"Family Secrets"

DS9, G, Mila
by Cardie-ologist

FAMILY SECRETS G, Mila, PG-13 (sexual situations)

SUMMARY: Tain’s housekeeper, and Garak’s mother, Mila pays a surprise visit to the station and shares with her son the story of her relationship with his father and the circumstances leading up to Garak’s birth. The action takes place a few weeks after the events of "In the Pale Moonlight.

This story is a follow-up to my earlier "Survival Skills," although it’s perfectly comprehensible if you haven’t read the previous story. For those interested in doing so, however, go to my Fanfic Page at http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Stage/1844

DISCLAIMER: These characters and situations are the property of Paramount Pictures, except for the ones I made up.

"The time is 0300 hours."

Garak didn’t jump at the station computer’s voice. Good. He was getting better at this every night, not dropping off to sleep during the hourly intervals, never once turning to check the illuminated chronometer at his bedside, not twitching a muscle when the computer spoke. He lay just as motionless, arms crossed behind his head, staring steadily up at the darkness as he had five, ten, fifteen minutes before.

How undisciplined age, and exile, and what the Terrans called "relationships" had made him. To have suffered a complete breakdown just because no one was left to love him! That’s what came of getting used to people’s trust, of worrying about the effects his actions might have on them, of dreaming foolishly of being acknowledged as son, as lover, as father. How could he have forgotten the lesson that was part of his earliest memories, that he was utterly alone, that everyone who touched his life swiftly left it. He, Garak, was the only person he had to live for, the only person upon whom he could depend. He’d really thought that solitude suited him, that it was nothing akin to loneliness. Yet how soon he had succumbed to the wiles of aliens who valued group effort and for whom coupling demanded an emotional component surpassing the mere animal pleasure of the moment. Much as he hated the Dominion, if it hadn’t set in motion the events that had so isolated him again, he might have gone irretrievably soft.

How that little adventure with the Romulans had reinvigorated him! Sisko had raged at him, playing the hypocrite, daring to strike him for doing precisely what the Captain desired but dare not name. The human would get over it. He’d be back with other unfulfilled desires that required a Cardassian’s skill. Soon Garak the secret agent would have far more work than Elim the tailor. He had to hone his abilities, regain that perfect self-control he had let slide.

So he was limiting himself to two hours sleep per night, yet reclining in bed for eight, willing himself awake. The other mental exercise he engaged in during these hours involved constructing elaborate erotic fantasies about Dr. Bashir and yet disciplining himself out of even the slightest hint of physical arousal. At this exercise he had been less than totally successful, but his performance (or rather non-performance) steadily improved with each succeeding evening.

**When are you going to stop fooling yourself, Garak?** He gave a snort of annoyance. It was that confounded Elim again. **You can lie here like a corpse. Doesn’t mean you *are* one. Doesn’t mean the pain is gone. It’s just compartmentalized.**

--You’re such a weakling, Elim. Sentimental, sensitive, always whining. I’ve told you that I’m not going to listen to you ever again. You’ve always made me weak, too, always gotten me into mischief--

**Have you given up tailoring, have you forgotten about how nice it would be to have Bashir in your bed? Have you stopped grieving for Ziyal? I think not. And every time you surrender to these impulses, you’re listening to me loud and clear.**

--Always the same old song, Elim. Give it a rest. It doesn’t work any more--

**Tell that to the longing that’s rising between your legs. The interrogation room taught both of us that the body doesn’t lie. You might fool everyone else with your practiced deceptions. You’ll never fool me, Garak.**

"The time is 0500 hours."

This time Garak jumped, fighting his way out of sleep. Damnation, he’d nodded off for nearly two hours. And the Elim of his dream had been right. His member was swollen and erect. Taking the problem firmly into both hands, he cursed under his breath, "All right. Tomorrow we go back to square one."

***

A week later, on a slow day in the shop, Garak sat at his desk working on decoding transmissions between Cardassia and its Dominion allies in the Alpha Quadrant. Admiral Ross himself had asked for the tailor’s assistance in making intelligible these important intercepted messages, while Sisko just stood there, looking innocent. Garak had put on his most obsequious manner, assuring them that he would do whatever he could, in his small way, to free his homeworld. Inwardly he gloated. Hadn’t he predicted that they’d be back, once they had a taste of the advantages of waging war in the Cardassian style?

The tone that chimed whenever a customer crossed the threshold went off. Looking up from his work, he saw a contingent of Bolian women, no doubt just disembarked from the transport, which had arrived from that planet a few hours ago. Garak approached them in his "charming merchant" guise. "Ladies, welcome. Bolius is renowned for its inhabitants’ own skills in designing clothing and accessories. I can but hope that something in my humble establishment might find favor with such discerning buyers."

"We’re just looking," replied one of the women, with a slight motion of her hand, indicating that they did not wish him to "hover."

He bowed slightly. "Just let me know if I can be of any assistance." He returned to his desk. In sales, as in interrogation, you had to know when to push and when to back off.

Several minutes later, he heard the tone sound again. The women had apparently left without finding something to their liking. Looking up, he saw that in fact one of them had remained. She had taken a dress off the rack and was holding it up to herself in front of the mirror. Unfortunately he had designed the dress with the station’s Bajoran residents in mind. Its rusty orange hue would have immediately attracted one of them, but it was completely wrong for a blue-skinned Bolian. Garak waited for the woman to come to the same conclusion; Bolians generally had a very refined fashion sense. But no. She was heading for the dressing room. Garak moved to intercept her. "Excuse me, madam. I want you to know that I can easily replicate that particular style in any color you choose. Dark blue, for example, would flatter madam’s complexion extremely well."

The Bolian gazed at him with an affectionate smile. "Hello, Elim," she said in a voice as well-known as her countenance was strange. "I knew there was no better way to attract your attention unobtrusively than to set out to commit a fashion blunder."

