Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (34 page)

Under the circumstances, they could certainly spare the delay. “Permission granted to divert from probe deployment to retrieve the captain.”

“Aye, Commander! Diverting to retrieve the captain!”
came Bolaji’s immediate reply.

Another voice intruded on the channel.
“Aili, is that really you? Ah, Ra-Havreii here!”
From the background noise, he was still in the scouter gig, heading toward the base at top speed. Vale wondered if the base would provide any refuge for him by the time he arrived.

“Xin! It’s good to hear your voices, all of you.”

“Aili, we could really use your diplomacy right now. We’re under attack from the squales!”

“What? Why? What did you do?”

“Wha—what the hell do you mean, what did
we
do?! We’re only trying to save their whole damned planet, and they’re showing their gratitude by trying to kill me!”

“Hello, superior officer here!” Vale shouted. “Listen, Aili. Are you on good terms with the squales?” It stood to reason, if she and Riker were still alive.

“Some of them, Commander.”

“Well, it’s a start. Ra-Havreii’s right, we’re having a diplomatic meltdown of the potentially fatal variety, and I don’t just mean for us. Listen—”

As Vale spelled out the immediate threat to her crewmates and the larger threat to Droplet in a few terse sentences, Aili absorbed it with growing dismay. She understood perfectly why the squales were so afraid and angry, so she could not blame them for their actions. But if they couldn’t be made to understand the truth, their own fear would doom them.

And Aili Lavena was the only one who could make them understand. Only she knew them well enough to make the case in terms that would hold meaning for them. The fate of this entire world rested on her voice.

Why me?
an old, familiar part of her asked.
I can’t handle this. There must be someone else.

But that impulse was quickly damped. Aili was done running from responsibility. She’d always done more harm than good that way.

“Acknowledged,” she told Vale. “I’ll talk to them. All of them. But I have to leave the probe. I need the squales’ help, and they can’t stand being close to it.”

“We can damp the EM fields now. We can drop more probes, get your message out quicker.”

“It won’t work, Commander. They don’t hear speakers the same way as voice. I need to do this the natural way. Through the
ri’Hoyalina
—the deep sound channel. It will take a few hours, but it’s the only way.”

After a brief pause, Vale said,
“Do it. We’ll hold out as long as we can.”

“Acknowledged, Commander. Good luck. And…take care of the captain.”

“We will, Aili. Good luck to you too—for everyone’s sake. Vale out.”

Aili swam toward the squales and began singing, loudly enough to reach the whole contact pod. She had to persuade them to help her, for not enough of the squales knew her language, and her voice alone could not carry far enough through the
ri’Hoyalina
. Expressing her gratitude for all their help, she pleaded with them to help her one more time, and help save their world in the process.

They were reluctant, though. By now, the first reports were reaching them through the long-range channel—songs of fury from squales elsewhere on the planet, battling the perceived invasion of their world. Aili’s voice had to outweigh that angry chorus, and it was hard. The defender squales went on their guard, like troops reacting to a declaration of war, and counseled against doing anything to help the offworlders. Alos and Gasa came to Aili’s defense, but Cham argued them down, scoffing at the notion that dumping lifeless, alien things into the World Below, the very source of the Song, could heal it rather than harming it worse. Aili hoped Melo would come to her defense again, but the elderly pod leader seemed uncertain, more comfortable with abstract science and philosophy than concrete political decisions.

Still, Aili pleaded with them.
“You know me,
” she sang, using Selkie but approximating their musical idiom as closely as she could.
“You have saved my life, and his, so many times. You’re podmates to me, all of you. Would I betray you now?”

“The others…”
Cham began.

“They’re the same as me. They’d do no willing harm. And listen,”
she said, calling their attention to the news of battles from distant fronts.
“They would give their lives to
mend the harm they’ve done. To save your people, even if you kill them in return.

“You know me. You, of all the squales, have touched another world, and felt its Song. Through me. Your sister. Trust what you have heard. Trust me, if no one else. I only ask you, help me sing!”

Alos and Gasa swam to her side.
“We shall,”
they sang in chorus.
“She is our podmate. Our responsibility! Must students teach our mentors now where obligation lies?”

“Your duty’s to the Song!”
Cham intoned.

“And that’s the duty that we serve! All things are voices in the Song; they play their destined parts. Aili and we, converging here, as discord finds its peak—might this not be the key that will resolve the Song again?”

The two young squales told Aili to sing her case to the world; they would amplify it for her if no one else would. The defender squales swam forward, but Cham interceded; despite his distrust of Aili, he was angered that they would threaten to turn on podmates. Taking a chance that she would not be stopped, Aili began to sing in Selkie, as loudly as she could. The boys joined her in harmony: Gasa repeated her Selkie words, mimicking her voice as perfectly as any amplifier, but adding strength so it could carry further; while Alos sang the squale translation as a counterpoint. A humanoid might have been confused, but the squales normally communicated this way, in multiple parallel lines of song.

With just the three of them, her song was inadequate to carry far. But Alos and Gasa’s fellow apprentices began joining in one by one, some amplifying her own words as Gasa did, others offering translations. To Aili’s ears, it
seemed they were not all singing the same thing, but interpreting in more than one way, offering different lines of argument at the same time.

At first, it was simply a matter of getting the squales’ attention. She sang introductory verses to identify herself, to explain how she came to be here. All the world knew of her by now, of course, but they had not heard her side of it. As she sang of her origins in a different, much smaller ocean, Melo joined in, perhaps intrigued enough by the subject matter of the song to want to sing along. Even one or two of the defender squales were singing with her now. After all, Aili realized, one of the things they believed in defending was the right of all individuals to make their voices heard, whether they agreed with what was sung or not.

