Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

HIRTEEN

TITAN

T’Pel looked up from the poem she was composing as Noah Powell came into her quarters, where he had been staying since his mother—and T’Pel’s husband—had departed the ship nearly five standard days before. “Greetings, Noah,” she said. “How was your afternoon with Commander Keru?”

“It was acceptable,” the boy said, his tone devoid of affect.

T’Pel lifted a brow. “Has there been any news pertaining to your mother?” Logically, if there had been, T’Pel would have received word pertaining to her husband as well. Yet there was occasional value in human conversational gambits such as asking questions whose answers were known—at least when conversing with humans. The status of Nurse Ogawa had weighed heavily on the ten-year-old boy these past several days, so T’Pel had striven to be receptive to his concerns on the issue.

“No, there has not,” the boy said, still evincing no emotion.

“I see. And how do you feel about that?”

Noah endeavored to cock an eyebrow at her, though the other one went partway up along with it. “I feel nothing.”

“Indeed?”

“There is nothing I can do to alter the situation. So it would be illogical to expend emotional energy upon it.”

T’Pel rose from her console and crossed her arms. “You are attempting to emulate Vulcan behavior in the belief that it will insulate you from your current emotional distress.”

Noah frowned at her. “I thought you’d like—approve of that. You were the one who told me it was illogical to worry.”

“That is a misinterpretation, Noah. I said that it would be illogical to dwell unduly upon your fears. But those fears are perfectly natural for you to experience.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to experience them anymore. If you can do it, why can’t I?”

“It is not that simple. Come.” She moved to the couch and sat; a moment later, Noah followed, though he kept a formal distance. “Noah, the Vulcan way is a lifelong path of discipline and self-examination. If you chose, after careful consideration, to dedicate yourself to pursuing that path, I would not disapprove—so long as your mother gave herapproval. But it takes many years of immersive training to discipline oneself to the point that one’s emotions can be successfully managed and partitioned from one’s everyday decision-making. It requires a careful and gradual reorientation of the cognitive process, for it is not the natural way for a humanoid mind to function.

“You do not have that training, Noah. Your emotions are an integral and normal part of your psyche. So a sudden attempt to lock them away and deny their influence upon you can only do you harm. The feelings will not be managed, only ignored.”

She met his gaze squarely. “You say you do not wish to experience your current fears as to your mother’s wellbeing. Is that your only motive? Or is there some other emotional experience you are hoping to avoid?”

By now, Noah was struggling to maintain his façade of detachment. “I went through that once…with my father. And I hardly knew him. If…if Mom doesn’t come back…I don’t want to feel that.”

T’Pel was silent for a time, gathering her thoughts. “I understand. But if that were to happen…even a fully trained Vulcan could not avoid experiencing the grief. Grief is too powerful an emotion to wish away. It is a transformative experience. No matter how ideal your control…the grief is there. Vulcan discipline does not erase that.”

She lowered her eyes, gazing at her folded hands upon her lap. “Indeed, in some ways, it makes the process of dealing with grief more…intense. More difficult. Because we must master it within ourselves—confront it directly in meditation and…negotiate with it until we find a way to make peace with it. It requires great strength and self-control.

“In some ways, I believe, the human way must be easier. For you can share your grief with others…turn to them for comfort and release.”

After a moment, T’Pel saw Noah’s small hand clasp her own. “I didn’t know. I know it’s been hard for Mister Tuvok to get over losing your son…but I thought you…I didn’t know you had to go through that. I’m sorry.”

“There is no cause for regret, Noah. My son’s life, as well as that of my daughter-in-law, carried great value. They deserved the acknowledgment of my grief, even if it was a private experience. I regret their loss, but I do not regret grieving their loss. It was necessary—and proper.”

She saw that Noah’s eyes had grown wet, and realized it was necessary to modify the course of this discussion. “I see that you are no longer attempting to deny your emotions,” she said. “That is good. But remember—we have no reason to believe your mother will not return safely. In all likelihood, this discussion will prove to be purely hypothetical.”

The boy studied her. “So…you’re not worried about Mister Tuvok?”

