Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (22 page)

“I don’t know,” Gibruch said. “But until we find out, I think going out swimming on this planet is definitely a bad idea.”

ELSEWHERE ON DROPLET

If there’s one good thing about this captivity,
Aili Lavena reflected on more than one occasion,
it’s that I get to do plenty of swimming.

Indeed, she could hardly do otherwise; without a hydration suit, she couldn’t function out of the water for long. Of course there was more oxygen in the air, but her gills needed water between their countless tiny filaments to function; otherwise the filaments would clump together and have too little exposed surface area to absorb sufficient oxygen. Out of the water, her membranes could only hold their moisture for a few minutes before shriveling up.

Which made it somewhat awkward to interact with Captain Riker—although she recognized that he would feel even more awkward if she could be up there on the islet with him, having no clothes of any kind. She’d declined to wear the kind of woven-grass garment he sported, stating that it would probably not hold up to the amount of swimming she had to do; besides, she imagined it must itch terribly, though she felt no urge to seek confirmation from him.

It was hard for Riker, she knew, being stranded on that little saucer of land with nothing to do, virtually no tools or resources to make anything with, virtually no food to forage for. He could swim reasonably well for a human, of
course, and sometimes joined her in gathering food from beneath the floater or simply swimming for exercise. But he couldn’t last without air any longer than she could last without water. And he was still weak from his injuries; he seemed to have gotten hurt worse than she had in the tsunami, or else he was healing more poorly for some reason.

She kept him company as best she could, but there was only so much they could talk about: Academy stories, navigation problems, music, the Pacifican yacht races, the most tasteless Borg jokes they could think of. They both shied away from more serious topics, such as what might have become of
Titan
or what their chances were for rescue—and of course they avoided talking about their past.

So, truth be told, Aili was relieved to spend the bulk of her time either foraging for food or conversing with the squales. Luckily the members of the research pod were still interested in continuing the language lessons—although she soon realized that was because they still wished to interrogate her about the asteroid impact and her people’s role in it. She was saddened that they shared the defender pod’s mistrust of her. Indeed, when the lessons first resumed, she hadn’t felt so fortunate, for one of the defender squales had grabbed her bodily again and kept her under close, intimidating guard at all times. She was pretty sure it was the same pseudo-male that had restrained her before, and she was starting to think of him as “Grabby.” But over the past few local days since then, once it had become clear she was eager to participate in the conversation, the researchers had grown more comfortable with her and talked Grabby and his team into keeping their distance.

Well, “comfortable” might not have been the word. Aili
had noted that all the squales were acting more tense and agitated over the past few days. She had soon discerned that they had reason, when the defender squales guarding the perimeter came under attack from a school of large chordate predators with broad, delta-wing fins, not unlike the rays of Earth but with long, scissorlike double beaks bracketing a flexible, prolapsing maw that shot out to engulf what the beaks severed. Grabby lost a tentacle and another defender lost a tailfin before the rest of the pod closed in and harried the scissor-rays off, firing bursts of intense concentrated sound to stun them. Aili was tempted to consider Grabby’s fate poetic justice, but she couldn’t bring herself to take pleasure in such a serious amputation and couldn’t help but be moved by the way his fellow defenders held and comforted him and the other injured male as they took them away for, presumably, medical treatment. She wondered if it would involve the womblike things she and Riker had apparently been placed in. But when she asked about it, the squales declined to answer.

The next day, Aili had found herself under attack from a large molluscoid that used its long, narrow conical shell to thrust at her like a jouster’s lance. Only quick reflexes saved her from being impaled, but she lost part of one gill fringe before two of the younger research-pod squales arrived and assailed the creature, crushing its shell and tearing out and consuming the innards. It was hard to be unambivalently grateful after seeing that, but she reminded herself it was simply the cycle of nature.

