NEW: A Party of Thyself

[arc...@fastnet.co.uk]

Hauling people out of their rightful past has always been a ST staple.
This is a story about a visit from Garak's historical alter ego - who's
always seemed to me to have had something of a bad press - and whose own
story reflects Garak's to a remarkable degree. Readers should note,
however, that the political sentiments expressed in this story are
definitely not those of the author! Hope you like it; write and let me
know.

From: E. H. Williams, my email address is: arc...@fastnet.co.uk
Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge that Paramount has exclusive rights to the
Star Trek universe, and that all characters are the property of Paramount
television (with the exception of the people in the holosuite program,
and Garak's guest, who as a historical personage is presumably the
property of no-one but himself). (9/3/97)

A Party of Thyself.

Thou shalt by sharp experience
be aware
How salt the bread of strangers
is, how hard
The up and down of someone else's stair...

Well it shall be for thee to
have preferred
Making a party of thyself alone.

Paradise XVII 58 -69.

i.

There are remarkably few places where one can truly be on one's own.
Looking back, I seem to have spent a sizeable part of my youth in finding
them; it became almost a hobby. It seems ironic, now that isolation is
the only thing I have in abundance. Everything else - influence,
friendship, respect - has been stripped away and now, up here in my
starlight eyrie, I have at last the solitude I used to crave. The humans,
it seems, have a saying to the effect that if the gods wish to destroy
you, they give you what you ask for. From a species not given to
cynicism, I find this remarkably apt.

One can, of course, always purchase one's friends. I'm not referring to
the sort of people who hang around the infinite variety of bars which add
so much colour to the monochrome landscape of this station; anyone will
talk to you for the price of a drink. With the possible exception of the
Romulans, of course. Or the Bajorans, naturally. And even some of my long
term customers can be a little reticent once they've left the privacy of
my tailor's shop. In fact, on my darker days, it sometimes seems to me
that our good doctor is practically the only person who doesn't appear
nervous or revolted at the prospect of socialising with me in public - but
I digress. When I remarked that friends are easily bought, I was referring
to the Holodeck. It's always seemed an odd form of diversion to me. I
used to enjoy the theatre, but I can't say that I ever felt moved to
leave my seat and join the cast. When one acts for a profession, as we in
the intelligence services are obliged to do so much of the time, it makes
a pleasant change to watch other people putting in the effort. The
participation in some holographically generated world lacks the
spontaneity of concourse with real people; there's little savour in
predictability. And although the images may look real enough,
they don't have the sensory texture of a living being. They don't smell
of anything, and - if I may lapse into morbidity for a moment - they feel
uncannily similar to dead flesh. As for more intimate relationships with
these simulacra, well, I've never found necrophilia a particularly
appetising prospect. The result of all these prejudices is that I don't
go into the holosuites very often. Other people seem less discerning, or
perhaps are even more desperate than I. One sees individuals vanishing
practically for weeks into their favourite scenario and emerging wan-faced
and hollow eyed only for the occasional meal. Perhaps that's something of
an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. I've only ever really enjoyed
myself when I was in a program with someone else; you get some interesting
behaviour once people are removed from their familiar context. However, I
did find one particular program a little diverting.

I took part in the program by a convoluted route. I believe that the
elegant Lieutenant Dax originally hired it, since she has something of a
leaning towards the historical (natural, I suppose, since she remembers
more of history than the rest of us). She got it at a discount rate, it
seems; it was one of those cut price melodramas in which people who never
actually met are crammed into the same setting and left to get on with it.
Anyway, her duty period was re-arranged, or something, and so she passed
the booking on to Julian Bashir. Since it apparently offered relatively
few opportunities for saving worlds, he was less than keen.
'You go along,' he urged me. 'It's your sort of thing.'
'*Which* period is it?' I asked again. He had told me already, but I'm
lamentably ill versed in human history.
'Sixteenth century.'
'Ah, a Shakespearean romance, perhaps?' I hazarded.
'No, Shakespeare's later. This,' he said with a sweeping gesture that
encompassed the entire promenade 'is Renaissance Italy. You'll love it.
Political intrigue, scandal, everyone trying to assassinate everybody
else.'
'A sort of home from home?'
'Well...I thought it might appeal to you...' At least he had the grace
to blush.
'It's kind of you to think of me,' I told him. 'But are you sure you
won't join me?'
'No, I really should finish off this last batch of samples. And
besides,' he added, avoiding my gaze 'Our last outing, that secret agent
thing, was a bit - a little too dramatic, actually.'
Well, he had nearly blown my head off, I recollected, but I didn't hold it
against him. I like surprises.
'My dear doctor,' I said, not without irony, 'You should know by now
that I can forgive you anything.' I ventured a smile that started out as
paternal and ended, I hoped, as inviting, but he didn't seem to notice. I
might just as well have fluttered my eyelashes at Morn; a patron of such
permanence that even Quark's less inebriated clients occasionally mistook
him for part of the furniture. I picked up the program clip and made a
graceful exit, leaving the object of my unrequited affections staring
moodily at the floor.

