The reflection of Sef’s host vanished, replaced by several other vignettes of stored memory. Like the previous encounters, some of these related the experiences of long-dead symbionts, while others belonged to hosts who had become dust eons ago. Like the experiences of Hodak and Sef, many of them seemed to go back to the very genesis of Trill symbiosis, an event that might have occurred as long as twenty-five millennia ago—and had been completely obscured by the passage of time. Whenever Dax had considered the conundrum of the origin of Trill symbiosis, she concluded it was as unfathomable as the Big Bang itself.
These must be memories of memories,Dax reasoned in between the ancient, mutually exclusive encounters. Or maybe memories of memories of memories. Of other memories.
She recalled her earlier tricorder readings. Despite their great age, she tended to doubt that any of the Annuated were quite old enough to possess anything like an accurate, firsthand recollection of the very first instance of symbiont-humanoid joining, or the precise circumstances surrounding it. But they certainly couldcarry within them many mnemonic echoes from long-dead symbionts born eons before they were. And thanks to Joran, whose existence the Symbiosis Commission had concealed from her for nearly a century, Dax knew very well that memory was a very malleable thing; because of this, all of the “first symbiosis” memories she had glimpsed might be false to a significant degree—or true, at least in certain respects.
She noted wryly that asking questions about such things always seemed to leave one with more questions than one started with. As a person whose mind had a decidedly problem-solving bent, she found the idea of increasing the universe’s net question-content somewhat distressing.
Dax suddenly noticed that something had changed yet again in her surroundings. She was back in her environmental suit, and yet she was also floating in the void that contained the moving mnemonic spheres. But the spheres were altering their speed and direction. Her headlong plunge into the mnemonic past seemed to be reversing course.
Of course. I’m inside an Annuated’s head, so to speak. And I’ve zipped all the way to the oldest fragments of its memory. So there’s no place else to go but forward.
Her reverie was interrupted by yet another sudden change of scenery. All at once—
—her environment suit was gone again, and she stood on what appeared to be the deck of a space vessel. She was in a brightly lit, low-ceilinged control center filled with consoles, screens, and other instruments. The consoles bore markings that resembled some archaic form of the Trill written language, and she found she could read none of it.
This sure isn’t Starfleet issue, Dax thought as she looked around the narrow control center, where several green-uniformed Trill humanoids of both sexes were intent on various consoles and readouts. Dax noted that she, too, was wearing similar garb.None of this looks very much like anything the Trill Defense Ministry has at the moment, either.
Someone activated a large forward viewscreen, which displayed a half-lit blue planet. The serene-looking world was swiftly growing in size, as though the ship had just dropped out of warp and was making its initial approach.
“There it is,” said one of the Trill humanoids, a male. “The first other world we’ve ever found capable of supporting both humanoids and symbionts throughout the entirety of both species’ life cycles. Or so the survey reports say.”
“It took us long enough to find it,” another crew person answered, this one a female. Behind the woman was a circular conference table, the centerpiece of which Dax had never seen before—not in its entirety, anyway—but which she recognized at once: anaiskos . “Let’s hope we don’t have to travel as far or search as long before we locate the next one,” the woman said.
Kurl, Dax thought as the crew members continued making small talk about their mission, which was evidently to drop a large contingent of colonists off on this planet, along with sufficient agricultural resources and machine tools to allow them to establish permanent habitations here. Though she still believed Kurl was so distant that it made an improbable site for an early “lost Trill colony,” she thought its selection might make perfect sense if the exacting environmental requirements for maintaining both humanoid and symbiont populations were taken into account.
Though Dax found the crew’s grammar, vocabulary, and syntax strange—archaic, in fact—she had no problem understanding their speech.More Annuated telepathy, she thought, realizing with no small amount of wonderment that at least part of the recent neo-Purist manifesto was apparently true: there evidently really had been a previously undiscovered ancient period of Trill interstellar exploration—an era that had been all but forgotten millennia before the time of Dax’s first host, Lela.
As though the Annuated with whom she was linked were now satisfied that Dax’s remaining questions were best answered elsewhere, the scene shifted again.
The starship and the blue planet vanished, to be replaced by a sterile white room whose tightly sealed windows looked out over a placid blue lake. A few pleasure craft skated slowly across the azure water, and homes dotted the lake’s far side.
Somehow, Dax knew she was on Kurl—and that centuries had passed since the initial colony ship had deposited its living cargo here to form the very first society to be composed entirely of joined Trills.
And she also knew with certainty that something had been going horribly wrong with that society lately.
Dax turned from the windows and found herself inside what appeared to be an extremely well-equipped research laboratory. A pair of white-smocked Trill humanoids, a man and a woman, were intent on an experiment. A Trill symbiont sat on a table before them, its brown, wrinkled skin slick and shiny from the shallow nutrient bath in which it sat.
“It’s so peaceful out there,” Dax said, indicating the lake behind her.
The female scientist made a harrumphing sound. “It won’t stay that way for long. Not unless we find a way to neutralize this damned virus, and quickly.”
The virus. Yes. Dax was aware that the virus, perhaps the accidental offspring of a misfolded protein molecule produced by some of the indigenous biota, had already killed more than ten percent of the colony’s fifteen million people. Images of horrendous, blood-spattered deaths from hemorrhagic fevers, isoboramine starvation–induced symbiotic interruptions, and complete RDNAL breakdowns flashed unbidden across her mind—an extraordinarily vivid memory-within-a-memory that Dax found highly disconcerting. Obviously not everyone on Kurl had succumbed as yet, otherwise the original owners of these memories could never have found their way to the deep pools of the Annuated.
She also knew that so far, the symbionts had been the most vulnerable to the virus, though no one had yet discovered precisely how or why the infections were occurring. But hope remained that a cure would come soon.
And Dax knew that this lab was one of the brightest sources of that hope.
She watched as the man prepared a hypo and injected the symbiont with it. The small vermiform entity twitched several times as the woman ran a handheld scanner over its length. She studied the device’s readout for a moment, then smiled up at the man and at Dax.
“The RDNAL sequences are strengthening and repairing themselves, just as we saw in the simulations,” the woman said brightly. “With a few more adjustments to their genome, I think the symbionts will be toughened up enough to make them completely immune.”