It was fortunate that Garak had been practicing self-discipline, or he might either have whooped for joy or collapsed in a dead faint. As it was, he simply stood very still and whispered, "Mila! I thought you had killed yourself."

She put her hand on his shoulder. "Just as I intended you to think, my boy. We can’t talk here. I trust that you’ve secured your private quarters from prying eyes and ears?"

"Of course," he replied, wounded to the quick. "I haven’t been in exile *that* long."

"Then be prepared for me to beam in at 0230 tonight. I’ll explain everything."

***

Back in his heyday with the Obsidian Order, Garak’s reputation for patience had been legendary. No one else could simply wait hours for a subject to crack in the interrogation room, without lifting a finger. No one else could allow an assassination target to move within and then beyond range over and over until the precise circumstances that guaranteed a quick kill and an untraceable escape presented themselves.

That patience had certainly vanished on this occasion. He thought that the seventeen hours would never pass. He even went to the extreme of loitering at Quark’s from 1800 to 2100. There he had to endure Bashir’s strictly reflexive question, "What are you doing here, Garak?" delivered in an offhand and hurried manner that showed he could care less about the answer. The doctor never slowed his pace a nanosecond as he rushed off to play in the holosuites with that glorified mechanic O’Brien. Even Odo, making his rounds, stopped to chat longer than that. Despite the unwelcoming atmosphere, the Cardassian persevered until at last the nauseating sight of Commanders Dax and Worf holding hands and murmuring endearments over a late supper of blood wine and gagh drove him home.

Back in his quarters he tried to hem a few pants but kept getting distracted. After the computer announced in sonorous tones that it was still only 2300 hours, he angrily shouted, "Kill chronometer audio," and, despite his better judgment, poured himself a glass of kanar. Then he started pacing up and down, feeling twinges of that dizziness and shortness of breath that always presaged one of his claustrophobic attacks. Why, now, when he’d finally recovered and resigned himself to living without emotional ties, would his mother miraculously show up? How he had mourned the news of her supposed suicide, certain that those few minutes in which he had refused to kill her at his father’s command were destined to be the only moments they would ever speak together as mother and son. Yet with a second chance at hand, he had no idea what to say to her, a woman he had known for twenty-five years, and suspected of being his parent for nearly that long. For her total absence from his childhood had prevented him from ever satisfactorily imagining her as Tain’s intimate or constructing any logical chain of circumstances that would have resulted in the birth of Elim Garak.

Brooding on such questions, Garak actually lost track of time, and her beam-in at precisely 0230 ended up startling him. In the moments he took to recover, she had already forged ahead. "All right, Elim, before we lose ourselves in any reminiscences, there’s important business to take care of." She handed him a polished wooden box of Bolian design. "Lock this in your most secure area when I’m gone. Don’t even let me see where that is. The box has a false bottom, and underneath are six data rods. They contain all of Enabran Tain’s files, and everything about the Dominion presence on Cardassia his agents could compile before those accursed Founders purged them totally. The information may be of use to you."

"To a simple tailor?" It occurred to him that perhaps he should be wary of a trap.

"You fought with the Federation on that Defiant ship, did you not? And when the Romulans suddenly declared war on the Dominion, I recognized the way in which it came about as the classic Tain-Garak strategy for bringing the Nausicaans in on our side against the Federation. So then I was sure that you were working with the alliance of Alpha Quadrant powers against the Dominion."

Garak relaxed. No Changeling would have seen the connection. "I’ll keep them safe, should an opportunity arise to share them with Captain Sisko."

"Good." Mila suddenly plopped herself down on his sofa. "That’s a great weight off my mind. It hasn’t been easy protecting those rods from your father’s enemies these last four years. Do you think I could have a drink?"

"Certainly. Rokassa juice, raktajino, kanar?"

"I’ve developed a taste for Bolian brandy, as a matter of fact. Does your replicator have it programmed?"

Garak ordered her up a glass. "Bolius is a Federation member. There are many Bolians on the station, and their traditional foods and beverages all come standard on station replicators." he said as he handed it to her. He noticed that her hands were shaking slightly. She downed the drink in three gulps.

"Ah, I feel much better," she said, putting aside the glass.. "I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve transformed myself into a Bolian."

"I was rather wondering how you faked your death and got out of Cardassian space. The people who told me you’d killed yourself were very reliable, and they seemed very sure."

"I used your father’s plan, the one he devised in case his rivals in the Order ever moved against him."

"He told you about ritasirin?" Garak gasped. "The whole point was that only Tain and I knew of the drug’s unique properties. It’s why he had me kill the entire scientific team that developed it."

"That was all fine as long as you were there to take care of the funeral arrangements. It wouldn’t have done him much good to have acquired a foolproof way to deceive even the most sophisticated medical scanners into registering him as dead if he ended up cremated before he revived six days later. When he exiled you, he had only me to turn to."

"But he exiled me because I wouldn’t kill you. I don’t understand him at all."

"It’s complicated, Elim dear" she replied, searching for the right words, but not finding them. "Whatever his reasons, he took me back, and he eventually told me about the drug and its uses. When the Dominion destroyed him, I knew that every powerful faction on Cardassia would soon converge on our doorstep looking for his files and not caring what they had to do to find them. So I used the ritasirin on myself."

"And who could you depend upon to keep *you* from cremation?"

"The very last nanny you had before Tain sent you off to boarding school remained as a tenant in that little farmhouse where you spent your early years. I’d managed to have some communication with her from time to time. I enjoyed hearing her stories of what you were like as a little boy. I asked her to pose as my sister and claim my body when they notified her I was gone. It was a tremendous risk, but she didn’t betray me. I concealed myself with her until that traitor Gul Dukat sold us out to the Dominion. Then I knew that no place on Cardassia was safe for me, and I would have to get to Federation territory."

