Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (26 page)

TITAN

T
’Pel looked up from the poem she was composing as Noah Powell came into her quarters, where he had been staying since his mother—and T’Pel’s husband—had departed the ship nearly five standard days before. “Greetings, Noah,” she said. “How was your afternoon with Commander Keru?”

“It was acceptable,” the boy said, his tone devoid of affect.

T’Pel lifted a brow. “Has there been any news pertaining to your mother?” Logically, if there had been, T’Pel would have received word pertaining to her husband as well. Yet there was occasional value in human conversational gambits such as asking questions whose answers were known—at least when conversing with humans. The status of Nurse Ogawa had weighed heavily on the ten-year-old boy these past several days, so T’Pel had striven to be receptive to his concerns on the issue.

“No, there has not,” the boy said, still evincing no emotion.

“I see. And how do you feel about that?”

Noah endeavored to cock an eyebrow at her, though the other one went partway up along with it. “I feel nothing.”

“Indeed?”

“There is nothing I can do to alter the situation. So it would be illogical to expend emotional energy upon it.”

T’Pel rose from her console and crossed her arms. “You are attempting to emulate Vulcan behavior in the belief that it will insulate you from your current emotional distress.”

Noah frowned at her. “I thought you’d like—approve of that. You were the one who told me it was illogical to worry.”

“That is a misinterpretation, Noah. I said that it would be illogical to dwell unduly upon your fears. But those fears are perfectly natural for you to experience.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to experience them anymore. If you can do it, why can’t I?”

“It is not that simple. Come.” She moved to the couch and sat; a moment later, Noah followed, though he kept a formal distance. “Noah, the Vulcan way is a lifelong path of discipline and self-examination. If you chose, after careful consideration, to dedicate yourself to pursuing that path, I would not disapprove—so long as your mother gave
her
approval. But it takes many years of immersive training to discipline oneself to the point that one’s emotions can be successfully managed and partitioned from one’s everyday decision-making. It requires a careful and gradual reorientation of the cognitive process, for it is not the natural way for a humanoid mind to function.

“You do not have that training, Noah. Your emotions are an integral and normal part of your psyche. So a sudden attempt to lock them away and deny their influence upon you can only do you harm. The feelings will not be managed, only ignored.”

She met his gaze squarely. “You say you do not wish to experience your current fears as to your mother’s wellbeing. Is that your only motive? Or is there some other emotional experience you are hoping to avoid?”

By now, Noah was struggling to maintain his façade of detachment. “I went through that once…with my father. And I hardly knew him. If…if Mom doesn’t come back…I don’t want to feel that.”

T’Pel was silent for a time, gathering her thoughts. “I understand. But if that were to happen…even a fully trained Vulcan could not avoid experiencing the grief. Grief is too powerful an emotion to wish away. It is a transformative experience. No matter how ideal your control…the grief is there. Vulcan discipline does not erase that.”

She lowered her eyes, gazing at her folded hands upon her lap. “Indeed, in some ways, it makes the process of dealing with grief more…intense. More difficult. Because we must master it within ourselves—confront it directly in meditation and…negotiate with it until we find a way to make peace with it. It requires great strength and self-control.

“In some ways, I believe, the human way must be easier. For you can share your grief with others…turn to them for comfort and release.”

After a moment, T’Pel saw Noah’s small hand clasp her own. “I didn’t know. I know it’s been hard for Mister
Tuvok to get over losing your son…but I thought you…I didn’t know you had to go through that. I’m sorry.”

“There is no cause for regret, Noah. My son’s life, as well as that of my daughter-in-law, carried great value. They deserved the acknowledgment of my grief, even if it was a private experience. I regret their loss, but I do not regret grieving their loss. It was necessary—and proper.”

She saw that Noah’s eyes had grown wet, and realized it was necessary to modify the course of this discussion. “I see that you are no longer attempting to deny your emotions,” she said. “That is good. But remember—we have no reason to believe your mother will not return safely. In all likelihood, this discussion will prove to be purely hypothetical.”

