Uplift - Startide Rising Part 17

Much as he didn't care for Sah'ot, Tos.h.i.+o was glad the fin had provided the lever he needed to pry a c.h.i.n.k in Dennie's armor.

He was about to try out another bon mot when Dennie cut in.

"I'm sorry, Tosh. I'd love to hear the rest, but I'm going to bed. We've a busy day tomorrow, launching Tom's glider, showing Gillian the Kiqui, and experimenting with that d.a.m.ned robot for Charlie. I suggest you get some sleep too."

She turned to wrap herself in her sleeping bag at the far end of the camp, near the watch-wards.

"Yeah," Tos.h.i.+o said, perhaps a bit too heartily. "I'll do that in a bit, Dennie. Good night. Pleasant dreams."

She was silent, with her back to the tiny glow from the fire. Tos.h.i.+o couldn't tell if she was asleep or awake.

I wish we humans were better at psi, he thought. They say telepathy has its drawbacks, but it would sure be nice to know what's going on in another person's head sometimes.

It'd take away a lot of the anxiety if I knew what she was thinking ... even if I found out she just thought I was a nervy kid.

He looked up at the patchy sky overhead. Through long ragged openings in the clouds he could see stars.

In two places, there were nebiculae in the sky that hadn't been there the night before, signs of a battle still raging. The tiny false nebulae glowed in every visible color, and probably in other bands than light.

Tos.h.i.+o let a fistful of metallo-silicate dirt sift through his fingers onto the coals. Falling sparkles of metal winked at him like incandescent confetti, like winking stars.

He dusted off his hands and turned to crawl into his own sleeping roll. He lay there, eyes closed, reluctant to watch the stars, or to dissect the pros and cons of his behavior.

Instead, he listened to the wind-and-surf sounds of the night. They were rhythmic and calming, like a lullaby, like the seas of home.

Except once in a while he thought he could pick up, on the edge of hearing, sighs and soft laughter coming from the south. They were sounds of complex happiness that filled him with a sad longing.

"They're at it again," he sighed to himself. "I swear, I've never heard of anything like it."

The humid air kept their perspiration slick upon them. Gillian licked a moustache of tear-like salt off her upper lip. The same way, Tom cleaned some of the sheen off her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The wetness of his mouth cooled on her aureoles and nipples when he took his mouth away.

She gasped and grabbed the wavy hair at the back of his head, where his slightly balding vanity feared no tugging. He responded with mock biting that sent s.h.i.+vers to her calves, thighs, and lower back.

Gillian locked her heel behind his knee and levered her pelvis up against his. Her breath whistled softly as he lifted his head and met her eyes.

"I thought what I was doing was afterplay," he whispered a little hoa.r.s.ely. He made a show of wiping his forehead. "You should warn me when I cross over the line, and start promising what I can't deliver." He took her hand and kissed its palm and the inside of her wrist.

Gillian ran her fingers along his cheek, to touch, feather light, his jaw, throat and shoulder. She took spa.r.s.e clumps of chest hair and pulled playfully.

She purred-not like a housecat, but with the feral rumble of a leopardess. "Whenever you're ready, love. I can wait. You may be the illegitimate son of a fecund test-tube, but I know you better than your planners ever did. You have resources they never imagined."

Tom was about to say that, planners or no planners, he was the quite legitimate son of May and Bruce Orley of Minnesota State, Confederacy of Earth ... but then he noticed the slight liquid welling in her eyes. Her words were rough, light and teasing, but her grip on his chest hair only tightened as she looked up at his face, eyes roaming, as if she were memorizing every feature.

Tom felt suddenly confused. He wanted to be close to Gillian on their last night together. How could they be any closer than they were right now? His body pressed against hers, and her warm breath filled his nostrils. He looked away, feeling somehow he was letting her down.

Then he felt it, a tender stroking that seemed to strive against a locked and heavy feeling inside his own head. It was a soft pressure that would not go away. He realized that the thing fighting it was himself.

I'm leaving tomorrow, he thought.

They had argued over who would be the one to go, and he had won. But it was bitter to have to go.

He closed his eyes. I've cut her off from me! I may never come back, and I've cut myself off from the deepest part of me.

Suddenly Tom felt very strange and small, as if he were stranded in a dangerous place, the sole barrier between his loved ones and terrible foes, not a superhero but only a man, outnumbered and about to gamble all he had. As if he were himself.

