Insistence of Vision (38 page)

In abstract, she understood the terrible strain that had put them in this state. Perhaps, if she were offered a chance to kill Zhaki and Mopol, Peepoe might call that punishment a bit too severe.

On the other fin, sterilization was much too good for them.

ᚖ

Despite sharing the same culture - and a common ancestry as Earth mammals - dolphins and humans looked at many things differently. Peepoe felt more annoyed at being kidnapped than violated. More pissed-off than traumatized. She wasn’t able to stymie their lust completely, but with various tricks – playing on their mutual jealousy and feigning illness as often as she could – Peepoe staved off unwelcome attentions for long stretches.

But if I find out they murdered Kaa, I’ll have their entrails for lunch.

Days passed and her impatience grew. Peepoe’s real time limit was fast approaching.
My contraception implant will expire. Zhaki and his pal have fantasies about populating Jijo with their descendants, but I like this planet far too much to curse it that way.

She vowed to make a break for it. But how?

Sometimes she would swim to a channel between the two remote islands where her kidnappers had brought her, and drift languidly, listening. Once, Peepoe thought she made out something faintly familiar – a clicking murmur, like a distant crowd of dolphins. But it passed, and she dismissed it as wishful thinking. Zhaki and Mopol had driven the sled at top speed for days on end with her strapped to the back, before they halted by this strange archipelago and removed her sonar-proof blindfold. She had no idea how to find her way back to the old coastline where Makanee’s group had settled.

When I do escape these two idiots, I may be consigning myself to a solitary existence for the rest of my days.

Oh well, you wanted the life of an explorer. There could be worse fates than swimming all the way around this beautiful world, eating exotic fish when you’re hungry, riding strange tides and listening to rhythms no dolphin ever heard before.

The fantasy had a poignant beauty – though ultimately, it made her lonely and sad.

ᚖ

The ocean echoed with anger, engines, and strange noise.

Of course it was all a matter of perspective. On noisy Earth, this would have seemed eerily quiet. Terran seas buzzed with a cacophony of traffic, much of it caused by her own kind as neo-dolphins gradually took over managing seventy percent of the home planet’s surface. In mining the depths, or tending fisheries, or caring for those sacredly complex simpletons called whales, more and more responsibilities fell to uplifted ‘fins using boats, subs and other equipment. Despite continuing efforts to reduce the racket, home was still a raucous place.

In comparison, Jijo appeared as silent as a nursery. Natural sound-carrying thermal layers reported waves crashing on distant shorelines and intermittent groaning as minor quakes rattled the ocean floor. A myriad buzzes, clicks and whistles came from Jijo’s own subsurface fauna – fishy creatures that evolved here, or were introduced by colonizing leaseholders like the Buyur, long ago. Some distant rumbles even hinted at large entities, moving slowly, languidly across the deep... perhaps pondering long, slow thoughts.

As days stretched to weeks, Peepoe learned to distinguish Jijo’s organic rhythms... punctuated by a grating din whenever one of the boys took the sled for a joy ride, stampeding schools of fish, or careening along with the load indicator showing red. At this rate the machine wouldn’t stand up much longer, though Peepoe kept hoping one of them would break his fool neck first.

With or without the sled, Zhaki and Mopol could track her down if she just swam away. Even when they left piles of dead fish to ferment atop some floating reeds, and got drunk on the foul carcasses, the two never let their guard down long enough to let her steal the sled. It seemed that one or the other was always sprawled across the saddle. Since dolphins sleep only one brain hemisphere at a time, it was impossible to take them completely by surprise.

ᚖ

Then, after two months of captivity, she detected signs of something drawing near.

Peepoe had been diving in deeper water for a tasty kind of local soft-shell crab when she first heard it. Her two captors were having fun a kilometer away, driving their speedster in tightening circles around a panicked school of bright silvery fishoids. But when she dived through a thermal boundary layer, separating warm water above from cool, saltier liquid below – the sled’s racket abruptly diminished.

Blessed silence was one added benefit of this culinary exploit. Peepoe had been doing a lot of diving lately.