The boy studied her. “So…you’re not worried about Mister Tuvok?”

“He and I have been separated for far longer than this,” T’Pel told him. “Our longest separation was seven years, when he was aboard
Voyager
in the Delta Quadrant. Two years, six months into that time, my husband was officially declared dead, and was not discovered to be alive until seven months thereafter. I have already been through the experience of grieving for him. It is not an experience I wish to repeat.

“However, it also established a precedent. If my husband was able to stay alive for seven years in the Delta Quadrant and return to me, then I have little cause for concern in the current instance.”

Noah smiled. “Me too, T’Pel. If Mister Tuvok’s anywhere near as smart as you, my mom’s gonna be fine.”

DROPLET: THE DEPTHS

It took the engineers a day to design, replicate, assemble, and test the diving pod for what the crew had already dubbed “Cethente’s Descent.” It was a perfect sphere for uniform compression, and in fact was designed to be somewhat compressible so that the interior pressure could increase along with the exterior, minimizing the differential that its structural integrity field would have to resist. Also to that end, the interior was filled with a dense fluid not unlike Syrath growth medium, which would serve to sustain Cethente throughout the dive. The control cradle was designed to be snug against the underside of Cethente’s dome, so that it could use its tentacles—the most vulnerable parts of its body—to operate it without needing to expose them to the full pressure. Cethente, whose legs were now being kept in medical stasis, had needed assistance to be lowered into the cradle, but once securely in place, the Syrath actually felt more comfortable than it would if it had needed to fold up its long legs somewhere in the bathysphere. Cethente was not concerned by the amputation; Onnta had assured it that the limbs could be reattached without difficulty, and even if they could not, a few weeks in genuine growth medium would suffice to regenerate them. Cethente only preferred reattachment because, for one thing, it was more convenient, and for another, it didn’t want that extra set of legs potentially growing into a clone of itself. In those rare cases where separate pieces of an injured or dead Syrath were simultaneously regenerated into whole beings with the same core personality, it proved difficult for two be
ings with equal claim to the same identity to coexist civilly. Dying was easy; comity was hard.

Once Cethente was secured in the pod, it was towed by shuttle down to the surface and released. As soon as it was given the go-ahead, Cethente turned off the antigravs that gave the pod buoyancy, allowing it to sink more swiftly than a humanoid could endure, though still slowly enough to give Cethente’s body time to acclimate to the rising pressure. Odds were that it would be unharmed, but why take chances? The slower descent was easier on the pod as well.

It soon became clear just how shallow the veneer of life was on this world. After just the first kilometer, barely over one percent of the way to the solid mantle, all sunlight was gone, even to Cethente’s wide-band optics, and far fewer living things were coming in range of the pod’s sensors—only a few scattered, bioluminescent organisms. And they rapidly thinned out over the next few kilometers. Without sunlight, life could only consume other life to survive; but the constant “marine snow” of organic detritus that descended into this realm, the remains and discards of the more abundant creatures dwelling above, was progressively consumed along the way, growing sparser and sparser. And so the life became sparser as well. (Cethente reflected that it would not want to live if it had to consume the remains of other organisms to do so, rather than subsisting on radiant or geothermal energy and the occasional absorption of mineral compounds. It didn’t understand how its crewmates could tolerate it, even when the consumables were created in a replicator. Luckily, without a digestive tract, Syrath were incapable of nausea.)

By about a dozen kilometers down, the ocean had become virtually barren. The sensors registered only one exception: a particular genus of zooplankton, microscopic animal life. It was sparsely distributed, but still the only life to exist in any abundance at all down here. Cethente was no biologist, but it believed it was odd to find plankton at these depths, with no sunlight to sustain it. True, the sensors showed that the plankton was in a dormant state, alive but conserving what little energy it had.
Conserving it for what?
Cethente wondered.
And why are they down here at all if they cannot function here?