He opened his eyes as he felt a touch on his face.

He pressed his cheek against her hand. There were still tears in her eyes, but also the beginnings of a smile.

"Silly boy," she said. "You can never leave me. Haven't you realized that by now? I'll be with you, and you'll come back to me."

He shook his head in wonder.

"Jill, I ..." He started to speak, but his mouth was stopped as she pulled him down to kiss him hungrily. Her lips were hot and tender upon his, crosswise. The fingers of her right hand did inciteful things.

Still and all, it was the heady, sweet smell of her that made him realize that she had been right about him, once again.

PART THREE.

Dissonance

"Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend.

To their minds there is no past and no future.

There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the air and in the sea.

"There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man.

He has entered into the strange world of history ...

LOREN EISELEY.

28 ::: Sah'ot

All night he had followed them. Toward morning, Sah'ot felt he was beginning to understand.

With the dawn, the Kiqui left their nocturnal hunting grounds and swam toward the safety of their island. They stowed their woven nets and traps in hidden coral clefts, took their crude spears, and hurried from the growing light. With daytime the killer vines would become active, and other dangers as well. By day the Kiqui could forage in the forests atop the metal islands, seeking nuts and small animals in the thick foliage.

Underwater, the Kiqui looked like green puffer fish with short, web-handed arms and flippered legs. A pair of almost prehensile ventral fins helped them maneuver. Their strong, kicking legs left their hands free to carry burdens. Around each head a fin-like crest of wafer-thin flagellae waved, collecting dissolved oxygen to supplement each Kiqui's distended air-sac.

The hunter-gatherers pulled two nets full of bright, crablike sea creatures, like multi-colored metal sculptures in the mesh. The Kiqui sang a song of flutters and squawks and yelps.

Sah'ot listened as they squeaked to one another, their tiny vocabulary hardly more than a series of vocalized signals coordinating their movements. Each time a few Kiqui rose to the surface for air, the act was accompanied by a chain of complex twitters.

The natives took little notice of the alien creatures that followed them. Sah'ot kept his distance, careful not to interfere. They knew he was here, of course. Now and then the younger Kiqui would cast suspicious sonar squirts his way. Strangely, the older hunters seemed to accept him completely.

Sah'ot looked up at the growing light with relief. In spite of the darkness, he had kept his own sonar down to a minimum all night to keep from intimidating the natives. He had felt almost blind, and a little panicky when he almost blundered into something ... or "something" almost blundered into him.

Still, it had been worthwhile.

He felt he had a pretty good grasp of their language now. The signal structure, like Primal Dolphin, was based on a hierarchical herd and the tempo of the breathing cycle. Its cause-and-effect logic was a bit more complicated than Primal, no doubt due to hands and tool use.

[scanners note: the following 7 lines will only look right using a mono-s.p.a.ced font like Courier. There are 2 columns of text.]

:?: Look, we well hunt hunt hunted -well :?: Careful, Careful, Opportunistic :?: Eat, EAT well, will eat- not eaten No!

:?: Die above water, not in ...

Based on semantic ability alone, these creatures seemed less ripe for uplift than fallow Earth-dolphins had been. Others, biased toward tool-using ability, might disagree.

Of course, the fact that they had hands probably meant the Kiqui would never be particularly good poets. Still, some of their current braggadocio had a certain charm.

The straps of Sah'ot's harness chafed as he rose for breath. In spite of its lightweight, streamlined design, he wished he could get rid of the d.a.m.ned thing.

Of course, these waters were dangerous, and he might need its protection. Also, Keepiru was out there somewhere, staying out of the way as requested, but listening, nonetheless. Keepiru would chew Sah'ot s dorsal fin down to the backbone if he caught him without his harness.

Unlike the ultra-technical fen of Streaker's crew, Sah'ot was uncomfortable with devices. He didn't mind computers, some of which could talk, and which helped him speak to other races. But implements for the moving, shaping, or killing of objects, these were unnatural things which he wished he could do without.

He hated the two nubby little "fin-gers" at the tips of each of his pectoral fins-which they said would someday lead to full hands for his species. They were unaesthetic. He also resented the changes made to the dolphin lungs, making them more resistant to land-based diseases, and adapting parts to breathing oxywater. Natural cetaceans needed no such mutations. Fallow Stenos bredanensis and Tursiops truncatus dolphins, left untouched by the gene-crafters, could out swim any of the "amicus" breed almost any time.

