Aili dubbed her young friends Alos and Gasa, after two of her younger siblings. But it turned out they were not related, or even part of the same specialist pod. What she’d thought of as the research pod was actually an aggregate of two. As Alos and Gasa explained, the squales had no pods specializing in studying newly encountered species, for they had long since catalogued all the species in the sea and air and domesticated many of them. (Aili wondered how long that would have taken; an ocean was vast, but Droplet’s fairly uniform ocean had more limited biodiversity than would be found on a planet whose seas were subdivided by land masses. And there was always the possibility that their knowledge was not as pervasive as they assumed.) So two specialist pods had combined their efforts. Alos was apprenticed to a pod that studied astronomy, using specially bred flying chordates and balloon jellies as probes that recorded visual information and encoded it into echolocation-like impulses. Gasa’s apprenticeship was with an animal-management pod specializing in interactions with their world’s more intelligent nonsquale species, making them the closest thing Droplet had to experts in interspecies communication or diplomacy. This was the first time those two pods had collaborated, and the two youngsters were enjoying the exchange of ideas, perhaps more so than the elders, who were more set in their ways.

But Aili soon discerned that even Alos and Gasa were as much on edge as the rest of the squales. If anything, they seemed to find her presence comforting, for she was the one being they knew who wasn’t suffering from the general anxiety. When she asked them what was troubling the squales, their answer was confusing: the Song, they said, was out of tune. Or so she interpreted it. Alos and Gasa tried to explain the concept, but it was difficult for them to communicate some of the ideas they apparently took for granted.

So they took the matter to their respective pods’ dominant males, essentially the lead scientists. Aili dubbed the leader of the astronomy pod Melo, after Melora Pazlar, while the leader of the animal-management pod got the nickname Cham, after the ecologist Chamish. The two of them discussed the issue and decided to call in more specialists. Periodically, pods of squales would aggregate into temporary superpods of hundreds of members for feeding or mating purposes. When the combined contact pod (as Aili began to think of it) drifted near an area rich in piscoids and joined with other pods for the feeding frenzy, the members of the contact pod persuaded an elder hermaphrodite—apparently a spiritual leader of sorts—to break away from her pod for a time and give Aili some spiritual instruction.

According to Alos and Gasa, there was a fair amount of tension during the frenzy, with many in the other pods seeing the offworlders as a threat and wanting them dealt with aggressively. A couple of members of the defender pod had even defected to other pods, persuaded by their arguments. Some of those in Cham’s pod had come close, the young ones told her; since they were closely attuned to the animal life of Droplet, they were deeply troubled by the distress of their fellow creatures. Cham, being a stolid and conservative sort who disliked divergence from the proper order of things, had been unhappy with the idea of their defection, but could not really disagree with their reasons. But Melo and his astronomers had taken the offworlders’ side. Melo was elderly, but that had not made him hide-bound; if anything, a lifetime of studying a purely abstract science had made him something of a dreamer. He and his like-minded podmates were enthralled by the discovery of life from beyond the sky and had sung eloquently of the great insights they might be able to gain from them. This had brought around the potential defectors from Cham’s pod, and it had also persuaded the Matron, as Aili dubbed the spiritual leader, to come meet Aili and discuss squale beliefs with her.

“They believe in something called the Song of Life,” she explained to Riker once she’d sorted out the Matron’s lessons to her own satisfaction. As usual, he was seated at the shoreline of the floater, with her lying on her side in the shallows just beyond. “Everything is song to them. They sing to the world, and it sings back to them. The song and its reflections define the world, make it real, give it form and substance.”

“Echolocation,” Riker interpreted. “They perceive their world by sending out sonic pulses and listening to the echoes.”

She nodded. “To them, that’s just part of the greater Song. They sing to find food. They sing to find other squales to sing with, to mate with, to make new squales. They sing, and other species listen and obey.

“Even the universe is a song to them. As they see it, there’s the World Below, the World Between, and the World Above. That’s the hypersaline depths, the regular ocean, and the air. And they’re all overtones of a deeper fundamental, the core of the world.”

She smiled as she tried to recapture the beauty with which the Matron had sung it to her. The World Between was the physical realm, the world of waking; the World Above was the realm beyond the physical, the world of sleep. Squales would regularly visit the World Above through sleep, sustaining their spirits as the air sustained their bodies. In squale as in English, “spirit” was kin to “respiration.” However, no squale could remember one’s sojourn Above upon waking. At most, one remembered dreams, which were distorted reflections of the waking world, like the rippling reflections the surface of the sea cast back below. Like Selkies, they slept with only half the brain at a time, retaining enough awareness to respond to threats; so in their dream state they straddled the World Between and the World Above, just as they did when they swam at the surface.

But just as the motions of the surface told of the weather above, so the nature of one’s dreams bespoke the conditions in the World Above, providing spiritual guidance—with plenty of room for interpretation, of course. A large percentage of deep sound channel communication was devoted to oneirocriticism, as the meanings of squale dreams were debated back and forth. There was no dogma in squale beliefs; they enjoyed a good argument too much.

As for the World Below, that was the realm of death, where all living things sank eventually, inexorably. But they did not believe the spirit belonged there; its nature, when freed from the flesh, was to rise into the World Above, as gases escaped from a decaying body and bubbled upward as the body sank below.

“But the World Below is alive to them too, somehow,” she said. “It’s part of the Song, a deeper level than ours—theirs. Somehow it’s more…real. I guess because the Song is what creates reality, to them.”

“In the Beginning was the Word,” Riker said. “And the Word became flesh.”

“Sir?”