LET MY PEOPLE GO

 Major Kira Asks The Emissary of The Prophets for Help

[Captain's office] 
 SISKO: 
A transmission from Dukat? 
This is the first I've heard of it. 

[Captain's office]

SISKO: A transmission from Dukat? This is the first I've heard of it.
KIRA: That's because I didn't report it.
SISKO: Why not?
KIRA: It was of a personal nature. I tried to trace the signal, but
SISKO: What did he want?
KIRA: He said he knew my mother, that they were lovers.
SISKO: You don't believe him, do you?
KIRA: He knew certain things about her. Personal things.
SISKO: Well, Gul Dukat is a very resourceful man. I'm sure he knows a lot about your family, about all of our families.
KIRA: I keep trying to tell myself that, but I need to know.
SISKO: That may not be possible. Major.
KIRA: There is a way. I can visit the Temple of Iponu on Bajor and consult the Orb of Time.
SISKO: Excuse me?
KIRA: I need to know the truth.
SISKO: Let me get this straight. You want to travel back in time to see if Dukat and your mother were lovers?
KIRA: That's right.
SISKO: Major, the Federation has very strict regulations
KIRA: This has nothing to do with the Federation. I need your help as the Emissary, not as Starfleet captain. The Emissary can see to it that I am allowed access to the orb. After that, it's up to the Prophets. If they feel that my request is worthy, they'll send me where I need to go. If not, I've made a trip to Bajor for nothing.
SISKO: And if they do send you back, what then? What makes you so sure you won't interfere with the timeline?
KIRA: The Prophets will be guiding me. Nothing will happen without their blessings. Please, Emissary, please, let me seek the will of the Prophets.

[Temple of Iponu]

(Kira is escorted to a small, dimly lit chapel where the orb box sits on an altar. She opens it.) 

JAKE: What do you mean you're not going to let Doctor Bashir operate on you? You have to.
SISKO: Don't you see? These visions are gifts. I can't refuse them.
KASIDY: I cannot believe what I'm hearing. Listen to yourself, Ben. Sitting there, telling us that this mystical journey of yours is more important than watching your son grow up.
JAKE: Dad, please think about what you're doing. These visions, they're not worth dying for.
SISKO: I remember the first time I held you in my hands. You were only a few minutes old and when I looked down at your face, it was almost as if I could see your whole life stretched out in front of you. All the joys it would bring, and the bruises. It was all there, hidden in that scrunched up little face. The baby that I'm holding in my hands now is the universe itself. And I need time to study its face.
KASIDY: Look at the face of your son now and then tell me you're doing the right thing.
(Doorbell)
SISKO: Come in.
WINN: It's time, Emissary, if you're ready.
SISKO: I am.
KASIDY: Ready for what?
WINN: The Emissary has asked for help in his journey. I'm providing it.
JAKE: And you trust her? Since when?
SISKO: Jake, it'll be all right. I love you. Both of you.

[Ops]

KIRA: I've never seen the Temple so crowded. Seemed like every Bajoran on the station was there to pray for the Emissary.
DAX: Glad to hear it. He going to need all the help he can get if he's going to survive this.
KIRA: The Captain is not going to die. He is the Emissary. The Prophets will take care of him.
O'BRIEN: With all due respect, Major, I'd rather see Julian take care of him.
KIRA: Chief, I know you're worried, but the Prophets are leading the Emissary on this path for a reason.
WORF: Do not attempt to convince them, Major. They cannot understand.
DAX: Since when did you believe in the Prophets?
WORF: What I believe in is faith. Without it there can be no victory. If the Captain's faith is strong, he will prevail.
DAX: That's not much to bet his life on.
KIRA: You're wrong. It's everything.
O'BRIEN: I hope you're right, Major. I hope you're right.

