Orion's Hounds

by Christopher L. Bennett

  You don’t know humanoids very well, do you? Huilan joked to himself. Particularly Ra-Havreii. But she had a point; since Pak’shree were only male for the decade or so between their immature neuter stage and their mature female stage, that was their only window to mate and ensure procreation, so they essentially spent their entire male stage fixated on mating. “I’m a male too, you know.”

  “Ohh, yes, and you’re completely adorable. I hope you don’t think that’s rude of me, Captain Riker didn’t seem too amused when I called him adorable, but you’re just so irresistibly cute I can’t help myself.”

  “Cute I may be, but I’m ruthless when I need to be. I won’t keep your little secret, because the captain deserves to know why you don’t like to leave your quarters. He’s a big boy, and so is Dr. Ra-Havreii, and they can handle it. The question is, what can you handle?”

  “I can go out when I need to, really. I just don’t like to. I’m tired of bumping my head on doorframes. This ship just isn’t comfortable. You understand that, right, dear? As you said, it isn’t comfortable for you either.”

  Huilan pondered. “No, I suppose you have a point. A ship like this—it isn’t really comfortable for anyone, is it? Everything’s a compromise. Everything’s designed to be a reasonable average. The temperature, the humidity, the gravity, the diurnal cycle, all calibrated to strike a balance between different species’ needs. Those of us with really different needs—Zaranites, Selkies, Elaysians—must wear special, uncomfortable suits during the day and know that our guests will never be fully comfortable in our own quarters. But there’s a human saying about compromise—it’s a solution that makes everyone equally unhappy. The conditions of this ship aren’t really ideal for any one species, and so nobody’s really comfortable. It’s an awkward way to live. It has been whenever it’s been tried in the past. Indeed, there are some who say that’s one reason why mixed-crew starships like this haven’t generally succeeded in the past—that it’s just too much trouble for species with such different needs to try to coexist in a single, closed environment. They say it’s just too much to ask.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” K’chak’!’op said. “I mean, we’re space explorers, aren’t we? We seek out alien environments, often visit worlds much harsher than this.”

  “True, true. But the claim is that when we come back to our home ships, the places where we spend most of our time, we want them to be comfortable and familiar.”

  “Maybe so, but that’s no reason to abandon the whole concept! If people think that way, how far are they from deciding that it’s not worth listening to ideas they aren’t comfortable with? That way of thinking, it’s so shallow, it’s immature, it’s—”

  “Male?”

  K’chak’!’op gave off the equivalent of a laugh. “Sweet-heart, our males can’t be bothered to think about such questions at all. But it’s not the way a responsible adult should think.”

  “I agree.”

  “Good for you, dear.”

  “So why are you still in this room?”

  There was a long pause. “Ohh, you’re very good! That was very smart the way you led me to that, sweetie. You deserve a pastry for that, would you like me to get you one?”

  Huilan cackled. “Only if you obtain it from the mess hall.”

  She stridulated a laugh of her own. “Ohh, all right. Come along.” She led him out into the corridor. “At least the lift won’t be too crowded if it’s just you and me. Still, I wish there were a more comfortable way to get there. You know what this ship should’ve been designed with? Ramps between decks. Maybe if they’d built the corridors in a continuous spiral, connecting each level to the next….”

  “Oh, yes, I’d like that,” Huilan replied. “Then I could ride a scooter to where I needed to be, save myself a lot of walking. Maybe we could propose it for the ship’s next refit.”

  “What a good idea! Yes, we really should. Let’s see, what else could we propose? How about replacing the seats with holographic projections that could be reshaped for each user?”

  “Why not make the whole bridge a holodeck, adjustable for any use?”

  “Oh, that’s good! And how about this….”

