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 Voyagerin 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 Titanimpossible. 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.