JMJ

Chapter Fourteen

Keelhauling, Mutiny, and the Subtle Current

"Are you alright?" asked Sharzee.

Quark laughed quietly as he seated himself in a more upright position. Awkwardly he straightened his vest-coat.

He thought of some silly reply to joke the concern away, but he knew Sharzee was too smart to fall for that and too forceful to let it slide either. Even if he did not know the details of her life, she was still her, and somehow, true to the old joke that a man always married someone who reminded him of his mother, he knew that despite his relationship with his mother never quite being the best, he knew that Sharlezeed resembled her in more ways than first appearance implied or that he originally would have liked to have admitted.

They had practically grown up together. She was all but a sister, though even now he knew that he doubted the space between. With good reason, he did, though. After all, could he trust anyone?

Pfft, except maybe Bashir?

He did not want to be reminded of Rule of Acquisition Number 99: "Trust is the biggest liability of all." It may not have been an original rule accepted by the Hidden Profiters, but it was one that still seemed to ring truer than ever on Ferenginar these days. It counted for enough in the old days.

"What time is it?"

"Not late," said Sharzee standing in front of him as Quark lowered his eyes to the floor. "I hardly came in and you hardly let me enter you were so tired. I know you must have had a horrible day."

At the moment of his release from his duties, he had obeyed his promise to tell her, and she had wasted no time in coming. How he had selfishly wanted to be comforted then. Now he simply selfishly wanted to be alone with about the same conviction, but one thing that it was taught of any good Ferengi was to be in tune with his emotions whether to use it to gain profit or to be wary of it in case of a situation which recalled Rule of Acquisition Number 101 "Profit Trumps Emotion".

Letting his chin fall into his fists he leaned forward against his knees. He looked up at her rather guiltily; then he threw a careless shrug.

"What?" Sharzee urged.

She may have been as strong as Ishka, but she had always been such a lady. Even at a young age, even when she was being naughty— and oh, how she could be mischievous in those old days— she could conduct herself in such a way that she was always acting the part of the lady. Her poise, her tone… Was it taught or natural? He was not sure if that would have annoyed him at some time in his life, but it surged a swell of pride for her as his wife now despite himself, and he smiled even if sadly. His whole family had always been loud, obnoxious, and disjointed, and he was not certain if at the moment he felt himself to be gentlemanly enough to match her.

"Why did you come?" he asked despite himself.

"What do you mean? I said I would come," and here at last she smiled, and to him it was perfectly suited— maybe too perfectly suited. "You wanted me to."

"We shouldn't've done this," Quark told her. "We should've waited. Now you're dragged into all this with me. If I'd know that—"

Sharzee's eyes flashed indignantly as she raised her head up and tightened her breath. Then without warning she plopped down beside him on the couch; though even still Quark was not surprised.

"If we simply decided to get married on a whim yesterday I would heartily agree with you, but I'm your wife!" she said, and she pulled his shoulder so that he would face her. "I'm where I should be in my mind, making up for lost time by supporting you at your side, right?"

"But you don't know me, anymore. I don't know you. We don't even know if we can truly trust each other, and it kills me."

"I know you still, and no matter what you've gone through in the expected life of a Ferengi businessman, you're still the same," said Sharzee steadily. "You're acting just the same as when your father died and you thought you were being punished for marrying me. You still fear Rule of Acquisition Number 285, 'No good deed ever goes unpunished.'"

Quark shook his head, and for those who did not know him it would have sounded the most natural and truthful tone of voice in the universe as he calmly lied, "No, I don't. That's why I became a Hidden Profiter."

"A Ferengi should take into account the wisdom of good writers. The guilty always punish the innocent for being innocent if they can get away with it far more than swindling a Klingon if they can get away with that," she said stubbornly, and sniffed with a nod, but in still such a ladylike manner that Quark could not help but smile with amusement.

"I'm sure you're guilty of something," Quark could not help but tease despite himself.

"Aren't we all?" Sharzee teased back. "And so we all know the feeling of petty resentment when someone is innocent and we are not."