ii.

I will admit, I enjoyed that program. I've never been to Earth, and
though, as I've said, the program lacked a certain historical accuracy,
the scenario stirred in me a quite unexpected nostalgia. The palace of
the de Medicis was magnificently de trop; much more appalling in its
opulence than anything the twentieth century had to offer. No wonder the
Federation had finally settled for blandness, after a thousand years of
such indescribable vulgarity. The atmosphere of the court was as
astringently refreshing as a bath of vitriol. Catherine de Medici herself
(in her own time, the Queen of France) was the possessor of a remarkable
décolletage and a glacial green gaze; I've seen kinder eyes in the face of
a Biranian bonecat, prior to pouncing. I took to her immediately. Her
successor, Guilano, had the sort of sleek good looks and languid manner
that one always associates with an appetite for private depravity. I
liked him, too. The rest of the court was composed of the usual
assortment of sycophants, cynics, whores and servants trying to remain
invisible and thus last another day. It reminded me of Romulus, without
the prevailing asceticism.

My principal interactions were with the de Medici family, Catherine and
Guilano; Piero Soderini, the brief ruler of Florence in between Medicis,
and the visiting Borgia family: another set of charmers. Amusing though
the protagonists undoubtedly were, my attention was caught by a subsidiary
character in the drama. He seemed to have no real part in any of the
plots, but hung around the edges of the court. He was a slight, dark man,
and he wore an expression of frustrated misery. I recognised the look at
once; I've seen
it in the mirror often enough. I tried to talk to him as the drama
unfolded, but whenever I made to do so, either he vanished or I became
distracted by the events around me. It was a little irritating.

Catherine let it be known that my presence at court, in the guise of the
visiting Genoese ambassador, might be celebrated in more personal ways,
removed from the tiresome pomp and show. She had a tendency to narrow her
icy eyes and take deep, shuddering breaths whenever she looked in my
direction. I realise that such gratification is a primary function of the
holosuites, but nonetheless, I was here on business.

The two hours passed swiftly and entertainingly enough. I contrived to
foil one assassination and two minor poisonings, and averted the brutal
murder of Catherine herself, immediately prior to her bath.
'I am indebted to you, Signore,' she breathed (the dialogue was
dreadful). If it is possible to recline when standing, she did so. She
gave a smouldering sigh and her brocade night robe slipped an inch or two.
'How can I ever repay you?' she added. A number of options were
immediately apparent.

'Your safety, madam, is reward enough,' I told her, adroitly returning
her to a more upright position. It was nearly time to go. I terminated
the program and left the holosuite.

The promenade was quiet. Julian had gone. I contemplated looking him up,
but thought better of it. Increasingly, these days, I found myself forced
to exert conscious control over my demeanour with regard to that young
man, and it annoyed me. I don't enjoy falling in love, even when it's
reciprocated; it's too much like being assaulted, suddenly and without
warning. I returned to my quarters alone, and retrieved the kanaar from
the bathroom cabinet before finally falling into an uneasy sleep.

iii.

At some point close to midnight, I awoke abruptly, and lay for a bemused
moment in the darkness. There was someone in the room with me. I am
ashamed to admit that for a minute I thought, and hoped, that it was
Bashir. That this should be my initial conclusion, and not that the
unknown should be some assassin sent to slay me as I slept, showed me how
far I had fallen. How easy it is, after all, to dull the razor's edge.
'Lights!' I ordered, blearily. Even when fully illuminated, the room
seemed curiously imprecise. The dark, unhappy man from the Medici's court
and I stared at one another in stupefaction.

