Startide Rising

35 ::: Gillian

"Like most species derived from wholly carnivorous forebears, the Tandu were difficult clients. They had cannibalistic tendencies, and attacks on individuals of their patron race, the Nght6, weren't unheard of early in their uplift.

"The Tandu have remarkably low empathy for other sapient life forms. They are members of a pseudo-religious alignment whose tenets propose the eventual extermination of species judged 'unworthy.' While they observe the codes of the Galactic Institutes, the Tandu make no secret of their desire for a less crowded universe, or their eagerness for the day when all laws are swept aside by a higher power."

"According to followers of their 'Inheritor' alignment, this will happen when the Progenitors return to the Five Galaxies. The Tandu assume that they will be chosen, come that day, to hunt down the unworthy.

"While waiting for this millennium, the Tandu keep in practice by indulging in countless minor skirmishes and battles of honor. They join in any war of enforcement declared by the Galactic Institutes, whatever the cause, and are often cited for use of excess force. 'Accidental extinction' of at least three spacefaring species has been attributed to them.

"Although the race has little empathy for their patron level peers, the Tandu are masters of the art of uplift. In their pre-sentient form, on their fallow home world, they had already tamed several local species for use as hunting animals: the equivalent of tracking dogs on Earth. Since release from indenture, the Tandu have acquired and adapted two of the most powerful psychic adepts of the recent crop of clients. The Tandu are under long-term investigation for excessive genetic manipulation in making the two.

(See references:

EPI SIARCH-cl-82f49; ACCEPTOR-cl-82J 50) totally dependent instruments of their love of the hunt…"

Nice people, these Tandu, Gillian thought.

She put the flat reading plate down beside the tree where she sat. She had allotted herself an hour for reading this morning. It was almost over. She had covered another two hundred thousand words or so.

This entry on the Tandu had come over the cable from Streaker last night. Apparently the Niss machine was already accomplishing things with the mini-Library Tom had retrieved from the Thennanin wreck. This report read too clearly, and came to the point too directly to have come straight from the English translation software of Streaker's own pathetic little micro-branch.

Of course, Gillian already knew some things about the Tandu. All Terragens agents were taught about these secretive, brutal enemies of Mankind.

This report only reinforced her feeling that there was something terribly wrong with a universe that had such monsters in it. Gillian had once spent a summer reading ancient space-romances from pre-Contact days. How open and friendly those old-time fictional universes had seemed! Even the rare "pessimistic" ones hadn't come close to the closed, confined, dangerous reality.

Thinking about the Tandu put her in a melodramatic mind to carry around a dirk, and to exercise a woman's ancient last prerogative should those murderous creatures ever capture her.

The thick, organic smell of humus overwhelmed the metallic tang that permeated everywhere near the water. The aroma was fresh after last night's storm. Green fronds waved slowly under gentle buffeting from Kithrup's incessant tradewinds.

Tom must have found his island crucible by now, she thought, and begun preparing his experiment.

If he still lived.

This morning, for the first time, she felt uncertain about that. She had been so sure she would know it, if he died, wherever or whenever it happened. Yet now she felt confused. Her mind was muddied, and all she could tell for certain was that terrible things had happened last night.

First, around sunset, had come a crawling premonition that something had happened to Tom. She couldn't pin the feeling down, but it disturbed her.

Then, late last night, she had had a series of dreams.

There had been faces. Galactic faces, leathern and feathered and scaled, toothed and mandibled. They yammered and howled, but she, in spite of all her expensive training, couldn't understand a single word or sense-glyph. A few of the jumbled faces she had recognized in her sleep — a pair of Xappish spacemen, dying as their ship was torn apart — a Jophur, howling through smoke at the bleeding stump of its arm — a Synthian, listening to whale songs while she waited impatiently behind a vacuum-cold lump of stone.

In her sleep Gillian had been helpless to keep them out.

She had awakened suddenly, in the middle of the night, to a tremor that plucked her spine like a bowstring. Breathing heavily in the darkness, she sensed a kindred consciousness writhe in agony at the limit of her range. In spite of the distance, Gillian caught a mixed flavor in the fleeting psychic glyph. It felt too human to have been only a fin, too cetacean to have been merely a man.

Then it ceased. The psychic onslaught was over.

She didn't know what to make of any of it. What use was psi, if its messages were too opaque to be deciphered? Her genetically enhanced intuition now seemed a cruel deception. Worse than useless.

She had a few moments left to her hour. She spent them with her eyes closed, listening to the rise and fall of sound, as the breakers fought their endless battle with the western shoreline. Tree limbs brushed and swayed with the wind.

Interleaved with the creakings of trunk and branch, Gillian could hear the high chittering squeaks of the aboriginal pre-sentients — the Kiqui. From time to time, she made out the voice of Dennie Sudman, speaking into a machine that translated her words into the high-frequency Kiqui dialect.

Though she was working twelve hours a day, helping Dennie with the Kiqui, Gillian couldn't help feeling guiltily that she was taking a vacation. She reminded herself that the little natives were extremely important, and that she had just been spinning her wheels back at the ship.

But one of the faces from her dream had stuck with her all morning. Only a half-hour ago she had realized that it was her own subconscious rendering of what Herbie, the ancient cadaver which had caused all this trouble, must have looked like when he was alive.

In her dream, shortly before she had begun feeling premonitions of disaster, the long, vaguely humanoid face. of the ancient had smiled at her, and slowly winked.

"Gillian! Dr. Baskin? It's time!"

She opened her eyes. She lifted her arm and glanced at her watch. It might as well have been set by Toshio's voice. Trust a midshipman at his word, she remembered. Tell him to fetch you in one hour, and he'll time it down to the second. Early in the voyage she had had to threaten dire measures to get him to call her "sir" — or the anachronistic "ma'am" — only in every third sentence, rather than every other word.

"On my way, Toshio! Just a minute!" She rose to her feet and stretched. The rest break had been useful. Her mind had been in knots that only quiet could smooth.

She hoped to finish here and get back to Streaker within three days, about the time Creideiki had planned to move the ship. By then she and Dennie should have worked out the environmental needs of the Kiqui — how to take a small sample group with them back to the Center for Uplift on Earth. If Streaker got away, and if humanity first filed a client claim, it could save the Kiqui from a far worse fate.

On her way through the trees, Gillian caught a glimpse of the ocean through a northeast gap in the greenery.

Will I be able to feel it here, when Tom calls? The Niss said his signal should be detectable anywhere on the planet.

All the ETs will hear it, for sure.

She carefully kept all psychic energies low, as Tom had insisted she do. But she did form an old-fashioned prayer with her mouth, and cast it northward, over the waves.

"I'll bet this will please Dr. Dart," Toshio said. "Of course, the sensors might not be types he'd want. But the 'bot is still operational."

Gillian examined the small robot-link screen. She was no expert on robotics or planetology. But she understood the principles.

"I think you're right, Toshio. The X-ray spectrometer works. So do the laser zapper and the magnetometer. Can the robot still move?"

"Like a little rock lobster! The only thing it can't do is float back up. Its buoyancy tanks were ruptured when the piece of coral crashed down on it."

"Where is the robot now?"

"It's on a ledge about ninety meters down." Toshio tapped the tiny keyboard and brought a holo schematic into space in front of the screen. "It's given me a sonar map that deep. I've held off going any lower until I talk to Dr. Dart. We can only go down, one ledge at a time. Once the robot leaves a spot there's no going back."

The schematic showed a slightly tapered cylindrical cavity, descending into the metal-rich silicate rock of Kithrup's thin crust: The walls were studded with outcrops and ledges, like the one the crippled probe now rested on.

A solid shaft ran up the great cavity, tilted at a slight angle. It was the great drill-root Toshio and Dennie had blown apart a few days earlier. The upper end rested against one rim of its own underwater excavation. The shaft disappeared into unknown territory below the mapped area.

"I think you're right, Toshio," Gillian grinned and squeezed the boy's shoulder. "Charlie will be glad about this. It may help get him off Creideiki's back. Do you want to ring him up with the news?"

Toshio was obviously pleased with the compliment, but taken aback by Gillian's offer. "Uh, no, thank you, sir. I mean, couldn't you just tuck this in when you report to the ship, today? I'm sure Dr. Dart will have questions I'm not qualified to handle…"

Gillian couldn't blame Toshio. Presenting good news to Charles Dart was barely more pleasant than delivering bad news. But Toshio would have to come to grips with the chimp planetologist sooner or later. It would be best if he learned to deal with the problem from the start.

"Sorry, Toshio. Dr. Dart is all yours. Don't forget that I'm leaving here in a few days. You're the one who's going to have to… satisfy Charlie, when he asks you to put in thirty-hour shifts."

Toshio nodded seriously, taking her advice soberly until she managed to catch eye contact with him. She grinned until he couldn't help but blush and smile.

36 ::: Akki

Hurrying to get to the bridge before watch change, Akki took a shortcut through the outlock. In his haste he was halfway across the wide chamber before he noticed anything different.