  Chapter Five

  STARDATE 57159.4

  It was four days before Titan made another cosmozoan sighting, though what they found was not a star-jelly. Rather, it was a Black Cloud—a living dark nebula of the type theorized in the twentieth-century fiction of Earth astronomer Fred Hoyle. “We detect radio emissions and shaped magnetic fields throughout the Cloud,” Jaza reported in a briefing, “linking thousands of point sources into a network. These are probably clumps of particulate matter, small asteroids and planetesimals, with organic molecules laid down in complex chains. Collectively they make up its brain.”

  “Is it intelligent?” Vale asked.

  Jaza shook his head. “The neural activity is too simple. Little more than stimulus-response and motor control. The magnetic fields shape its interior structure, giving it a gaseous anatomy of sorts for transporting nutrients and waste through its ‘body.’ They can change its shape, too. In fact, we discovered it that way, by comparing our subspace sensor scans of its current shape with the visible-light image through an optical telescope, showing how it looked over a decade ago.” He displayed the images side by side on the obs lounge monitor. “See how it’s taken on a spindle shape, oriented radially outward from that protostar nearby? At first we thought it was just a conventional cometary globule until we saw how quickly it’s changed shape—and I should add that for a living nebula drifting through interstellar space without warp drive, a dozen years or so is very quick. It’s actually reshaped itself to present the smallest possible profile to the protostar, to minimize erosion from its T Tauri winds.”

  Riker smiled at Jaza’s enthusiasm, but said, “That’s all very interesting, Commander, but does it help us find any star-jellies?”

  “No, I suppose not. But it does suggest we’re on the right track. The closer we get to the Vela Association, the more species we’ll probably see.”

  Indeed, it was only another day before their next find. At first it seemed like they might have found a star-jelly, since the sensors detected similar compounds in the creature’s hide. But as Titan grew closer and refined its scans, the creature turned out to be a spheroid mass only a few hundred meters in diameter, seemingly inert, although sensors detected faint biological activity inside it. Jaza concluded it was hibernating for its interstellar journey, and backtracked it to a nearby blue star. On approaching that star system, Jaza’s people discovered numerous other creatures of the same species occupying the cometary disk around it. By observing numerous individuals in different phases, they were able to reconstruct their life cycle fairly quickly. “When they drift into a system,” Jaza explained, demonstrating with sensor images and computer animation on the obs lounge monitor, “they open up and deploy vast solar sails to collect energy. They also use the light pressure to maneuver through the system. They latch onto the cometary chunks and mine them for CHON.”

  Riker had read enough science officers’ logs to recognize the shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the essential building blocks of carbon-based life. “In simpler terms, they feed on them.”

  “Yes, but more like a plant drawing nutrients from the soil, with the solar sails analogous to photosynthetic leaves. They use the CHON and the solar energy to reproduce themselves. Once the offspring are grown, they break off and deploy their solar sails, using them to accelerate out of the system, as well as to save up energy for the long journey ahead. Like Bajoran sailseeds spilling out into the wind. They seem to point themselves toward the brightest stars in the sky—which makes sense, since those are either the nearest or the most energetic.”

  “Why would they evolve that way?” Vale wondered. “Why not just stay in one star system, where they know there’s enough energy and matter to live on?”

  “Well, they don’t seem
to be anywhere near intelligent—”

  “Pardon my anthropomorphizing,” Vale said.

  “But I’d assume it’s because in a turbulent region like this, a given star system could be struck by disaster at any time. Cosmozoans that evolved interstellar migratory behavior would thus have a survival edge.”

  “What about the star-jelly-like compounds in their shells?” Riker asked. “Are there any other signs that the species are related?”

  “Hard to say for sure. I’d say they’re related in the sense of being part of the overall ecosystem of the Orion Arm. So it stands to reason they’d be made of similar stuff. Also as spacegoing creatures that procreate in star systems, they may have evolved similar shell chemistry for similar needs. I don’t yet have enough information to say if they’re directly related.”

  “All right, then, how about this: if the ‘sailseeds’ contain compounds the star-jellies need, is it possible the jellies might feed on them? If we follow them, could they lead us to the jellies?”