He wanted to be sober and brooding. He still had a strong feeling of wanting to be alone, but like one being in a steaming hot tub with something pressing on one's mind to leave it, it was all summed up in that simple mental response of, "oh, just a few moments longer…"

"But when we know we're innocent and in the right, we don't have to feel guilty about being punished for it."

"Now you're just telling me what I want to hear," said Quark.

"You want to hear that what your heart desires is wrong for you. You were correct when you told me that you made a career out of being a victim. It's easier that way. I know. To be an emotional martyr for a cause rather than a true humble one. I felt that way too both when I felt wronged as a female and when the local teacher's union called me a bootlicker of the 'Old Course' for not denouncing the Rules of Acquisition as dangerous to learn and to recite."

He could have asked how bad it was in the Highlands of his home. He could have asked the circumstances of her being fired or a number of other things that would have put his pet peeve on a chase of the century, but although the fire of it hissed a little in the back of him mind, it all passed like a storm that had decided to move on rather than lumber entirely in.

"What age did you teach?" asked Quark looking at her tenderly as he touched her cheek.

"I didn't teach," said Sharzee. "At least not at school I was an adviser politically on the education board. Mostly for young children, though I did some daycare work for mothers who could not be home for them before that and during certain times of the year I still did until recently."

Quark smiled. "Did you have a lot of them to take care of?"

"Once up to thirty at a time."

"That's a lot of wild lobelings to take care of at once."

"I know," said Sharzee, "which is why I felt so responsible for them even when I did not see children often face to face anymore."

"I bet they loved you," Quark said full of passion he had been trying to withhold, but which he had given so freely to Natima and Grilka, and he did not quite understand it himself.

Sharzee grinned wryly. "Maybe they should have loved their parents more…"

"Maybe, but I bet you told them to respect them."

Sharzee's grin widened but became less happy and more ironic. "There was a time early on when I encouraged the opposite."

That was enough to put a damper on the romantic feeling that Quark was starting to stoke, but his love for her only increased rather than not.

"Forget what you've already been sorry for," Quark admonished sternly.

Sharzee looked steadily at Quark for a moment— listening, studying, and cocking her head to one side. Then she put her hand over his heart as though to mend some rent she had taken note of, and Quark almost rolled his eyes.

"You have to too, Quark," she admonished back.

She could hear the conflict within him easier than a Betazoid would have felt it in him even if it would have been difficult anyway considering that emotion-reading fell under the telepathic division from which Ferengi were nearly immune. He was as Zek had said, however, to the ears of a Ferengi. Forever had he been an open book with no control over his emotional output except when he really had been into a Ferengi lie, and even then an intuitive Ferengi could usually sense his deceit anyway.

With a grim nod, Quark stood up slowly and tenderly. He stroked his wife's chin in between the dangle of beaded ear-laces. Then up on his feet he turned towards the round window. Behind its decorative grilles, the rain fell steadily and soothingly solid, much unlike the disturbingly muted rain in his dreams.

"So?" Sharzee demanded putting her hands neatly into her lap.

"Hmm?"

"Are you going to tell me?"

"Tell you what?" shrugged Quark even though he had a pretty good guess what.

"What's really troubling you at the moment?"

The thought that she was a spy whispered chills down his spine again. He could not help it. The thought of a Keeoopii within her mind, forcing her to abuse her old relationship with a man she loved a long time ago, made him utterly revolted to the point of throwing up, to the point of near madness, to the point of killing someone. Had he not felt the same at their first meeting? She most-likely sensed that conflict too even if she could not read his mind to know all his thoughts about it.

Being in tune with her himself, however, he could also hear her withdrawing breath as she contemplated his mistrust of her and his self-guilt for feeling it. They did know each other, after all. Dangerously, well. Perhaps better in a sense because memories of events that one missed of the other did not get in the way of the core-inner-workings of their minds. Quark could tell it was no act that she felt hurt by his mistrust, but was it a hurt of her own or a hurt excelled by a Keeoopii enslaving her to her own emotions?

Don't be an idiot, he then suddenly thought. She got into the Tower, didn't she?