He did an overhead flip to stop. His gill-lungs heaved, and he cursed himself for an idiot, speeding and doing fancy maneuvers when there just wasn't enough oxygen available!

Akki looked about. The outlock was as empty as he had ever seen it.

The captain's gig had been lost at the Shallow Cluster. Heavy sleds and a lot of equipment had been moved to the Thennanin wreck, and Lieutenant Hikahi had taken the skiff there only yesterday.

There was a cluster of activity around the longboat, the last and largest of Streaker's pinnaces. Several crewfen used mechanical spiders to carry crates into the small spacecraft. Akki forgot his haste to be early on duty, and kicked a lazy spiral toward the activity.

He swam up behind one spider-riding dolphin. The fin's spider carried a large box in its waldo-arms.

"Hey Sup-peh, v-what's going on here?" Akki kept his sentences short and simple. He was getting better speaking Anglic in oxywater, but if a Calafian couldn't speak properly, what were the others to think?

The other dolphin looked up. "Oh, hello, Mr. Akki. Change of orders is what-t. We're checking the longboat for space worthiness. Also, we been told to load these cratesss."

"What are vey… er, what's in the boxes?"

"Dr. Metz's records, seemsss-s," the spider's third manipulator arm waved toward the pile of waterproof cartons. "Imagine, all our grandparents 'n' grandchildren here, listed on mag chips. It gives you a feeling of continuity, don't it-t-t?"

Sup-peh was from the South Atlantic community, a clan which took pride in quaint speech. Akki wondered if it were really eccentricity as much as plain dimness. "I thought you were on the supply run to the Thennanin ship?" he asked. Sup-peh was usually assigned tasks that required minimal finesse.

"That I were, Mr. Akki. But-t-t those runs have been stopped. The ship's closed down, didn't you hear? We're all swimming in circles t-til it's clearer about the captain'sss condition."

"Wvhat?" Akki choked. "… the captain… ?"

"Got hurt in an inspection outside the ship. 'Lectrocuted, I hear. Barely found him before his breather ran out-t. Been unconscious all this time. Takkata-Jim's in charge."

Akki lay there in shock. He was too stunned to notice Sup-peh turn suddenly and hurry back to work as a very large dark figure swam up.

"May I help you, Mister Akki?" The giant dolphin's tone sounded almost sarcastic.

"K'tha-Jon," Akki shook himself. "What's happened to the captain?"

Something in the bosun's attitude chilled Akki. And it wasn't just the minimal pretense of respect for Akki's rank. K'tha-Jon let out a quick squirt of Trinary.

* Suggestions come

to me,

* How you can know more — *

* Go and ask your

leader,

* Who awaits you on the shore — *

With an almost insolent wave of one harness arm, K'tha-Jon flipped about and swam off to rejoin his workcrew. The wake from his mighty flukes pushed Akki backward two meters. Akki knew better than to call him back. Something in K'tha-Jon's Trinary triple entendre told him it would be useless. He decided to take it as a warning, and turned to hurry toward the hull lift to the bridge.

He was suddenly aware of how many of the best fen in Streaker's crew were absent. Tsh't, Hikahi, Karkaett, S'tat and Lucky Kaa were all gone to the Thennanin wreck. That left K'tha-Jon senior petty officer!

And Keepiru was away as well. Akki hadn't believed the gossip he had heard about the pilot. He had always thought Keepiru the bravest fin in the crew, besides the fastest swimmer. He wished Keepiru, and Toshio, were here right now. They'd help him find out what was going on!

Near the lift, Akki encountered a group of four Tursiops, clustered in a corner of the outlock doing nothing in particular. They wore morose expressions and lay in listless postures.

"Sus'ta, what's going on here?" he asked. "Don't you fen have work to do?"

The messman looked up and twisted his tail in the dolphin's equivalent of a shrug. "What'sss the point, Mr. Akki?"

"The point ish… is we do our duty! Come on, what's got you all in such a f-funk?"

"The c-captain…" one of the others began.

Akki cut him off: "The captain would be the first to say you should p-p-persevere!" He switched to Trinary.

* Focus on the far

Horizon -

* On Earth!

Where we are needed — *

Sus'ta blinked, and tried to drop his forlorn stance. The others followed suit.

"Yesssir, Mr. Akki. We'll t-try"

Akki nodded. "Very good, then. Carry on in the spirit of K-k-keneenk."

He entered the lift and clicked out a code for the bridge. As the doors slid shut, he saw the fen swim away, presumably toward their work stations.

Ifni! It had been hard to posture and act reassuring, when all he really wanted to do was squeeze the others for information. But in order to be reassuring he had to seem to know more than they!

Turtle-bites! Disfunctioning motors! How badly is the captain hurt? How will we stand a chance, if Creideiki is taken from us?

He decided to be as innocuous and unnoticed as possible for a while… until he found out what was going on. He knew a middie was in the most exposed position of all, with an officer's duties and burdens and none of the protections.

And a middie was always the last to find out what was going on!

37 ::: Suessi

The excavation was nearly ready. The Thennanin battleship had been reamed and braced. Soon they'd be able to fill the cylindrical cavity with its intended cargo and be off.

Hannes Suessi couldn't wait. He'd had it with working underwater. If the truth be told, he'd about had it with fins, too.

Gads, the stories he would be able to tell back home! He had bossed work gangs under the smog oceans of Titan. He had helped herd adenine comets through the Soup Nebula. He had even worked with those crazy Amerindians and Israelis who were trying to terraform Venus. But never had a job taught him the laws of perversity as this one had!

Almost all of the materials they'd had to work with were of alien manufacture, with weird ductility and even stranger quantum conductivities. He'd had to check the psionic impedance of almost every connection himself, and still their masked marvel would probably leak telekinetic static all over the sky when it took off!

Fins! They were the frosting! They'd flawlessly perform the most delicate operation, then swim about in circles squealing Primal nonsense when the opening of a hatchway set off a particular pattern of sonar reflections.

And every time a job was finished, they called for old Suessi. Check it for us, Hannes, they'd ask. Make sure we've done it right.

They tried so damned hard. They couldn't help feeling like half-finished clients of wolfling patrons in an impossibly hostile galaxy, especially when it was all true.

Suessi admitted he was bitching more to hear the echoes in his own skull than out of any real complaint. The Streakers had done the job; that was all that really mattered. He was proud of every one of them.

Anyway, it had been a lot better since Hikahi arrived. She provided an example for the rest, teasing with Keneenk parables, to help the fen concentrate.

Suessi rolled over onto one elbow. His narrow bunk was only a meter below the ceiling. Inches from his shoulder was the horizontal hatch to his coin-like sleeper compartment.

I've rested enough, he thought, though his eyes were scratchy and his arms still ached. There was no sense in trying to go back to sleep. He would only stare at his eyelids now.

Suessi pushed the narrow hatch open. He shielded his eyes from the overhead lights of the companionway as he sat up and swung his legs over the side. They splashed.

Ugh. Water. Except for the top meter or so, up here near the ceiling, the skiff was full of water.

His body looked pale in the sharp hall light. I wonder when I'm scheduled to fade away, he thought, sliding into the water with his eyes closed. He swam over to the head and closed the door behind him.

Naturally, he had to wait until the room pumped out before he could use any of the fixtures.

A little later, he made his way to the control room of the tiny spacecraft. Hikahi was there with Tsh't, fussing over the comm set. They argued in a fast, squeaky version of Anglic he couldn't follow.

"Whoa!" he called. "If you want to keep me out, fine. But if I can help, you'd better change to thirty-three and a third. I'm not Tom Orley. I can't follow that jabber!"

The two dolphin officers lifted their heads clear of the water as Suessi took a grip on a nearby wall rail. Hikahi's eyes extended outward to refocus for above-water binocular vision.

"We aren't sure we have a problem, Hannesss, but we seem to have lost contact with the ship."

"With Streaker?" Suessi's bushy eyebrows went up. Are they under attack?"

Tsh't rocked her upper body left to right slightly. "We don't think so. I was here, waiting for word that they'd heard from Orley, and would be moving the ship soon. I wasn't paying close attention, but heard the operator suddenly tell us to 'stand by'… then nothing!"

"When was this?"

"A few hours ago. I waited until shift mange, hoping it was a technical glitch at the ship, then I called Hikahi."

"We've been tracing circuits since then," the senior officer finished.

Suessi swam over to look at the set. Of course, the thing to do was tear it apart and check it by hand. But the electronics were sealed away against the wetness.

If only we were in free fall so the fins could work without all this damned water everywhere.

"All right," he sighed. "With your permission, Hikahi, I'll kick you two officers and gentlefems out of the control room and look at the unit. Don't bother the fen resting in the hold."

Hikahi nodded. "I'll send a crew to follow the monofilament and see if it's intact."

"Good thinking. And don't worry. I'm sure nothing's really the matter. It's probably just gremlins at work."