"How did you ever think of going to Bolius?" Garak asked. "You can’t have known any Bolians, and that planet’s affairs weren’t among Tain’s professional interests either."

"In fact, I have you to thank for my salvation, Elim."

"But I don’t have any contacts on Bolius either."

"Not a contact, exactly," Mila responded. "A former subject."

Garak searched his memory. He didn’t recall ever interrogating any Bolians. Then it came back to him. The time he did the favor for Sakal. The time Elim made one of his most egregious intrusions into Garak’s domain. "Tekka Gobb?" he asked.

"None other."

"I thought they would have executed her," he replied, trying to sound surprised.

"So did she. But they sentenced her to five years in a labor camp instead, and when she was released, six years ago, she came looking for you. She’d heard one of her other interrogators say you worked for Tain, so when she couldn’t trace you, she came to our house. Luckily for her Tain was away, and she ended up speaking with me."

"I can’t imagine why she would seek me out. I simply extracted the necessary information from her and left her to her fate." Garak wondered just how much the Gobb woman had pieced together of the real story.

Quite a bit, as it turned out. "That’s not exactly the way she recalls it," Mila insisted. "She remembers awakening from a period of delirium to have you tell *her* the information her interrogators wanted. It was information she couldn’t have told you, she said, because it was information she didn’t know. You said it was very important that she learn it precisely, and confirm it to the interrogators, and to hold to the story that she had only given you the information in exchange for your promise that you would see to it her life was spared."

"That’s ridiculous. You said yourself she was delirious."

"Elim," Mila spoke sharply, "stop lying to your mother."

Garak started laughing in spite of himself. "All right, Mother, I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know why I tried to hide it in the first place. Force of habit, I suppose. Technically, it wasn’t even my case. I’d moved on from interrogations years before. She was Crelan Sakal’s subject. He’d apprenticed with me, and now the Ministry had put him in charge of finding out the source of some very sophisticated phaser rifles that were finding their way to the Bajoran resistance. Our forces had apprehended three of the Bajoran pilots who had penetrated our lines and beamed the weapons down to the planet. Sakal had interrogated them endlessly--two of them had died--and all he’d come up with was the location of three totally different systems where the Bajorans had picked up their cargo, three different contacts of three different species who had approached *them* on three other planets where neither the Bajorans nor the contacts were native. As to who was actually behind the scheme, the prisoners told him nothing. Sakal’s superiors were growing weary of his lack of progress, and he begged me to see what I could learn from the fourth member of the conspiracy to fall into Cardassian hands, a prisoner whom he had questioned for five days without getting any better results. That was your friend Tekka Gobb."

"She’s told me the story," Mila put in. "She had a Bajoran lover, who’d been born in one of the offworld refugee camps where some of the Bajorans who’d escaped the planet in the early days of the Occupation waited and hoped for the liberation of their homeland. He got drawn into the gun-running scheme, and she’d simply gone along for the ride when our security forces captured their ship, and killed her lover as he defended his cargo."

Garak’s face grew troubled. "I’d watched the recordings of her interrogation, along with those of the other smugglers, and it was clear that she had no idea what her Bajoran was up to. She’d told Sakal what little she did know upon the first touch of an instrument. But, you see, Sakal didn’t have a very subtle mind. He could never distinguish between a person who was holding back information and one who simply had no information to divulge. So he always pressed too hard. I’d warned him about this failing repeatedly during his apprenticeship, but he never seemed to get the point. Still, he’d been a loyal subordinate, and he had other charms"--Garak paused to savor the memory. "I told him I’d see what I could find out. At the very least, I thought I might persuade him to put the unfortunate woman out of her misery."

"If she didn’t know anything, and she says also that she didn’t, how did you end up with name of the mastermind behind the operation?" Mila asked, puzzled.

"Quite by accident, as it happened. When I went in to question her, she was very heavily sedated, so that she could regain her strength in order to endure the next round of interrogation. I had the drugs to rouse her, but, when I entered the cell, she was babbling on and on in her delirium. I thought it prudent simply to listen for a while.

"She could speak of nothing save her dead lover. His name was Rimar I believe. She kept repeating that she was so glad she would be joining him soon and describing some of the tender moments when they’d been together. Then she became aware that I was in the room, but she thought that I was Rimar. She held out her hand, and I took it, saying nothing to distract her from her memories. Eventually she spoke of the day they met. He had come to Alpha Centauri to attend a conference about displaced populations that one of the galactic humanoid rights organizations had sponsored. She served drinks in the bar of the conference hotel.

"Suddenly I remembered something from one of the other interrogations. That man had studied warp technology during a summer institute at the Zefram Cochrane University in that same city on Alpha Centauri. I increased Miss Gobb’s sedation and slipped out. Then I went straight to the files on the other captured smugglers. The Cochrane students had stayed at the identical hotel. The mother of another woman had received treatment for Betexian anemia at a research hospital on the planet, and the daughter, too, had stayed at the hotel when she paid a visit. In short order I discovered that this hotel on Alpha Centauri was the common link among all the Bajorans we’d captured.

"Everyone in the Order knew of Richard Philip Parker, a human from Alpha Centauri, who was one of the most powerful arms merchants in the quadrant. But we’d never had any evidence of his doing business within a thousand light years of Cardassia. Every instinct now told me that Parker was supplying the weapons to Bajor. Of course there was no proof, but I suspected we could discover some, if I told Sakal that Tekka Gobb had given up his name. I returned to her cell, brought her to full consciousness, and made sure that she would tell the same story.

