than letting the replicator approximate it. The replicator, in his view, missed the point. The point was the brewing.
Julian had given up arguing about the tea three years ago.
They sat at the small back table, folded out from behind the cutting station, draped in a length of indigo brocade worth more than the table itself. Two plates. Two cups. A bowl of pickled rokat that Julian had developed, against his expectations, a real fondness for.
JULIAN: ...which is precisely my point. You can't extrapolate the next thirty years of Cardassian literature from the last hundred. The conditions that produced it are gone. The censorship apparatus, the patron system, the entire epistemic frame in which a writer like Iloja was operating, all of it. Cardassia is rebuilding itself from the foundation up. The literature is going to change.
He gestured with his fork as he spoke. Garak refilled his own cup. Slow. Two hands on the pot. He set it down before he answered.
GARAK: And you imagine this change will be an improvement.
JULIAN: I imagine it will be different. Whether it's an improvement depends on what you mean by improvement, which is the entire question Cardassian literature was wrestling with in the first place, so you're rather neatly proving my...
GARAK: My dear doctor.
Garak set the pot down.
GARAK: You are describing an event you have never witnessed in any culture. Literatures do not change because the conditions that produced them change. They calcify. The forms persist long after the meaning has drained out of them. What you are imagining is a renaissance. What actually happens is imitation.
Julian set his fork down.
JULIAN: That's an extraordinary claim from someone who watched his entire civilization burn.
GARAK: It's an extraordinary claim because I watched my entire civilization burn.
Garak's tone remained perfectly pleasant. He took a small sip of tea before continuing.
GARAK: The writers who survived the Fire have spent the last four years producing work that is, and I say this with the affection of a man who has read all of it, almost indistinguishable from the work they were producing in 2370. The vocabulary has shifted. The forms have not. The sensibility has not. They are writing about ruin in precisely the cadences they once used to write about ascendance, and they appear to find this entirely natural.
JULIAN: That's the first wave. Of course the first wave preserves the forms, those are the only forms the writers have. They were trained inside them. But the next generation isn't going to have that training, Garak. The schools are gone. The patronage networks are gone. The state aesthetic apparatus is gone. The children growing up now are reading whatever survived, in whatever fragmentary order it survived in, alongside Federation translations and Klingon epics and, for all I know, Ferengi pulp. The substrate of what counts as literary is being rebuilt. It can't produce the same literature on the other side. It mechanically can't.
Garak's eyebrow rose approximately a millimeter.
GARAK: An almost touching faith in the next generation.
JULIAN: It's not faith. It's basic...
GARAK: Doctor.
He smiled, slightly.
GARAK: When you have lived through one cultural collapse, you may have earned the right to predict the second one. Until then, I'm afraid I'll have to settle for being wrong about my own civilization in my own way.
Julian opened his mouth, closed it, picked up his fork again. He chewed thoughtfully.
JULIAN: I think you're wrong.
GARAK: I know you do.
JULIAN: I think you're substantially wrong.
GARAK: I know that too.
They ate for a moment. The chronometer above the cutting station read 13:47.
Garak set his fork down. Folded his napkin. Refolded it.
Julian watched him do it.
GARAK: Julian.
Garak's mouth was still pleasant. His hands had stopped moving.
GARAK: I find myself in need of a discretionary favor.
Julian set down his own fork. Said nothing.
GARAK: It's a small thing. The work is, I would describe it as restorative. Quiet. Nobody is harmed. A piece of architecture that should not exist is going to be made to not exist, and the people whose lives are currently being shaped by it will go on with their lives, unaware that the shaping has stopped. There is no public dimension. There is no record. When it is done, it is done.
JULIAN: What kind of architecture?
GARAK: A database.
Julian waited.
GARAK: A database maintained by a man who believes he is working for a Starfleet placement program. He is not. The placement program is a fiction layered over a recruitment apparatus run by, well. I expect you can fill in the acronym.
The pickled rokat had stopped tasting like anything.
GARAK: I would like the database replaced. Not destroyed. Replaced. With a version that is plausible, internally consistent, and entirely poisonous to the people relying on it. The man maintaining it should not know it has been replaced. The people he believes he's helping should not know. The work he does should continue, because, and this is the part I find aesthetically pleasing, the work he does is genuinely useful. He's been identifying brilliant young people for a placement program that doesn't exist. We are simply going to ensure that the people he identifies are subsequently placed where the placement program would have wanted to place them, rather than where his other employer would prefer.
Julian was very still.
JULIAN: Why are you telling me this?
GARAK: Because I need someone of Cat's particular talents.
Garak's voice was perfectly even.
GARAK: And because you have, as I understand it, a certain standing instruction with yourself about who Section 31 should not be allowed to recruit.
The chronometer read 13:51.
GARAK: Finish your lunch. Think about it. Wednesday next week, if you like.
He picked up the teapot and refilled Julian's cup.