[Guest quarters]

(Sisko is in front of an Orb, and Winn is praying in front of a shrine.)
WINN: He asks for your guidance. Let him see with your eyes. Lift the veil of darkness that obscures his path. Emissary?
SISKO: I'm ready.
(A vicious headache hits him.)
WINN: The Orb of Prophecy is very powerful. It taxes even the healthy. Are you sure you want to go through with this?
SISKO: I have to. I need to bring the visions into focus, tie them together. I can't do it alone.
WINN: But you're very weak. Perhaps it would be better to wait until after the signing.
SISKO: I may not have time. I need to do this now.
WINN: As you wish. May the Prophets reveal their wisdom to you, Emissary.
(Kai Winn leaves and Sisko opens the doors of the Orb case)

[Wardroom]

(It's a proper signing with pens and paper.)
WHATLEY: He's already an hour late.
WINN: He's still consulting the Orb of Prophecy.
WHATLEY: How long do these Orb experiences last?
WINN: Minutes. Hours. Sometimes days.
WHATLEY: Then maybe we shouldn't wait for him. Do you have any objections to proceeding without Captain Sisko?
WINN: I'm sure the Emissary would want to be here, but under the circumstances.
WHATLEY: May I have your attention. I've been looking forward to this day for many years, as I'm sure all of you have. Welcoming a new planet to the Federation is the happiest assignment an Admiral could hope for. The Federation is not just a union of planets, it's much more.
(An exhausted Sisko stumbles)
WINN: Emissary!
WHATLEY: Get him to the Infirmary.
SISKO: No! I have to tell them.
WINN: What is it, Emissary? Have the Prophets revealed something to you?
SISKO: Locusts. They'll destroy Bajor unless it stands alone.
WHATLEY: Ben, what the hell are you talking about?
SISKO: It's too soon! Bajor must not join the Federation. If it does, it will be destroyed.
(And he collapses, having a fit.) 

(Inside the wormhole.) 

SISKO: 

Full stop. Chief, divert all power to forward shields and weapons. 

DAX: 

Captain, I'm reading multiple warp signatures ahead. 

SISKO: 

On screen. Maximum magnification. 

(Here comes the enemy fleet, but no more than three abreast in the narrow tunnel.) 

SISKO: 

Lock phasers. Prepare to launch quantum torpedoes.  

[Limbo] 

 SISKO: 

Why have you brought me here? 

Show yourselves. What do you want? 

 [Promenade] 

 ODO: 

The Sisko has returned to us. 

 [Quark's] 

 JAKE: 

He arrives with questions. 

 [Ops] 

 KIRA: 

There are always questions. 

SISKO: 

I didn't ask to come here. 

 [Captain's office] 

 DUKAT: 

You desire to end The Game. 

SISKO: 

What game? I don't understand. 

 [Wardroom] 

 WEYOUN: 

You seek to shed your corporeal existence. 

 [Bridge] 

 DAMAR: 

That cannot be allowed. 

 [Promenade] 

 ODO: 

The Game must not end. 

SISKO: 

The Game? You mean my life? 

Is that what this is about? You don't want me to die? 

 [Captain's office] 

 DUKAT: The Game must continue. 

 [Wardroom] 

 WEYOUN: You are The Sisko. 

SISKO: 

Believe me, I don't want to die, but I have to do everything I can to prevent the Dominion from conquering the Alpha Quadrant. 

If that means sacrificing my life and the life of my crew, so be it. 

[Quark's] 

 JAKE: 

We do not agree. 

KIRA: 

We find your reasoning flawed. 

ODO: 

Insufficient. 

SISKO: 

I'm flattered you feel that way, but it doesn't change anything. 

Now send me back to my ship. 

 [Bridge] 

 SISKO: 

This isn't what I meant. 

I want to return to my reality. 

DAMAR: 

You are The Sisko. 

SISKO: 

I am also a Starfleet captain. 

I have a job to do and I intend to do it. 

WEYOUN: 

The Sisko is belligerent. 

DUKAT: 

Aggressive. 

DAMAR: 

Adversarial. 

SISKO: 

You're damn right I'm adversarial. 

You have no right to interfere with my life. 

 [Ops] 

 KIRA: 

We have every right. 

SISKO: 

Fine. You want to interfere, then interfere. 

Do something about those Dominion reinforcements. 

ODO: 

That is a corporeal matter. 

DUKAT: 
Corporeal matters do not concern us.

SISKO: 
The hell they don't. 
What about Bajor? 
You can't tell me Bajor doesn't concern you. 
You've sent the Bajorans orbs and Emissaries. 
You've even encouraged them to create an entire religion around you. 

You even told me once that you were Of Bajor. 
So don't you tell me you're not concerned with corporeal matters. 

I don't want to see Bajor destroyed. 
Neither do you. 

But we all know that's exactly what's going to happen if the Dominion takes over the Alpha Quadrant. 

You say you don't want me to sacrifice my life? 
Well, fine, neither do I. 

You want to be gods, then be gods. 
I need a miracle. Bajor needs a miracle. 

Stop those ships.

