by Andy Mangels
—disappeared. The village and everything in it were swept away, replaced by darkness. But the darkness was filled with sensation, warmth, and even flashes of wordless conversation. Dax—
—became Sef, one of the first of its kind to gain the sense known as “sight.” On numerous occasions, Sef had used the mind-tendrils it customarily used to converse with its fellow Swimmers to entice various four-legged beasts to the Pool’s edge. Some of those creatures had bolted at the last moment, but others had permitted Sef to “ride” them, sharing their sensory experiences, sometimes for lengthy periods.
And what experiences the Fourlegs had to share! To see! To hear! To run across the Aboveworld, basking in all its light, glorying in the variegated colors and tastes and smells. Few Swimmers had any real knowledge of these sublime sensations, for only a handful had ridden on the Fourlegs. And like those others, Sef wanted more.
Many had been the times that Sef had wished to share the experiences of a creature whose subtlety of intellect equaled Sef’s own. But did any such creature exist anywhere on Trill?
Then the first of the two-legged Walkers approached the Pool’s rocky edge, in answer to one of Sef’s mind calls. Of course, Sef did not know what a Walker was until after riding the creature for the first time and examining its sleek, furry coat and feeling its steeply ridged brow with the being’s own graceful, long-fingered hands. The Walkers had bigger brains than any of the Fourlegs, and quite subtle intellects—at least in comparison to the Fourlegs. The creature’s initial fear response had been quite intense, and might take some time to counter. The Fourlegs have taken us far from the Pool and back again, Sef thought, gazing wonderingly at the beetle-browed face reflected in the Pool’s surface. Who knows how much farther the Walkers might take us?
The reflection of Sef’s host vanished, replaced by several other vignettes of stored memory. Like the previous encounters, some of these related the experiences of long-dead symbionts, while others belonged to hosts who had become dust eons ago. Like the experiences of Hodak and Sef, many of them seemed to go back to the very genesis of Trill symbiosis, an event that might have occurred as long as twenty-five millennia ago—and had been completely obscured by the passage of time. Whenever Dax had considered the conundrum of the origin of Trill symbiosis, she concluded it was as unfathomable as the Big Bang itself.
These must be memories of memories, Dax reasoned in between the ancient, mutually exclusive encounters. Or maybe memories of memories of memories. Of other memories.
She recalled her earlier tricorder readings. Despite their great age, she tended to doubt that any of the Annuated were quite old enough to possess anything like an accurate, firsthand recollection of the very first instance of symbiont-humanoid joining, or the precise circumstances surrounding it. But they certainly could carry within them many mnemonic echoes from long-dead symbionts born eons before they were. And thanks to Joran, whose existence the Symbiosis Commission had concealed from her for nearly a century, Dax knew very well that memory was a very malleable thing; because of this, all of the “first symbiosis” memories she had glimpsed might be false to a significant degree—or true, at least in certain respects.
She noted wryly that asking questions about such things always seemed to leave one with more questions than one started with. As a person whose mind had a decidedly problem-solving bent, she found the idea of increasing the universe’s net question-content somewhat distressing.
Dax suddenly noticed that something had changed yet again in her surroundings. She was back in her environmental suit, and yet she was also floating in the void that contained the moving mnemonic spheres. But the spheres were altering their speed and direction. Her headlong plunge into the mnemonic past seemed to be reversing course.
Of course. I’m inside an Annuated’s head, so to speak. And I’ve zipped all the way to the oldest fragments of its memory. So there’s no place else to go but forward.
Her reverie was interrupted by yet another sudden change of scenery. All at once—
—her environment suit was gone again, and she stood on what appeared to be the deck of a space vessel. She was in a brightly lit, low-ceilinged control center filled with consoles, screens, and other instruments. The consoles bore markings that resembled some archaic form of the Trill written language, and she found she could read none of it.
This sure isn’t Starfleet issue, Dax thought as she looked around the narrow control center, where several green-uniformed Trill humanoids of both sexes were intent on various consoles and readouts. Dax noted that she, too, was wearing similar garb. None of this looks very much like anything the Trill Defense Ministry has at the moment, either.
Someone activated a large forward viewscreen, which displayed a half-lit blue planet. The serene-looking world was swiftly growing in size, as though the ship had just dropped out of warp and was making its initial approach.
“There it is,” said one of the Trill humanoids, a male. “The first other world we’ve ever found capable of supporting both humanoids and symbionts throughout the entirety of both species’ life cycles. Or so the survey reports say.”
“It took us long enough to find it,” another crew person answered, this one a female. Behind the woman was a circular conference table, the centerpiece of which Dax had never seen before—not in its entirety, anyway—but which she recognized at once: a naiskos . “Let’s hope we don’t have to travel as far or search as long before we locate the next one,” the woman said.
Kurl, Dax thought as the crew members continued making small talk about their mission, which was evidently to drop a large contingent of colonists off on this planet, along with sufficient agricultural resources and machine tools to allow them to establish permanent habitations here. Though she still believed Kurl was so distant that it made an improbable site for an early “lost Trill colony,” she thought its selection might make perfect sense if the exacting environmental requirements for maintaining both humanoid and symbiont populations were taken into account.
