by Andy Mangels
Wrunch.
Once again, both of her shoulders had come into sharp contact with the alarmingly tight rock walls that bracketed her. Fortunately, the suit wasn’t pouring oxygen bubbles into the water, so its seals hadn’t been compromised. Then she noticed the true gravity of her predicament.
Stuck. Damn!
Fear kicked her hard in the belly; she knew that the intense pressures at this depth made it extremely doubtful that a symbiont would notice her plight and carry word of it back to the Guardians. And even if the Guardians somehow did become aware of her problem, they wouldn’t be in a position to do anything about it.
Forcing down an impulse to make matters worse by hyper-ventilating, Dax simultaneously called upon the expertise of two previous hosts: Emony, among whose skills were agility and deep-breathing exercises; and Curzon, who’d been nonpareil in the fine art of complex extemporaneous cursing.
Neither was of much help. She was jammed in tight. And her injured hand felt like it had caught on fire.
After perhaps a minute of fruitless pushing and disciplined breathing, she recalled the time Torias had performed an EVA to repair some meteor damage to a shuttle he’d been piloting in low Trill orbit. Matters had gotten very complicated and interesting when his environmental suit malfunctioned, causing portions of it to expand like a balloon. In pretty short order, his suit had become larger than the shuttle’s hatchway, trapping him in the airless void outside. Ezri realized she had no choice now other than to employ the very same risky-but-elegant solution Torias had improvised that day.
She felt around on her chest-mounted keypad until her gloved fingers came into contact with her suit’s manual valve control. A few seconds later, a spray of bubbles flooded the narrow stone tube. She heard another sharp wrunch as her suit contracted slightly and her shoulders came loose. Moving her feet in tandem in a flukelike motion, she quickly developed enough forward momentum to traverse the two meters or so that separated her from the end of the passage. Then she tumbled languidly into the vast pool that lay beyond it.
As she scrambled to close the valve before too much of her air supply bled away, she was relieved to find herself descending into a much larger chamber, though her lights told her little else about her new environment. Her weighted belt drew her steadily downward, and she noticed a conspicuous lack of both symbionts and their conversational energy discharges. It was as though she were floating in the same featureless white void Benjamin Sisko had described to her when he had recounted his “visions” of the wormhole aliens.
Then her boots once again made contact with a hard, irregular surface. Because her lights were revealing little of value about her surroundings, she turned them off, just as Taran’atar had done back in the frigid cavern on Minos Korva. Whiteness instantly gave way to blackness; Mak’ala’s weak but persistent currents and the stone beneath her feet were the only proof that anything in the universe existed other than herself.
Eventually her dark-adapting eyes picked up the slender flicker of blue-white energy in the distance. It looked distinctly like the communications impulses that the symbionts passed between one another. But these exchanges lasted significantly longer, almost like lightning magically trapped in amber. The colors of these energy spikes were subtler than the discharges of the symbionts, layered in countless variegated hues.
Unsure how far away they might be, she moved toward them, trying not to dwell on the ever-burgeoning pressure at these depths; the fluid that surrounded her seemed increasingly intent on crushing her environmental suit flat.
After an interval that might have lasted ten minutes or an hour, she felt she had come nearly close enough to grab the slow, stately energy discharges in her gloved hands. The rocky surface upon which her boots had settled took on a smooth, almost paved feel, ending at a gracefully curving section of rough stone wall that rose several meters over her head and curved away into the darkness. The stone wall had an almost scaly texture, and exhibited an eerie greenish glow that brought to mind recollections of Minos Korva, as well as memories of the ice comet that had brought Audrid such pain and horror.
Spying a sudden, furtive movement on the periphery of her vision, Dax turned toward it. Her jaw dropped in incredulity as she realized she was standing perhaps a meter away from the largest symbiont she had ever seen. Though the creature had the same overall vermiform shape of the symbiont that dwelled within her, it was nearly two meters in length. Lit by Dax’s wrist lamps, the giant symbiont’s bulk reminded Dax of a Tenaran seal, or a manatee that Emony had seen during a visit to one of Florida’s Gulf Coast estuaries on Earth. Somehow, Dax maintained the presence of mind to run a quick scan of its RDNAL profile, which revealed it to be a good thousand years older than any other known living symbiont.
Dax was startled further when a flash of blue light lanced from one end of the creature and into her abdomen. Simultaneously, a voice, filled with equal parts indulgent humor and idle curiosity, sounded inside her head and seemed to reverberate all the way down through her midsection.
<
Annuated? Dax thought.
The creature began swimming, circling Dax in a graceful arc. <
Even though the water was a superb sound conductor, the creature certainly couldn’t have been employing actual words, given the symbionts’ distinct lack of any humanoid-type speech apparatus.
Telepathy, Dax thought, theorizing that the creature’s energy discharges were connecting it directly with the Dax symbiont inside her. She wondered if she was beginning to lose some of her capacity to be surprised.