38 ::: Charles Dart

"I'm afraid they've only taken the damned robot down another eighty meters. That kid Toshio will only work on it for a few hours, then he's always got to be off helping Dennie and Gillian run their new clients through mazes, or having them knock down bananas with poles or something. I tell you it's frustrating! The rotten little half-wrecked probe's carrying mostly the wrong kinds of instruments for geological work. Can you imagine how bad it will be when we get it down to a decent depth?"

The holographic image of the metallurgist Brookida seemed to look past Charles Dart for a moment. Apparently, the dolphin scientist was referring to his own displays. Each eye was covered with a goggle lens to correct for astigmatism when reading. He turned back to look at his chimp colleague.

"Charlie. You talk so assuredly about sending thisss robot deeper into Kithrup's crust. You complain that it has gone down 'only' five hundred meters. Are you cognizant that that-t is half a kilometer?"

Charlie scratched his fuzzy jaw. "Yeah? So what? The excavation has got so little taper that it might easily drop down as much farther as it's already gone. It's a wonderful mineralogical lab! Already I'm finding out a lot about the subsurface zone!"

Brookida sighed. "Charlie, aren't you curious as to why the cavern under Toshio's island goes down even one hundred metersss?"

"Hmmm? What do you mean?"

"I mean that the so-called 'drill-tree' that'ss responsible for this excavation cannot have dug so deep merely in search of carbon and silicate nutrients. It can't-t have…"

"How would you know? Are you an ecologist?" Charlie rapped out a sharp laugh. "Honestly Brookida, what do you base these suppositions on? Sometimes you surprise me!"

Brookida waited patiently for the chimpanzee to finish laughing. "I base them on a well-informed layman's knowledge of basic lawsss of nature, and upon Occam's Razor. Think of the volume of material removed! Has it been scattered upon the watersss? Has it occurred to you that there are tens of thousands of these metal-mounds along this plate boundary, most with their own drill-trees… and that there may have been millions of such deep excavations dug in recent geologic time?"

Dart started to snigger, then he stopped. He stared for a moment at the image of his cetacean colleague, then laughed in earnest. He pounded the desk.

"Touche! All right, sir! We'll add 'Why these holes?' to our list of questions! Fortunately I've been cultivating an ecologist lab-mate for the last few months. I've done her innumerable favors, and it happens she's at the site of our quandary! I'll ask Dennie to get to work on it right away! Rest assured, we'll know soon enough what these drill-trees are up to!"

Brookida didn't bother answering. He did let out a small sigh.

"Now that that's settled," Charlie went on, "let's get back to the really important stuff: Can you help persuade the captain to let me go out there in person and take a real deep-probe robot with me to replace that lousy little thing Toshio salvaged?"

Brookida's eyes widened. He hesitated.

"The c-captain remains unconscious," Brookida said at last. "Makanee has twice performed surgery. According to the latest reports, the outlook remains bleak-k."

The chimp stared for a long moment. "Oh, yeah. I forgot." Charlie looked away from the holo display. "Well, then maybe Takkata-Jim will be willing. After all, the longboat's not being used. I'll ask Metz to talk to him. Will you help?"

Brookida's eyes were sunken. "I'll study these mass spectrometer data," he answered evenly. "I will call you when I have results. Now I mussst sign off, Charles Dart."

The image dissolved. Charlie was alone again.

Brookida was awfully abrupt there, he thought. Have I offended him somehow?

Charlie knew he was offensive to people. He couldn't help it. Even other chimpanzees thought him abrasive and self-centered. They said neo-chimps like him gave the race a bad rep.

Well, I've tried, he thought. And when a person's tried and failed so often, when his best attempts at gallantry turn to faux pas, and he constantly finds himself forgetting other people's names well then, maybe a guy should give up. Other people don't always win awards for kindness to me, either.

Charles Dart shrugged. It didn't matter. What point was there in pursuing an ever-elusive popularity? There was always his personal world of rocks and molten cores, of magma and living planets.

Still, I thought Brookida, at least, was my friend… He forced the thought aside.

I've got to call Metz. He'll get me what I need. I'll show 'em this planet is so unique they'll… they'll rename it after me! There are precedents. He chuckled as he tugged on his ear with one hand and punched out a code with the other.

An idle thought came to him, as he waited for the computer tracer to track down Ignacio Metz. Wasn't everybody waiting to hear from Tom Orley? That was all anybody 'd talk about, a while back.

Then he remembered that Orley's report was supposed to come in yesterday, about the time Creideiki was hurt.

Ah! Then Tom was probably successful at whatever it was he was doing, and nobody bothered to tell me. Or maybe somebody did, and I wasn't listening again. Anyway, I'm sure he got everything squared away with the ETs. About time, too. Damned nuisance being hunted all over the galaxy, forced to fill the ship with water…

Metz's number appeared on the intercom. The line was ringing.

It was a shame about Creideiki. He was awfully stiff and serious for a fin, and not always reasonable… but Charlie couldn't bring himself to feel happy to have him out of the way. In fact, it gave him a queer sensation in his stomach whenever he thought about the captain being removed from the picture.

Then don't think about it! Jeez! When has it ever paid to worry?

"Ah, Dr. Metz! Did I catch you as you were going out? I was wondering, could we have a talk together soon? Later this afternoon? Good! Yes, I do have a very, very small favor to ask…"

39 ::: Makanee

A physician must be part intellectual and part alchemist, part sleuth and part shaman, Makanee thought.

But in medical school they never told her she might have to be a soldier and a politician, as well.

Makanee had trouble keeping a dignified demeanor. In fact, she felt on the verge of insubordination. Her tail crashed to the water's surface, sending spray over the canals of sick bay.

"I tell you I can't-t-t operate alone! My aides haven't the skill to assist me! I'm not sure I could do it even if they did! I must-t-t talk to Gillian Baskin!"

With one eye lazily lifted above the water line, one harness arm holding a channel stanchion, Takkata-Jim glanced at Ignacio Metz. The human returned an expression of great patience. They had expected this sort of reaction from the ship's surgeon.

"I'm sure you underrate your skill, Doctor," Takkata-Jim suggested.

"So you're a sssurgeon, now? I need your opinion? Let-t me talk to Gillian!"

Metz spoke placatingly. "Doctor, Lieutenant Takkata-Jim has just explained that there are military reasons for the partial communications blackout. Data from the detection buoys appear to indicate a psi leak somewhere within a hundred kilometers of this spot. Either the crew working under Hikahi and Suessi or the people at the island are responsible. Until we trace the leak…"

"You are acting on the basis of information from a buoy? It was a defective buoy that almost k-k-killed C-C-Creideiki!"

Metz frowned. He wasn't used to being interrupted by dolphins. He noted that Makanee was quite agitated. Too agitated, in fact, to speak with the Anglic diction a fin in her position should use. This was certainly data for his files… as was her belligerent attitude.

"That was a different buoy, Physician Makanee. Remember, we have three on station. Besides, we aren't claiming the leak is necessarily real, only that we must treat it as real until proven otherwise."

"But the blackout isn't total! I hear that chimpanzee is ssstill getting his Iki-damned robot-t data! So why won't you let me talk to Dr. Baskin?"

Metz wanted to curse. He had asked Charles Dart to keep quiet about that. Damn the necessity to keep the chimp placated!

"We are eliminating the possibilities one at a time," Takkata-Jim tried to soothe Makanee. At the same time he assumed a head-down forward stance, dominant assertive body language. "As soon as those in contact with Charles Dart — the young humans Iwashika and Sudman and the poet Sah'ot — have been eliminated as possible leaks, then we will contact Dr. Baskin. Surely you see that she is less likely to be the one carelessly leaking psi energy than these others, so we must check them first."

Metz's eyebrows rose slightly. Bravo! The excuse wouldn't hold up under close scrutiny, of course. But it had a flavor of reasonability! All they needed was a little time! If this kept Makanee quiet for just another couple of days, that should be enough.

Takkata-Jim apparently noticed something of Metz's approval. Encouraged, he grew more assertive. "Now, enough delaying, Doctor! We came down here to find out about the captain's condition. If he's unable to resume his duties, a new commanding officer mussst be selected. We're in a crisis and cannot put up with delays!"

If this was meant to intimidate, it had the opposite effect. Makanee's tail churned. Her head rose out of the water. She turned one narrowed eye to the male dolphin and chattered in sarcastic verse.

* I'd thought that you

— had misremembered

— duty's orders

* How nice to note

— I had mistaken

— your behavior

* You'll not claim, in

— hasty mischief

— captain's honors?

Takkata-Jim's mouth opened, baring twin vee rows of rough white teeth. For a moment it seemed to Metz he would charge the small female.

But Makanee acted first, leaping up out of the water and landing with a splash that covered both Metz and Takkata-Jim. The human spluttered and slipped off the wall curb.

Makanee whirled and disappeared behind a row of dark life-support cons. Takkata-Jim spun underwater, emitting rapid sonar clicks, seeking her out. Metz seized him by the dorsal fin before he could take off after her.