I don't mind being haunted by the shades of those who I may have hastened
into the darkness, but I really don't see why I should be plagued by some
character I've never met outside a computer game. I spoke firmly to him.
'Go back to your program at once!' I commanded, rather as one might send
an errant pet to its basket. An inane thing to say, I know, but it was
still the middle of the night and the pounding in my head reminded me of
the inadvisability of drinking alone.
'What?' my guest said.
'I saw you at the court,' I told him.
'Yes,' he said, wonderingly. 'I saw you, too. What manner of man are
you? From what level of Hell?' It was said with a smile.
'I - I come from a long way away. A far country. I'm nothing
supernatural.'
He gave a sour little laugh.
'Hell or the court of Florence, what difference is there these days?
There's little enough to choose between Guilano or Satan.'
'I see you know him well.'
Stepping across the room, he sat down on the end of the bed. The cover
remained undisturbed by his weight, I noticed, and he cast no shadow. He
said, with bitterness
'I was close to the court, once. Now - you should have let them all
die. It would have been a kindness.'
It crossed my mind that this was some spurned lover of Guilano's or
Catherine's, but I sensed something other.
'What were you to them?' I asked, and received the answer I expected.
'I was Piero Soderini's principal adviser. He sent me to the four
corners of the world. To Louis' court, to Rome.' He laughed. ' I had a
hand in every intrigue and scheme between Paris and Padua. I was
ambitious, in those days.' He leaned towards me and his dark eyes burned.
'I did it for love, you understand, not simply for myself. I believed in
the state. I thought that Florence could become great again, that I
would be instrumental in its rise. I conversed with the greatest minds of
my day; I accompanied Cesare Borgia on campaign. I watched him closely -
now there was a strategist! A phenomenon indeed. I knew da Vinci, too;
got him one of his principal commissions. He was a good man, you know.
Not naive, but a moral man; a humanist. I knew all of them,' he repeated.
'Can you imagine what it was like, to be a part of history; an agent of
change?'
'I can imagine.' I studied his downcast face as he sat so improbably at
the end of my bed. 'What happened? They threw you out, didn't they?'
He nodded. 'Yes, they cast me out. The Spanish invaded. I warned Piero
what was about to happen - I had my sources, after all - but he didn't
believe me. When the Spanish swept in, we were entirely
unprepared. Piero fled, and left me to face the music. I barely escaped
with my life. And then the dust died down and the Medicis came back, and
Guilano took control of Florence. In November I was dismissed from my
post at the Chancery; in February they arrested me, on charges of
conspiracy.' He winced. 'They subjected me to the persuasion of the
strappado - I'd prefer not to give you a detailed description of what that
does to a man. And then they exiled me, to Sant'Andrea, where my family
had a house. I used to look out across the muddy fields, the rows of
cabbages and beets, all the way to the gilded roofs of the city. They
denied me Florence, but more than that, they denied me a voice. I used to
go