"I have to congratulate Sakal for the way he handled the investigation after that. His operatives eventually discovered that Parker’s agents loitered around the hotel bar, listening for Bajorans who spoke heatedly about driving us from their planet. They never approached them there, simply made an identification. If they determined that the Bajorans had only a transient presence on the planet, then Parker would have his people contact them in completely different locales, months or even years after they’d last set foot on Alpha Centauri. It was a very intricate and ingenious operation, involving some Andorians, the Orion syndicate, and a host of unaligned mercenaries. Unfortunately, by the time the Order had put the puzzle together, and sent a specialist to put Parker out of business permanently, the end of the Occupation was only weeks away. Nevertheless, the case made Sakal’s reputation. I imagine he inherited command of what was left of the Order after the disaster at the Founders’ hands."

"Yes, he did," Mila confirmed. "However, he was one of the first to be executed under the Dominion regime."

"A pity," Garak reflected, although not for political reasons.

"Elim, dear, you’ve told a fascinating story, but you still haven’t answered my question, you know," Mila continued. "After Tekka had provided you with the answers you sought, why did you invent this non-existent bargain in order to have her sentence commuted?"

He fidgeted in his chair. "Would you like another brandy, Mother?"

"Elim, you’re evading again," she chided.

"The poor girl hadn’t committed any crime against Cardassia, at least not intentionally, and she’d already suffered unspeakably. I thought it quite unnecessary to have her executed."

"And this had nothing to do with the fact that she and Rimar had a year-old son, whom she’d left behind on Bolius?"

Garak looked up in surprise. She’d sprung that one like the most skilled of Information Ministry operatives. Clearly she’d learned much from her long association with Tain. "I didn’t even know she had a child," he lied.

"Strange. Tekka said that when she asked you why you had interceded for her, you told her ‘Every little boy has a right to be with his mother,’" Mila said with a smugly triumphant expression.

Garak cursed inwardly. Generally survivors of torture retained visceral memories of the pain and terror but found the sequence of events and the content of conversations coalescing into one indecipherable blur. Perhaps Bolian psychology worked differently. "Really, Mother," he grumbled, "You might have told me directly that you knew."

"Where’s the fun in that, as your father would say." They both chuckled at the memory. "In any event, " Mila went on, "Tekka was very grateful for what you’d done. That’s why she was looking for you, to thank you. When I told her you’d been exiled, it quite disturbed her. She asked me to convey her good wishes, should I ever speak with you. And she offered you sanctuary on Bolius should you ever require it."

"And eventually you told her that it was you who required it?"

"Yes. I’m afraid I was quite shameless, tracking her down and pleading with her to get me out of Cardassia, because I was your mother. She didn’t hesitate for a moment, though. Her sufferings had made her quite a heroine in the Bajoran exile community on Bolius, and they somehow got a ship through and spirited me away in the dead of night. Then they arranged for a surgeon to turn me into a convincing Bolian. Tekka insisted that I come to live in her home. She told the neighbors that I was her recently widowed great aunt. She had married after her return home, one of her old schoolfellows, who runs a furniture emporium. She keeps the accounts. The boy Rimar fathered is a big, strapping fellow now. He just won the school mathematics prize. She and her husband have two little girls together, ages four and two. I mind them when their parents are at work. They call me "Mamp mamp," Bolian for grandmother. I never could have dreamed I would have such a secure and happy life after Tain died."

Garak sat silently, reflecting upon her tale, then got up. "Well, I’m going to have a drink now, whether you want one or not."

"Perhaps I will have another brandy." As he walked to the replicator, she started speaking again, softly, as if to herself. "Yes, that was the mistake Tain and I made with you. We thought that giving you no one but yourself to rely on would make you hard and callous, so that you would be able to carry out without a qualm the duties for which he’d destined you. But the strategy backfired. You ended up empathizing with anyone who was alone and helpless, particularly anyone bereft of blood kin. We should have given you to foster parents, not had you raised by revolving teams of strangers."

Garak had returned with the drinks and was staring at her in confusion. "Do you expect me to believe that Enabran Tain would ever have allowed me to form bonds of affection to anyone but himself? Or that he would permit you have any say in how he raised me?"

Mila colored. "Not at first, I admit. He never even let me hold you after you were born or told me where you were or what he’d named you. He thought it safer for all of us that way. When he sent you off to school, however, he told me that he’d been thinking, that in his profession sudden death was always a risk, and for your sake someone else would have to be able to see to your care if anything happened to him. So he sat me down and showed me the recordings he’d had made of you over the years--what a handsome and precocious lad you were! He told me about the farmhouse in Illytia and the school on Cardassia Secunda. And then he told me something I’d never even hoped for. He told me that he’d named you according to my wishes."

"*You* wanted to brand me a g’reakh every time I spoke my name? Why, Mother?" He flopped down beside her as if he were a helium balloon with a slow leak.

Mila reached over and embraced him. "I never thought of it that way. I’m sorry if it hurt you. My mother raised me to be proud that I belonged to a line of bastards that had carried on despite everything the state did to destroy us. The authorities never permitted the illegitimate to bear family names. If Tain was going to manage somehow to give you one, I thought it quite a delicious joke to provide you with an accurate representation of your heritage. I suppose I should have seen the disadvantages. But then I never seriously believed that your father would use my suggestion. He’d gone on and on enough about the given name, mine spelled backwards save with his first initial substituted for the ‘a.’ He said I might as well tattoo your parents’ identities on your forehead."

"I think he ultimately found the joke too irresistible to pass up," Garak replied with a sneer.

Mila downed the brandy, only slightly more slowly than she had the first. "The one thing that’s weighed on my mind since his death was my failure to pass on his legacy to you. Whatever quarrels you had, I’m sure he would have wanted you and no other as the guardian of his secrets. Now that’s done." She rubbed her hands together with satisfaction and got to her feet, a bit stiffly. "Be assured that you needn’t worry about me, Elim, and I won’t worry about you. I had better be going before I’m missed."