"Ah… ahem!" He grabbed a wall rail. "If we can put a stop to this foul temper, fin-people? Dr. Makanee? Will you please come back? Its bad enough half the known universe wants to hunt us down. We mustn't fight amongst ourselves!"

Takkata-Jim looked up and saw that Metz was earnest. The lieutenant continued to breathe heavily.

"Please Makanee!" Metz called again. "Let's talk like civilized folk."

They waited, and a short time later Makanee's head emerged from between two autodocs. Her expression was no longer defiant, simply tired. Her physician's harness made tiny whirring sounds. The delicate instruments shook slightly, as if held in trembling hands.

She rose so only her blowmouth broke the surface.

"I apologize," she buzzed. "I know Takkata-Jim would not assume permanent captaincy without a vote by the ship's council."

"Of course he wouldn't! This is not a military vessel. The duties of the executive officer aboard a survey ship are mostly administrative, and his succession to command must be ratified by a ship's council as soon as one can be conveniently arranged. Takkata-Jim is fully aware of the rules involved, is that right, Lieutenant?"

"Yessss."

"But until then we must accept Takkata-Jim's authority or have chaos! And in the meantime, Streaker must have a chain of command. That will be ambiguous until you certify that Captain Creideiki can no longer function."

Makanee closed her eyes, breathing heavily. "Creideiki will probably not regain consciousness without further surgery. Even then it'sss chancy.

"The shock traveled along his neural connector socket into the brain. Most of the damaged areas are in the New Zones of the cortex… where basic Tursiopsss gray matter has been heavily uplift-modified. There are lesions in regions controlling both vision and speech-ch. The corpus callosum is seared…"

Makanee's eyes re-opened, but she did not appear to be looking at them.

Metz nodded. "Thank you, Doctor," he said. "You've told us what we need to know. I'm. sorry we took so much of your time. I'm sure you're doing your best."

When she did not answer, the human slipped his oxymask over his face and slid into the water. He motioned to Takkata-Jim and turned to leave.

The male dolphin clicked at Makanee for a moment longer, but when she did not move he flipped about and followed Metz toward the exit.

A shudder passed through her as the two entered the lock. She lifted her head to call after them.

"Don't forget-t when you call a ship's council that I'm a member! And Hikahi and Gillian and T-Tom Orley!" The lock was hissing shut behind them as she called. She couldn't tell if they had heard.

Makanee settled back into the water with a sigh. And Tom Orley, she thought. Don't forget him, you sneaky bastards! He'll not let you get away with this!

Makanee shook her head, knowing she was thinking irrationally. Her suspicions weren't based on facts. And even if they were true, Thomas Orley couldn't stretch his hand across two thousand kilometers to save the day. There were rumors that he was already dead.

Metz and Takkata-Jim had her all confused. She had a gut feeling that they had told her a complex assortment of truths, half-truths, and outright lies, and she had no way of knowing which was which.

They think they can fool me, just because I'm female, and old, and two uplift generations cruder than any other fin aboard but Brookida. But I can guess why they're giving special favors to the one chimpanzee member on the ship's council. Here and now, they have a majority to back up any decision they make. No wonder they're not anxious to have Hikahi or Gillian back!

Maybe I should have lied to them… told them Creideiki would awaken any minute.

But then, who can tell how desperate they are? Or what they'd resort to? Was the accident with the buoy really an accident? They could be lying to cover up ignorance — or to cover up a conspiracy. Could I protect Creideiki, with only two female aides to help me?

Makanee let out a low moan. This sort of thing wasn't her department! She sometimes wished that being a dolphin physician, like in the old days, simply meant you lifted the one you were trying to save up on your brow, and held his head above the water until he recovered, or your strength failed you, or your own heart broke.

She turned back toward Intensive Care. The chamber was darkened except for a light that shone upon a large gray neo-dolphin, suspended in a shielded gravity tank. Makanee checked the life-maintenance readings and saw that they were stable.

Creideiki blinked unseeingly, and once a brief shudder passed down the length of his body.

Makanee sighed and turned away. She swam over to a nearby comm unit and considered.

Metz and Takkata-Jim can't be back on the bridge yet, she thought. She clicked a sonar code that activated the unit. Almost instantly the face of a young, blue-finned dolphin appeared before her.

"Communications. C-can I help you?"

"Akki? Yes, child, it's Dr. Makanee. Have you made any plans for lunch? You know, I do think I still have some of that candied octopus left. You're free? How sssweet. I'll see you soon, then. Oh, and let's keep our date our little secret. Okay? That'sss a good lad."

She departed Intensive Care, a scheme beginning to form in her mind.

40 ::: Creideiki

In the quiet grayness of the gravity tank, a faint moaning cry.

* Desperate, he swims

Tossed by gray storm winds, howling:

Drowning! Drowning! *

41 ::: Tom Orley

A foul-tempered mountain growled in the middle of a scum-crusted sea.

It had stopped raining a while ago. The volcano grumbled and coughed fire at low overhanging clouds, casting orange on their undersides. Thin, twisting trails of ash blew into the sky. Where the hot cinders finally fell, it was not to a quenching by clean sea water. They landed in a muddy layer atop a carpet of dingy vines which seemed to go on forever.

Thomas Orley coughed in the dank, sooty air. He crawled up a small rise of slippery, jumbled weeds. The dead weight of his crude sledge dragged a tether wrapped around his left hand. With his right he clutched a thick tendril near the top of the weed-mound.

His legs kept sliding out from under him as he crawled. Even when he managed to wedge them into gaps in the slimy mass, his feet frequently sank into the mire between the vines. When he awkwardly pulled them out, the quagmire would let go reluctantly, giving off an awful sucking sound.

Sometimes "things" came out with his feet, squirming along his legs and dropping off to slither back into the noisome brine.

The tightly wrapped thong cut into his left hand as he pulled the sledge, a meager remnant of his solar plane and supplies. It was a miracle that he had been able to salvage even that much from the crash.

The volcano sent ochre flickers across the weedscape. Rainbow specks of metallic dust coated the vegetation in all directions. It was late afternoon, almost a full Kithrup day since he had banked his glider toward the island, searching for a safe place to land.

Tom raised his head to look blearily over the plain of weeds. All of his well-laid plans had been brought down by this plain of tough, ropy sea plants.

He had hoped to find shelter on an island upwind of the volcano, or, barring that, to land at sea and turn the glider into a broad and seaworthy raft from which to perform his experiment.

I should have considered this possibility. The crash, those dazed, frantic minutes diving after gear and piling together a crude sledge while the storm lashed at him, and then hours crawling among the fetid vines toward a solitary hump of vegetation — it all might have been avoided.

He tried to pull forward, but a tremor in his right arm threatened to turn into a full-scale cramp. It had been badly wrenched during the crash, when the plane's wing pontoons had come off and the fuselage went tumbling across the morass, splashing at last into an isolated pool of open water.

A gash across the left side of his face had almost sent him into shock during those first critical moments. It reached from his jaw almost to the neural socket above his left ear. The plastic cover that normally protected the delicate nerve interface had spun out into the night, hopelessly lost.

Infection was the least of his worries, now.

The tremor in his arm grew worse. Tom tried to ride it out, lying face down on the pungent, rubbery weeds. Gritty mud scraped his right cheek and forehead each time he coughed.

Somewhere he had to find the energy. He hadn't time for the subtleties of self-hypnosis, to coax his body back into working. By main force of will, he commanded the abused muscles to behave for one final effort. He could do little about what the universe threw at him, but dammit, after thirty hours of struggle, within meters of his goal, he would not accept a rebellion by his body!

Another coughing fit ripped at his raw throat. His body shook, and the hacking weakened his grip on the dry root. Just when he thought his lungs could take no more, the fit finally passed. Tom lay there in the mud, drained, eyes closed.

He hadn't the breath to whistle the Trinary Haiku, but it blew through his mind, and he spared the energy for a brief smile through cracked, mud-crusted lips.

Somewhere, he found the reserves for one more effort. He clenched his teeth and pulled himself over the last stretch. The right arm almost buckled, but it held as his head rose over the top of the small hill.

Tom blinked cinders from his eyes and looked out at what lay beyond. More weeds. As far as the eye could see, more weeds.

A thick loop of neustonicne stuck out at the summit of the modest hillock. Tom heaved the sledge high enough to wrap the slack line around the root.

Sensation flowed into his numbed left hand, leaving him open-mouthed in silent agony. He slumped back against the hillock, breathing rapidly and shallowly.

The cramps returned in force, and his body folded under them. He wanted to tear at the thousand teeth that bit at his arms and legs, but his hands were immobile claws. He lay curled around them.

Somehow, the logical part of Tom's mind remained disconnected from the agony. It still plotted and schemed and tried to set time limits. He'd come out here for a reason, after all.

There had to be a reason for going through all this… If only he could remember why he was here in the stench and hurt and dust and grit…

The calming pattern he sought wouldn't form. He felt himself start to fade.

