In today’s episode, while Quark prepares for a transaction with a new customer, Jake Sisko is itching to get his learner’s permit. But when the runabout gets knocked into the Gamma Quadrant with Ben’s baby on board, he’ll have to lay down arms to machine-learn his way to a solution. Can Kira keep the s___ of five aggrieved parties away from the fan? Is Quark making rookie mistakes? Would Sisko have been a good teacher? All this and more in Trial by Error, the book that knows there’s always time for a snooze.

Trial by Error
Author: Mark Garland
Pages: 281
Published: November 1997
Timeline: After “Bar Association” (4×16)
Prerequisites: None. The Dominion and the conflict with the Klingon Empire are frequently referenced ongoing concerns, but this story takes place entirely independently of them

The kinds of things I want to talk about in this one require digging into major spoilers, so if you’re the kind of person who likes it when I do that, today is your lucky day.

Quark is looking to trade with a race from the Gamma Quadrant called the Aulep, who want to unload some trellium crystals in exchange for gold-pressed latinum, of which they have none. But beyond that, he hasn’t done a lot of research on them, which has Rom and Odo giving him the eyebrow of doubt. Meanwhile, Jake is anxious to learn how to pilot a runabout, mostly to impress a Bajoran girl he likes, and so Ben makes some time to give him a driving lesson. I liked this moment—it didn’t really move anything forward, but I always like when the series takes a moment to re-affirm the beautiful bond between the two.

The Aulep arrive and demand to speak with Captain Sisko. They talk with him and “Trade Ambassador” Quark over dinner, but they’re extremely evasive about their intentions. While Sisko tries to squeeze anything useful out of them, a ship similar to the Aulep ship comes in guns a-blazin’, but Flenn, the Aulep leader, remains reticent to give out hard information. The attackers turn out to be a nearly identical race called the Rylep. Each accuses the other of being up to no good and can’t be in a meeting together without needing Odo and Steve Wilkos to break it up. Not long after that, some Klingons who first appeared in the first chapter come through the wormhole badly hurt and being pursued. The other ship also looks Klingon, but with some weird unidentifiable technology. In their ensuing melee, the crystals Quark bought get knocked out into space, effectively sidelining him for the rest of the book.

The skirmish also knocks loose the Rio Grande, where Jake and his Bajoran crush Elliena are waiting for Chief O’Brien to take them out for a spin. Jake doesn’t have the piloting experience to bring it out of its tailspin, so it goes directly into the wormhole, with the weird not-quite-Klingon ship in hot pursuit. Feeling guilty about the delays that kept him from being in the runabout with them earlier, O’Brien tags along with Sisko in the Rubicon to go rescue the children, leaving Major Kira in charge of cleaning up the Aulep/Rylep mess, which only gets worse when several new players arrive with their complaints, including Quark’s also-Ferengi buyer and a race called the Beshiel Second Realm that wants their trellium crystals back.

So yes, spoilers. It takes until nearly the end of the book for the crew to figure it out, but the peculiar beings that eventually become the largest source of, uh, not so much conflict as confusion per se are these electromagnetic plasma wisps that imitate the forms and behaviors of ships (and later, people), crudely at first, but getting more accurate with time and practice. Once I understood them, I thought of them as like AI aliens training themselves on people they run into. So basically they copy whatever you do, which, if you’re trigger-happy Klingons, is shoot at your target until it’s vaporized, which is why they seem like such a threat at first: they learn by imitation, and they’re very good imitators. The payoff doesn’t quite get there in the end, and Sisko getting through to them by using baseball is like, “Why are we recycling from literally the first episode?” It is at least a little cute how childlike the aliens are, though.

When you see them copying other species, however, you notice a huge missed opportunity. The Aulep and the Rylep are very similar—though crucially, not quite identical—in temperament, ship design, appearance, and many other qualities. So what if one of them had turned out to be a generations-long attempt by the plasma aliens to emulate the other? It’s so obvious you have to wonder why nothing was done with it. The two plot threads could have come together so nicely, and I think it would have made a cool light-bulb moment and paradigm shift for the Aulep to realize that the Rylep only acted the way they did because they were taking cues from the Aulep’s behavior. That said, it is not that bad as is. It’s just not that good either, and it had the potential to be a whole lot more.