WEYOUN: 
We are of Bajor.

DAMAR: 
But what of the Sisko?

ODO: He is intrusive.

DUKAT: 
He tries to control The Game.

JAKE: 
A penance must be exacted.

WEYOUN: 

It is agreed. 

DUKAT: 

The Sisko is of Bajor, but he will find no rest there. 

KIRA: 
(touches Sisko's left ear) 
His pagh will follow another path.

SISKO: What path is that?

[Bridge]

(Back to reality.)
O'BRIEN: 
Phaser banks fully charged.
NOG: Forward shields at a hundred percent.
O'BRIEN: Torpedoes ready. Targets locked.
DAX: Here they come.
SISKO: Fire on my command.
NOG: There must be thousands of them.
GARAK: And half of them have locked targets on us.
SISKO: Steady, people. Make every shot count.
DAX: Benjamin.
(Energy crackles in the wormhole and the Dominion fleet vanishes.)
O'BRIEN: They've cloaked.
DAX: I'm not picking up any neutrino emissions.
GARAK: Then where did they go?
SISKO: Wherever they went, I don't think they're coming back.
(The ultimate Deus ex Machina cop-out.)

[Ops]

DAMAR: Sir, the wormhole is opening.
(WHOOSH)
DAMAR: The Defiant.
DUKAT: Our reinforcements must be right behind.
(The wormhole closes.)
DAMAR: No, sir. There's no sign of them.
WEYOUN: That's impossible. Check our listening posts in the Gamma Quadrant.
DAMAR: They're not there either.
DUKAT: But they entered the wormhole. Where are they?
DAMAR: I don't know.
(BOOM)
DAMAR: The Defiant has opened fire on us.
WEYOUN: Obviously.
DUKAT: Can you get our weapons back online?
DAMAR: Not for a while. Sir, two hundred enemy ships have broken through our lines. They're headed this way.
WEYOUN: Time to start packing.
FOUNDER: Contact our forces in the Alpha Quadrant. Tell them to fall back to Cardassian territory. It appears this war is going to take longer than expected.
WEYOUN: We'll meet you at airlock five.
(The Founder and Weyoun leave. Dukat's jaw is still on the floor.)
DAMAR: Sir?
DUKAT: Victory was within our grasp.
DAMAR: We have to evacuate the station, sir.
DUKAT: Bajor, the Federation, the Alpha Quadrant, all lost.
DAMAR: We have to go now, sir.
DUKAT: Go?
DAMAR: The Federation ships, they'll be here soon. We have to get back to Cardassia.
DUKAT: I have to find my daughter.
DAMAR: I'll send someone for her.
DUKAT: That won't be necessary.
DAMAR: You're wasting your time.
DUKAT: Promenade.
DAMAR: She won't go with you.

[Bridge]

O'BRIEN: 
Sir, the Dominion forces are leaving the station.

SISKO: 
Let them go. We're in no shape to stop them.

BASHIR: 
Captain, we're getting a message from the Cortez. 
The Dominion fleet has broken off the fight. They're in retreat.

SISKO: 
Tell the Cortez and the rest of our fleet to rendezvous at Deep Space Nine.

The Game

The Pawn Who is The King :

Guardians pose as prisoners,

but none would be intimidated by me.

The Rook :

They know you're a prisoner?

The Pawn Who is The King :

Only other prisoners would obey me.

The Rook :

So you've found a way to identify.

The Pawn Who is The King :

One has to know who one can rely on.

Second Boy: 

One of the figures in some of the epics, like the "Faerie Queene," is the dwarf who accompanies Una and the Redcrosse Knight where the idea for Angelo Muscat come from?

McGoohan: 

Oh. I don't know. 

Where did that come from?

Second Boy: 

Is there a literary image...

McGoohan: 

No, I certainly never thought of one. 

There were all sorts of interpretations to little Angelo. He's a very sweet man and...a very, very sweet man. 

It's this sort of...there should be something also--sinister about him. 

I mean, there was always the possibility that he might be No. 1. 

See, I don't know if anyone...do you pick up that at all? 

I don't know, but that...because he was such a good friend and always by the side of No. 6, that there was...should have been an implication that perhaps he was a sinister character, and particularly in the last episode, when he goes...he's the one that goes out with No. 6 and they go into the...

Maybe he's over No. 1 somewhere...you know they have so...they have stars, superstars, and what are they gonna call them next? Comets? 