Suddenly, through pain-squinted eyes, he thought he saw Gillian's face before him.

Fronds of airy vegetation waved behind her. Her gray eyes looked his way, as if searching for something just out of range. They seemed to scan past him twice as he trembled, unable to move. Then, at last, they met his, and she smiled!

Pain-drenched static threatened to drown out the dream-words.

He strained to focus on the message — more likely a hallucination. He didn't care which it was. It was an anchor. He clung to it as cramps made humming bowstrings of his tendons.

Her smile conveyed commiseration.

Meta-Orley disapproved. If this was really a message from Gillian, she was taking a terrible chance. " I love you, too," he subvocalized. "But will you shut the hell up before the Eatees hear you?"

The psicast — or hallucination — wavered as a fit of coughing struck him. He hacked until his lungs felt like dry husks. Finally, he sank back with a sigh.

At last, Meta-Tom surrendered pride.

Yes!

He cast into the murk before his eyes, calling after her dissolving image.

Gillian's face seemed to diffract in all directions, like a bundle of moonbeams, joining the shimmering volcanic dust in the sky. Whether a true message, or an illusion borne of delirium, it faded like a portrait done in smoke.

Still, he thought he heard a lingering trace of Gillian's inner voice…

He listened, unaware of time, and slowly, the tremors subsided. His fetal curl gradually unfolded.

The volcano rumbled and lit the sky. The "ground" beneath Tom undulated gently and rocked him into a shallow slumber.

42 ::: Toshio

"No, Dr. Dart. The enstatite inclusions are one part I'm not sure of. The static from the robot was really strong when I took that reading. If you'd like, I can double-check it right now.

Toshio's eyelids were heavy with ennui. He had lost track of time spent pushing buttons and reading data at Charles Dart's behest. The chimp planetologist would not be satisfied! No matter how well and quickly Toshio responded, it was never quite enough.

"No, no, we haven't got time," Charlie answered gruffly from the holoscreen at the edge of the drill-tree pool. "See if you can work it out on your own after I sign off, okay?

"It would make a nice project for you to pursue on the side you know, Toshio. Some of these rocks are totally unique! If you did a thorough study of the mineralogy of this shaft, I'd be happy to help you write it up. Imagine the feather in your cap! A major publication couldn't hurt your career, you know."

Toshio could well imagine. He was, indeed, learning a lot working for Dr. Dart. One thing he had learned, which would serve him well if he ever did go on to graduate school, was to be very careful in choosing his research advisor.

The question was moot, anyway, with aliens overhead getting ready to capture them. For the thousandth time, Toshio shied away from thinking about the battle in space. It only made him depressed.

"Thanks, Dr. Dart, but…"

"No problem!" Charlie barked in gruff condescension. "We'll discuss the details of your project later though, if you don't mind. Right now, let's have an update on where the drone is."

Toshio shook his head, amazed by the fellow's tenacious single-mindedness. He was afraid that if it got any worse he would lose his temper with the chimp, senior research associate or no.

"Um…" Toshio checked his gauges. "The 'bot's descended to a little over a kilometer, Dr. Dart. The shaft is narrower and smoother as we get down to more recent digging, so I'm anchoring the robot to the wall at each site."

Toshio looked over his shoulder to the northeast, wishing Dennie or Gillian would show up as a distraction. But Dennie was with her Kiqui, and he had last seen Gillian seated in lotus position in a clearing overlooking the ocean, oblivious to the world.

Gillian had been pretty upset earlier, when Takkata-Jim told her everyone at the ship was too busy getting Streaker ready for the move to talk to her. Even her questions about Tom Orley were brushed aside with abrupt politeness. They'd call her when they knew anything, Takkata-Jim had said before signing off.

Toshio had seen a frown settle over her face as every call she made was deflected. A new comm officer had replaced Akki. The fin told Gillian every person she wanted was unavailable. The one crew member she was able to talk to was Charles Dart, apparently because his skills weren't urgently needed at the moment. And the chimp refused to talk about anything but his work.

Immediately, she had begun getting ready to leave. Then came orders from the ship, directly from Takkata-Jim. She was to stay indefinitely and help Dennie Sudman prepare a report on the Kiqui.

This time Gillian took the news impassively. Without comment, she had gone off into the jungle to be alone.

"…more of those tendrils of Dennie's." Charles Dart had been talking as Toshio's mind drifted. Toshio made himself sit up straight and pay attention to what the chimp scientist was saying.

"…The most exciting thing is the potassium and iodine isotope profiles. They prove my hypothesis that within recent geological time some sophont race has been burying garbage in this subduction zone of the planet! This is colossally important, Toshio. There's evidence in these rocks of multiple generations of dumping of material from above, and rapid recycling of stuff brought up by nearby volcanoes. It's almost as if there's been a rhythm to it, an ebb and flow. Something awfully suspicious has been going on here for a long time! Kithrup's supposed to have been fallow since the ancient Karrank% lived here. Yet somebody's been hiding highly refined stuff in this planet's crust up until very recently!"

Toshio almost committed a rudeness. "Very recently" indeed! Dart was sleuthing in geological time. Any day now, the Eatees would be down on them, and he was treating the alleged burying of industrial garbage thousands of years ago as if it was the latest Scotland Yard mystery!

"Yes, sir. I'll get on it right away." Toshio wasn't even sure what Dart had just asked him to do, but he covered his ass.

"And don't worry, sir. The robot will be monitored day and night. Keepiru and Sah'ot have orders from Takkata-Jim to stay plugged into it at turns when I'm unavailable. They'll call me or wake me if there's any change in its condition."

Wouldn't that satisfy the chimp? The fen hadn't taken well at all to that order from Streakers exec, but they would obey, even if it slowed Sah'ot's work with the Kiqui.

Miracle of miracles, Charlie seemed to agree. "Yeah, that's nice of them," he muttered. "Be sure to thank 'em for me.

"And say! Maybe, while Keepiru's plugged in, can he trace that intermittent static we keep getting from the robot? I don't like it, and it's getting worse."

"Yes, sir. I'll ask him."

The chimpanzee rubbed his right eye with the back of a furry hand, and yawned.

"Listen, Toshio," he said. "I'm sorry, but I really need a break. Would you mind if we put off finishing this until just a little bit later? I'll ring you back after supper and answer all your questions then, hmmm? OK bye, then, for now!" Charlie reached forward and the holo image disappeared.

Toshio stared at the empty space for a moment, slightly stunned. Mind? Would I mind? Why, no, sir, I don't believe I'd mind at all! I'll just wait here patiently, until either you call back or the sky falls down on my head!

He snorted. Would I mind.

Toshio stood up, his joints crackling from sitting cross-legged too long.

I thought I was too young for that. Ah, well. A midshipman is supposed to experience everything.

He looked toward the forest. Dennie was hard at work with the Kiqui. Should I bother Gillian, I wonder? She's probably worried about Tom, and who could blame her? We were supposed to have heard from him early yesterday.

But maybe she wants company.

Lately he had started having fantasies about Gillian. It was only natural, of course. She was a beautiful older woman — at least thirty — and by most standards quite a bit more alluring than Dennie Sudman.

Not that Dennie wasn't attractive in her own way, but Toshio didn't want to think about Dennie much any more. Her implicit rejection, by effectively overlooking him when the two of them were alone and so much alike, was painful.

Not that Dennie had said or done anything offensive, but she had become moody lately. Toshio suspected she sensed his attraction to her, and was overreacting by turning cold to him. He told himself that was an immature response on her part. But that didn't keep it from hurting…

Fantasizing about Gillian was another matter. He'd had shameful but very compelling daydreams about being there when she needed a man helping her overcome her loss…

She probably knew how he felt, but didn't let it change her behavior toward him at all. It was a comforting forgiveness, and it made her a safe object of semi-secret adoration.

It could simply be that I'm very confused, of course, Toshio thought. I'm trying to be analytical in an area where I have almost no experience, and my own feelings keep getting in the way.

I wish I wasn't just an awkward kid, and were more like Mr. Orley, instead.

An uneven electronic tone behind him interrupted his fantasy — the comm coming back to life.

"Oh, no!" Toshio groaned. "Not already!"

The unit spat static as the tuner sought to bring in an erratic carrier wave. Toshio had a wild desire to run over and kick the thing into the bottomless murk of the drill-tree shaft.

Suddenly, a crackling, noise-shrouded whistle broke out.

"Akki!" Toshio hurried over to kneel in front of the comm.

"Do I? Ifni! I wish we were home doing that now! What's happening? Are you having equipment trouble on the bridge? I'm getting no visual, and there's a lot of static. I thought you were taken off comm duty. And why the Trinary?"

Toshio's lips pursed as he repeated the message to himself silently. "…soft High Patron." There were few humans given titles like that by fins. Only one candidate was here on the island right now.

"You want to talk to Gillian?"

Toshio blinked, then he said, "I'll get her right away, Akki! You hold on!"