"But-- but you just can’t leave like this," Garak sputtered, rising also.

Mila regarded him quizzically. "Why not? I’ve accomplished what I came for. We wouldn’t want to court danger by attracting attention."

She was right, of course. Yet he simply couldn’t bear to let her go. "Isn’t it finally time to talk about our . . . our family." What a ridiculous notion, that Mila, Tain, and he constituted a *family.* One of Elim’s little fantasies. "I mean," the voice of Garak reasserted itself, "isn’t it time I knew what careless accident resulted in my conception?"

"Careless accident?" Mila returned, dumbfounded. "That’s what you think?"

Garak nodded. "I can’t imagine any other explanation."

"Listen to me, Elim. No child’s conception and upbringing were ever as carefully planned as yours. No man ever desired a son as fervently as Enabran Tain desired you."

"He had a strange way of showing it, once he got his wish," he replied skeptically.

Mila’s expression softened. She stepped toward him and ran her index finger over the outer eye-ridge from the point at which the vertical brow bones intersected to its loop underneath the lower lid. It was the time-tested gesture by which Cardassian mothers soothed fretful children. Garak felt a spasm of emotion constrict his throat. He gently but firmly pushed her hand away. She was an old woman, he a man of middle years. The time for such endearments had long passed. Mila stepped back with a sigh. She spoke to him slowly and deliberately. "You’re right Elim. This doesn’t need to be secret between us any more. It’s not a pretty story though."

"I’ve not had any illusions that it would be."

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "It will wound you, I know. You may judge me harshly. Will you at least listen and withhold your reproach until you’ve heard everything?"

"I’ve made a life’s work of listening," Garak said with only the slightest smile.

"First there’s the unfortunate truth about me, your mother, what kind of woman I was when Tain met me. My mother was a courtesan, as was her mother before her. We’ve traced our line back fifty generations, all illegitimate, mostly thieves and whores. My younger sister was the pretty one, trained up to please Guls and Legates and to earn a living for the family when mother’s charms faded. I was plain and so expendable, a necessary sacrifice so that the others could survive. It was only by making such hard choices that the family had persevered for so many years. So when I was fifteen, Mother indentured me to one of the Halls of Endurance for ten years. They paid her a bar of latinum for me."

Garak blanched. Respectable Cardassian women didn’t work as servants and sleep with their employers. He’d always known that his mother had to be a woman of no legitimate caste. Nevertheless, circumstances this sordid had never entered into his speculations about his ancestry. He saw pain invade the familiar blue eyes in the unfamiliar blue face, mirroring the dismay in his own, and he searched for expressions of sympathy. He’d always hated Cardassian class snobbery and castigated himself for succumbing to it, even momentarily. "You must have suffered greatly all those years."

She shrugged. "They kept us high on pain killers and stimulants most of the time so that we could comply with the clients’ desires without losing consciousness before they’d had their fill. Then there were the anxiety-suppressants so we didn’t panic during our offtime. I really don’t remember my duties as agonizing, just numbing. And I’d only been there a year and a half when your father first engaged me."

"Yes, the Halls would be just the place for him to take his pleasures," Garak said with extreme bitterness.

Mila smiled. "It’s what he wanted everyone to think, but it was quite far from the truth. Come, sit down with me, and I’ll tell you of our first meeting." They perched respectively at the head and the foot of his cot. As Mila began her narrative, Garak became certain that she had rehearsed the telling of this tale in her mind many times, perhaps even written it down at some point. She gave every impression of reciting from memory some pre-existing text. He reflected upon the irony of this sad and seamy description of his origins unfolding to him in the guise of a bedtime story . . .

"What more could a woman ask for?" I teased him, finally feeling safe to speak my mind.. That made him laugh the loudest he had yet, "As I said, a most practical girl." . . .

. . .With that Mila ceased her recitation, studying Garak for his reaction. He made no effort to spare her feelings. "How romantic!" he pronounced sarcastically. "Just about the kind of courtship one would imagine my father conducting."

Tears began to fill her eyes. "You were the one who wanted to discuss these matters, Elim. I warned you that you wouldn’t like what you heard. Can’t you show a little more respect for your parents, even if they didn’t live a fairy tale."

He’d spent a lifetime storing up resentment for the way they’d used him. It was too late to demand respect. Still, Mila had been in an impossible situation. He was cruel to blame her. "Forgive me, Mother," he said. "I had no idea that, like me, you spent so many years wondering if every day would be the day Tain ended your life."

"Why would you have worried about such a thing, Elim? Your father always provided for you."

"It was the fate of most bastard sons, whenever the novelty wore off for their sires."

"Such an idea certainly never crossed Tain’s mind," Mila responded with some heat. "Well, maybe once, when he found out about the sewing. But I calmed him down by reminding him that adolescent boys go through odd phases."

Garak smiled. "It’s been a rather long phase."

"True," she smiled back. "Tain finally grew reconciled to it, since you proved yourself so able in fulfilling his plans for you."

"Ah, yes. His plans. He didn’t tell you that you’d have to produce a son for him when he was making his attractive offer?"

Mila let the mockery go this time. "I’m sure it was the last thing he had on his mind at the moment. He had always believed that having children was like giving your enemies the access codes to your private security system. That’s why it was so important to him that no one know you were his son."

"What changed his mind?" Garak wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but something compelled him to ask.

Mila paused to reflect for a few seconds. "Elim, your father used to say that the advantage he had over so many other powerful men on Cardassia was that he knew his limitations. Our first five years together were the years when he achieved a position of influence in the Order, as aide to Mehelon Artag. Artag had one goal, to consolidate the Occupation of Bajor into a full-scale colonization effort. There were many in Central Command who resisted such a long-term commitment of troops and resources. Your father had the task of insuring that the voices of these men did not prevail, without there being a detectable trace of Obsidian Order manipulation in the matter. It was delicate work. It took a lot of advance planning."