If she had been possessed by a parasite, she would have been scanned out, and Quark did not dare to allow his suspicious mind to question whether Sharzee would betray her whole race willingly to such desolation as the Keeoopii had planned.

He huffed at himself.

"Do you mind if I ask you something about the Hidden Profiters?" he asked, turning to her again.

"Of course not," said Sharzee, raising a brow of gentle suspicion herself.

He rather would have asked Bashir about this, but he had been unable to get him alone since his lunch with Zek. He double-checked himself whether he wanted to go on, but Sharzee would drag it out of him now if didn't.

"Did the liquidators always know about them still existing?"

Sharzee laughed in a tinkling manner that was cold and humorless like a chime in the chill of an early morning fog without rain.

He winced just a little. That sort of laugh was something new in her like a nostalgic song with a single bad note or even played on a cooler key.

"Why wouldn't they?" she asked.

"Of course, they did," said Quark looking back at the window sullenly as he leaned a shoulder against the wall before the window cavity.

"That's why my brother had to act carefully when he found out what you revealed about our relationship," said Sharzee. "He wasn't going to risk me being sent into years of servitude as punishment."

Quark nodded. "That's what I thought… but why did the Ferengi government allow them to exist when they'd banish or arrest people for things they obviously had to allow the Hidden Profiters to do or they would no longer be Hidden Profiters?"

Sharzee shrugged. "If the Hidden Profiters made too much spectacle of themselves, they did."

"Yes…"

"When they didn't, I think it was because they did not want to make martyrs out of us. They did not want it to look like slaughter. Ferengi as a whole are tolerant of other people's beliefs even when they're completely intolerant in their own, and the idea of genocide is even more frowned upon. But the Hidden Profiters were non-applicable. Although the Hupyrians and the Tarahongers are part of the Alliance, they did not abide by all the Rules of Acquisition or the unjust laws becoming more and more unjust that the Ferengi Alliance enforced upon their own race. Hidden Profiters, in the government's mind, were to be treated like non-Ferengi unofficially not to upset the balance of those who believed in the divinity of the Tower of Commerce. It could make the entire Alliance question the Grand Nagus' infallibility or give an opportunity for those who did not believe it to voice it whether Hidden Profiter or not. It would have sent a message to all who doubted that the Ferengi Alliance was no longer the place it began as. It was to keep the peace. I believe there was a time when we were truly hidden, but ten thousand years is a long time not to be noticed by people like those in the FCA."

"I was told today that the Hidden Profiters profited the Alliance in some fashion."

"They kept the number of deaths caused by the corruption of the Alliance's negligence down to a minimum by use of the tradition of Hidden Profiting charity. Why do you think they invented the Rule 'Charity is good as long as it ends up in your pocket?'"

"So," said Quark quietly, "just like a Hupyrian bank account, it was used to make the Ferengi way of life look less unlivable than the government was turning it into. It was not a free-trade economy anymore— for those on the planet, especially. That's why 'Home is where the heart is but the stars are made of latinum'. It was slowly becoming a dictatorship run by the liquidators secretly as far as I can see, and the Hidden Profiters were giving the planet a false sense of security in a place that would have felt more like a dictatorship without them."

"I suppose, that's one reason."

"But what about before that? This takeover by the liquidators was a slow thing. The Alliance wasn't always like that."

"It was always still to keep the peace, and the Alliance was from very early on usurped… or merged."

The ancient pirates? Yes, Quark understood that well enough. The pirates and the original Hidden Profiters before they were hidden, at one time represented the two main factions of the Ferengi. The pirates surrendered to those early Hidden Profiters, but only to exploit their virtues. It was a lesson on compromising with evil intent and the consequences of trusting an untrustworthy person no matter how big the smile. The knife plunged into the heart of the Alliance caused a wound that wound had never fully healed despite the ups and downs of certain Nagi's reigns.

Quark paused as a flickering new thought occurred to him.

"Then what in the universe did we need the Congress of Economic Advisers for?" he snapped as he began to pace about the room. "The Nagus' power could always be technically out-ruled by the FCA if they really put their mind to it—"

"You answered your own question."

Quark sighed and nodded as he looked her in those smart and beautiful eyes.