“He and I have been separated for far longer than this,” T’Pel told him. “Our longest separation was seven years, when he was aboard Voyagerin the Delta Quadrant. Two years, six months into that time, my husband was officially declared dead, and was not discovered to be alive until seven months thereafter. I have already been through the experience of grieving for him. It is not an experience I wish to repeat.

“However, it also established a precedent. If my husband was able to stay alive for seven years in the Delta Quadrant and return to me, then I have little cause for concern in the current instance.”

Noah smiled. “Me too, T’Pel. If Mister Tuvok’s anywhere near as smart as you, my mom’s gonna be fine.”

DROPLET: THE DEPTHS

It took the engineers a day to design, replicate, assemble, and test the diving pod for what the crew had already dubbed “Cethente’s Descent.” It was a perfect sphere for uniform compression, and in fact was designed to be somewhat compressible so that the interior pressure could increase along with the exterior, minimizing the differential that its structural integrity field would have to resist. Also to that end, the interior was filled with a dense fluid not unlike Syrath growth medium, which would serve to sustain Cethente throughout the dive. The control cradle was designed to be snug against the underside of Cethente’s dome, so that it could use its tentacles—the most vulnerable parts of its body—to operate it without needing to expose them to the full pressure. Cethente, whose legs were now being kept in medical stasis, had needed assistance to be lowered into the cradle, but once securely in place, the Syrath actually felt more comfortable than it would if it had needed to fold up its long legs somewhere in the bathysphere. Cethente was not concerned by the amputation; Onnta had assured it that the limbs could be reattached without difficulty, and even if they could not, a few weeks in genuine growth medium would suffice to regenerate them. Cethente only preferred reattachment because, for one thing, it was more convenient, and for another, it didn’t want that extra set of legs potentially growing into a clone of itself. In those rare cases where separate pieces of an injured or dead Syrath were simultaneously regenerated into whole beings with the same core personality, it proved difficult for two be ings with equal claim to the same identity to coexist civilly. Dying was easy; comity was hard.

Once Cethente was secured in the pod, it was towed by shuttle down to the surface and released. As soon as it was given the go-ahead, Cethente turned off the antigravs that gave the pod buoyancy, allowing it to sink more swiftly than a humanoid could endure, though still slowly enough to give Cethente’s body time to acclimate to the rising pressure. Odds were that it would be unharmed, but why take chances? The slower descent was easier on the pod as well.

It soon became clear just how shallow the veneer of life was on this world. After just the first kilometer, barely over one percent of the way to the solid mantle, all sunlight was gone, even to Cethente’s wide-band optics, and far fewer living things were coming in range of the pod’s sensors—only a few scattered, bioluminescent organisms. And they rapidly thinned out over the next few kilometers. Without sunlight, life could only consume other life to survive; but the constant “marine snow” of organic detritus that descended into this realm, the remains and discards of the more abundant creatures dwelling above, was progressively consumed along the way, growing sparser and sparser. And so the life became sparser as well. (Cethente reflected that it would not want to live if it had to consume the remains of other organisms to do so, rather than subsisting on radiant or geothermal energy and the occasional absorption of mineral compounds. It didn’t understand how its crewmates could tolerate it, even when the consumables were created in a replicator. Luckily, without a digestive tract, Syrath were incapable of nausea.)

By about a dozen kilometers down, the ocean had become virtually barren. The sensors registered only one exception: a particular genus of zooplankton, microscopic animal life. It was sparsely distributed, but still the only life to exist in any abundance at all down here. Cethente was no biologist, but it believed it was odd to find plankton at these depths, with no sunlight to sustain it. True, the sensors showed that the plankton was in a dormant state, alive but conserving what little energy it had. Conserving it for what?Cethente wondered. And why are they down here at all if they cannot function here?