  Jaza mulled it over. “Cosmozoans generally live very far apart, at least this far out from the core star-formation region. It would be fairly unusual for one to come across another, for the same reason that Starfleet encounters with them have been fairly infrequent. So I doubt we’d see them feeding on one another very much, at least not until we get closer—assuming I’m right that there’s a fuller ecosystem at Vela.

  “Since they can travel at warp, star-jellies would be better off just hopping to the nearest inhabited planet to find biomass—and given their replication abilities, they could convert CHON from comets directly just as the sailseeds do.” He pondered. “Still…species with similar needs might seek out similar conditions. So tracking sailseeds might help us find our way deeper into the biosphere, which would increase our chances.”

  Vale sighed. “Maybe instead we should find some Pa’haquel and ask how they track the jellies down.”

  “Somehow,” Riker said, “I don’t think they’d tell us.”

  “Probably,” Jaza suggested, “they’re more familiar with the jellies’ habits and migration patterns. Or maybe they can scan for some kind of ‘spoor’we don’t know how to recognize.”

  “Or maybe they can tap into some sensory ability of the jellies they kill and inhabit.”

  Jaza pondered the captain’s suggestion. “Perhaps. Some kind of empathic center in the brain, possibly.”

  Riker looked at him sharply. “So to find an empath…”

  “Maybe it takes an empath.”

  Deanna was very quiet for a while after he made the suggestion. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that,” she finally said.

  Riker sat next to her on the couch, close but not too close, trying to remind himself that he was speaking as her captain, not her husband. That was why he’d come to her in her office. “You must have known that we’d need your empathy when the time came. Your own reports said that emotion seemed to be their primary form of communication.”

  “I know, Will…I’ve just been hoping to avoid it.”

  He paused, choosing his words. “You told me, back on the Enterprise, that contact with the jellies was a beautiful experience. Exhilarating, you called it.”

  “When they were happy, yes. But even then it was overpowering. And I was a different person then.” She looked inward. “You can’t know what it’s like…having another being’s emotions forced into you like that. Even though it’s not intentional or malicious, it’s still…like being inundated, swept away in a flood. Being totally helpless to control or resist it…”

  To hell with protocol, Will thought, and took her in his arms. “Imzadi,” he said, and then nothing more for a moment. Then he pulled back and met her eyes. “Deanna…your ability to, to connect with others…to share in their feelings, accept them inside yourself and help others understand them…it’s your gift. You’ve used it to heal minds, to build bridges, to prevent wars and save lives. It’s your strength, Deanna. Your strength has always come from letting others in, not blocking them out.” He stroked her cheek. “Don’t let Shinzon take that away from you.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, a smile gradually growing. “You’re not so bad a healer yourself, you know.”

  “Just something that rubbed off from my wife.”

  “Hey, no rubbing during work hours.”

  “Ahh…there’s the rub.”

  After Will left, Deanna darkened the room, meditated for a few minutes to center herself, and then opened her mind. Her awareness expanded, letting in the emotional voices/flavors/colors of the rest of the crew (all except Dr. Bralik, of course, since she couldn’t read Ferengi). She took a moment to acknowledge them, acclimate to them, and filter them out of her perceptions. Along the way, she noted a faint twinge of awareness that she had sensed growing stronger over the past weeks—little Totyarguil down in sickbay. Such a pure little voice, all feeling, no thought, no taint of damage from the world yet, the empathic equivalent of untrodden snow—save for the vaguely registered trauma of his mother’s accident, the premature labor, the transporter surgery. But the turmoil had been brief and quickly eased by the comforting conditions of his artificial womb, and his still-forming mind had all but forgotten it. Now there was only a vague sense of incongruity about his existence, but one within the bounds of comfort: This is not my home. This is different. But it will do.

  Deanna latched on to that pure tone as a model, willed her own mental state to the same smoothness, the same blankness open to input from the world. White snow, white paper, white light, racing outward unencumbered by mass or time, her awareness spreading through space, pervading it, a cosmic background immanence. Here I am, she declared by being—white snow, paper, light, awaiting footprints, writing, silhouettes. Diaphanous silhouettes, dancing shadow puppets trailing wispy, waving tendrils—here I am, awaiting you.