"And 'sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer'," he remarked. "Mo— It was put in place more to balance out the power of the liquidators."

"I suppose so," Sharzee agreed.

"But that doesn't help me now." He paused again, and muttered, "Unless it's the FCA's 'reformed liquidators' who are working with the Keeoopii…"

"What would help you now would be to have something to eat," said Sharzee. "And then to go to bed."

"Probably…If I can relax enough to do that," Quark admitted, but he shook his head. "If I don't get assassinated in my sleep or wake up being arrested and dragged back up to the spire for something I didn't do!"

"Quark," said Sharlezeed.

Quark was turned to the window yet again, glaring out at the rain and the lights beyond as he slumped forward onto the sill. He really should not have invited Sharlezeed to come. Now she was putting her arms over his shoulders; she was getting in close and confidential, and Quark could only sigh yet again and close his eyes miserably.

"Why did you become a Hidden Profiter?" she asked.

"Because it's the truth," said Quark simply without opening his eyes.

Sharzee paused as she stared out the window too in thought for a moment.

"If it's the truth, why don't you trust the truth?"

"What?"

"You forgot that being a Hidden Profiter is about trust, Quark. Even if you don't trust and can't trust anyone else— and maybe this is true— you can trust the divine undercurrent going so often in the opposite direction as everyone else in the physical realm and those racing along the wrong winds of the Great River to the Falls that lead to the Vault? Does not a good *dayitela know his craft and know his business more than anyone else?"

Quark's eyes narrowed as he considered this.

Sharzee felt his concentration emerge from the inner stoop of despondency.

Does not the River of the Hidden Profiters go in the opposite direction from the rest of Ferenginar? he thought.

He had been apprenticed under the very hidden son of a Hidden Profiting mother who had passed on so many of her beliefs to him regardless of his rejection of it by the way. He had imparted it onto Quark in so hidden a manner that it had followed him ever after.

The Acquisitioner who had always believed strongly in "holy greed" was indeed merged, as Sharzee put it, between pirating and holiness. Madness, really. But it did require a sense of humility— a humility that Ferenginar was fast losing, but it was a thing which Quark had always loved.

But the current upon which the Hidden Profiters meant to sail was one unseen and opposite of both old and new courses in the sense that it profited not from greed but by the absence of it. Not from physical or mental prowess, but from the lack of them. Meekness could be used as strength beyond measure where the New Course believed it to be an ailment. To gain the profit was to put other people before oneself, to give without expecting anything back much to the horror of a traditional Acquisitioner— to not desire equal shares as the New Coursers demanded but offer the better half to another against the beliefs of both.

If everyone truly believed that way, however, then the form of government truly would not matter a whole lot. Laws would not have to be strict on either side. And that, of course, was what the original Ferengi Alliance had truly all been about.

The only problem had been that the founders had decided to row alongside pirates in the first place in their quest to join everyone into their Alliance.

Misplaced 'niceness' Quark thought with the same distaste as he had as the young bar owner on DS9, but then shook his head back to the more pressing matter of that current.

"A wise man can hear profit on the wind" according the Rule of Acquisition Number 22, but Quark took it a step further: a wiser man can humble himself to hear it in the slightest zephyr and trust it enough to allow into his sails into the force of a gale.

Though he doubted he was wise enough, he bowed his head and tried to listen for that zephyr with all the humility he could muster.

"No," he said.

All the while Sharzee had been waiting patiently with her hands on his arms and her chin gently on his shoulders as though trying to pull the thoughts from Quarks' soul. Her hazel eyes watching his stare out reflecting the city lights outside enough to make them a myriad of rainbow color rather than their typical blue. As he remembered her now and what she had just said, he blinked and turned to her with a smile for how she had jumped at his "no".

"Not that," he laughed; though he did not explain. "I think I'm going to have something to eat, and then go to bed."

*dayitela: a person who designs, makes and uses one's own work either selling it or actually using it, but is always independent and is known for being an artist, loving his craft, usually offering the service of mending whatever is made and thus always has contact with what he makes no matter where his work ends up. It is also what Hidden Profiters are known to call their Maker in tradition for secrecy.