Those same two squales began spending an increasing amount of time with her, taking the lead in the language lessons. These two pseudo-males—one each of the two
roughly masculine sexes—were apparently fairly new apprentices in the research pod, having left their maternal pod less than a Dropletian year before, and they were still rich with the open, inquisitive spirit that drove squales of their age to seek apprenticeships, often going through several specialist pods before settling on a preferred career. They watched with fascination as she swam, taking note of how her alien form functioned in the water, carefully examining the details of her body. She did her best to cultivate their curiosity, guiding the conversation toward a mutual exchange of knowledge, offering them a share of the food she harvested, even engaging with them in play. One or two adults always hovered nearby, ready to strike if she attempted anything untoward, but they allowed the young ones their freedom to engage her.
What was the game Commander Vale mentioned when we were prisoners of the Hreekh? Are these the “good cops” I’m supposed to open up to?
If so, that was fine, since she was here to be open.

Aili dubbed her young friends Alos and Gasa, after two of her younger siblings. But it turned out they were not related, or even part of the same specialist pod. What she’d thought of as the research pod was actually an aggregate of two. As Alos and Gasa explained, the squales had no pods specializing in studying newly encountered species, for they had long since catalogued all the species in the sea and air and domesticated many of them. (Aili wondered how long that would have taken; an ocean was vast, but Droplet’s fairly uniform ocean had more limited biodiversity than would be found on a planet whose seas were subdivided by land masses. And there was always the possibility that their knowledge was not as pervasive as they assumed.) So
two specialist pods had combined their efforts. Alos was apprenticed to a pod that studied astronomy, using specially bred flying chordates and balloon jellies as probes that recorded visual information and encoded it into echolocation-like impulses. Gasa’s apprenticeship was with an animal-management pod specializing in interactions with their world’s more intelligent nonsquale species, making them the closest thing Droplet had to experts in interspecies communication or diplomacy. This was the first time those two pods had collaborated, and the two youngsters were enjoying the exchange of ideas, perhaps more so than the elders, who were more set in their ways.

But Aili soon discerned that even Alos and Gasa were as much on edge as the rest of the squales. If anything, they seemed to find her presence comforting, for she was the one being they knew who wasn’t suffering from the general anxiety. When she asked them what was troubling the squales, their answer was confusing: the Song, they said, was out of tune. Or so she interpreted it. Alos and Gasa tried to explain the concept, but it was difficult for them to communicate some of the ideas they apparently took for granted.

So they took the matter to their respective pods’ dominant males, essentially the lead scientists. Aili dubbed the leader of the astronomy pod Melo, after Melora Pazlar, while the leader of the animal-management pod got the nickname Cham, after the ecologist Chamish. The two of them discussed the issue and decided to call in more specialists. Periodically, pods of squales would aggregate into temporary superpods of hundreds of members for feeding or mating purposes. When the combined contact pod (as
Aili began to think of it) drifted near an area rich in piscoids and joined with other pods for the feeding frenzy, the members of the contact pod persuaded an elder hermaphrodite—apparently a spiritual leader of sorts—to break away from her pod for a time and give Aili some spiritual instruction.

According to Alos and Gasa, there was a fair amount of tension during the frenzy, with many in the other pods seeing the offworlders as a threat and wanting them dealt with aggressively. A couple of members of the defender pod had even defected to other pods, persuaded by their arguments. Some of those in Cham’s pod had come close, the young ones told her; since they were closely attuned to the animal life of Droplet, they were deeply troubled by the distress of their fellow creatures. Cham, being a stolid and conservative sort who disliked divergence from the proper order of things, had been unhappy with the idea of their defection, but could not really disagree with their reasons. But Melo and his astronomers had taken the offworlders’ side. Melo was elderly, but that had not made him hide-bound; if anything, a lifetime of studying a purely abstract science had made him something of a dreamer. He and his like-minded podmates were enthralled by the discovery of life from beyond the sky and had sung eloquently of the great insights they might be able to gain from them. This had brought around the potential defectors from Cham’s pod, and it had also persuaded the Matron, as Aili dubbed the spiritual leader, to come meet Aili and discuss squale beliefs with her.