  But nothing came. Time was subjective in this state, but the duration of the silence became palpably greater. Deanna looked at herself from without, asking herself if her timidity, her fear of losing control was holding her back. She searched her mind for self-sabotaging doubts and fears, did her best to smooth them out and leave only pure white. But still nothing came, and at length, on opening her eyes and existing within her skull once again, she had to conclude that the problem was perhaps not with her mind, but with her brain. Although the star-jellies were powerful transmitters, perhaps her Betazoid-sized brain was too small and weak a receiver at this range, and too weak a transmitter to catch their attention. She needed amplification.

  Which brought her to Orilly Malar. “Thank you for seeing me, Cadet,” she said when the Irriol arrived in response to her page. She shook Orilly’s trunk in greeting and invited her in. “Please, sit,” she said, offering her a low floor cushion. The quadrupedal cadet thanked her and settled down on her haunches, then blinked her big black eyes inquisitively at the counselor. Deanna took a moment to drink in the Irriol’s features, her rounded head and golden pangolin scales, and found herself with a sudden craving for pineapples.

  Deanna explained her problem, then said to the cadet, “I think that your people’s gestalt abilities could be helpful here. You could join me and the ship’s other psi-sensitives into a larger network of sorts, like an array of telescopes, and together we’d be more sensitive than I can be alone. Perhaps we could be strong enough to send a signal that would get the star-jellies’ attention and bring them to us.”

  Orilly fidgeted, twisting her trunks together. “What you ask…it would be better if you had another Irriol. I am…not someone you should trust with a gestalt.”

  “I know you’re an exile, a criminal by your people’s laws. But your service to Starfleet has been exemplary. I know you can be trusted.” She knew, indeed, that even the most malicious Irriol criminal could be trusted to serve Irriol interests offworld in order to earn points toward freedom from exile, since the desire to return home was an instinctive need, overriding all other concerns. But there was nothing in Ori
lly’s psych profile to indicate any malicious drives, and the nature of her crime was still unclear to Deanna.

  “Not with this, I cannot,” Orilly said. “Failure of gestalt…it is at the heart of my crime.”

  “Can you try to explain to me what your crime was?”

  “It is not easy. Perhaps as an empath, though, you can understand better. I will try.”

  Orilly explained as best she could, with both words and empathic impressions. She strove to convey to Deanna what life was like on Lru-Irr. It was not only the Irriol themselves who shared the empathic gestalt; it was all the life of their world, everything sophisticated enough to have a nervous system—and, many Irriol believed, even the simplest plants and microbes, even the planet itself. All the life-forms of Lru-Irr sensed each other, knew each other, cooperated in an intricate, symbiotic dance of life and death, predation and submission, dependence and giving. The Irriol had never considered themselves above nature, but a part of it, the mind within Lru-Irr’s body, giving awareness to the whole and tending its needs. It was the embodiment of the old Gaia principle, Deanna recognized, a biosphere as a cooperating whole, almost a single organism. Animals didn’t quite fling themselves into their predators’ jaws, but the sick and elderly of a pack would often choose not to flee, sacrificing themselves for their fellows and also serving to feed their predators. Yet this happened less often when the predators were fuller and stronger. The needs of the whole and the interests of the one were given equal consideration—although that made it sound more conscious than it was. The creatures of Lru-Irr simply felt what was called for, felt how the patterns of the gestalt combined and affected the moment, and reacted as much in response to that as to their own individual drives—which were, after all, only part of the Whole.

  The catch was intelligence. Sapient beings had more power of choice, a more complex range of responses than creatures of instinct. Irriol felt the gestalt as much as any animal, and it influenced their choices even when they did not know why; but sometimes choices were made in defiance of gestalt, and the balance was disrupted.