Dax waded slowly out into the pool’s grayish-white, almost milky water, allowing it to engulf her environmental suit. The nutrient-rich fluid soon splashed against the faceplate of her helmet as she moved deliberately forward, and moments later the water rose to cover her head entirely. After she was fully submerged, the ragged sound of her own breathing reverberated within her bubble helmet—much too loudly, she thought.
As she drifted free in the murky water, she could see at least half a dozen symbionts swimming energetically near the pool’s surface, while several arced gracefully about her body. Their tranquil blue static-electrical discharges linked each of them together every few seconds, and provided illumination as the cavern lights faded quickly with the increasing distance of the pool’s surface. Occasionally, one of the symbionts’ static bursts would gently reach out to her abdomen, no doubt speaking directly to the Dax symbiont on some level that bypassed symbiosis itself. Though the communication was entirely wordless, these brief psionic touches filled her with feelings of peace and reassurance, and evoked flashes of comforting colors, sounds, and even smells and tastes. If the Guardians experienced such things regularly, she could certainly understand why they showed such dedication to their charges.
Placing a gloved hand near her suit’s neck ring, she opened up a comm channel. “Dax to Cyl,” she said, her voice echoing strangely inside her helmet.
“Cyl here,” came the general’s static-laced reply. Evidently the jamming signals that had disrupted the runabout’s communications weren’t extending into the depths of Mak’ala, at least at the moment. “How’s your descent going, Lieutenant?”
She glanced at the glowing display on the tricorder mounted on her right gauntlet. “So far so good, as long as ‘down’ is the right general direction.” A loud rush of static assailed her ears for a moment, then abruptly faded to the background. “But I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep this channel open.”
“Understood. I guess I don’t need to remind you to be careful.”
After she signed off, Dax’s boots came to the edge of a steep drop-off. She stepped over it, pushing her legs hard against the precipice to ensure that her body would fall well clear of it. The bottom of the submerged cavern fell away beneath her, prompting a momentary surge of fear; it was as though she were tumbling, untethered and in slow motion, into one of the icy crevasses on Minos Korva. She was surrounded by an allencompassing darkness broken only by the navigational data scrolling across her tricorder’s display. She recognized the silence that enfolded her as the absence of all sound, both inside and outside of her helmet.
The symbionts who were escorting her began to withdraw, but before they moved back toward the surface, each of them touched her with an electrical tendril. A moment later she was alone, floating in the stygian gloom.
In spite of the darkness and the isolation, she wasn’t afraid. Although the symbionts had not communicated with her verbally, their meaning seemed crystal clear to her. They aren’t abandoning me. They want me to continue downward, but they can’t—or know they mustn’t?—go below this point.
Another thought, less benign, occurred to her: They don’t know what’s down here any more than I do.
As the weighted belt that encircled her waist drew her steadily downward, she tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the water was far warmer than the Minos Korvan caverns had been, no doubt because of the upwellings of the underground hot springs that helped sustain the symbionts.
She also noticed that the increasingly viscous water seemed to be fighting her, almost as though Mak’ala itself were trying to reject her presence, like a Trill humanoid entering the throes of neural shock following a badly executed symbiosis.
She glanced again at her wrist-mounted sensor display. As far as she could tell, the dark cavern into which she was descending was bottomless; she knew that at some point her suit would no longer be able to take the pressure.
Keep breathing, she thought, concentrating on taking normal, shallow breaths. Not for the first time, she wondered if Julian hadn’t been right when he’d tried to tell her that she was embarking on a fool’s errand. Why did he have to be right so damned often?
Just as she was about to activate her suit’s wrist lights, she glimpsed a dim, orange-green glow lining a nearby cavern wall. Her tricorder identified it as a colony of bioluminescent microorganisms, evidently growing out of a side channel that appeared to be an ancient, partially collapsed lava tube. As she watched the mat of glowing microbes, the pool’s currents carried some of its tentacle-like fronds away from the wall and toward the surface. Maybe this is what they eat when they’re living down here unjoined, Ezri thought, finding it curious that she couldn’t recall the Dax symbiont’s experiences in the caverns with any degree of detail. Maybe the symbionts don’t share everything when they join with us.
That thought made her more determined than ever to continue her descent. To get to the bottom of things, as it were.
Ignoring the protest of the burned skin on her hand, she checked her navigational data again, then touched her comm button again. “Cyl, I’m continuing my descent. I think I’m finally getting close to the cavern floor.”