Cethente could not share these questions with anyone except the bathysphere’s log recorder, for the EM interference and the sheer intervening mass of water made communication with Titanimpossible. It logged its observations into the recorder, but soon it ran out of things to say. For long minutes, the realm outside was unchanging, save only for a steady increase in pressure and a gradual brightening of the magnetic field patterns emanating from below. There was nothing to do, nothing to perceive. So much of the universe is empty,the Syrath reflected. Life exists only in tiny portions of it. Even on planets whose surfaces seem so lush and rich with life, scratch below the surface and you find immense volumes of emptiness.Cethente knew the emptiness of space was unimaginably more vast, but it was more difficult to perceive that as one raced through it at high warp speeds, hurrying through it to avoid facing it. Especially on a ship with hundreds of other beings of numerous different types, surrounding one with life. And as an astrophysicist, he was able to think of the universe in terms of vast scales, abstract and removed from life. But down here, alone, drifting slowly through the emptiness, facing it on a scale that was smaller and more comprehensible, it was easier to appreciate how vast the cosmos actually was in proportion to living things. Is this why we so rarely visit ocean planets?Cethente mused. Not only because they are barren, but because their depths frighten us?Syrath had little fear of nonexistence, but to exist without input or companionship—that was terror.

Cethente’s time sense slowed in response to the sensory deprivation, and it entered the meditative state that was its species’ closest analog to sleep. An unknown time later, it was roused by several changes in its environment. One was that the magnetic field patterns dancing across its sensory nodes were resolving and growing brighter. Another was that the pod’s descent was beginning to slow. The third, related to the second, was that the readouts in the control cradle were registering an accelerating increase in water density. It was a myth that water was incompressible; it was merely difficult to compress, requiring hundreds of atmospheres of pressure to make a significant difference in its density. But that point had been reached at about the same depth where total darkness had fallen, and the density had been increasing at a slow but exponentially rising rate ever since; this comparatively sudden increase had to be from some other cause.

The other thing that affected water density, Cethente recalled from its daylong crash course in oceanography, was salinity, the ratio of minerals dissolved in the water. Checking its depth and taking a few more scans, Cethente confirmed that it was nearing the hypersaline layer, the saltwater dynamo whose contamination was altering the planet’s magnetic chorus. Cethente took a moment to “listen” to the magnetic field, although to the Syrath it was more like tasting; the field patterns did seem slightly dissonant, tinged with more exotic energies, though Cethente found it bracing rather than disquieting. Must be a flesh thing,it reflected.

The interface between the upper ocean and the hypersaline layer was not a sharp divide. The two layers had separate convection currents, keeping them from mixing too extensively, but there was a gradual transition from one to the other, more like the distinction between two layers of an atmosphere or a stellar interior than between two strata of rock, say. Nonetheless, the pod was slowing as the water around it grew denser and more buoyant, and once it was confident it had become sufficiently immersed in the dynamo layer, Cethente set the antigravs to give the pod neutral buoyancy, halting its descent. The Syrath set the sensors to maximum gain, and opened its own senses as well—the same senses that had allowed its species to develop an advanced knowledge of astrophysics while living on a perpetually clouded world.

Both sensory suites soon revealed the same thing: Cethente was not alone down here. It could sense smaller surges and pulsations in the magnetic field, isolated, seemingly random, yet oddly purposeful. It had the flavor of life to it. The sensors confirmed it: the dynamo layer was inhabited!

“Remarkable,”Cethente said into the log recorder after studying the scan results. “This is an order of high-pressure life—barophiles, the computer calls them—completely unlike what is found on the surface. They are evolved for pres sures that would destroy protein-based life. They are very dense, solid creatures, made of pressure-resistant shapes: spheres, toroids, cylinders with rounded ends. They have no internal voids, no pockets of lower density to give them buoyancy. They use hydrofoil surfaces, fins, to give themselves lift. They seem to ride the convection currents, which implies they can survive being swept down near to the deepest, highest-pressure regions of the dynamo layer.”