This time, however, the transition did more than spare her the sled’s noise for a brief time. It also brought forth a new sound. A distant rumble, channeled by the chilly stratum. With growing excitement, Peepoe recognized the murmur of an engine! Yet the rhythms struck her as unlike any she had heard on Earth or elsewhere.

Puzzled, she kicked swiftly to the surface, filled her lungs with fresh air, and dived back down to listen again.

This deep current offers an excellent sonic groove
, she realized,
focusing sound rather than diffusing it. Keeping the vibrations well-confined. Even the sled’s sensors may not pick it up for quite a while.

Unfortunately, that also meant she couldn’t tell how far away the source was.

If I had a breather unit... if it weren’t necessary to keep surfacing for air... I could swim a great distance masked by this thermal barrier. Otherwise it seems hopeless. They can use the sled’s monitors on long-range scan to detect me when I broach and exhale.

Peepoe listened for a while longer, and decided.

I think it’s getting closer... but slowly. The source must still be far away. If I make a dash now, I won’t get far before they catch me.

And yet, she daren’t risk Mopol and Zhaki picking up the new sound. If she must wait, it meant keeping them distracted ‘til the time was right.

There was just one way to accomplish that.

Peepoe grimaced. Rising toward the surface, she expressed disgust with a vulgar Trinary demi-haiku.

* May sun roast your backs,

* And hard sand scrape your bottoms,

* Til you itch madly... *

* ... as if with a good case of the clap! *

Makanee

She sent a command over her neural link, ordering the tools of her harness to fold away into streamlined recesses, signaling that the inspection visit was over.

The chief of the kiqui, a little male with purple gill-fringes surrounding a squat head, let himself drift a meter or so under the water’s surface, spreading all four webbed hands in a gesture of benediction and thanks. Then he thrashed around to lead his folk away, back toward the nearby island where they made their home. Makanee felt satisfaction as she watched the small formation of kicking amphibians, clutching their stone-tipped spears.

Who would have thought that we dolphins, youngest registered sapient race in the Civilization of Five Galaxies, would become patrons ourselves, just a few centuries after humans started uplifting us.

The Kiqui were doing pretty well on Jijo, all considered. Soon after being released onto a coral atoll, not far offshore, they started having babies.

Under normal conditions, some elder race would find an excuse to take the Kiqui away from dolphins, fostering such a promising pre-sapient species into one of the rich, ancient family lines that ruled oxygen-breathing civilization in the Five Galaxies. But here on Jijo things were different. They were cut off from starfaring culture, a vast bewildering society of complex rituals and obligations that made the ancient Chinese Imperial court seem like a toddler’s sandbox, by comparison. There were advantages and disadvantages to being a castaway from all that.

On the one hand, Makanee would no longer have to endure the constant tension of running away from huge oppressive battlefleets or aliens whose grudges went beyond Earthling comprehension.

On the other hand, there would be no more performances of symphony, or opera, or bubble-dance for her to attend.

Never again must she endure disparaging sneers from exalted patron-level beings, who considered dolphins little more than bright beasts.

Nor would she spend another lazy Sunday in her snug apartment in cosmopolitan Melbourne-Under, with multicolored fish cruising the coral garden just outside her window while she munched salmon patties and watched an all-dolphin cast perform Twelfth Night on the tellie.

Makanee was marooned, and would likely remain so for the rest of her life, caring for two small groups of sea-based colonists, hoping they could remain hidden from trouble until a new era came. An age when both might resume the path of uplift.

Assuming some metal nutrient supplements could be arranged, the Kiqui had apparently transplanted well. Of course, they must be taught tribal taboos against over-hunting any one species of local fauna, so their presence would not become a curse on this world. But the clever little amphibians already showed some understanding, expressing the concept in their own, emphatic demi-speech.