So what...maybe he's a comet or something, little...little Angelo. 

So there should be that remaining sinister thing about it.

White King :

Sir, you play a fine game.

Yes...

White King :

- Shall we walk?

Why not? Lead on.

Why do you use people?

White King :

It satisfies the desire for power

It's the only opportunity here.

White King :

Depends which side you're on.

- I'm on my side.

White King :

Aren't we all?

White King :

You must be new.

Most of us join The Enemy.

White King :

Have you?

- Let's talk about the game.

- Why do both sides look alike?

- How do I know black from white?

- Well?

By their disposition. You soon know who's for you or against you.

I don't follow you.

- It's psychology, as in life - you judge by attitudes.

People don't need uniforms.

Why complicate it?

White King :

To keep your mind alert.

What use is that here?

Let's walk.

Why do you keep your mind alert?

White King :

Now? Hmm... from habit.

Just to defy them.

Too old. Too old.

For what?

White King :

Escape.

- You had a plan?

White King :

Everybody does, but they all fail.

Why?

White King :

It's like The Game. 

You have to distinguish between black and white.

- You're following me.

- Oh!

- When do you plan to escape?

- How do you know I was going to?

- Everybody plans to. I'll help.

- Help who?

I like you. If it's a good plan,

I'll escape with you.

- I've helped people's plans.

- But you're still here.

- None of them succeeded.

- Coincidence(!)

I can tell you what not to try.

- How do I know I can trust you?

- That's a risk you have to take.

Not me.






- What have I done?
- Why did you run?

- I don't know!
- A sign of resistance.

- No!
- The will to escape.

No! I didn't think!

- It was instinctive?
- Y... yes. No! Oh, anything you say.

- Your thoughts interest me.
- What do you mean?

Come with me.

(Panting)

Why should you hide?

How long have you been here?

A month... A year...
Don't you know?

- Do you still hope?
- Hope? To die. Nothing else.

- Death is an escape?
- One day I'll die and beat you all!

- Why were you brought here?
- You don't need to ask.

I'm asking.

I invented a new defence system.

- Go on.
- But I've confessed it all before.

- Try again.
- It would have ensured peace.

- Treason?
- Perhaps.

They let the plans get stolen anyway.

You think that's funny?

Yes. All this to safeguard secrets,

then some fool gets his bag swiped.

- You had nothing to do with it?
- I'd die happy if I had.

I didn't mean that.
Leave me alone!

You still have an independent mind.
There are very few of us left.

You're wrong!

- Us?
- I'm a prisoner, too.

Oh, I've been caught that way before.

- It's a fact.
- Then why the inquisition?

- To make sure you're what I need.
- For what?

We'll talk again.

(Phone)

Yes?

Sir, Number Six is getting
friendly with the Rook.

Switch me into vision.

By my manner,
you assumed I was a guardian.

- That's true.
- I knew you were a prisoner.

Audio.

He should have moved
the King's Knight.

But Bishop takes Knight.

Queen takes Bishop - checkmate.

Seems all right.

You want a watch kept?

Yes...

No. Just a minute.

- Doctor?
- Yes, Number Two?

Are you confident about
the rehabilitation treatment?

On the Rook?
He's now properly integrated.

- You heard that?
- Yes.

The Rook will teach Number Six
there's no point in rebelling.

Guardians pose as prisoners,
but none would be intimidated by me.

- They know you're a prisoner?
- Only other prisoners would obey me.

So you've found a way to identify.

One has to know who one can rely on.

- What is the plan?
- First things first.

Let's find our reliable men.

- I'd like a word with you.
- You'll have to wait.

All right, forget it.

Guardian.

What do you think?

- Something wrong, sir?
- Did you paint this?

Yes. If it's not satisfactory...

- Yes?
- I'll do it again.

No, I'm satisfied. Are you?

- Yes.
- Carry on, 42. We'll be in touch.

Very good, sir.

- Yes, gentlemen?
- We'd like to inspect your books.

- Never been done before!
- There's always a first time.

Well, er, I think you'll find everything in order.

Tennis

" In considering the anxiety that consumes so much of human experience, [Petrarch] writes, 

“And what is the cause hereof, but only our own lightness & daintiness: for we seem to be good for nothing else, but to be tossed hither & thither like a Tennise bal, being creatures of very short life, of infinite carefulness, & yet ignorant unto what shore to sail with our ship.”