Cethente took the time to collect samples of a few small creatures, beaming them into the sample chamber, for the pressure-resistant design of the pod allowed for no hatches to draw them through. After a few minutes of analysis, it went on. “Instead of normal cell walls, they have microskeletons made of silicate spicules. Down here, the heavier elements are sufficiently concentrated to allow this. The spicules are intricately interlocked in a tight but flexible framework. It reminds me of plant biology on Syr.”“Plant” was a rough analogy, but it would do. “They appear to be magnetosynthetic, feeding on the field energy of the saltwater dynamo. Their biochemistry is based on molecules that are sturdy enough to withstand these pressures and temperatures, but would be inert under normal conditions. Intriguingly, this includes clathrates of carbon and heavier elements—ice-seven crystals actually serving as part of their biology.”This did not come as a complete surprise; Cethente was near a depth where it was possible for that allotrope of ice to form, though salinity, temperature, and other factors affected its formation and survival. At this depth, the water was fully liquid, but farther down it would grow increasingly slushy, a gradual transition from the liquid ocean to the hot-ice mantle below. Apparently when the creatures followed the convection currents down to the deeper levels, they fed upon the clathrates—ice-crystal lattices holding other types of atoms or molecules caged within them—and made use of the elements and compounds thus obtained, including the ice crystals themselves as a structural material. No doubt this was a major source of the silicates and other heavy elements constituting their biology; although the hypersaline layer was itself rich in these substances compared to the ocean above, the clathrate layer atop the mantle would be richer still, for that was where the infalling debris from space would eventually settle, accumulating more and more over billions of years.

“Is this how the heavy elements are kept in play in the ecosystem?”Cethente asked after summarizing this. “These barophile life forms bring them up from the mantle…but then what? How do they get from here to the surface? Convective mixing does not seem enough.”

Cethente watched the barophiles for a while longer, enjoying the intricate dance of light across their surfaces, though it doubted this was a light that its humanoid crewmates could see. “They emit magnetic pulses in complex patterns,”it reported, “apparently a form of communication. The translator detects nothing indicative of intelligence, though. But it is beautiful music. I wish you could experience this.”

But as it continued to travel through the dynamo layer, sinking deeper to where the barophilic life was more abundant, Cethente found that it was not all so lively and beautiful. It began to encounter dead creatures drifting in the convection currents, slowly sinking coreward before being latched onto by other creatures that pierced their bodies with stingers and began sucking out their internal fluids, making them crumple and crack under the pressure. Other creatures were weak and apparently ill, their magnetic calls feeble and distorted. Some were acting erratically, swimming aimlessly or striking out at anything that moved near, whether a prey species or one of their own kind. “They have been poisoned,”Cethente reported after bringing the pod closer to a cluster of them for a more detailed scan. “I read the same nadion and subspace energy signatures as in the asteroid dust. It is sinking here, being consumed by these animals, and it is disrupting their magnetosynthetic processes and their magnetic senses. It is at once starving them and deranging them.”

But Cethente had drawn too close. Not having the instinct for mortal fear, it sometimes acted with insufficient caution, especially when in the throes of curiosity. It had been so caught up in observing these animals’ hyperaggressive behavior that it had not considered how they would react to the pod’s proximity. Cethente was shaken in its cradle as the creatures began to batter at the pod, stabbing at it with their stingers. They were made of sturdy stuff, less sturdy than the pod’s SIF-reinforced duranium hull in absolute terms, but enough to put added strain on a hull and integrity field that were already pushed to the limits by the sheer weight of seventy kilometers of ocean overhead. Deciding it had gotten enough scans for now, Cethente turned the antigravs to full, causing the pod to shoot upward.

A few of the creatures managed to cling to the pod somehow, perhaps by magnetic adhesion. Some fell away as the bathysphere soared upward, but two proved exceptionally persistent, hanging on for dear life and jabbing at the hull with blind ferocity. They were on the upper surface of the pod, perhaps held there by the water pressure itself. But as the pressure and temperature fell, as the magnetic energy sustaining them grew more attenuated, their movements weakened and tapered off. Cethente did nothing to prevent the animals’ deaths; after all, they were dying already, and at least this way it was quicker.

Eventually, the creatures’ bodies burst open, the pressure outside their bodies too low now to contain the pressure within. At this depth, they might as well have been in vacuum—though the pressure was still beyond the maximum amount that protein-based life could withstand. “Remarkable,”Cethente said. “Two totally different biospheres sharing a single planet, but they might as well be on entirely different worlds. There seems to be no way they can ever interact physically. So how can the heavy elements in the deep biosphere be returned to the surface biosphere?”