Though Dax found the crew’s grammar, vocabulary, and syntax strange—archaic, in fact—she had no problem understanding their speech. More Annuated telepathy, she thought, realizing with no small amount of wonderment that at least part of the recent neo-Purist manifesto was apparently true: there evidently really had been a previously undiscovered ancient period of Trill interstellar exploration—an era that had been all but forgotten millennia before the time of Dax’s first host, Lela.
As though the Annuated with whom she was linked were now satisfied that Dax’s remaining questions were best answered elsewhere, the scene shifted again.
The starship and the blue planet vanished, to be replaced by a sterile white room whose tightly sealed windows looked out over a placid blue lake. A few pleasure craft skated slowly across the azure water, and homes dotted the lake’s far side.
Somehow, Dax knew she was on Kurl—and that centuries had passed since the initial colony ship had deposited its living cargo here to form the very first society to be composed entirely of joined Trills.
And she also knew with certainty that something had been going horribly wrong with that society lately.
Dax turned from the windows and found herself inside what appeared to be an extremely well-equipped research laboratory. A pair of white-smocked Trill humanoids, a man and a woman, were intent on an experiment. A Trill symbiont sat on a table before them, its brown, wrinkled skin slick and shiny from the shallow nutrient bath in which it sat.
“It’s so peaceful out there,” Dax said, indicating the lake behind her.
The female scientist made a harrumphing sound. “It won’t stay that way for long. Not unless we find a way to neutralize this damned virus, and quickly.”
The virus. Yes. Dax was aware that the virus, perhaps the accidental offspring of a misfolded protein molecule produced by some of the indigenous biota, had already killed more than ten percent of the colony’s fifteen million people. Images of horrendous, blood-
spattered deaths from hemorrhagic fevers, isoboramine starvation—induced symbiotic interruptions, and complete RDNAL breakdowns flashed unbidden across her mind—an extraordinarily vivid memory-within-a-memory that Dax found highly disconcerting. Obviously not everyone on Kurl had succumbed as yet, otherwise the original owners of these memories could never have found their way to the deep pools of the Annuated.
She also knew that so far, the symbionts had been the most vulnerable to the virus, though no one had yet discovered precisely how or why the infections were occurring. But hope remained that a cure would come soon.
And Dax knew that this lab was one of the brightest sources of that hope.
She watched as the man prepared a hypo and injected the symbiont with it. The small vermiform entity twitched several times as the woman ran a handheld scanner over its length. She studied the device’s readout for a moment, then smiled up at the man and at Dax.
“The RDNAL sequences are strengthening and repairing themselves, just as we saw in the simulations,” the woman said brightly. “With a few more adjustments to their genome, I think the symbionts will be toughened up enough to make them completely immune.”
The man returned the woman’s smile, though he powered it with somewhat less wattage. “Let’s hope so.”
The white-smocked duo vanished, and—
—Dax was suddenly in another room.
She recognized the young man lying on the medical theater’s operating table as an initiate being prepared for his first joining. A pair of physicians dressed in surgical tunics carefully lifted a symbiont toward not the initiate’s abdomen, but his waiting open mouth. The Kurlans’ experiments had led them to believe that symbiosis could be achieved more effectively by direct connection to a host’s brain stem.
Then Dax noticed that the symbiont looked . . . strange. Its overall vermiform shape was no different from that of any other symbiont she had ever seen, but the creature’s body was much paler. Small barbed feelers extended from its “head.” It would need those, Dax knew, to burrow its way gently through the back of the host’s throat . . .
Minutes later, the joining was done. The initiate sat up. He smiled. Then he opened his eyes.
The light of pain and madness burned there, and a long string of drool looped from his mouth. Something had clearly gone wrong with the symbiont’s new immune-system modifications . . .
Before Dax could recoil in horror, the scene changed once more. The memory vignettes to which one or more of the Annuated were treating her were now becoming briefer and more frequent, much as they had been during the earlier part of her mnemonic journey. And they were moving steadily forward in time, as though the elder symbiont had looked inside her, had anticipated her every question, and was deliberately trying to spin his memories into a coherent narrative in order to furnish the answers she sought.
Dax saw more labs, more researchers. Some were devoted to the continued enterprise of artificially enhancing the symbiont genome to make it more resistant to the disease. Others had the task of devising direct attacks on the virus whose extraordinarily high mutational rate was bringing continued devastation to Kurl’s symbionts. It even appeared that some of the symbionts’ genetic enhancements had accidentally crossed over to the virus, rendering it that much harder to kill.
The race against the virus continued for a decade or more. And the Kurlans were losing ground, their crash program to heal the symbionts leaving them diseased and insane instead. More disturbing still, the altered symbionts had begun taking control of their hosts, closing themselves off to the Kurlans’ long-term memories in order to dominate where once they had shared.
Dax once again found herself aboard a starship, watching the planet Kurl from low orbit. This time, however, the planet appeared anything but serene. Ugly plumes of brown-gray smoke rose in crooked columns on the day side. Fires raged at the edge of the southeastern continent, visible just beyond the darkness of the night-side terminator.
