<<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—”