But it had another reaction that it chose not to record for its crewmates: astonishment and pity at the sheer fragility of non-Syrath life forms. If they were more like us, they would not have lost so much to the Borg. But then, they lose everything, in time. Their whole existence must end in tragedy.

Cethente was philosophical about it, though. After all, for the same reasons Syrath lacked mortal dread, they also lacked any deep sense of grief. It understood regret at losing something valuable, but to a Syrath, even the loss of life memory was a growth experience, a chance for a fresh start. Excitement at new possibilities always overcame re gret before long. That was why it was able to live among these fragile beings, even knowing their existence was doomed.

Not that they would ever know it felt that way, of course. Syrath maintained their enigmatic reputation for very good reason.

DROPLET: THE SURFACE

Riker’s new floater-islet sanctuary—or prison—was somewhat larger and more comfortable than the previous one. It had some larger palm-like growths with wide, round leaves that the plants could apparently angle into the wind to serve as sails. Aili wished Eviku or even Kekil were here to tell her why a tree would evolve this ability. Was it simply to maneuver out from under clouds or away from storms, or was it more symbiotic, the palms actually helping the floater colonies navigate to nutrient-rich areas so that the palms could in turn draw more nourishment from the islets? She could ask Cham or Gasa, but the elder squale reacted to her frequent questions with impatience and the younger might not know. Besides, she missed her crewmates.

For now, though, all that mattered was that the leaves provided Riker with some covering and warmth. There was also a depression holding enough fresh rainwater to sustain him, and a small cave burrowed into the islet by some tool-creatures of the squales, apparently used to store surplus food, but now largely cleared out to serve as a shelter for the weakened human. Some remnants of the surplus seaweed had been left at the base of the cave to rot, its decay producing some warmth for Riker’s benefit, although he clearly did not enjoy the smell. Aili asked the squales if they had anything that could potentially start a fire, perhaps some creature secreting chemicals that generated heat when mixed, but they had little familiarity with the concept. On a world like this, pretty much the only thing that could start fires was lightning, but the high humidity of the air near the ocean surface conducted charge too well for any large voltage differential to build up, so most of the lightning on Droplet was cloud-to-cloud, except in cases where an ocean swell surged exceptionally high.

Riker’s condition was growing steadily worse. He was weak, fatigued, suffering occasional tremors, and he was having difficulty keeping food down and keeping fluids in. It made Aili feel somewhat guilty about fighting with him, but that guilt was smothered by her continued anger at his assumptions about her. She didn’t want his health to suffer further, but she wasn’t inclined to speak civilly to him beyond what was necessary between an ensign and her commanding officer.

The ideal solution to both problems was a return to Titan—assuming the ship and its crew were still intact, still able to help them. Aili asked Alos to take her to Melo so she could plead her case, on the theory that the astronomy-pod leader would be the one most sympathetic to the offworlders (aside from Alos and Gasa, who lacked the authority Melo held). She explained to the aged squale that neither she nor Riker could survive on Droplet in the long term. But Melo denied her request, and Aili soon recognized that there was an apologetic tone to his song; his denial was cast, not so much in terms of what the squales would not do, but in terms of what they couldnot do. “What do you mean?” Aili demanded in Selkie. “Is there anyone else left? Are the others like me still on…in the world at all?”

The two astronomer squales exchanged a private communication for several moments, flashing intricate color patterns to one another on their carapaces. Then they sang to the others nearby at a speed that outraced her tenuous understanding of their speech. The squale language was polyphonic and incredibly intricate, with multiple channels of information being conveyed at once in parallel. Even at slow speed, she could only follow a fragment of it.

But when Melo finally sang to her in Selkie again, his reply was simple: “Not for Aili.”

“What does that mean?” Aili pleaded.

“That is a mystery we have not solved.”

She winced. Either the contact pod was being kept out of the loop for some reason, or…she didn’t know what. Sensing her distress, Alos stroked her with a tentacle and told her not to worry, assuring her that they would take care of her.