down to the inn every evening, and hold forth to anyone who would listen.
The peasants laughed at me. 'There goes old Niccolo, ranting on again,'
they'd say. Then I'd go home and do you know what I'd do?' He was far
away now, his gaze fixed on a horizon that I could not see.
'Tell me,' I murmured.
'I would lock the door, put on my best clothes, and then I would
address those personages whom I thought would best profit from my counsel.
Caesar, Alexander, Aristotle - I could almost see them, through the empty
air. And there were others, too, whose names I did not know, but still
they came to me: Gramsci, Lenin, Baikan. The only audience left to me
were those long dead, or yet to come. I honed my ideas on these chimerae,
and then I wrote it all down, in my little book. I based it on Cesare
Borgia - oh, I know he was a wicked man, a tyrant born, but states need a
strong man to lead them, and brutality is sometimes necessary - ' he broke
off, and gave me a sharp look. 'You understand, don't you? You don't
think I am wrong?'
'No,' I said, with care. 'I don't think you're wrong. But one must be
careful to draw a fine line between firmness and oppression.'
'Yes, that's it exactly. A leader must avoid being hated by his
subjects. He should set a commander to undertake the bloody exigencies of
government, then have that commander executed when he becomes too greatly
detested. Then the leader himself is loved for his mercy.'
'And, above all, the leader must avoid alienating his close advisers,
who are liable to turn against him.' I supplied, with perhaps a little
bitterness of my own.
He said, as if quoting 'The Prince should restrain himself from inflicting
grave injury on anyone in his service whom he has close to him in his
affairs of state.'
Your Piero didn't learn that lesson, did he?' *Not the only one*, I
thought. I remembered Enabran Tain, that last night, casually saying to
me 'Well, someone's got to pay, Elim. Who do you think it should be?'
'No, he did not learn. I see you know something of statesmen,' my guest
added, wryly. We exchanged a look of sudden complicity. He said
'And now there's you. Who are you, I wonder? Someone from my future
or my past, who seeks to benefit from my poor opinion? Some august
minister, perhaps, in some distant land?'
'No,' I said. 'Only an exile like yourself, who once had power and now
sits at the window and watches an empire pass by without him. Who wanted
to serve the state and his master, and who is now reduced to dissembling
to those who neither care nor understand.'
'Well,' he said, sighing. 'There'll always be those like you and me,
eh? We think we comprehend the realities of power, but we never do, until
it's too late. We're a little surprised, aren't we, when it twists around
and bites our hand? As it always does.'
'As it must, perhaps.'
He smiled. 'Do you know what I see, when I look at myself in the glass?'
'No,' I told him, but nonetheless, I thought I knew.
'I used to see the face of influence, but now it seems to me that I look
more like some old travelling conjuror. I've got the same furtive gaze
that I've seen a dozen times in the eyes of the carnival showmen, plucking
doves out of a shabby sleeve or making beans vanish underneath a cup, just
to beguile and cozen a few gullible locals. Politics, popularity, power:
all that's no different from the travelling show. It's all cheap magic in
the end.'
'Ah,' I said. 'But wasn't it a good illusion while it lasted?'
'While it lasted,' my guest echoed. 'Yes. Yes, it was. What do they
say? "Time waits for no-one, goodness is not enough, fortune varies and
malice receives no gift that placates her." '
'That would seem to sum it up, yes.'
He reached across and grasped my wrist. His grip was warm and real.
'You must visit me again,' he said.
'I will, if I can.'
He seemed to be growing transparent before my eyes; fragile upon the air.
'One last thing,' I said, before he was quite gone. 'Your book. What
was it called?'
'Oh, the book. I dedicated it to Guilano. Its title is 'The Prince.' '
he said, a shadow, and then only the stars remained, shining through the
place where he had been.

iv.

'Niccolo Machiavelli,' the doctor said, rolling the words on his tongue.
'Horrible man, apparently. A scheming, manipulative professional cynic.'
'I see.'
'Fell from grace in - ' he checked the padd ' - 1513. They exiled him.
Apparently he wrote 'The Prince' during his exile to worm his way back
into Guilano de Medici's favour. It must have worked - he got

reinstated, for a brief spell, to work for the Medicis, and soon after
that, he died. 'The Prince' was quite a famous work at one time; it
refers to it here as 'the Bible of realpolitik.' Thank God the politics
of Earth have moved on from such callous attempts at social engineering.'
'Indeed.'
'What's your interest in this, all of a sudden? Did Machiavelli put in
an appearence in that holosuite program?'
'Yes, he showed up, briefly. Just caught my attention, I suppose,' I
said, dismissively. For some reason, I did not want to tell him about my
midnight visitor. I had no idea what had conjured this long-dead spirit
to my bedside, but the mechanics of his visitation seemed oddly
irrelevant. I sometimes feel that we are subject to forces that exceed in
capacity those that are merely physical, that can accomplish feats held
impossible by science. Love is certainly one of them, but so, I believe
now, is sympathy: a compulsion which transcends both time and space.
'No particular reason,' I told Bashir.
'Stick to Shakespeare,' the doctor advised, between mouthfuls.
'Inspirational literature, that's the thing...Anyway, look, I've got to
rush. Thank you for your company, Garak; an enjoyable lunch, as always.'

I finished my meal slowly, reading with care as the text of 'The Prince'
unscrolled down the screen. A lively work, with a thorough understanding
of certain universal principles. It was admirable in its brevity and
sound in its conclusions. Yet as a theoretical exercise it was limited,
no doubt by the restrictions of its time and context. The contemporary
political realities called for a revision. The only problem with
Machiavelli's little book, I decided, was that it did not go far enough.

Thoughtfully, I took the padd back to my quarters. Sitting down at my
desk, I looked out for a moment at the turning stars, and then I began to
write.

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