"And a number of fatal accidents, no doubt."

"Oh, yes, accidents, scandals, sudden retirements, you know the way such operations unfold. This was a huge undertaking though. It makes your little Romulan plot look like a game of Kalevian Montar. It also revealed one of your father’s key weaknesses."

"That he couldn’t hit Mt. Getenderal with a disruptor at ten meters?" Garak jibed.

"Not that. He’d learned to compensate for his clumsiness when he was still a schoolboy. You see, Elim, your father had wonderful instincts. He could sense betrayal, concealment, untruthfulness. He could intuit people’s vulnerabilities upon a very short acquaintance. He was ruthless and cunning. But he wasn’t a thinker. He could zero in on precisely the result that had to occur yet get all tangled up in himself trying to make it happen. And when this frustrated him, he’d talk things out with me, and insist that I never be afraid to tell him what I thought. Most Cardassians would never have ‘lowered’ themselves in that way, but Tain’s instincts had told him that my mind ran at warp speed in just those areas where his couldn’t even get to impulse." Mila leaned forward. "Those brains of yours that everyone envied, they came from me, Elim," she whispered, as if still concerned for Enabran Tain’s reputation.

"You engineered Cardassia’s seizure of Bajor?" Garak asked incredulously.

"Let’s just say I helped Tain work out some of the details," Mila responded. "The day Central Command issued the official annexation proclamation we allowed ourselves a little private celebration. Tain wouldn’t let me prepare the meal. He brought it in from one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. We drank from his finest kanar.

"Then he suggested that we make an early evening of it. Our coupling had always been fairly functional, matter-of-fact, but this time he tried to be romantic. He’d lit candles in the bedroom! Afterwards he suggested we bathe together, and there were arcantha petals floating in the water. When we went back to bed, he didn’t just turn over and start his usual snoring. He lay on his back with one arm around my shoulders, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Well, we made it happen, my girl, and no one will ever be able to retrace the path we traveled.’ he said, but he didn’t sound triumphant. He sounded regretful. I knew why. I’d known ever since I saw the candles.

"‘One is secret, two is the seed from which discovery blossoms,’" I quoted the old Hebitian proverb. "I’m a terrible danger to you, am I not, Tain?" He grunted and nodded his head but wouldn’t look at me. "I know where you hide the toxins. I’ll bring the hypospray if you think it’s the time." He looked at me then, a little surprised, but only a little.

"‘You know everything, Mila," he said. "That’s the problem. I don’t fear your betrayal, but if any of my enemies ever found out and decided to force the issue--’

"I told him that it had always been clear to me what would happen then, and how we had to prevent it at all costs. But he didn’t send me for the hypospray. He kissed me on the cheek and said that it was never good to make such decisions by moonlight."

"So he never concluded that the time was right until he sent me to do the deed, all those years later?" Garak asked.

"He knew the time was right that evening, just as I did. He simply couldn’t go through with it, because there would always be new plots to hatch, new enemies to topple. The Order put him in charge of seeing that we held on to Bajor, once we’d taken it, and there was unrelenting internal dissent on Cardassia from one quarter or the other. He had no illusions that he could handle it without me to listen and give advice. It was only when you had proven yourself even more useful than I in such matters that he could move from the threat to the action itself."

Garak was appalled. "He bred me to assume your place, to give him leave to kill you?"

Mila struggled for the right words. "It wasn’t exactly like that. He just observed one day what a perfect partnership we had, how someone that combined the best of both of us could have an unlimited future in the Order. And then his eyes lit up, like they always did when he’d had the inspiration for a particularly devious scheme. ‘Mila,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have a son. Of course, he can’t ever know he’s our son, but I’ll see to it that he’s raised to help me take over the Order, and to take my place when I’m gone.’ He told me to deactivate my contraceptive implant and practically threw me into bed so we could get our start making his plan reality." She smiled at the memory. "I certainly had all the attentions I could have desired in those days."

"Did I spring into being immediately upon demand?"

Her smile faded. "No, Elim. We didn’t have trouble conceiving at all, but the first four times they were girls." She sighed. "I would so have liked to keep one of them, to raise with us, but of course that was out of the question. He had each of them terminated as soon as the gender test results came in. Then, for a year, nothing. He grew moody with me, and I wondered if he wouldn’t decide to discard me, also, and look for a son with some other girl. Finally, though, what we’d hoped for came to pass, and there you were. How proud I was on the day you were born, and all the years you were growing up. We’d sit in the evenings looking at the holoimages the schools forwarded, hearing about all your success in the classroom. Tain used to worry that you were becoming too clever, that you were overly fond of reading. He said that agents needed to be quick-witted and resourceful, but not intellectuals. Men with too much of a philosophical bent could find the performance of their duties paralyzing. I told him I was sure you’d turn out to be just the son he wanted, and I was right. At least until the day you betrayed him by taking pity on your poor old mother." She took his hand and squeezed it gently.

His mother’s tale made Garak feel more shamed than any of the unsavory actions he had committed in Tain’s service had ever done. Sired and bred up to his father’s service like a prize riding hound. His mother’s body and mind raped nearly every day of her half-century with Tain. "Mother," he said gently, "when he brought you back to him, after I . . . betrayed . . . him. Why did you agree?"

"What else could I do, Elim ? It was him or death, just as it had always been."

"Where was your pride, Mother? Didn’t it ever occur to you that death might have been preferable to him?"

"No." She said it decisively, without a moment’s reflection, looking him straight in the eye.

He knew in a flash all that one word contained. "Mother, you loved him! How could you, after the cold-blooded way he used you?"