He turned and ran into the forest, calling Gillian's name at the top of his lungs.

43 ::: Akki

The monofilament cable was almost invisible against the rubble and ooze of the sea floor. Even in the light from Akki's harness lamp, it barely reflected a spiderweb's glimmer here and there amidst the rock and sediments atop this jagged ridgeline.

The cable had been designed to be hard to detect; it was the only certain way Streaker could communicate with her two outlying work parties without giving away her location. Akki had been forced to search for over an hour, using the best instruments at his disposal and knowing where to look, before finding the line to the island. By the time he had clipped his neural tap into the line, more than half of the oxygen in his breather was gone.

A lot of time had been spent just getting away from the ship. And Akki wasn't even sure his departure had gone unnoticed. The taciturn electrician's mate in charge of the equipment locker shouldn't have questioned orders when Akki asked for breathing gear. Another fin, an off-duty engine room rating, had followed him from a distance after he had left the equipment locker, and Akki had to dodge through the outlock to shake the Stenos off his tail.

In less than two days a subtle change had come over the crew of Streaker. A new alignment of power had been set up. Crew members who had formerly been of little influence now pushed their way to the front of the food lines and adopted dominant body postures, while others went about their duties with eyes downcast and flukes drooping.

Rank and official position had little to do with it. Such things had always been informal aboard Streaker anyway. Dolphins were more apt to pay attention to subtle shifts in dominance than to formal authority.

Now even racism seemed to be a factor. A disproportionate number of the new figures of authority were of the Stenos sub-breed.

It amounted to an informal coup. Officially, Takkata-Jim was acting on behalf of the unconscious Creideiki until a ship's council could be convened. But Streaker's water had the taste of a herd with a new dominant male. Those close to the old bull were on the out, and the cronies of the new swam in the vanguard.

Akki found it all quite illogical and a bit disgusting. It brought home to him that even the highly selected fen of Streaker's crew could submit to ancient patterns of behavior under stress. He now saw what the Galactics meant when they said that three hundred years of uplift was too short a time for a race to be ready for starships.

It was a rude realization. It made Akki feel more like a client than he ever had in the mixed, egalitarian colony of Calafia.

The discovery did help in one way, though. It gave him a primitive satisfaction in his act of mutiny. Legalistically, he was committing a serious crime, abandoning the ship to make contact with Gillian Baskin against specific orders from the acting captain.

But now Akki felt he knew the truth; he was a member of a crew of imitation spacemen. There was no way, short of Creideiki miraculously recovering, that they were going to get out of this mess without intervention by their patrons.

He discounted the value of Ignacio Metz — or Emerson D'Anite or even Toshio, for that matter. He agreed with Makanee that their only hope lay in Dr. Baskin or Mr. Orley coming home.

By now he had come to accept that Orley was lost. The rest of the crew believed this, and it was one more reason morale had gone to hell since Creideiki's accident.

The comm line quietly sent a carrier tone directly to his stato-acoustic nerve, as Akki waited impatiently for Toshio to return with Gillian. The line was not being used for anything else, now that Charles Dart had signed off, but every second that passed increased the chance that the present comm operator aboard the ship would detect the resonance of his tap. Akki had set it up so they couldn't pick up his conversation with Toshio, but even a dullard CommSec fin couldn't miss the side effects, in time.

Where are they? he wondered. Surely they know I only have so much air? And this metal-rich water makes my skin itch!

Akki breathed slowly for calm. A teaching rhyme of Keneenk ran through his mind.

Past, future and present were among the hardest ideas to express explicitly in Trinary The rhyme was meant to teach causation as the human patrons, and most other sophonts, saw it, while keeping essential faith with the cetacean view of life.

It all seemed so simple to Akki. At times he wondered why some of these dolphins of Earth had so much trouble with such ideas. One thought, one imagined actions and their consequences, considered how the — different results would taste and feel, then one acted! If the future was unclear, one did the best one could, and hoped.

It was how humans had muddled through during the ages of their horrible, orphaned ignorance. Akki saw no reason why it should be so hard for his people, especially when they were being shown the way.

"Akki? Toshio here. Gillian's coming. She had to break away from something important, so I ran ahead. Are you all right?"

Akki sighed.

"Hang on," Toshio called, interrupting the rhyme. Akki grimaced. Toshio never would develop a sense of style.

"Here's Gillian," Toshio finished. "Take care of yourself, Akki!"

The line crackled with static.

"Akki?"

It was the voice of Gillian Baskin, made tinny by the weak connection, but almost infinitely gratifying to hear.

"What is it, dear? Can you tell me what's going on on the ship? Why won't Creideiki talk to me?"

That wasn't what Akki had thought she would ask first. For some reason he had expected her main concern to be Tom Orley. Well, he wasn't about to bring the subject up if she didn't.

There was silence at the other end. No doubt Gillian was formulating her next question in a way that would let him answer unambiguously in Trinary. It was a skill Toshio sometimes sadly lacked.

Akki brought his head up quickly. Was that a sound? It hadn't come from the comm line, but from the dark waters around him.

"Akki," Gillian began. "I'm going to ask you questions phrased to take three-level answers. Please spare artistry for brevity in answering."

Gladly, if I can, Akki thought. He had often wondered why it was so hard to hold direct conversations in Trinary without beating around the bush in poetic allusion. It was his native tongue as much as Anglic was, and still he was frustrated by its resistance to shortcuts.

"Akki, does Creideiki ignore the Fish-of-Dreaming, does he chase them, or does he feed them?"

Gillian was asking if Creideiki was still functioning as a tool user, was he lost to injury, drifting in an unconscious dream-hunt or, worse, was he dead. Somehow, Gillian had immediately gone right to the heart of the matter. Akki was able to answer with blessed brevity.

There was that sound again! A rapid clicking, coming from not far away. Curse the necessity to keep his neural socket linked to the static of this line! The sounds were close enough to leave little doubt. Someone was hunting for him out here.

"All right, Akki. Next question. Does Hikahi calm all with her Keneenk rhythms, does she echo herd obedience, or does she sing an absent silence?"

Dolphin sonar is a highly directional thing. He felt the edge of a lobe of a sonic beam pass just above him, without hitting him broadside. Akki got down as close to the ocean floor as he could, and made an effort to direct his own nervous clickings into the soft sand. He wanted to reach out with one of his harness arms and grab a rock or something for stability, but was afraid the tiny whirring of the motors would be heard.

He wished he, too, were absent this place and back in his quiet stateroom aboard Streaker.

"Okay, is their silence that of netted capture? Is it of orca fearful waiting? Or is it the silence of fishes feeding?"

Akki was about to answer when, like one whose eyes were suddenly struck by a bright light, he was awash in a loud beam of pulsed sound, highly directional and from his left and above. There was no question a dolphin up there was instantly aware of him.

Akki was so agitated that some of that actually came out as sound rather than impulses sent to the monofilament. There was no use trying any longer for secrecy. He made ready to jettison the line and turned his melon toward the intruder. He fired off a sonar pulse strong enough, he hoped, to momentarily stun him.

The echoes of his burst returned giving him a vivid image. There was a thrashing sound as a very large dolphin swung aside, out of his beam.

K'tha-Jon! Akki recognized the echo at once.

"Akki? What was that? Are you in fighting patterns? Break off if you have to. I'm coming home fast as I…"

Duty absolved, Akki popped the neural link free and rolled to one side.

He acted none too soon. A blue-green laser bolt sizzled through the spot where he had been seconds before.

So, that's the way of it, he thought as he dove into the canyon next to the ocean ridge. The hammerhead is out to get me, and no politeness about it.

He did a quick roll to his right and speared downward toward the shadows.

Dolphins were known for a reluctance to kill anything that breathed air, but they were not a limited race. Even before uplift, humans had witnessed cases of fin murdering fin. In enabling cetaceans to be starfarers, men also made them more efficient when they chose to kill.

A line-bright laser beam hissed a bare meter ahead of him. Akki clenched his jaw and dove through the streak of scalding bubbles in its wake. Another narrow, searing bolt sizzled between his pectoral fins. He whirled and dove for the long sonic shadow of a jagged outcrop of rock.

K'tha-Jon's laser rifle could kill at long range, while the welder/torch on Akki's harness was, like all sidearm-tools, of use only up close. Obviously, his only chances were in flight or in trickery.

It was very dark down here. All of the red colors were gone. Only blue and green could pass through from the day to illuminate a shadow-filled landscape. Akki took advantage of the rugged terrain and slipped between the sharp walls of a narrow rock cleft. There he stopped to wait and listen.

The echoes he picked up through passive listening only told him that K'tha-Jon was out there, somewhere, searching. Akki hoped his own rapid breathing wasn't as loud as it sounded to him.

He sent a neural query to his harness. The microcomputer in its frame told him he had less than half an hour's air left in his breather. That certainly put a limit on how long he could wait.

Akki's jaws ground together. He wanted K'tha-Jon's long pectorals between his teeth, much as he knew he was no match for the big Stenos in size or strength.