“You can’t,” she tried once more to explain to them. “Your food cannot sustain me for long. It can sustain Riker for far less time. It lacks things we need. We are different from you, from the other life that lives here.”

Once the astronomers understood her concern, they promised to discuss the matter with the biologists. Finally, after hours of squalesong she could not follow, Aili was approached by the visitor from the life-maker pod, a mature male she had nicknamed Eres, after Doctor Ree’s third name.

“There is a way the two from World Beyond can be made well,”Eres sang. “Your Song is out of harmony, in key unlike our own. But keys may be transposed. Though our own Song is in discord, it still sustains our life, more so than your metallic theme. Perhaps, indeed, transposing you would end the dissonance, and bring the Song of Life back into ancient harmony.”

Aili struggled to parse the poetry, but the ideas were too strange to her. Was Eres actually proposing some kind of biological transformation? She knew the squales believed the Song of Life created the world and all things in it. It followed that they defined biology as an aspect of the Song. But even with the squales’ exceptional capacity for animal breeding, how could they transform a living individual?

Eres was reluctant to reveal the answer to an alien; Aili was reminded of a priest defending a sacred mystery from exposure to heathen eyes. But Alos and Gasa took her case, debating eloquently that she deserved the opportunity to make an informed decision. The squales were an open society, necessarily so in an ocean where sound could travel so far and wide that secrets were difficult to keep (although the squales’ color-changing skin gave them an avenue for private discourse at close range). All matters were debated openly in the ri’Hoyalinaforum and decided through democratic consensus. It was part of their basic beliefs, Alos reminded his elders, that all sapient beings had the right to informed self-determination.

Finally, Eres agreed that Aili should be shown the answer to her questions. But Aili consulted with Riker before agreeing to go. The meeting was awkward, but necessarily brief due to the limited time she could spend on dry land. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We shouldn’t separate too far.”

“I know they’ll keep me safe. And their helpers will tend to you while I’m gone, if you need anything.”

“Marvelous,” he muttered. “Cared for by woodland creatures. Just like a storybook.”

She wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or becoming delirious. But then he nodded and said, “Go.” And that was all. Deciding she couldn’t afford to linger, she raced back to the water.

The trip took most of the night, even with the large, strong Eres holding Aili in his tentacles and swimming at top speed. As local dawn broke, they entered an area where the squales kept their farms and breeding facilities, one of several such complexes which were centralized to be more defensible. As she drew near the first farm, she initially thought it was just a large kelp bed. But she soon realized it was far too regular. It was a vast, floating lattice on which the kelp grew like ivy on a trellis. By catching a swell and swim-leaping out of the water, she was able to get an overhead view, revealing it to be an enormous fractal spiral like a sunflower blossom. The lattice was itself alive, made of a woodlike material; below the spiraling surface, a series of branches grew straight down, evenly spaced so as to make light and nutrients available equally to all the plants. Several small species of animal coexisted with the kelp, serving as “farmhands” under the supervision of a large aggregate pod of farmer squales. As Eres explained, a couple of species gobbled up parasites and organisms that fed upon the kelp; others devoured “weeds” that happened to take root upon the lattice. Animals of a harvester species used their hard beaks to break off lengths of the kelp, carrying it up to the surface in their tentacles and transferring it to flying chordates that carried it away, no doubt to storage caverns like the one now sheltering Riker. The flight presumably helped dry the kelp, prolonging its shelf life.

Soon they came upon a variant of the farm lattice organism, this one with a second spiral framework down below, forming an enclosed cage. Fast-swimming, dangerous-looking squale-related animals with fearsome beaks patrolled its perimeter. Here, Eres rendezvoused with the others in his “life-maker” pod, who had been alerted to his arrival hours ago by ri’Hoyalinatelecommunication. The pod passed Aili through the defense cordon and let her examine the woodlike columns that formed the cage. They were made of a material considerably harder than normal wood, though presumably hollow enough for buoyancy. Aili suspected that they had used a lot of their limited metal reserves to supply this organism with its structural strength.