And this vessel carried people whose dark uniforms and serious bearing told her that the current mission did not involve establishing a new colony.
From a duty station on the port side of what could only be the bridge of a military vessel, Dax watched as a stern-faced middle-aged woman gave orders to a disciplined crew of six of her fellow Trills. From the way they carried themselves, she could tell immediately that most of them were joined.
“Have they launched any of their ships?” the captain asked.
A young male science officer responded crisply. “Not since we got here, Captain. However, some of them could have broken the planetary quarantine and gotten offworld before we arrived. There’s really no way to know for certain.”
Of course, Dax thought. The Kurlan memories I’ve been experiencing, or at least their echoes, had to have gotten off Kurl and back to Trill somehow.
The captain nodded grimly at the science officer. “How many are still alive down there?”
“Almost four million. All infected.”
Dax saw a light flash on her console. Though she couldn’t actually read the text on her display, she somehow understood its meaning. “Someone on the surface is hailing us, Captain. It’s coming from a high-level official address.”
“Put it on the screen,” said the captain.
The face that appeared on the central viewer was that of a fortyish Trill humanoid male. He was joined, no doubt, as was every adult on Kurl. But the creature that shared his existence had obviously been so greatly altered to resist the virus that it was clearly no longer fit for joining—at least not in the mutually beneficial manner that had always been the very essence of Trill symbiosis.
Dax, or rather the person whose memories she was experiencing, recognized him as the current Kurlan president. And she saw the same fires of madness that had illuminated the young initiate’s eyes in this man’s intense gaze.
Just like Jayvin, Dax thought. She no longer had any doubt that yet another of the neo-Purists’ assertions was true: the ancient Trill colony on Kurl was indeed the source of the parasites, or at least had spawned their remote ancestors.
“So you’ve finally come to kill the rest of us,” the man on the screen said, his eyes fixed upon the captain’s.
“You’ve already done a pretty thorough job of that yourselves,” the captain responded, apparently referring to the smoke and fires that were visible from orbit. “We’ve been sent to maintain the medical quarantine,” the captain continued. There was sympathy in her tone, but also cold, hard duranium. “By any means necessary.”
“You have failed to heal us. You have betrayed our symbiosis. You have forced us to take charge of it, rather than allowing you to inflict further harm upon us. You can no longer contain us. We have vessels ready to launch even now.”
“Contact them. Tell them they have to power down and remain on the surface.”
The president laughed, a hard, braying sound. “You do not command here.”
“Captain, I’m reading several vessels leaving the surface,” said the science officer, alarmed. “They all read as transluminal configurations.”
The captain turned and addressed Dax directly. “Private Memh, can you target all four of them simultaneously?”
Somehow, Dax knew that she could. Such things seemed to be Memh’s specialty. “Yes, Captain.”
Approximately two and a half minutes later, nothing remained of any of the other ships save orbiting fragments of superheated metallic debris.
And dozens of Kurlan Trill, both humanoids and symbionts, were dead. Dax felt physically ill, but remained at her—at Memh’s—post.
“They can still launch a lot more ships, Captain,” the science officer said, breaking the dolorous silence that had enveloped the control center. “We can’t possibly chase down every last one of them.”
“We might,” the captain said. She clearly did not like the direction the conversation was taking. Neither did Dax.
The science officer was almost in tears, but he h
eld his ground admirably nevertheless. Like everyone else here, he was a creature of duty. “We can’t rely on that, Captain. The risk to Trill is too great.”
The captain settled back in her chair, staring straight ahead quietly. “You’re right, Mister Lev,” she finally said at length. “Womb help us all, you’re right.”
Turning her chair until she once again faced Dax, the captain said, “Private Memh, deploy the biogenics, along with the incendiaries.”
Dax was surprised at how little she hesitated after hearing that order. Memh must have anticipated the very real possibility of having to do this. Perhaps it had become second nature to her.
After Dax entered three brief commands into her board, a console light’s telltale flash confirmed that the network of satellites had left the ship’s belly, the individual pulse launchers already well on their way to their optimal firing positions.
Fourteen minutes later, the first of the rhythmic flashes appeared on the forward screen. First, the spaceports and landing fields erupted in orange flames that consumed hangars, terminals, spacecraft, and people indiscriminately. Moments later, the flames were eclipsed by multiple nimbuses of dazzling golden-white light as the biogenic detonations struck each city in turn. The individual pulses faded almost as quickly as they had registered on everyone’s retinas, though the effects were actually still propagating throughout the entire Kurlan biosphere.
There would be no more ships launched from anywhere on Kurl. Though the cities were largely intact, no one on the surface would now be in any condition to pilot a vessel, even if the planet’s spaceports hadn’t been leveled. Within a few short hours, every trace of the virus would be gone. All four million or so of the planet’s inhabitants would be dead as well, thanks to a biogenic weapon that no one on either Trill or Kurl had expected ever to be put to use.
The sheer horror of what she had just witnessed made Dax want to scream. But all she could do was look at the forward viewer with a disciplined gaze, her larynx all but paralyzed. That’s how nightmares go, she told herself.