## Rare is precious! ##

##
Not eat-or-hurt rare/precious things/fishes/beasts!
##

## Only eat/hunt many-of-a-kind! ##

She felt a personal stake in this. Two years ago, when
Streaker
was about to depart poisonous Kithrup, masked inside the hulk of a crashed Thennanin warship, Makanee had taken it upon herself to beckon a passing tribe of Kiqui with some of their own recorded calls, attracting the curious group into
Streaker’s
main airlock just before the surrounding water boiled with exhaust from revving engines. What then seemed an act of simple pity turned into a kind of love affair, as the friendly little amphibians became favorites of the crew. Perhaps now their race might flourish in a kinder place than unhappy Kithrup. It felt good to know
Streaker
had accomplished at least one good thing out of its poignant, tragic mission.

As for dolphins, how could anyone doubt their welcome in Jijo’s warm sea? Once you learned which fishoids were edible and which to avoid, life became a matter of snatching whatever you wanted to eat, then splashing and lolling about. True, she missed her holoson unit, with its booming renditions of whale chants and baroque chorales. But here she could take pleasure by listening to an ocean whose sonic purity was almost as fine as its vibrant texture.

Almost
...

Reacting to a faint sensation, Makanee swung her sound-sensitive jaw around, casting right and left.

There! She heard it again. A distant rumbling that might have escaped notice amid the underwater cacophony on Earth. But here it seemed to stand out from the normal swish of current and tide.

Her patients – the several dozen dolphins whose stress atavism had reduced them to infantile innocence – called such infrequent noises
boojums
. Or else they used a worried upward trill in Primal Delphin – one that stood for strange monsters of the deep. Occasionally the far off grumbles did seem to hint at some huge, living entity, rumbling with basso-profundo pride, complacently assured that it owned the entire vast sea. Or else it might be just frustrated engine noise from some remnant derelict machine, wandering aimlessly in the ocean’s immensity.

Leaving the kiqui atoll behind, Makanee swam back toward the underwater dome where she and Brookida, plus a few still-sapient nurses, maintained a small base to keep watch over their charges. It would be good to get out of the weather for a while. Last night she had roughed it, keeping an eye on her patients during a rain squall. An unpleasant, wearying experience.

We modern neo-fins are spoiled. It will take us years to get used to living in the elements, accepting whatever nature sends our way, without complaining or making ambitious plans to change the way things are.

That human side of us must be allowed to fade away.

Peepoe

She made her break around mid-morning the next day.

Zhaki was sleeping off a hangover near a big mat of driftweed, and Mopol was using the sled to harass some unlucky penguin-like sea birds, who were trying to feed their young by fishing near the island’s lee shore. It seemed a good chance to slip away, but Peepoe’s biggest reason for choosing this moment was simple. Diving deep below the thermal layer, she found that the distant rumble had peaked, and appeared to have turned away, diminishing with each passing hour.

It was now or never.

Peepoe had hoped to steal something from the sled first. A utensil harness perhaps, or a breather tube, and not just for practical reasons. In normal life, few neo-dolphins spent a single day without using cyborg tools, controlled by cable links to the brain’s temporal lobes. But for months now her two would-be “husbands” hadn’t let her connect to anything at all! The neural tap behind her left eye ached from disuse.

Unfortunately, Mopol nearly always slept on the sled’s saddle, barely ever leaving except to eat and defecate.

He’ll be desolated when the speeder finally breaks down
, she thought, taking some solace from that.

So the decision was made, and Ifni’s dice were cast. She set out with all the gifts and equipment nature provided – completely naked – into an uncharted sea.

For Peepoe, escaping captivity began unlike any human novel or fantasholo. In such stories, the heroine’s hardest task was normally the first part, sneaking away. But here Peepoe faced no walls, locked rooms, dogs or barbed wire. Her “guards” let her come and go as she pleased. In this case, the problem wasn’t getting started, but winning a big enough head start before Zhaki and Mopol realized she was gone.

Swimming under the thermocline helped mask her movements at first. It left her vulnerable to detection only when she went up for air. But she could not keep it up for long. The
Tursiops
genus of dolphins weren’t deep divers by nature, and her speed at depth was only a third what it would be skimming near the surface.