Aloud, she said, “My escorts must have warned you that I was coming,”
<
“So you can tell me the truth about Trill’s relationship to the parasites? And what happened to the ancient Trill colony on Kurl?”
<>
Dax blinked several times, temporarily at a loss for words. “But you said that the Annuated are the keepers of the oldest memories.”
<
That made no sense whatsoever to Dax. “As far as I can tell, you’re the oldest symbiont anybody’s ever encountered.”
A light, buoyant sensation tinged with flashes of pastel colors flashed through Dax’s mind. She realized belatedly that it was laughter.
<> the creature said. <>
Though her brain spun with questions—not least of which were those surrounding the issue of symbiont reproduction, about which even joined Trills knew next to nothing—she struggled to keep herself focused on the topic at hand. Assuming she survived the current mission, there would be time later to return here to satisfy her curiosity about the Annuated, their mysterious life cycle, and their relationship not only to the younger-yet-still-venerable symbionts who dwelled in Mak’ala’s depths, but also to the general symbiont population at large.
“All right,” Dax said. “Where are these . . . Annuated?”
The creature suddenly released an intense bioelectrical discharge, which struck the wall with the apparent intensity of a phaser blast. Curiosity drew Dax to place her hands on the spot where the bolt had impacted, which she was surprised to see hadn’t been marred by the release of energy.
<
The scaly stone surface began to move beneath her gloves, writhing sinuously like a serpent’s belly. Several meters directly overhead, brilliant multicolored energy disch
arges began flashing in all directions.
It’s alive, she thought, withdrawing her hands. This thing’s alive, and it’s waking up.
Fear reached straight into her chest and clutched her heart when she noticed that her boots had suddenly left the ground. It was as though she had been caught in a sudden upwelling or deepwater current, and it propelled her inexorably upward and past the stone wall, until she was nearly smack in the middle of the overhead electrical display. Just as she became concerned that one of the energy charges might strike her, leaving her either dead or dying within a nonfunctioning environmental suit, she began to descend. Looking down, she saw that what she thought had been a wall was actually a rounded, streamlined form that might have been thirty meters long and eight meters high. Its shape was entirely familiar.
It was a gigantic symbiont, one of many that Dax could now see limned clearly in the ambient glow of what was undoubtedly a bioluminescent effect similar to that of the parasites. Tentacular projections issued from along their bloated sides, disappearing into meter-wide cracks in the cavern floor, like taproots extending from a plant into the life-giving heart of the planet. Dax assumed that the massive creatures drew their sustenance from the same mantle-deep, nutrient-rich hot springs that sustained Mak’ala’s entire vast network of submerged channels, tunnels, lava tubes, and pools.
Dax arced over the awe-inspiring creatures, then slowly descended back toward the cavern floor. Moments later, her boots once again made contact with a stony surface, evidently ground smooth by eons of occupation by these ancient, massive, bottom-dwelling creatures. Other, similarly massive shapes were visible in the distance, conversing with one another in long, eerily beautiful bioelectrical discharges, sharing their impossibly ancient, ineffable thoughts.
Enthralled, Dax consulted the glowing display of her suit’s tricorder. If these gigantic things were indeed symbionts, they were far older than any she had ever encountered before, or had ever even heard about. She quickly determined that the one nearest to her was nearly twenty thousand years old. At least five others lay nearby, though not near enough for her to make an accurate determination of their ages.
She wondered momentarily if she had discovered the literal truth behind the myth of Mak’relle Dur, then brushed the thought aside as useless; too many of Dax’s hosts had pursued careers in the hard sciences for her to permit metaphysics and mythology to cloud her judgment. What she was seeing was merely a group of extremely old—not to mention large—variants of the more familiar Trill symbionts, rather than figures out of some unverifiable myth.
It occurred to her then that very little was definitely known about the extreme latter end of the symbiont life cycle, other than that most of them apparently ceased to be capable of joining after several centuries of symbiotic existence. Is this where the Dax symbiont will eventually end up?
<
A rivulet of sweat ran from Dax’s scalp into her eyes, making her wish she could open her helmet long enough to wipe her face. She also noticed a discordant electronic background hum; it told her that her environmental suit’s heat exchangers were being strained to the limit. A glance at her sensors informed her that the water temperature outside was already close to three hundred degrees Celsius; were it not for the intense pressure at these depths, the close proximity of Mak’ala’s life-giving geothermal heat sources would have transformed the water down here into superheated vapor. Whatever these elder symbionts’ hides were made of, it was sterner stuff than her suit.
“Speaking of not getting killed prematurely, I think we had better get started soon.”
<
Dax chafed at that, even though she was well aware that the long-lived Annuated, and probably their much younger attendants, would necessarily have a unique perspective on time. Eight prior lifetimes had taught Dax herself more than a little about patience, after all. But the actions of the neo-Purists—to say nothing of the strain being placed on her environmental suit at the moment—made patience a luxury she could scarcely afford.