I also wish the aliens had been explored more from Jake and Elliena’s point of view than from Sisko and O’Brien’s. So far, we haven’t gotten many opportunities in print to see Jake operate outside of a young-reader mode. Here, he and Elliena have a nice dynamic where they supply each other’s emotional needs and regulate each other’s anxieties in a mature way without it ever getting too saccharine. I think letting them solve the enigma of the plasma aliens would have proven more interesting than the admittedly kind-of-novel Sisko/O’Brien pairing and wouldn’t have devolved too far into insufferable kiddieness. They may not be as experienced in problem-solving as those two, but it was a little frustrating that much of their time on-page was spent spinning their wheels. For a while I was wondering why O’Brien made the cover when this was ostensibly a Quark story, but it eventually made sense. I think I might have been even more intrigued seeing Jake make the cover, however.

Though it misses a lot of cool chances, Trial by Error still goes down pretty smoothly thanks to the character voices that ring true, and everyone except Dax and Bashir gets a pretty solid amount of time in the limelight. Achieving the verisimilitude of the shows in print isn’t easy, but when an author does, it helps cover for a lot of the ways in which this book falls short. It is pretty funny how despite increased acknowledgment of the Dominion, DS9 stories continue to go out of their way to not involve it at all. I wonder about both when Mark Garland started writing this and how many times he was asked to include something that brought it in line with then-present continuity. You definitely don’t need to read this one, but there are certainly bigger wastes of time.

MVP & LVP

• I liked Jake the most in this book. He and Elliena made a really charming couple, had a very natural back-and-forth, and were chaste without being prudish. Like I said, I wish they had gotten to be the main solvers of the alien puzzle, but I’m glad for what we got.
• My LVP pick this time is Quark. Even though his actions are what get the ball rolling on this story and it seems like he’s going to be smack in the middle of it for the duration, after the trellium crystals get spaced, he pretty much just goes catatonic and bows out entirely. It also smells a little funny that he would conduct business without thoroughly researching his seller. Normally, his failures come from unexpected turns of bad luck rather than foundational incompetence, and in general he’s just usually a much more shrewd businessman than that. Not to mention that his lack of consumer research seems like it would be a bush-league violation of Rules of Acquisition numbers 74 and 194.

Stray Bits

• “Sisko found himself dreaming, as he rested during the chief’s watch, that O’Brien was waking him up, telling him he’d found something … Sisko blinked and realized it wasn’t a dream at all.” A rare glimpse into the more grounded physical limits of characters of exceptional talent. It often feels like everyone on Star Trek can go days on end without sleep. It reminded me somewhat obliquely of the part in Battlestations! where Piper has to go to the bathroom during a space battle. (p. 127)
• I could have done without the short scene of Kira getting propositioned by a Tellarite. (pp. 133–34)
• Although this passage describes Sisko’s captaining style, it also succinctly nails how I want to be as a teacher: “The captain was as cool as they came—too cool at times, according to some—but that suited O’Brien well enough. He didn’t like commanders who overreacted and fussed all the time, the kind who got so involved in other people’s jobs that they wound up making those jobs impossible to accomplish. Benjamin Sisko had the ability to recognize competence and act accordingly. The catch was that you had to live up to his expectations. When he needed you to come up with results, you just didn’t let him down.” (p. 229)

Final Assessment

Average. Mark Garland got the characters’ vibes and voices down pretty well, at least, which helps soften the blow of the potential that was missed by not having the Aulep/Rylep and plasma alien plots come together. The synopsis makes it seem like it’s going to be a Quark story, but the Sisko/O’Brien/Sisko story we did get instead was fine. That’s the key word for this whole book: fine. More than skippable, but you won’t feel cheated out of your valuable time if you don’t.

NEXT TIME: Day of Honor: The Television Episode: The Novel