And that was something she could build on.
“Our mission’s to explore,”
she sang.

“To seek out strange new worlds, new life,

To go where we have never gone, and meet the people there.

We voyage in the name of peace. We celebrate all life.

Diversity combined: it’s the refrain that guides our quest.

For different voices, even those that frighten us at first

Can join with ours in harmonies we never could have dreamed;

Just as your voices all combine to sing the Song of Life—

A whole that’s greater than the sum, a chord of destiny.”

As she elaborated further on the theme, she heard Alos and the other squale translators begin to improvise upon it, illustrating it by the very act as well as by the words. She reflected that Riker would love the jazzy spirit of it. Together, they developed the theme that all things in the cosmos, even those that are dangerous or painful or discordant, were nonetheless harmonics of the same fundamental tone, the over-arching Song that sang the universe into being. As alien as she and her companions seemed, she told them, they were still part of the same continuum of life and mind.

At this point, Cham began singing too, but not to reinforce her words. His was a counterpoint conceptually as well as musically, reminding the squales of the crisis precipitated by the offworlders. The defender squales not singing her part took his, amplifying it to compete with hers.

Yet it wasn’t truly competition, she realized. Melodically, rhythmically, even thematically, it merged harmoniously with her song rather than clashing. Cham wasn’t trying to drown her out or sabotage her. He was simply adding a voice of caution to the chorus, making sure all sides were heard. In a way, Aili thought, he was even reinforcing her point: even dissenting voices could be part of a single song. An argument didn’t have to be about silencing or sabotaging the opposition; it could be a cooperative act, a way to participate in seeking a resolution to a conflict. Cham wanted the other side to be heard, but only to facilitate a healthy debate.

And maybe, she realized, to give her an opening to
address his concerns.
“I understand your fear—your dread of losing all you have,
” she sang.
“That dread is known to us, more so than you could ever dream.”

Aili dug deep down in herself, calling on her memories of the ordeal the Federation had faced at the hands of the Borg. She reached for all the emotions she’d buried away at the time and since: terror for the survival of herself, her ship, her world; grief at the deaths of friends and crewmates; shock, anguish, and sheer incomprehension at the devastation of entire worlds, the elimination of entire civilizations from the cosmos. She knew the squales could not comprehend the events, but she sang to them of the emotions—emotions she’d never let herself face this directly. It was painful, harrowing, and her voice often faltered, but her squale chorus compensated, making her vocal distress a part of the music. When she could not go on, their singing trailed off into a long, sustained chord, a dirge for the dead. It gave her time to gather herself before she went on.

“Like you today, we faced the end of our entire world.

We could have bowed to panic, helped to tear that world apart.

Instead, we let our fear inspire us all to stand as one.

To join in greater chorus, even with our enemies,

And sing a louder, richer song than any could alone—

A harmony that won out over chaos and discord,

Resolved the darkest movement in our cosmic symphony,

And let us start anew, transposed into a brighter key.”

But something was still missing. Aili didn’t feel she’d sold it enough; Cham’s counterpoint was still present, his skeptical melody creating an unresolved chord. The Borg invasion, the loss of worlds—however movingly she sang, it was too abstract for them. As drained as she was, there was one more corner of her soul she had to bare for them.

“Still, there is loss, I know. My grief will be an overtone

In every joyous song to come. For they’ll be incomplete.

They’ll lack a certain voice that I will never hear again.

Miana, sister, lost when I was but a little girl.”

She told them of Miana, of how she had blamed her mother for her death, turning her grief into rage in order to avoid facing it. She faced it now as she never had before. Despite her emotional and vocal exhaustion, she pushed on.

“In all my songs thereafter, Void has sung one of the parts.

But Void must not become the loudest singer in the song,

As it became for me. I feared the loss and pain so much

That I became the cause of loss and pain to my own kin.”

She confessed it all, not hesitating to make herself un-sympathetic. Her purpose could not be served by anything less than brutal honesty. And she needed to drive home the theme of how fear could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By singing of how her own fear of hurting her children had cost her a loving family life, she hoped to underline how their panicked efforts to protect their world would bring just the opposite result.

“We act in fear because we wish to change the course of Fate,

Believing we can stop the surge of oceans if we try.

But if we swim against the Song’s inexorable flow,

We may just smash ourselves upon the shores of death and pain,

Destroyed by our misguided fight against that very doom.

“There is no shame in fear, unless we let it make us deaf.

We’ve all known fear and loss; we need to heed each other’s song

And add the voice the other lacks, fill in the aching void—

Not swim alone in fear until we lose our very selves.

Together, we can bring the Song back into harmony.”

She wasn’t sure it was enough; she was afraid it was hokey, sentimental rubbish. And her voice was raw and failing; she couldn’t imagine it sounded very pretty to the squales.

But she must have poured her soul into it, for she could hear a change in the squale chorus. Cham’s counterpoint had modulated, synchronizing with her part of the song and allowing the chord to resolve at last. It was his way of showing that she’d won him over.

And beyond, in the
ri’Hoyalina
, the squalesong was changing too. There had been mostly silence for a time, as the squales had paused to listen to her song, with only a few voices raised in protest or anger. But now, new voices were singing, repeating her own song, echoing it even as the multiple reflections of the deep sound channel echoed it, turning the song into a round, a canon. Aili realized they were passing the message along, reamplifying it for the benefit of squales farther away. She wasn’t sure if that meant she had convinced them, but at least it meant they were willing to ensure she was heard. Within six hours, she knew, every squale on Droplet would have heard her plea.