Within seconds his self-disgust was eclipsed by hope. Hope that Bashir’s wild idea might actually work on the other patients who lay around the room, dying.
Torvin approached Bashir. Extending a long, wiry arm, he helped the human doctor back to his feet. Warm tears suddenly stung Torvin’s eyes; he realized he had never before been so delighted at having been proved wrong.
“I think you and I have a great deal of work ahead of us, Doctor,” Torvin said. “Don’t you agree?”
Grinning, the human held up his now-empty hypospray. “Give me a few minutes with one of your pharmaceutical replicators. And alert your nurses and medics to get ready to start distributing the drug immediately.”
15
“Is there another way to the surface?” Ezri Dax asked.
<<There are many ways,>>the caretaker symbiont said. <<The Annuated would prefer that you return the way you came, however.>>
“My equipment has malfunctioned. The pressure down here has put too much strain on it.” Dax felt awash in sweat as her environmental suit’s temperature quickly and steadily climbed. She did her best not to let the onset of panic affect her respiration or heart rate; there was nothing to be gained by wasting her few remaining life-support resources, even if she was slowly cooking inside her suit.
<<You require rescue.>>
There was no point trying to hold anything back from the telepathic creature, Dax realized. “That’s a pretty fair observation.”
<<And none is forthcoming.>>
“Right again.”
The caretaker symbiont went silent for a protracted moment before speaking again inside Dax’s mind. <<I regret that I cannot help you. Nor can the Annuated.>>
Of course,Dax thought with a growing sense of resignation. This creature has to tend to these giant superslugs. They probably need constant care, so it can’t just abandon them. Not even to return me to the surface.
But she couldn’t simply give up. Aloud, she said, “If I don’t get back safely, the Annuated will have shared their memories with me in vain. I’ll die down here, along with my symbiont. And this entire mission will have been an utter waste.”
An unsettling thought occurred to her: What if the Annuated had never intended that she succeed in her quest to reveal the truth about Kurl and the parasites? Certainly, they had been generous about sharing with her thus far. On the other hand, it was hard for her not to conclude that everything that Trill humanoids knew about the symbionts was what the symbionts had decided to reveal to them, symbiosis notwithstanding. What if they had decided that Trill’s deepest secrets needed to remain buried?
The caretaker’s telepathic “voice” reverberated reassuringly through Dax’s mind. <<Were your symbiont to die, I would see to it that its memories are absorbed into the experiential storehouse of the Annuated.>>
“Wonderful.” The heat inside Dax’s suit was rapidly growing intolerable.
Sensing sudden movement behind her, she turned to see another nearly two-meter-long symbiont swimming ponderously toward her from the direction of the monolithic, apparently slumbering forms of the Annuated. Several long, whip-thin, cilia-like tentacles streamed from its body, which was more rust-colored than the first caretaker symbiont.
The ruddy creature undulated and turned one end toward Dax. She couldn’t tell whether that end was its head or its tail. <<Vah is not the only caretaker of the Annuated, youngling. Hold fast to my appendages, and I will conduct you surface-ward.>>
Dax reached forward and grabbed two of the tentacles. “Thank you,” she said, ignoring the surge of pain in her burned hand as she established a firm grip.
The giant symbiont moved quickly forward, its armored body rippling as it swam. Dax was pulled along behind it, concentrating all her energy on controlling her breathing and keeping hold of the tentacles. Sweat streamed into her eyes from the intense heat that was flooding her damaged suit.
As they swam forward and upward, Dax noticed that she didn’t recognize the cavern walls her wrist lights were illuminating, as if they were taking an alternate, more expansive route. It made sense that the larger symbionts would use larger travel arteries than would the smaller ones; no matter how slippery their hides, she couldn’t imagine that either of these caretaker symbionts could have passed through the narrower lava-tube channels she had been forced to squeeze through during her initial descent.
<<Did you find the experiences the Annuated shared with you surprising?>>The creature asked as it knifed through the hot, murky water.
“More than you can imagine. I just hope that all the secrets I’ve dredged up will calm down some of the chaos that’s going on now up on the surface.”
The caretaker’s psionic “voice” was a study in perplexity. <<Secrets? Why would the experiences of the Annuated be secrets in the Aboveworld?>>
The question sounded strange to Dax. “Apparently because my ancestors decided they needed to be kept that way. The destruction of Kurl was stricken from our collective history long ago.”
<<I know nothing of the history since then,>>the symbiont said. <<My last host chose to end her life after the Kurlan civilization was ended.>>
Dax saw an image then, in her mind, similar to those she had received from the Annuated. This time she saw the woman who had been Private Memh, one of those who had deployed biogenic weapons on Kurl, but she was not wearing her dark military uniform. Instead she was dressed in a crimson-stained robe and was praying in her home, her blood flowing freely from the slits on her wrists as someone behind her screamed.
Itwasn’t second nature to her to deploy those bombs,Dax thought, correcting her earlier misperception. She was numb when she pressed the button that wiped out the Kurlans. And once she could no longer lie to herself about what she’d done, she killed herself.
“I’m sorry for you,” Dax said quietly.
<<I never joined with a Walker again,>>the symbiont said. <<I have stayed below, tending to those who preserve all the memories of my time. Perhaps now is the moment to bring those memories forward intoyour time.>>
Dax was finding it hard to concentrate; her breath was coming in increasingly shallow gasps, and the acrid smell of her suit’s burned-out heat exchanger stung her eyes. “We need to go faster. I can’t last much longer.” She wondered if death by asphyxiation, heatstroke, or the bends were the only options left to her.
The symbiont slowed to a stop and floated nearly motionless, and Dax thought she might have offended it somehow. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pressure you. But if I don’t surface soon, I promise you I’m going to die,” she said, her voice raspy from the oppressive heat.
The symbiont’s thoughts suddenly became alarmingly discordant and jangled. <<Something has happened above us. Something terrible. Many voices are raised, yet many more have gone silent.>>The creature surged upward again, its pace even faster now. Dax nearly lost her grip, surprised at the sudden acceleration.
She looked up as something soft bumped against her shoulder. She saw a symbiont—an ordinary, garden-variety symbiont, she noted—brush against her hand as it swam downward. Then she realized that it was sinkingrather than swimming. Angling one of her wrist lights upward, she craned her head back to see what was happening closer to the surface.