“They believe in something called the Song of Life,” she explained to Riker once she’d sorted out the Matron’s
lessons to her own satisfaction. As usual, he was seated at the shoreline of the floater, with her lying on her side in the shallows just beyond. “Everything is song to them. They sing to the world, and it sings back to them. The song and its reflections define the world, make it real, give it form and substance.”

“Echolocation,” Riker interpreted. “They perceive their world by sending out sonic pulses and listening to the echoes.”

She nodded. “To them, that’s just part of the greater Song. They sing to find food. They sing to find other squales to sing with, to mate with, to make new squales. They sing, and other species listen and obey.

“Even the universe is a song to them. As they see it, there’s the World Below, the World Between, and the World Above. That’s the hypersaline depths, the regular ocean, and the air. And they’re all overtones of a deeper fundamental, the core of the world.”

She smiled as she tried to recapture the beauty with which the Matron had sung it to her. The World Between was the physical realm, the world of waking; the World Above was the realm beyond the physical, the world of sleep. Squales would regularly visit the World Above through sleep, sustaining their spirits as the air sustained their bodies. In squale as in English, “spirit” was kin to “respiration.” However, no squale could remember one’s sojourn Above upon waking. At most, one remembered dreams, which were distorted reflections of the waking world, like the rippling reflections the surface of the sea cast back below. Like Selkies, they slept with only half the brain at a time, retaining enough awareness to respond to
threats; so in their dream state they straddled the World Between and the World Above, just as they did when they swam at the surface.

But just as the motions of the surface told of the weather above, so the nature of one’s dreams bespoke the conditions in the World Above, providing spiritual guidance—with plenty of room for interpretation, of course. A large percentage of deep sound channel communication was devoted to oneirocriticism, as the meanings of squale dreams were debated back and forth. There was no dogma in squale beliefs; they enjoyed a good argument too much.

As for the World Below, that was the realm of death, where all living things sank eventually, inexorably. But they did not believe the spirit belonged there; its nature, when freed from the flesh, was to rise into the World Above, as gases escaped from a decaying body and bubbled upward as the body sank below.

“But the World Below is alive to them too, somehow,” she said. “It’s part of the Song, a deeper level than ours—theirs. Somehow it’s more…real. I guess because the Song is what creates reality, to them.”

“In the Beginning was the Word,” Riker said. “And the Word became flesh.”

“Sir?”

“The Bible, from Earth. The Gospel of Saint John. The term he actually used was
Lógos
—a pretty remarkable Ancient Greek word. It means not just a word, but the concept underlying it, the act of reasoning itself…maybe a few other things besides. In the beginning was
Lógos
, and
Lógos
was the Creator, and the act of creation, of all things.”

Lavena smiled. She’d always been impressed by Rik
er’s eclectic knowledge, the product of his insatiable curiosity. “Squale beliefs are a lot like that,” she agreed. “But there’s something more I’m still not getting. The squales…somehow they don’t see themselves as creating the Song, but participating in it. It comes from inside them, but outside them too. Maybe it’s more fundamentals and harmonics, the same thing having multiple layers.”

She smiled in recollection. “Even the way the Matron sang it to me was layered. She took me down to the
ri’Hoyalina
—the deep sound channel. The sea’s stabilized enough since the impact that the channel’s mostly working again. She let me listen in to the global dialogue, and made her song harmonize with its shifting melodies and echoes. I think she was using the channel’s ambience as an analogy for the Song. The greater melody that they’re all part of.”

Riker had perked up when she mentioned the long-range acoustic channel. “Did you listen for calls from
Titan
while you were there?” They had both concluded that the crew would use hydrophones in the DSC to listen for Lavena’s calls. On this world, with its sensor interference and vast stretches of empty ocean, the channel was the best way to search over large areas.