A metaphor for human existence, then, and for fate: “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls,” in John Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” “struck and banded / Which way please them.” 

That is one tradition. In another, tennis becomes a symbol of frivolity, of a different kind of “lightness.” Grown men playing with balls. 

The history of the game’s being used that way is twined up with an anecdote from the reign of Henry V, the powerful young king who had once been Shakespeare’s reckless Prince Hal. 

According to one early chronicler, “The Dauphin, thinking King Henry to be given to such plays and light follies . . . sent to him a tun of tennis-balls.” King Henry’s imagined reply at the battle of Agincourt was rendered into verse, probably by the poet-monk John Lydgate, around 1536:

Some hard tennis balls I have hither brought

Of marble and iron made full round.

I swear, by Jesu that me dear bought,

They shall beat the walls to the ground.

That story flowers into a couplet of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” circa 1599. The package from the Dauphin arrives. Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Exeter, takes it. “What treasure, uncle?” the king asks. “Tennis-balls, my liege,” Exeter answers. “And we understand him well,” Henry says (a line meant to echo an earlier one, said under very different circumstances, Hal’s equally famous “I know you all and will awhile uphold”):

How he comes o’er us with our wilder days

Not measuring what use we made of them.

A more eccentric instance of tennis-as-metaphor pops up in Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” where the tennis court is compared with the ocean. It occurs in the part of the play that scholars now believe was written by a tavern-keeper named George Wilkins. Pericles has just been tossed half dead onto the Greek shore and is discovered by three fishermen. He says,

A man whom both the waters and the wind,

In that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball

For them to play upon, entreats you pity him.

These lines may cause some modern readers to recall David Foster Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” an essay about learning to play the game in the central Midwest, where extreme winds are an almost constant factor, but where Wallace succeeded, he tells us, in part because of a “weird robotic detachment” from the “unfairnesses of wind and weather.”

David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis because life gave it to him—he had played the game well at the junior level—and because he was a writer who in his own way made use of wilder days, turning relentlessly in his work to the stuff of his own experience. But the fact of the game in his biography came before any thought of its use as material. At least I assume that’s the case. It can be amazing how early in life some writers figure out what they are and start to see their lives as stories that can be controlled. It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace.

He wrote about it in fiction, essays, journalism, and reviews; it may be his most consistent theme at the surface level. Wallace himself drew attention, consciously or not, to both his love for the game and its relevance to how he saw the world. He knew something, too, about the contemporary literature of the sport. The close attention to both physics and physical detail that energizes the opening of his 1996 Esquire_ piece on a then-young Michael Joyce (a promising power baseliner who became a sought-after coach and helped Maria Sharapova win two of her Grand Slam titles) echoes clearly the first lines of John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game” _(one of the few tennis books I can think of that give as much pleasure as the one you’re holding): “Arthur Ashe, his feet apart, his knees slightly bent, lifts a tennis ball into the air. The toss is high and forward. If the ball were allowed to drop, it would, in Ashe’s words, ‘make a parabola.’ ”

For me, the cumulative effect of Wallace’s tennis-themed nonfiction is a bit like being presented with a mirror, one of those segmented mirrors they build and position in space, only this one is pointed at a writer’s mind. The game he writes about is one that, like language, emphasizes the closed system, makes a fetish of it (“Out!”). He seems both to exult and to be trapped in its rules, its cruelties. He loves the game but yearns to transcend it. As always in Wallace’s writing, Wittgenstein is the philosopher who most haunts the approach, the Wittgenstein who told us that reality is inseparable from language (“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”), and that language is inseparable from game (both being at root “part of an activity, a form of life”).

From such a description a reader might conclude that the writer under discussion was dry and abstract, and in the end only using the sport, in a convenient, manipulative way, to say other things, which he deemed more significant—but that is not the writer you’ll meet in the following pages. This is instead one who can transpose on-court sensations into his prose. In those paragraphs that describe how growing up in a windy country shaped his game, briefly allowing him to excel over more talented opponents who tended to get frustrated in unpredictable conditions, he tells us that he was “able to use the currents kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved left to right. . . .” In reviewing Tracy Austin’s autobiography, he finds a way, despite his disappointment with the book, to say something about athletic greatness and mediocrity, and what truly differentiates them, remembering how as a player he would often “get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.” Unlike the great, who become so in part because it would never occur to them not to be “totally present.” Their “blindness and dumbness,” in other words, are not “the price of the gift” but “its essence,” and are even the gift itself. The writer, existing only in reflection, is of all beings most excluded from the highest realms.