Mila bent over and kissed him on the cheek. "Just the same way you did, my son."

Garak tried in vain to stop the blood from rushing to his face. His mother had named the thing that he most loathed in himself, the thing which even Elim never dared taunt him with: this irrational, ineradicable, inexplicable love for the monster who had sired him. Every time it surfaced, he resorted to a long list of wrongs Tain had done him in a vain effort to push it back. Now he tried something similar with Mila. "You know, even when I rejoined him on that ill-fated expedition against the Founders, he was still threatening to have you killed."

Mila appeared unperturbed. "Oh, I know. He was forever saying, ‘Mila, I really can’t let you live after this.’ But I came to regard it more as an endearment than a threat. He would have never trusted anyone but you to do it; and he was quite incapable of taking matters into his own hands."

"Just like the boy who cried wolf," Garak mused.

"Who?"

Garak shook his head dismissively, "Oh, just an old Earth fable Dr. Bashir once told me."

Mila seized eagerly upon the opportunity to move away from the painful subject matter they had been discussing. "Ah yes, Dr. Bashir. Your father showed me his file and photo. The handsome young man who came storming into Cardassian space to demand of Enabran Tain in his own house that he turn over the information necessary to save your life. With someone like him around, it’s no wonder you’ve not provided me with any grandchildren."

Garak shot her a look of feigned indignation. "Really, mother, what a lewd imagination you have. Dr. Bashir is simply very devoted to the welfare of his patients."

"No physician is *that* devoted, Elim."

"He was my friend as well," Garak admitted, "but nothing more. I’m not sure he’s even that at present."

"So there’s been no one, then, to make the nights less lonely here?"

"There was a young woman who was fond of me, but she died in the war."

Mila’s face expressed immense sympathy. "Another Terran?"

"No, a Cardassian, more precisely a half-caste. Her mother was Bajoran."

Mila’s brow-ridges puckered. "I don’t know that I would have liked that turn of events. One strength we ‘Garaks’ can claim is that although we may have been bastards for 300 years, our blood is pure Cardassian. Still I wouldn’t have begrudged you a life with her, if she could have made you happy."

"She might have, Mother," he acknowledged, "but we’ll never know."

Mila gave a little grunt of displeasure. "My sister turned out to be infertile. You’re my mother’s only grandchild. I suppose I’d better just resign myself to seeing the blood of Ilm die out with you."

"Ilm? The fleece of the makhala beast? What does that have to do with our ancestry?"

"It’s part of the story of our line’s beginnings. Mothers have passed it on to children for all these centuries, but I was never there to tell it to you. If you’re curious, I’ve put the whole saga into one of the files on the data rods."

Garak took her hand. "There’s still time to tell me now, Mother, to keep the tradition intact."

His request left her positively beaming. "I’ll give you the short version, son. Just sit back and listen. It all began during the terrible time after the Hebitian civilization fell and the colonists on the southern continent of Cardassia Prime were trying to survive a three-year-long drought and famine."

"You mean when Magreb Talnak, the first father of our race, established the modern Cardassian State, built upon the pillars of duty, discipline and family?" Garak recited, with just a hint of irony, remembering the countless times the lectors had drilled the phrase into him during his schooldays.

Mila wrinkled up her nose in distaste. "That sounds all well and good, but there are aspects of founding a state upon duty, discipline and family they don’t talk about in the history books. Those are also the years when the bastardy laws arose, and they arose as a way to justify the starvation of one-third of our people so that the others could live. Talnak, the leader of the colonists, declared a twenty-year moratorium on marriages and decreed that only those who were already joined, and their offspring under the age of 25, would qualify for rations from the central food depository. According to the ‘first father,’ if those older than 25 hadn’t yet joined, or those younger couldn’t prove that they were the legitimate children of joined parents, then they were obviously subversives to the new order of things and deserved to fend for themselves. And when those twenty years had passed, only those same individuals, and their legitimate descendants, would qualify for full citizenship in the new Cardassian Union.

"To distinguish these lucky people from their expendable fellows, the government tattooed the soles of their right feet with a special dye whose formula it kept a very closely-guarded secret. In old Kardasi ‘g’reakh’ wasn’t an obscenity. It just meant ‘unmarked.’ No newly-born child could receive its tattoo unless both parents presented an official certificate of joining, and their feet passed the dye scanner. Even though we aren’t starving any more, they’ve never changed the law, just substituted DNA screenings for tattoos.

"In those early years, tens of thousands of the unmarked died of hunger, but some of them managed to survive by bartering special skills or being willing to do highly unpleasant work for food. Kanda and Berom were the first parents of our line... They had both been orphaned in their teens during the years of chaos and had no documents with which to earn their marks. Berom survived by thievery, Kanda by selling herself. They met on the streets of the capital of Illytia province and became lovers. Whiling away the dark hours, they discovered that they both shared a gift for music. Kanda had a beautiful singing voice, and Berom played the egenderan reed. One day, on an impulse, they set out for the countryside, where they played and sang in village squares, provisioned themselves with what the villagers sent their way, and then moved on to the next village.

"They were crossing through the high pass in the mountains between Illytia and Comber on a winter day in the month of storms, when they came upon a wagon that had been attacked by robbers. The man and woman who had driven it were dead, the beast who had pulled it stolen, and the cargo gone. Times being so hard, I’m afraid that Kanda and Berom went over to see what they could scavenge, and when they lifted the bodies down to take their clothing, they found under the woman’s skirts a box labelled ‘Ilm.’ They hurried to open it, for they could trade a box of ilm for many days of food and shelter--."

"And, don’t tell me, inside they found a baby," Garak interrupted.

"Yes, how did you know?"

