A swift land shuttle delivered them to the port city of Malinal where they boarded the hydrofoil that took them out to sea. By her calculations, they had been traveling for several hours, past kilometer after kilometer of water farms and quaint aquaculture villages mounted on stilts. Village residents tended the plants and animals being cultivated in surrounding waters, or served as lookouts, protecting the spawning grounds nestled along the continental shorelines. Once, the hydrofoil paused at the request of three marine patrol boats. Uniformed naval personnel talked in hushed tones with the hydrofoil captain—Ezri gathered they had been traveling on the border of a military training reservation and the officers wanted to examine the travel logs for security reasons. Later, one of the Yrythny representatives explained that a Cheka spy craft had been detected making several attempts at shoreline penetration; the military wanted to make certain their enemies weren’t gaining access to secure areas with Yrythny assistance. Otherwise, the journey had been uneventful, almost leisurely. Had the circumstances been less formal, Ezri would have been tempted to throw on some sunlenses and sunscreen, sprawl on a deck chair and make shore leave out of it. She had a feeling her hosts might not like that too much, though she wasn’t sure exactly what it was they would have preferred instead.
From the start, the Upper Assembly committee had been vague about what they wanted her to see, plying her with exquisitely prepared food, offering her comfortable seating, and breathtaking views from the hydrofoil’s observation deck. Schmoozing,as the humans called it, was expected in this line of work. In the course of his years serving the Federation, Curzon had been offered latinum, liquor and the company of beautiful women (he’d taken them up on that offer); a little gourmet finery didn’t phase Ezri. She liked the pampering. All the fuss hadn’t totally distracted her—she hoped. Several times already she’d found her mind wandering through the last time she’d done this—right before Risa, when the Federation Council …Scratch that. The last time Curzon had done this.But did it really matter who did what? She was Dax. Curzon was part of Dax, and allowing some of his harmless vices to creep into her own behavior couldn’t be all bad. Besides, she’d already learned a lot during this trip, even if it hadn’t been synthehol in that last carafe of wine. Dax had a good head for liquor, having drunk more than her fair share of unsavory types under the table…Had that been Curzon, too? Or had it been Jadzia? Ezri shook her head, hoping the cool sea spray might sharpen her senses and make her forget her argument with Julian over these very issues.
Unbidden, she remembered a similar conversation she’d had with Dr. Renhol of the Symbiosis Commission during the Europani evacuation—how she’d confronted Ezri with her recent tendency to slip into her past-host personae, blurring the lines between present and past. And it wasn’t like the weeks and months after joining either, where she’d wake up uncertain as to her sex. More like she didn’t feel inclined to reign in Dax’s various personalities. Maybe when she got back to the Alpha Quadrant, she’d return to Trill for her zhian’tara.She could only imagine what it would be like to meet these people she so enjoyed being. Ezri snorted. Who am I now, standing here looking out over this ocean? One thing’s certain, Lela would be more on task than I am.She could hear Lela’s firm, focused voice. “Time to buckle down, Lieutenant. Start putting the pieces together so you can do the job you were left here to do.”Recommitting herself to the task at hand, Ezri considered what she’d learned.
What struck her most, as she considered the day’s observations, was how lacking in arable land this planet was. It was astonishing that the population had proliferated as well as it had, considering. Yes, Vanìmel had five primary continental masses and hosts of island chains. Faults, toxic levels of minerals leeching into the water sheds from constantly shifting land plates, and geological instability (such as the volcanoes) made utilizing the planet tricky for sentients like the Yrythny, whose life cycles required both land and water. The degree to which they’d adapted the oceans for their use was a tribute to their cleverness. Yet at some point, Vanìmel’s capacity to sustain life would be maximized.
Adding more modules to Luthia or farming more square kilometers of the oceans would work, but not indefinitely. During their first year, Yrythny hatchlings required thousands of kilometers of open seas. Confined spaces inhibited their maturing processes. Consuming ocean acreage to feed a growing population would only bring another level of complications.
Ezri had caught her first glimpse of “newborn” Yrythny about an hour before, when a school of hatchlings swimming close to the surface had been pointed out to her by Jeshoh. Longer tails and the un differentiated limbs indicated these hatchlings had been in the water only for a short time. He’d explained that during the first year, hatchling respiratory systems gradually matured beyond utilizing gills to extract oxygen from the water, to lungs requiring gaseous oxygen. By the time they came ashore as younglings (as Yrythny in their first five years out of the water were called), the Yrythny were dependent on the atmosphere. Vanìmel’s geography made it difficult. Even with the aquaculture villages, Luthia, and other communities built over the water, dry surfaces were difficult to come by. Maybe she’d been correct in her hypothesis, that indeed, caste customs, especially those related to reproduction, had arisen out of a fragile planet’s needs.
When she noticed the hydrofoil slowing down, she turned to one of her Yrythny escorts for an explanation. He had said simply, “Force field ahead,” and left it at that. Ezri guessed that they might be entering a section of the military reservation. McCallum, Candlewood and Juarez, her companions on this trip, emerged from the lower decks to see what had stopped the hydrofoil. Together, they walked over to the port bow. From there, they had a clear view of multistory towers extending out of the water at kilometer intervals directly in front of them. Signal lights on the top of each tower flashed orange. The lights continued blinking for a moment longer, dimmed, and began flashing blue. The hydrofoil moved forward, between two of the towers, across the waters beyond.
A representative Ezri knew as Lesh approached the four Starfleet officers and indicated that she wanted them to follow her. Ezri found she needed to jog to keep up with Lesh’s bowlegged amble. Thankfully, Lesh was impossible to lose in a crowd, her distinctive mottled brown-yellow striping running from her forehead, beneath her headpiece and down her neck, setting her apart from the others. Color and striping, she knew, unlike the distinctive ridges of the Klingon crest, were not necessarily indicative of an Yrythny’s House affiliation. The real test of a returning hatchling’s identity was the distinctive chemical taste of its skin. Hatchlings with the “wrong” taste were raised in the Houses they came to, but as servants.
A Wanderer, clearing dirty plates off deck tables, had coloring similar to Lesh’s and Ezri wondered, not for the first time, how it would feel if you knew where you were supposed to belong, but were unable to do anything about it. “Can’t you simply send the lost younglings home? If a youngling from House Fnoral swims ashore to House Soid, why not send the lost one back to Fnoral?”she’d asked.
Jeshoh had looked at her like she’d sprouted another head. “Because if they can’t find their way home in the first place, there’s something wrong. Isn’t it compassionate that the Houses take in one that’s not their own instead of casting it back out to sea or killing it?”he’d answered. “A thousand years ago that’s what the
Houses used to do: club to death any hatchling that wasn’t theirs. We’ve come quite a distance from those days, Lieutenant.”
As she watched the servant Yrythny scrape food scraps into the recycler, she wondered if the distance they’d come was as far as Jeshoh believed it to be.