Possibly Wallace’s finest tennis piece, certainly his most famous, is “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” an essay first published in 2006 in the Times’ short-lived sports magazine Play. The greatest tennis writer of his generation was writing about the greatest player of his generation. The sentence needs no qualifiers. Federer himself later remarked, in a question-and-answer forum, that he was astonished at what a “comprehensive” piece Wallace had produced, despite the fact that Federer had spent only “20 min with him in the ATP office.” But I doubt Wallace wanted more face time than that. He had come to Wimbledon in search of not the man Roger Federer but rather the being Federer seemed to become when he competed. What Wallace wanted to see occurred only as spectacle. In that respect and others, it is interesting to compare the Federer piece with the profile Wallace had written precisely a decade before, about Michael Joyce. I tend to prefer the earlier piece, for its thick description and subtleties, while recognizing the greatness of the later one. In the Joyce piece, Wallace had written about a nobody, a player no one had heard of and who was never going to make it on the tour. That was the subtext, and at times the text, of the essay: you could be that_ good and still not be good enough. The essay was about agony. In Federer, though, he had a player who offered him a different subject: transcendence. What it actually looked like. An athlete who appeared “to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.” One can see exactly what Wallace means in footage of the point he breaks down so beautifully—a “sixteen-stroke point” that reads as dramatically as a battle scene—which occurred in the second set of Federer’s 2006 Wimbledon final match against Rafael Nadal, a point that ends with a backhand one can replay infinite times and somehow come no closer to comprehending, struck from about an inch inside the baseline with some kind of demented spin that causes the ball to slip _over the net and vanish. Nadal never touches it. Wallace is able not only to give us the moment but to let us see the strategic and geometric intelligence that went into setting it up, the ability Federer had (has, as of this writing) to “hypnotize” opponents through shot selection.

The key sentences in the Federer essay, to my mind, occur in the paragraph that mentions “evolution.” In discussing the “power baseline” style that has defined the game in the modern era—two heavy hitters standing back and blasting wrist-fracturing ground strokes at each other—Wallace writes that “it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer.” One imagines his writing this sentence with something almost like gratitude. It had taken genius to break through the brutal dictates of the power game and bring back an all-court style, to bring back art. And Federer, as Wallace emphasizes, did this from “within” the power game; he did it while handling shots that were moving at hurricane force. Inside the wind tunnel of modern tennis, he crafted a style that seemed made for a butterfly, yet was crushingly effective. What a marvelous subject, and figure, for a twenty-first-century novelist, a writer working in a form that is also (perpetually?) said to be at the end of its evolution, and an artist who similarly, when at his best, showed new ways forward.

This piece was drawn from the introduction to “String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis,” which is out May 10th from Library of America.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. His forthcoming book is “The Prime Minister of Paradise.”

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

Bob, Jack Ryan here.

Good morning, Jack.

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

Morning. 

Listen, I was just thinking, maybe we got off to a bad start here.

We're going to be working together here.

Maybe we should spend some time. 

Get to know each other a little better.

You pIay Tennis?

Tennis? 

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

You play Tennis?

Yeah, yeah, I play Tennis.

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

Well, how about we get together sometime?

Next week maybe. Hour before we start work or something.

Jack — 

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

Yeah.

Computer Theft is a Serious Crime.

JACK RYAN,

Acting Deputy-Director of Central Intelligence :

Shit.

So are crimes against The Constitution.

• "Writers would come in an say, 

'What about the chaos theory?' 

And someone else would say, 

'Well, what about it?' 

Everyone would struggle but nobody would devise a story. It wasn't until Jim Trombetta pitched that Michael [Piller] saw a story." 

• Michael Piller conceived Martus Mazur to be the wayward son of Guinan. Guinan herself was to appear in the episode but Whoopi Goldberg was unavailable. All the references to Guinan were removed and only Martus's status as an El-Aurian was retained. 

• "because there was this subplot of the racquetball game that they had wanted to put in a number of times and had not been able to, so they put it in this [episode] after I was gone because they felt it made the most sense since this was about games." He goes onto say, "I would have liked to have done more with the quantum-luck thing. I had the idea that if randomness could be managed, then you're in a lot of trouble. Basically, the universe is random; it's a mind boggling thing. Eventually Quark would beat [Martus] by using Mr. Randomness. We never got into that, although I would have liked to."