Cethente could not share these questions with anyone except the bathysphere’s log recorder, for the EM interference and the sheer intervening mass of water made communication with
Titan
impossible. It logged its observations into the recorder, but soon it ran out of things to say. For long minutes, the realm outside was unchanging, save only for a steady increase in pressure and a gradual brightening of the magnetic field patterns emanating from below. There was nothing to do, nothing to perceive.
So much of the universe is empty,
the Syrath reflected.
Life exists only in tiny portions of it. Even on planets whose surfaces seem so lush and rich with life, scratch below the surface and you find immense volumes of emptiness.
Cethente knew the emptiness of space was unimaginably more vast, but it was more difficult to perceive that as one raced through it at high warp speeds, hurrying through it to avoid facing it. Especially on a ship with hundreds of other beings of numerous different types, surrounding one with life. And as an astrophysicist, he was able to think of the universe in terms of vast scales, abstract and removed
from life. But down here, alone, drifting slowly through the emptiness, facing it on a scale that was smaller and more comprehensible, it was easier to appreciate how vast the cosmos actually was in proportion to living things.
Is this why we so rarely visit ocean planets?
Cethente mused.
Not only because they are barren, but because their depths frighten us?
Syrath had little fear of nonexistence, but to exist without input or companionship—that was terror.

Cethente’s time sense slowed in response to the sensory deprivation, and it entered the meditative state that was its species’ closest analog to sleep. An unknown time later, it was roused by several changes in its environment. One was that the magnetic field patterns dancing across its sensory nodes were resolving and growing brighter. Another was that the pod’s descent was beginning to slow. The third, related to the second, was that the readouts in the control cradle were registering an accelerating increase in water density. It was a myth that water was incompressible; it was merely difficult to compress, requiring hundreds of atmospheres of pressure to make a significant difference in its density. But that point had been reached at about the same depth where total darkness had fallen, and the density had been increasing at a slow but exponentially rising rate ever since; this comparatively sudden increase had to be from some other cause.

The other thing that affected water density, Cethente recalled from its daylong crash course in oceanography, was salinity, the ratio of minerals dissolved in the water. Checking its depth and taking a few more scans, Cethente confirmed that it was nearing the hypersaline layer, the saltwater dynamo whose contamination was altering the
planet’s magnetic chorus. Cethente took a moment to “listen” to the magnetic field, although to the Syrath it was more like tasting; the field patterns did seem slightly dissonant, tinged with more exotic energies, though Cethente found it bracing rather than disquieting.
Must be a flesh thing,
it reflected.

The interface between the upper ocean and the hypersaline layer was not a sharp divide. The two layers had separate convection currents, keeping them from mixing too extensively, but there was a gradual transition from one to the other, more like the distinction between two layers of an atmosphere or a stellar interior than between two strata of rock, say. Nonetheless, the pod was slowing as the water around it grew denser and more buoyant, and once it was confident it had become sufficiently immersed in the dynamo layer, Cethente set the antigravs to give the pod neutral buoyancy, halting its descent. The Syrath set the sensors to maximum gain, and opened its own senses as well—the same senses that had allowed its species to develop an advanced knowledge of astrophysics while living on a perpetually clouded world.

Both sensory suites soon revealed the same thing: Cethente was not alone down here. It could sense smaller surges and pulsations in the magnetic field, isolated, seemingly random, yet oddly purposeful. It had the flavor of life to it. The sensors confirmed it: the dynamo layer was inhabited!

“Remarkable,”
Cethente said into the log recorder after studying the scan results.
“This is an order of high-pressure life—barophiles, the computer calls them—completely unlike what is found on the surface. They are evolved for pres
sures that would destroy protein-based life. They are very dense, solid creatures, made of pressure-resistant shapes: spheres, toroids, cylinders with rounded ends. They have no internal voids, no pockets of lower density to give them buoyancy. They use hydrofoil surfaces, fins, to give themselves lift. They seem to ride the convection currents, which implies they can survive being swept down near to the deepest, highest-pressure regions of the dynamo layer.”