“Oh, no. Part of our responsibility is to mate with low-status males who cannot win brides of their own. Myself, I have had eleven…no, twelve children for other lines.”
“ ‘For other lines?’ They’re raised in the father’s family?”
“Of course, how else?”
Troi’s eyes were wide. “So you’ve had to give up a dozen children?”
“Well, they are incubated in artificial marsupia once they are born, so I never had a chance to become attached to any of them. Just as well—I had too much work to do anyway.”
The Betazoid seemed sad for her. “I guess it’s easier that way,” she said, sounding far from convinced.
Qui’chiri looked her over. “And how about you? How many children have you had?”
Troi grew wistful. “Well…technically, one. In a strange way. An alien energy being impregnated me so that it could be born as a corporeal being and learn about us. It…it was all over in a matter of days. Ian…the life-form was unable to survive for long in that form.”
“I am sorry,” Qui’chiri said. “Some of my offspring did not survive to term. And I have lost siblings who were very young. The Hunt exacts its price.” She found herself growing somber. She tried to shake it off, but it lingered, calling up feelings of loss that she hadn’t been bothered by for many years. Perhaps changing the subject would help. “So you have had no children yet with your husband?”
“No…no, not yet.”
“Is that not the point of marriage in your culture?”
“Not the exclusive one. I mean, it’s part of it, yes, but we’ve only been married a few months…it isn’t the right time yet.”
“How long must you wait?”
“Until…until the time is right.”
Sensing her unease, Qui’chiri backed off. “I apologize. If I have impinged on some taboo…”
“Oh, no,” Troi reassured her. “Nothing like that. It’s just…not something I’ve given a lot of thought to yet. Although lately it seems to keep coming up.” Troi smirked at something.
Qui’chiri found it amusing herself, somehow. “Then perhaps the Spirit is trying to tell you something.”
Troi glared. “I thought you weren’t spiritual.”
“Of course I am. I just do not think about it much.” She laughed. Just then the mount lurched again. “Oh, no! Are the ticklers at it again?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said her assistant, who seemed very amused by it. Qui’chiri would have chastised her, but she could see the joke.
Troi was grinning too, but she seemed concerned as well. “Something strange is going on,” she said. “All of you—your emotions are changing with the jelly’s! When I grew sad, I felt it sadden in sympathy, and all of you grew more somber as well. And now the other jellies have come in to cheer it up, and we’re all laughing!”
Qui’chiri started to laugh at that, but stopped herself. “How can that be? We are not telepaths!”
“I know. But there’s no question—you’re all emoting in synch with the star-jelly.”
“Hormones,” Dr. Ree explained, once he had concluded his examination of Qui’chiri and several of her crewmates. Now Riker, Troi and Qui’hibra had joined them in sickbay for his report. “I would call them pheromones, except they are internal to the star-jellies. Apparently Pa’haquel hormonal receptors are sensitive to the jellies’ own hormones. I would imagine they shared their homeworld with the jellies for much of their evolutionary history, long enough for their biochemistries to be influenced.”
Qui’hibra was puzzled. “The legends say our history began elsewhere on Quelha. That we only discovered the skymounts during our migrations.”
“But your ancestral ecosystem could still have been affected by the jellies’ breeding grounds—perhaps by runoff from their hotsprings.”
“I’m more concerned with the here and now,” Riker said. “Why did it take so long to detect this?”
Ree clacked his teeth thoughtfully. “The Pa’haquel have not cohabited with live jellies for millennia. Maybe it took time for their systems to reacclimate.”
“Or maybe,” Troi said, “it simply seemed natural for their emotions to correlate. The Pa’haquel would have expected to feel irritation or concern when they were having trouble working with the jelly, and satisfaction when things were going more smoothly.”
“More importantly,” Qui’hibra said, “what do we do about it? How can we do our jobs if we cannot avoid breaking into fits of giggles?”
“I was able to manage it with an effort,” Qui’chiri said. “I am sure the will of all Pa’haquel is at least equal to my own.”
“No doubt,” Ree said. “Still, perhaps some form of hormonal antagonist could counteract the effect.”
“I will have my medical staff research it,” Qui’chiri replied. “Although it would be so much easier if we could just convince them to let us hunt them again.”
“Ahh, I have had the same thought,” Ree told her. “But I have had no luck finding volunteers among the crew.”
Ranul Keru couldn’t tell up from down right now.
Free fall was one thing. That he could handle, having trained for it extensively as part of the all-encompassing security drills he required for his people. But the play of gravity fields around a star-jelly’s distortion generators was much more confusing. Along the equatorial plane of the jelly, where the gravity vector reversed, one was technically weightless, but there was a sort of inverse tidal effect, a sense of one’s head and feet being pulled in toward one’s belly. It was particularly pronounced for a large man like himself. And right around the generators themselves, the gravity became considerably more problematic. Essentially each of the jelly’s seventy-six generator nodes was the center of its own local gravity field, and “down” was toward it from any direction. As one drew nearer a node, the gravity vector shifted more and more toward it. It would be easy to get lost, except that all the respiratory “corridors” in the area fed into the nodes. Keru was assuming that the gravity shifts he was feeling meant that he was getting closer to a node, rather than getting turned around and heading away from the equator. But he could only hope it was the right node.
Truth be told, he wasn’t even sure what he was doing here. Counselor Troi had suggested that he might be able to help the jellies adjust to the idea of living symbiotically with other sentient beings inside their bodies, by telling them something about the Trill experience with symbiosis. He did not consider himself an ideal choice for this, since he had never been joined. True, he had tended the symbiont pools for a few years, but his communication with the symbionts had been limited and intuitive at best, and he had no firsthand insights from the host’s perspective. But there were no joined Trills on Titan’s crew, so it came down to him. Troi had heard his objection that he would have little to offer, but had asked him to do what he could anyway.
So right now he was tracking down a telepath. The jellies could read any thoughts he had to offer, but he could not sense theirs without an interpreter. Since the other psisensitive crew members were occupied, he had been assigned to work with Lieutenant Chamish. The Kazarite ecologist could only register their emotions, not their cognitive thoughts, but Troi felt that would be enough to allow basic feedback, and apparently in their case the distinction was blurred anyway.
Keru was happy enough to work with Chamish, since he’d been trying to persuade the Kazarite to help train his security force in tactics against telekinetic attack. The gentle ecologist had shown no interest in combat exercises, and had demurred that his powers were too feeble to present much opposition. Riker and Vale had not seen the proposal as important enough to make it an order. Still, Keru hoped to change the lieutenant’s mind, feeling that any further edge he could give his people, however slight, would be worthwhile. Maybe it was impossible to save them all, but the more prepared they were, the fewer he’d have to lose.