She heard only hissing and crackling in response as her comm signal tried and failed to negotiate the magmafed, ionrich water and Mak’ala’s fistrium-laden cavern walls. Looks like I’m on my own down here, she thought, swallowing hard.
Her boots suddenly found purchase on the stony and steeply sloping bottom, and Dax finally activated her suit’s powerful helmet lights in the hope of actually seeing where she was headed, as opposed to relying entirely upon her tricorder. The soupy miasma all around her swallowed most of the light before it got more than a few meters away in any direction. Despite the limited visibility, Dax caught glimpses of the pool’s rocky walls, and noted that they were narrowing as the passage descended ever deeper through Trill’s volcanic crust.
As she dropped slowly into the increasingly claustrophobic passage, she recalled the Dax symbiont’s experience inside the mysterious “cathedral artifact” the Defiant’s crew had discovered in the Gamma Quadrant. Ezri and Dax had been separated for a short time, and the unjoined Dax symbiont experienced a horrific, solitary vision that Ezri Dax now recognized as a premonition of the recent parasite attack on Trill. This unsettling encounter had brought the symbiont face-to-face with all of its previous hosts, each of whom had carried dire, oracular warnings—and had accused Dax of negligence in preparing for what was to come. Dax had surmised that the mystical, almost nightmarish experience had been precipitated as much by symbiotic interruption as by Audrid’s painful memories of the alien thing that taken the life of poor Jayvin.
Dax’s boots settled at last to almost level ground, and she saw that the passage had narrowed to the point that her suit lights had no trouble illuminating the walls in any direction; every crack and crevice stood out in sharp relief. As she moved forward, half walking and half swimming, the passage wound and twisted and narrowed until she thought the wide upper portion of her environmental suit might get her stuck.
Any symbiont that manages to make it this far down has got to be hunchbacked, she thought with no small amount of gallows humor. Even if she were able to raise Cyl or the runabout’s computer, she knew that an emergency beam-out to the Rio Grande would have a very low probability of success. The very geological features that protected the symbionts in the caverns from long-distance transporter kidnappings would kill her if she were to become trapped down here.
Dax continued following the tunnel’s gentle downward slope for perhaps another twenty minutes, her suit’s metal-ribbed shoulders scraping disconcertingly from time to time against the sides of what had become a nearly horizontal tube of fluid-filled rock. For several minutes, she was literally crawling on her belly through yet another ancient lava tube. On top of this difficulty, the steadily increasing water pressure was pushing relentlessly against her suit, making its joints stiff and unyielding. Her thighs and arms ached with exertion, and exhaustion was threatening to overwhelm her. Still, her suit sensors indicated that something—something alive and symbiont-like—lay an indeterminate distance ahead.
Fortunately, one of her helmet lights revealed what appeared to be a ledge only a few meters ahead. Beyond that ledge lay what looked like another one of Mak’ala’s large, open pools. A gentle current seemed to be pulling her in that direction. She heaved a sigh of relief at the prospect of getting out of the narrow passage soon.
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.
<<The Annuated have already been told to expect you. The Annuated understand the danger Trill now faces. The Annuated have consented to interrupt their isolation in order to help.>>
Annuated? Dax thought.
The creature began swimming, circling Dax in a graceful arc. <<The Annuated. The eldest of the Interior People. Their progenitors, and the keepers of their most ancient memories.>>
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,”
<<And why.>>
“So you can tell me the truth about Trill’s relationship to the parasites? And what happened to the ancient Trill colony on Kurl?”
<<I cannot.>>
Dax blinked several times, temporarily at a loss for words. “But you said that the Annuated are the keepers of the oldest memories.”
<<Yes. But I do not yet qualify as Annuated. That is for some eon yet to come.>>
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.
<<I am but young,>> the creature said. <<I tend to the material needs of the Annuated, and ensure that their eggs reach the Shallows whenever one enters an interval of fecundity. I also assist the Annuated in assimilating the memories of those symbionts who come here to die. It is the memories kept by the Annuated that you seek.>>
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.
<<You are among them already.>>
The scaly stone surface began to move beneath her gloves, writhing sinuously like a serpent’s belly. Several meters directly overhead, brilliant multicolored energy discharges 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?
<<Perhaps,>> said the smaller caretaker creature, who suddenly swam past Dax. For the first time, she noticed small immature nubs along the sides of the caretaker, matching the tentacular projections of the Annuated. <<If you take great care not to get it killed in the meantime.>>
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.”
<<Impatient youth,>> the caretaker said.
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.