Riker’s condition was growing steadily worse. He was weak, fatigued, suffering occasional tremors, and he was having difficulty keeping food down and keeping fluids in. It made Aili feel somewhat guilty about fighting with him, but that guilt was smothered by her continued anger at his assumptions about her. She didn’t want his health to suffer further, but she wasn’t inclined to speak civilly to him beyond what was necessary between an ensign and her commanding officer.
The ideal solution to both problems was a return to Titan—assuming the ship and its crew were still intact, still able to help them. Aili asked Alos to take her to Melo so she could plead her case, on the theory that the astronomy-pod leader would be the one most sympathetic to the offworlders (aside from Alos and Gasa, who lacked the authority Melo held). She explained to the aged squale that neither she nor Riker could survive on Droplet in the long term. But Melo denied her request, and Aili soon recognized that there was an apologetic tone to his song; his denial was cast, not so much in terms of what the squales would not do, but in terms of what they couldnot do. “What do you mean?” Aili demanded in Selkie. “Is there anyone else left? Are the others like me still on…in the world at all?”
The two astronomer squales exchanged a private communication for several moments, flashing intricate color patterns to one another on their carapaces. Then they sang to the others nearby at a speed that outraced her tenuous understanding of their speech. The squale language was polyphonic and incredibly intricate, with multiple channels of information being conveyed at once in parallel. Even at slow speed, she could only follow a fragment of it.
But when Melo finally sang to her in Selkie again, his reply was simple: “Not for Aili.”
“What does that mean?” Aili pleaded.
“That is a mystery we have not solved.”
She winced. Either the contact pod was being kept out of the loop for some reason, or…she didn’t know what. Sensing her distress, Alos stroked her with a tentacle and told her not to worry, assuring her that they would take care of her.
“You can’t,” she tried once more to explain to them. “Your food cannot sustain me for long. It can sustain Riker for far less time. It lacks things we need. We are different from you, from the other life that lives here.”
Once the astronomers understood her concern, they promised to discuss the matter with the biologists. Finally, after hours of squalesong she could not follow, Aili was approached by the visitor from the life-maker pod, a mature male she had nicknamed Eres, after Doctor Ree’s third name.
“There is a way the two from World Beyond can be made well,”Eres sang. “Your Song is out of harmony, in key unlike our own. But keys may be transposed. Though our own Song is in discord, it still sustains our life, more so than your metallic theme. Perhaps, indeed, transposing you would end the dissonance, and bring the Song of Life back into ancient harmony.”
Aili struggled to parse the poetry, but the ideas were too strange to her. Was Eres actually proposing some kind of biological transformation? She knew the squales believed the Song of Life created the world and all things in it. It followed that they defined biology as an aspect of the Song. But even with the squales’ exceptional capacity for animal breeding, how could they transform a living individual?
Eres was reluctant to reveal the answer to an alien; Aili was reminded of a priest defending a sacred mystery from exposure to heathen eyes. But Alos and Gasa took her case, debating eloquently that she deserved the opportunity to make an informed decision. The squales were an open society, necessarily so in an ocean where sound could travel so far and wide that secrets were difficult to keep (although the squales’ color-changing skin gave them an avenue for private discourse at close range). All matters were debated openly in the ri’Hoyalinaforum and decided through democratic consensus. It was part of their basic beliefs, Alos reminded his elders, that all sapient beings had the right to informed self-determination.
Finally, Eres agreed that Aili should be shown the answer to her questions. But Aili consulted with Riker before agreeing to go. The meeting was awkward, but necessarily brief due to the limited time she could spend on dry land. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We shouldn’t separate too far.”
“I know they’ll keep me safe. And their helpers will tend to you while I’m gone, if you need anything.”
“Marvelous,” he muttered. “Cared for by woodland creatures. Just like a storybook.”
She wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or becoming delirious. But then he nodded and said, “Go.” And that was all. Deciding she couldn’t afford to linger, she raced back to the water.
The trip took most of the night, even with the large, strong Eres holding Aili in his tentacles and swimming at top speed. As local dawn broke, they entered an area where the squales kept their farms and breeding facilities, one of several such complexes which were centralized to be more defensible. As she drew near the first farm, she initially thought it was just a large kelp bed. But she soon realized it was far too regular. It was a vast, floating lattice on which the kelp grew like ivy on a trellis. By catching a swell and swim-leaping out of the water, she was able to get an overhead view, revealing it to be an enormous fractal spiral like a sunflower blossom. The lattice was itself alive, made of a woodlike material; below the spiraling surface, a series of branches grew straight down, evenly spaced so as to make light and nutrients available equally to all the plants. Several small species of animal coexisted with the kelp, serving as “farmhands” under the supervision of a large aggregate pod of farmer squales. As Eres explained, a couple of species gobbled up parasites and organisms that fed upon the kelp; others devoured “weeds” that happened to take root upon the lattice. Animals of a harvester species used their hard beaks to break off lengths of the kelp, carrying it up to the surface in their tentacles and transferring it to flying chordates that carried it away, no doubt to storage caverns like the one now sheltering Riker. The flight presumably helped dry the kelp, prolonging its shelf life.
Soon they came upon a variant of the farm lattice organism, this one with a second spiral framework down below, forming an enclosed cage. Fast-swimming, dangerous-looking squale-related animals with fearsome beaks patrolled its perimeter. Here, Eres rendezvoused with the others in his “life-maker” pod, who had been alerted to his arrival hours ago by ri’Hoyalinatelecommunication. The pod passed Aili through the defense cordon and let her examine the woodlike columns that formed the cage. They were made of a material considerably harder than normal wood, though presumably hollow enough for buoyancy. Aili suspected that they had used a lot of their limited metal reserves to supply this organism with its structural strength.