Akki had no way of knowing whether K'tha-Jon was out here on his own or following orders from Takkata-Jim. But if there were some cabal of Stenos at work, he wouldn't put it past them to kill the helpless Creideiki if that were the way to secure their plan. Unthinkable as it was, they could even get it into their heads to harm Gillian, if she weren't careful how she made her return to the ship. The mere thought of any fin participating in such crimes made Akki feel sick.

I've got to get back and help Makanee defend Creideiki until Gillian arrives! That takes priority over everything else.

He slipped out of the cleft and swam a series of floorhugging zigs and zags toward a small canyon to the southeast, in a direction away from Streaker, and away from both Toshio's island and the Thennanin wreck. It was the direction most likely to be unwatched by K'tha-Jon.

He could hear the giant casting about for him. The powerful beams of sound were missing for now. There was a good chance he would get a head start before he was detected.

Still, it wasn't quite as tasty as the satisfaction he would have felt in surprising K'tha-Jon with a snout-ramming in his genitals!

Gillian turned from the comm set to see anxiety on Toshio's face. It made him seem very young. Gone was the role of a rough, tough, worldly mel. Toshio was an adolescent midshipman who had just found out his captain was crippled. And now his best friend might well be fighting for his life. He looked at her, hoping for reassurance that everything would be all right.

Gillian took the youth's hand and pulled him into a hug. She held him, against his protests, until, at last, the tension went out of his shoulders and he buried his face in her shoulder, holding her tightly.

When he finally pulled away Toshio didn't look at her, but turned away and wiped at one eye with the heel of his hand.

"I'm going to want to take Keepiru with me," Gillian said to him. "Do you think you and Sah'ot and Dennie can spare him?"

Toshio nodded. His voice was thick, but he soon had it under control. "Yes, sir. Sah'ot may be a bit of a problem when I start giving him some of Keepiru's duties. But I've been watching the way you handle him. I think I can manage."

"That's good. See if you can keep him off Dennie's back, too. You're going to be military commander now. I'm sure you'll manage fine."

Gillian turned to her small poolside campsite to gather her gear. Toshio went to the waters edge and switched on the hydrophone amplifier that would signal the two dolphins that they were wanted. Sah'ot and Keepiru had left an hour ago, to await the evening foray of the aborigines.

"I'll go back with you if you want, Gillian."

She shook her head as she gathered her notes and tools together. "No, Toshio. Dennie's work with the Kiqui is damned important. You're the one who's got to keep her from burning down the forest with a spent match while she's preoccupied. Besides, I need you to maintain a pretense that I haven t left. Do you think you can do that for me?" Gillian zipped shut her watertight satchel and started slipping out of her shirt and shorts. Toshio turned away, at first, and started to blush.

Then he noticed that Gillian didn't seem to care that he look. I might never see her again, he thought. I wonder if she knows what she's doing for me?

"Yes, sir," he said. Toshio's mouth felt very dry. "I'll act just as harassed and impatient as ever with Dr. Dart. And if Takkata-Jim asks for you… Ill tell him you're off somewhere, er, sulking."

Gillian was holding her drysuit in front of her, preparing to step into it. She looked up at him, surprised by the wryness of his remark. Then she laughed.

In two long-legged strides she was over to him, seizing him into another hug. Without a thought Toshio put his arms around the smooth skin of her waist.

"You're a good man, Tosh," she said as she kissed him on the cheek. 'And, you know, you've grown quite a bit taller than me? You lie to Takkata-Jim for me and I promise we'll make a proper mutineer of you in no time at all."

Toshio nodded and closed his eyes. "Yes, ma'am," he said as he held her tight.

44 ::: Creideiki

His skin itched. It had always itched, since that dim time when he rode alongside his mother in her slipstream — when he had first learned about touch from nursing and the gentle nuzzles she gave him to remind him to rise for air.

Soon he had learned that there were other kinds of touching. There were walls and plants and the sides of all the buildings of the settlement at Catalina-under; there was the stroking, butting, and yes! biting play of his peers; there was the soft, oh, so deliciously varied touch of the mels and fems — the humans — who swam about like pinnipeds, like sea lions, laughing and playing catch with him underwater and above.

There was the feel of water. All the different kinds of feel there were to water.

The splash and crash of falling into it! The smooth laminar flow of it as you speared along faster than anyone ever could have gone before! The gentle lapping of it, just below your blowmouth as you rested, whispering a lullaby to yourself.

O, how he itched!

Long ago he had learned to rub against things, and he discovered what that could do to him. Ever since then, he had masturbated whenever he felt like it, just like any other healthy fin would…

Creideiki wanted to scratch himself. He wanted to masturbate.

Only there was no wall nearby to rub against. He seemed unable to move, or even to open his eyes to see what surrounded him.

He was floating in midair, his weight held up by nothing… by a familiar magic… "anti-gravity." The word — like his memories of floating this way many times before — for some reason felt alien, almost meaningless.

He wondered at his lassitude. Why not open his eyes and see? Why not click out a soundbeam and hear the shape and texture of this place?

At intervals he felt a spray of moistness that kept his skin wet. It seemed to come from all directions.

He considered, and came to the conclusion that something must be very wrong with him. He must be sick.

An involuntary sigh made him realize he was still capable of some sound. He searched for the right mechanisms, experimented, then managed to repeat the sound.

They must be working to fix me, he thought. I must have been hurt. Though I don't feel any pain, I feel a vacancy. Something has been taken from me. A ball? A tool? A skill? Anyway, the people are probably trying to put it back.

I trust people, he thought happily. And the apex of his mouth curled into a slight smile.

* !!!! *

The apex of his mouth did what?

Oh. Yes. Smiling. That new thing.

New thing? I've done it all my life!

Why?

It's expressive! It adds subtlety to my features! It…

It is redundant.

Creideiki let out a weak, warbling cry of confusion.

* In the brightness

Of the sunshine -

* There are answers

In schools, like fishes *

He remembered a little, now. He had been dreaming. Something terrible had happened, and he had been plunged into a nightmare of bewilderment. Shapes had darted toward and away from him, and he had felt ancient songs take new, eerie forms.

He realized he must still be dreaming, with both hemispheres at the same time. That explained why he couldn't move. He tried to coax himself awake with a song.

* Levels there are -

Known only to sperm whales

* Physeter, who hunts

In chasms of dreaming

* To battle the squid

Whose beaks are sea-mounts

* And whose great arms

Encompass oceans…

It was not a calming rhyme. It had overtones of darkness that made him want to fly away in horror. Creideiki tried to halt it, fearing what the chant might call up. But he could not stop crafting the sound-glyphs.

* Go down to levels -

In the darkness

* Where your "cycloid"

Never reaches

* Where all music

Finally settles

* And it gathers

Stacked in layers

* Howling songs of

Ancient storms,

* And hurricanes

That never died…

A presence grew alongside Creideiki. A great, broad figure could be felt nearby, forming out of the fabric of his song. Creideiki sensed its slow sonar pulses, filling the small chamber he lay within… a small chamber that couldn't possibly hold the behemoth taking shape beside him.

Nukapai?

* Sounds of earthquakes -

Stored for epochs

* Sounds of molten

Primeval rocks…

The sound creature solidified with each passing verse. There was a muscular power in the presence forming beside him. The thing's slow, huge fluke strokes threatened to send him tumbling head over tail. When it blew, Its spume sounded like a storm breaking on a rocky shore.

Fear at last gave him the will to open his eyes. Moist mucus ran over his eyeballs as he labored to separate the lids. They were recessed to their deepest, and it took moments to make them switch to air-focus.

At first all he saw was a hospital suspension tank, small and confined. He was alone.

But sound told him he was in the open sea, and a leviathan rode next to him! He could feel its great power!

He blinked, and suddenly his vision shifted. Sight adopted the frame of reference of sound. The room vanished, and he saw It!

!!!!!!!

The thing beside him could never have lived in any of the oceans he had known. Creideiki almost choked in dread.

It moved with the power of tsunamis, the irresistibility of the tides.

It was a thing of darkness and depths.

It was a god.

* K-K-Kph-kree !!

It was a name Creideiki hadn't been aware he had known. It welled up from somewhere, like the dragons of a nightmare.

One dark eye regarded Creideiki with a look that seared him. He wanted to turn away — to hide or die.

Then it spoke to him.

It spurned Trinary, as he knew it would. It cast aside Primal, disdaining it a tongue for clever animals. It sang a song that brushed against him with physical force, enveloped him and filled him with a terrible understanding.

