Cultural Exchange
"I can't believe you thought I wouldn't notice," said Julian, without prelude.
Garak indicated the chair across from his own with a wave of his hand and Julian took it, setting a data padd down on the tabletop in front of him. Quark's was crowded at this hour, but the seat across from Garak had remained mysteriously vacant. A waitress appeared at Julian's elbow.
"What would you like?"
"The luncheon special sounds nice... and a Raktajino," replied Julian. The waitress nodded.
"Coming right up..." she made a note on her data padd and asked Garak, "-did you want anything else?"
"No, thank you."
"What specifically, are you referring to?" Garak asked, after she left.
"A certain stunt you pulled in this very bar, several years ago."
"That's hardly specific."
"Never mind, then," Julian said, evenly, Garak took a sip of his Rossaka juice, and waited. To his delight, Julian asked, "-So what did you think of the book?"
"Neuromancer? I found it prophetic."
"Go on..."
"But the main characters were horrible."
"How so?"
"Gibson makes a point of explaining each character's motivations. It's disgusting. He doesn't leave any mystery whatsoever. It's as if he can't imagine people doing evil things without a disturbed childhood for justification."
"I thought that was the point," countered Julian, "-as I recall that period in history all but traded on the idea of good versus evil. What Gibson did was deny the reader an unpitiable object of hatred." The food arrived, and Julian tested out the rice pilaf.
"Every villain has some sort of catharsis, but that doesn't mean it should be paraded in front of you," pointed out Garak with distaste, "-where's the mystery? The end of the book ties everything up in a neat bundle complete with psychoanalysis of each character. He might as well have included counseling class study questions at the end of the last chapter."
"He wrote several sequels," put in Julian, encouragingly. Garak took the joke for what it was.
"Magnificent as I found Gibson's descriptive style, I think I'll pass."
"You liked it? I thought is sounded like a bad day on Ferenginar with no end in sight."
"I thought you said you liked this book."
"Did I?"
"What about the book I gave you?" asked Garak. Julian made as if to answer, then seemed to remember his lunch, and took several bites while formulating his reply.
"Confusing as hell. I mean, six or eight sets of characters working independently of each other I can understand, but EIGHTEEN? It just distracts from the story."
"Surely you can keep them straight in your head-"
"That's not the point. This book was about three separate books mixed up and published under the same cover," Julian had another bite of rice, and gestured with his fork, pointing to three different spots on the table, and sketching a circle around them. "-Half the characters never even meet."
"But they interact with characters who do."
"What about the crew of the research station? They're captured by the Denkali long before Gul Perun and the others even arrive."
"They set the stage. How would Perun's executive officer have defended himself if the geneticist Shalef hadn't left her glass on the corner of the table?"
"Garak, it's just a glass. He could have used the bottle of cleaning solution, or any of a number of things on that table. The writer had of each set of characters interacting differently with the same set of objects to justify having that many sets of characters in the story, but the objects were hardly unique. It looked like a gimmick to me, like giving several children the same kind of toy just to see what they'll do with it."
"The objects weren't important. The point was that each set of characters acted differently, read differently, even when they were put into the same situations."
"I already KNOW that. Having it re-proven to me six times in the same book was nothing short of condescension."
"Far be it from me to condescend to someone who misses the point for years," said Garak, candidly.
"Oh, and that's supposed to make me tell you what I was referring to earlier? You'll have to do better than that."
" 'You'll have to do better than that?' Julian, please! I'm not one of your spy program holo-villans," scoffed Garak.
"This, from someone who still can't remember what the hell I'm talking about," observed Julian.
"Now who's using an obvious gimmick?" snapped Garak.
To Garak's intense annoyance, Julian's comm badge chirped. They glared at each other for a moment, then Julian keyed his comm badge and answered,
"Bashir here."
"Doctor, there's a ship coming into bay two with a burn victim. It seems one of the engineers was in the computer room when-"
"I'll be right there," sighed Bashir.
"Duty calls," observed Garak. Julian nodded, and slid the data padd across the table.
"I think you'll like this one."
"I'll look forward to dissecting it with you," replied Garak. Julian left. Garak picked up the padd and froze. There was a slight oily coating in the groove on the side of the casing of the padd. Garak set down the padd, and sniffed his fingers unobtrusively.
The oil was perfume.
Iris.
Iris, one of the flowers he grew, and the exact kind of flower he had arranged to have on the tables at Quark's on the day he'd first spoken to Julian. Iris, which according to his research, was an underground symbol on Earth much like the rainbow around the same time the 'Bond' movies came out.
Julian had gotten better at this game.
And what's more, his counter-move had been to start an argument.
Hmmm...
Garak opened the document on the padd, and began to read.
-
-end-
A/N: Written January 20, 2000. Originally titled 'The Essence of Subtlety'.
Yes, Garak grows flowers as a hobby. Whether the purple ones on the table were supposed to be the kind he grows is botanically beyond me, but it seemed like the kind of thing Garak would do.