“Look,” Dax said, trying not to sound as impatient as the creature had accused her of being, “I’m running out of time. Just how long—”
The nearest of the gigantic elder symbionts answered with a powerful bioelectrical blast that took her full in the face.
11
The group of Annuated and their caretaker abruptly vanished, as did Dax’s environmental suit. She was suddenly falling naked through a void that was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It wasn’t filled with the crushing gray water of the deep pools of Mak’ala, nor was it a vacuum like empty space.
A sudden recollection of a therapeutic mind-meld Curzon had once shared with the late Vulcan Ambassador Sarek made it clear what she was experiencing: a freefall tumble into an ocean of pure experience—the vast storehouse of memories of the Annuated.
Her mind quickly converted the disorienting mindscape into something concrete, a white backdrop filled with an apparently infinite number of spheres, each one bearing an absolutely unique color. Intuitively, she understood that each sphere represented a discrete package of stored memory and experience. The motley assignation of colors made it appear that each of these was gleaned from the memories of a different person.
Of course, she thought, angling herself toward one of the closer spheres with an effort of pure will. The Annuated have been isolated down here for ages. The only way they’d be able to stockpile memories is if those memories came to them from others on a fairly regular basis. It was a sobering thought. The Annuated stored the knowledge retained by dead symbionts, at least the ones who made it down here into the deep waters before expiring.
The nearest of the spheres made a close approach. Though it had to be over a meter in diameter, she threw her arms around it—
—and became Dhej, a symbiont who had descended to this place of remembering more than six centuries ago. Dhej’s eleven hosts had distinguished themselves in fields ranging from medicine, cybernetics research, poetry, and criminal law. This symbiont’s hosts had experienced motherhood, fatherhood, exultation, grief—
Dax released the sphere and thrust it roughly away, unwilling to risk losing focus on her mission by becoming caught up in the minutiae of a serial existence as rich as her own. She reached for a second sphere—
—and became one with Liak, a symbiont whose fourteenth host expired nearly fifteen centuries earlier. Dax ached in sympathy as the dying, senescent symbiont swam laboriously into ever deeper, denser, and hotter waters, desperate to leave its enormous burden of memory in a safe resting place, as though it were carrying a clutch of eggs—
Again, Dax pushed the mnemonic orb away and clutched at others, spending momentary eternities with a whole series of them. Though she wasn’t certain how much objective time she had spent in this pursuit, she realized that a pattern was gradually emerging: Each successive batch of memories hailed from farther and farther back in the long history of Trill.
Even as this realization struck her, the encounters began coming with steadily accelerating frequency. The successive touches of multitudes of other memory-laden symbiont minds quickly ran together in a dazzling mnemonic blur, a rapid experiential torrent that submerged both Ezri and the Dax symbiont, washing them swiftly backward in time. Like an unprotected swimmer caught in the rapids, Dax reached out frantically with her mind, seeking anything that might slow the dizzying motion. Nothing worked; her course seemed as unalterable as that of Trill itself as it made its stately, eternal freefall around its sun.
Shutting her eyes tightly, Dax felt her abdomen begin lurching crazily from the sensations of acceleration and falling. Oh, pleasepleasepleaseplease don’t let me yark inside my helmet, she tho
ught even as she realized that her closed eyelids posed no barrier to the telepathic kaleidoscope that assailed her.
Time passed in reverse even more quickly, and her perception of falling reached what felt like terminal velocity. She tried to calm herself by getting analytical; she reasoned that the oldest stored memories must lie closest to the center of this weird mindscape, like the pungent, meaty nut found at the heart of a syto bean.
More glimpses of the lives of other symbionts and humanoids entered Dax’s consciousness, vanishing almost as quickly as they arrived. Shards of millennia-old memories that seemed as broken and worn as the piece of Kurlan sculpture she had found on Minos Korva came and went, briefly grafting themselves onto her consciousness as they passed. For a few moments, Dax became—
—a nearly naked humanoid male named Hodak. As Healer, it fell to Hodak to use the valley’s plants and animals to try to restore health to those members of his tribe who fell ill. After lifting the riverworm over his head in supplication to the gods of healing, he brought the wriggling brown creature down onto the abdomen of the fever-stricken young woman who lay unconscious before him.
Hodak had seen the riverworms attach themselves to other animals, and noted that both had seemed strengthened by the contact; perhaps a similar effect would save this woman from the fever that was consuming her. As the villagers looked on, hope and apprehension etched across their painted, spot-framed faces, the eyeless riverworm found the opening of the woman’s empty abdominal pouch. The pouch not only allowed males and females alike to provide postbirth incubation for helpless newborns, it also served Healers as a conduit for their cures and medicaments.
The riverworm worked its way into the pouch. The woman’s eyes opened moments later, and a beatific smile split her face. Hodak thanked the gods and—