"Mother, these fables always have a certain degree of similarity. I don’t think we are dealing with the literal truth here-- although your story *is* far more convincing than some of Dr. Bashir’s foolish romances about great heroes found and raised by wolves."

"The Terrans do seem pre-occupied by these wolf creatures," Mila observed.

"Yes, they do." Garak nodded. "Some day I must run a detailed simulation in the holosuite to see just what it is about these predators that humans find so fascinating. But I’ve interrupted your story. I assume that Kanda and Berom took the baby and raised it as their own."

"Indeed they did," Mila said, with a trace of annoyance at having the big climax to the family saga thus anticipated. "They would never have brought another ‘g’reakh’ into the world, but this baby was already here, and unmarked. They named him Ilm, after the label on the box. In time, Ilm learned every folktale of every village his parents visited, and when he was grown, he made his living going from city to city, where the old tales were forgotten, and making them live again for each new generation of children. They say he fathered offspring everywhere he went, and since he could not legally join with a woman and pass on a family name, he insisted that all his children carry the letters of "ilm" somewhere in their given names. And that tradition has remained, even unto this day, and that’s why I’m called Mila and you Elim."

In spite of himself, Garak was rather charmed by the romantic, and surely imaginary, tale of his origins, a tale that attempted to put a more pleasing face on generations of desperately sordid behavior. "So we’re more after all than just a race of thieves and whores?" he thought aloud.

"Of course! I didn’t want to hide the less appealing truths from you, but they aren’t the whole story. You’ll find artists and performers and artisans throughout the lineage of Ilm. I’m sure that’s where your tailoring skills came from."

Yes, those and Elim’s other ridiculous interests, the Garak part of him protested. What was he thinking, to be comforted by this fabricated family history? "Any other spies, torturers and assassins along the way?" he inquired sarcastically.

Mila slapped him, hard. He pulled back, stunned by the sudden and unexpected violence of her reaction. "Stop it, Elim. I’ve had enough of your cynicism, about me, your father, yourself. We Ilms have always done what we must in order to survive. There’s no sense in either of us being ashamed at this late date. And I will *not* tolerate your sneering about your sacred heritage."

As he sat with his hand reflexively stroking the spot where her blow had landed, Garak suddenly felt as he had at three years old, when his nanny had burst into tears because he had told Tain that she used to sneak off to be with her lover after her young charge went to sleep. The thought that he had upset her so troubled him for days, especially because Tain had immediately sent her away. He had always marked it as a sign of his dubious "maturity" that he felt far less troubled when he figured out, at age twelve, that Tain must certainly have had her executed.

He took the extraordinary step of kneeling before Mila to ask her forgiveness. "I’m sorry, Mother."

Her eyes began to fill, but she said nothing in return. Instead she gestured to him to get up, then held out her hand so that he could help her do likewise. "I never saw to it that you were raised to respect your family’s history. What can I really expect?" she said at last. They stood silent for a moment, not able to look each other in the eye. Mila glanced around his small, efficiently arranged room. "It’s been a painful exile you earned yourself on my behalf, Elim, hasn’t it?"

There was so much to say on that score that there was nothing to say. He shrugged. "If I hadn’t been exiled, I’d be dead now, just like Tain and Sakal and the rest of the Order."

"I suppose you’re right," Mila reflected. Then, in a very different tone of voice, she exclaimed, "Why, look at the time. It’s after 0500. My fellow Bolian travelers will stir soon, and it won’t do for them to notice I’ve been away half the night. Oh, and just to allay suspicions further, you should send up that dress I was looking at in your shop, in the dark blue, of course."

"Of course," Garak replied.

Mila then held out her arms wide, "Here, give your mother a hug, Elim."

They embraced tightly for several minutes, then separated. "Good-bye, Mother," he said without noticeable emotion.

"Good-bye. Perhaps we can meet again on a liberated Cardassia."

"I hope so."

"If that should happen, Elim, I’d like you to find some sensible Cardassian girl who’d be willing to bear your child. Just for the sake of our line, you know. I wouldn’t expect you to inconvenience yourself. I’d be happy to take it in to raise."

Garak shook his head. She still really didn’t understand him at all. "Mother, in the unlikely event I ever father a child, its mother and I will raise it. No one else."

Mila smiled sadly and stroked his eye-ridge once again. This time he didn’t pull her hand away. "Ah yes, how could I forget so quickly what a sentimentalist you are about little children who get separated from their parents." Then she pressed a communicator concealed under her sleeve and beamed out without another word.

***

Garak lay down to try to get a few hours sleep before it was time to open up the shop, but a thousand thoughts inspired by his mother’s visit and the confidences she had shared kept racing through his head. When his mind got into such disarray, only sewing ever calmed it. So he went to the fabric replicator and programmed in the specifics for the dress he was to send to Mila. Gathering the dark blue material and the pattern in his hands, he turned to get a cutting tool, but abruptly stopped, laid down the cloth, and began scrolling through the device’s menu. With all the advances over the centuries in synthetics and replicator technology, no one kept live animals for their fleece any more. There were a few scattered makhala herds up in the mountains, and a number of the beasts in zoos, but no one had maintained domestic makhala or sheared ilm in a hundred years. Nevertheless, it might still be possible to replicate the cloth into which it was typically woven. After a search of six inactive menus, he finally found the program and had the machine produce a swatch. It felt soft and warm in his hand. An ilm sweater might be just what was needed to compensate his Cardassian metabolism for the always too-cold environs of Deep Space Nine.

**You should make it the same shade as Mila’s dress. It would set off the color of your eyes so strikingly that Bashir would have to stop and pay you notice.**

--Oh, Elim, do shut up. You know that’s all in the past.-- Nevertheless, he did replicate a bolt of the woven ilm in dark navy blue, and when he held it up to himself in the mirror, Garak couldn’t help but smile at how flattering it was.

~ END ~