:You Swam Away From Us Creideiki : You Were Starting To Learn : Then Your Mind Swam Away: But We Have Not Finished : Yet :

:We Have Waited Long For One Such As You : Now You Need Us As Much As We Need You : There Is No Going Back :

:As You Are : You Would Be A Hulk : Dead Meat : Emptiness Without A Song : Never Again A Dreamer or A Fire User :

:Useless Creideiki : Neither Captain : Nor Cetacean : Useless Meat :

:There Is One Path For You : Through The Belly Of The Whale Dream : There You May Find A Way : A Hard Way : But A Way To Do Your Duty : There You May Find A Way To Save Your Life… :

Creideiki moaned. He thrashed feebly and called out for Nukapai. But then he remembered. She was one of them. She waited, down below, with his other tormentors, some of them old gods he had heard of in the sagas, and some he had never heard mentioned even by the humpback whales…

K-K-Kph-kree had come to bring him back.

Though Anglic was lost to him, he conveyed a plea in a language he had not known he knew.

:I am damaged! : I am a hulk! I should be dead meat! : I have lost speech! I have lost words! : Let me die!

It answered with a sonorous rumble that seemed born beneath the earth. Beneath the ooze.

:Through The Whale Dream You Go : Where Your Cousins Have Never Been : Even When They Played Like Animals And Barely Knew Men : Deeper Than The Humpbacks Go : In Their Idle Meditation : Deeper Than Physeter : In His Devil Hunt : Deeper Than The Darkness Itself… :

:There You May Decide To Die, If Truth Cannot Be Borne… :

The walls of the small chamber faded away as his tormentor began to take on a new reality. It had the great brow and bright teeth of a sperm whale, but Its eyes shone like beacons, and Its flanks were streaked with sparkling silver. All around It shimmered an aura like… like the glimmering fields around a starship…

The room disappeared entirely. Suddenly, all around him was a great, open sea of weightlessness. The old god began to swim forward with powerful fluke strokes. Creideiki, wailing a soft fluting cry, was powerless to prevent being swept along in the behemoth's pulling slipstream. They accelerated, faster… faster…

In spite of the absence of direction, he knew, somehow, they were going DOWN.

"Did you hear that-t-t?"

Makanee's assistant looked up at the tank in which the captain lay suspended. A dim spotlight within the gravity tank shone on the suture scars of repeated surgery. Every few seconds, recessed nozzles cast a fine mist over the unconscious dolphin.

Makanee followed the medic's gaze.

"Perhapsss. I thought I heard something a little while ago, like a sigh. What did you hear?"

The assistant shook her head from side to side. "I'm not sure. I thought it sounded like he was talking to somebody — only not in Anglic. It seemed like there was a snatch of Trinary, then… then something else. It sounded weird!"

The assistant shivered. "Do you think maybe he's dreaming?"

Makanee looked up at Creideiki and sighed. "I don't know. I don't even know if, in his condition, dreaming is something to wish for him, or to pray devoutly he doesn't do."

45 ::: Tom Orley

A chilly sea breeze swept over him out of the west. A bout of shivering shook him — awake in the middle of the night. His eyes opened in the dark, staring into emptiness.

He couldn't remember where he was.

Give it a moment, he thought. It'll come.

He had been dreaming of the planet Garth, where the seas were small and the rivers many. There he had lived for a time among the human and chimp colonists, a mixed colony as rich and surprising as Calafia, where man and dolphin dwelt together.

Garth was a friendly world, though isolated far from other Earthling settlements.

In his dream, Garth was invaded. Giant warships hovered over her cities and spewed clouds of gas across her fertile valleys, sending colonists fleeing in panic. The sky had been filled with flashing lights.

He had trouble separating the trailing edges of the dream from reality. Tom stared at the crystal dome of Kithrup's night. His body was locked — legs pulled in, hands clutching opposite shoulders — as much from a rigor of exhaustion as from the cold. Slowly, he got the muscles to loosen. Tendons popped and joints groaned as he learned all over again how to move.

The volcano to the north had died down to only a feeble red glow. There were long, ragged openings in the clouds overhead. Tom watched the pinpoints of light in the sky.

He thought about stars. Astronomy was his mental focus.

Red means cool, he thought. That red one there might be a small, nearby ancient — or a distant giant already in its death throes. And that bright one over there could be a blue supergiant. Very rare. Was there one in this area of space?

He ought to remember.

Tom blinked. The blue "star" was moving.

He watched it drift across the starfield, until it intercepted another bright pinpoint, this one a brilliant green. There was a flash as the two tiny lights met. When the blue spark moved on, the green was gone.

Now what were the chances I'd witness that? How likely was it that I'd be looking at just the right place at the right time? The battle must still be pretty hot and heavy up there. It isn't over yet.

Tom tried to rise, but his body sagged back against the bed of vines.

Okay, try again.

He rolled over onto one elbow, paused to marshal his strength, then pushed upright.

Kithrup's small, dim moons were absent, but there was enough starlight to make out the eerie weedscape. Water sluiced through the shifting morass. There were croaking and slithering sounds. Once he heard a tiny scream that choked off — some small prey suddenly dying, he supposed.

He was thankful for the obstinacy that had brought him to this modest height. Even two meters made a difference. He couldn't have survived a night down in that loathsome mess.

He turned stiffly and began groping through his meager supplies on the crude sledge. First priority was to get warm. He pulled the top piece of his wetsuit from the jumbled pile, and gingerly slid into it.

Tom knew he should give some attention to his wounds, but they could wait just a little longer. So could a full meal — he had salvaged enough stores for a few of those.

Munching on a foodbar and taking sparing sips from a canteen, Tom appraised his small pile of equipment. At the moment what mattered were his three psi-bombs.

He looked up at the sky. Except for a faint purple haze near one bright star, there were no more signs of the battle. Yet that one glimpse had been enough. Tom already knew which bomb to set off.

Gillian had spent a few hours with the Niss machine before leaving Streaker to meet him at Toshio's island. She had connected the Tymbrimi device to the Thennanin micro branch Library he had salvaged. Then she and the Niss had worked out the proper signals to load into the bombs.

The most important was the Thennanin distress call. Ifni's fickle luck permitting, it would let Tom perform the crucial experiment, to find out if the Plan would work.

All of the work Suessi and Tsh't and the others had put into the "Trojan Seahorse" would come to naught if Thennanin were not amongst those left in the war. What use would it be for Streaker to slip inside a hollowed-out Thennanin hulk, to rise into space in disguise, if all the combatants would shoot anyway at a remnant of a faction which had already lost?

Tom picked up one psi-bomb. It was spherical, and rested in his hand like an orb. At the top was a safety switch and timer. Gillian had carefully labeled each bomb on a strip of tape. On this one she had added a flowing signature and a small heart with an arrow through it.

Tom smiled and brought the bomb to his lips.

He had felt guilty of machismo, insisting on being the one to come here while she remained behind. Now he knew he had been right. Tough and competent as Gillian was, she wasn't as good a pilot as he, and probably would have died in the crash. She certainly wouldn't have had the physical strength to haul the sledge this far.

Hell, he thought. I'm glad because she's safe with friends who'll protect her. That's reason enough. She may be able to lick ten Blenchuq cave lizards with one hand tied, but she's my lady, and I'll not let harm come near her if I can help it.

Tom washed down the last of the protein bar. He hefted the bomb and considered strategy. His original plan had been to land near the volcano, wait until the glider had recharged for launching, then plant the bomb and take flight before it went off. He could have ridden thermals from the volcano to a good altitude and found another island from which to watch the results of his experiment.

Lacking another island, he still could have gone far enough, landed in the ocean, and used his telescope to watch from there.

It was a nice plan, foiled by a raging storm and an unexpected jungle of mad vines. His telescope had joined the metal detritus at the bottom of Kithrup's world-sea, along with most of the wreckage of his solar plane.

Tom rose carefully to his feet. Food and warmth made it merely an exercise in controlled agony.

Rummaging through his few belongings, he tore a long, narrow strip of cloth from the tattered ruins of his sleeping bag. The swatch of tough insu-silk seemed adequate.

The psi-bomb felt heavy and substantial in his hand. It was hard to imagine that the globe was stuffed with powerful illusions — a super-potent counterfeit, ready to burst free on command.

He set the timer for two hours and thumbed the safety release, arming the thing.

He laid it carefully into his makeshift sling. Tom knew he was being dramatic. Distance wouldn't help him much. Sensors all over the Kithrup system would light up when it went off. He might as well set it off at his feet.

Still, one never knew. He'd toss it as far away as he could.

He let the sling sway a few times to get the feel of it, then he began swinging it. Slowly, at first, he built up momentum, while a strange feeling of well-being spread outward from his chest into his arms and legs. Fatigue seemed to fall away. He started to sing.

Tom's shoulders flexed as he took a step. His arm snapped straight, and he released the sling. The bomb sailed high into the night, whirling like a top. The spinning sphere shone briefly, still climbing, sparkling until it disappeared from sight. He listened, but never heard it land.

Tom stood still for a while, breathing deeply.

Well, he thought at last. That built an appetite. I have two hours in which to eat, tend my wounds, and prepare a shelter. Any time I get after that, O Lord, will be accepted with humble gratitude.

He laid the ragged strip of cloth over his shoulder and turned to prepare himself a meal by starlight.