He was ambivalent to the expanded visual sense, bought at the cost of gray matter once dedicated to sound alone.

Sah'ot rose again to breathe, then submerged, keeping pace with the aboriginals.

His own line represented a drive to emphasize language ability, rather than tool use. It seemed to him a more natural extension of dolphin nature than all this cras.h.i.+ng about in stars.h.i.+ps, pretending to be s.p.a.cemen and engineers.

That was one reason he had refused to go along in the s.p.a.ceboat, to help scout the derelict fleet back at the Shallow Cl.u.s.ter. Even had there been anything or anyone left to talk to-for which there'd been no evidence-he wasn't about to poke around supported only by a gang of inept clients! For Streaker to try to deal alone with the derelict fleet was like a group of children playing with a live bomb.

His actions had won contempt from the crew, even though he had been vindicated by the disastrous loss of the captain's gig.

Their contempt didn't matter. Sah'ot reminded himself. He was a civilian. As long as he did his job he didn't have to explain himself.

Nor did disapproving clicks over his pursuit of Dennie Sudman bother him. Long before uplift, male dolphins had been fresh with woman researchers. It's a long-standing tradition, he rationalized. Whatever was good enough for h.o.r.n.y old Flipper is good enough for his brainy descendant.

One of the things he hated about Anglic patterns of thought was this need to self-justify. Men were always asking "Why?" What did it matter why? There were other ways than the human way of looking at things. Any whale would tell you.

The Kiqui chittered excitedly as they swam toward the eastern end of their own island, preparing to hoist their catch up a crevice in the leeward seawall.

Sah'ot felt a sweep of sonar, like a pa.s.sing searchlight. Keepiru approached from the north, to escort him back to the Earthling encampment.

Sah'ot flicked up to the surface. He tilted his head to look out on the new day. The sun rose behind a bank of haze in the east, and the wind carried a whisper of rain on the way.

A metal taint seemed to stain the air, reminding him of their deadly predicament on Kithrup.

No doubt Creideiki and his "engineers" were trying to jury-rig a scheme to get them out of this mess. Their plan would, no doubt, be frightfully bold and clever ... and get them all killed.

Wasn't it obvious that neophytes at the game of making and conquering couldn't thwart the Galactics, who had been at it for aeons?

The humans had his loyalty, of course. But he knew them for what they were---clumsy wolflings, struggling to survive in a dangerously reactionary galaxy.

There was an old dolphin saying. "All humans are engineers, and all engineers are humans." It was cute, but patently a lie.

Keepiru broke the surface beside him. Sah'ot blew quietly, his breath condensing into spray. He lay watching the sunrise until Keepiru's patience wore thin.

"It'sss daylight, Sah'ot. We shouldn't be out here. We've got to report, and I want some food and rest!"

Sah'ot affected the role of an absent-minded scientist. He started, as if pulled from thoughts deeper than Keepiru might ever understand.

"What? Oh, yes. Of course, Pilot. By all means. I've very interesting data to report. You know, I think I've cracked their language?"

"How nice." Keepiru's reply was semantically Anglic, and phonemically a squawk. He dove and headed for the cave entrance.

Sah'ot winced at the pilot's sarcasm. But he was unrepentant.

Maybe I've time to finish a few suggestive limericks, to intersperse in my report to Dennie, he thought. It's too bad she stays up on the bank of the pool and won't join me in the water. Maybe today she'll relent, though.

He composed dirty poetry as he banked to follow Keepiru down into the night-like darkness below.

When they got to the bottom of the former drill-tree shaft, now lit by a small phosphor bulb, Sah'ot noticed that someone had taken both sleds out of the pa.s.sage and moored them in the cavern below. But at least one sled was always supposed to be in the pool in case Dennie and Tos.h.i.+o had to escape quickly! He hurried after Keepiru, up the narrow vertical tunnel.

There were two more sleds in the pool at the top. Someone must have arrived from the s.h.i.+p during the night, he realized.

Tos.h.i.+o and Dennie were already down by the water, talking to Keepiru. Sah'ot eyed Dennie speculatively, but decided not to start in.

This evening I'll try to get her to join me in the water, he thought. I'll think up a pretext, maybe something to do with the mechanics of the drill-tree root. It probably won't work, but the attempt should be fun.

Sah'ot spy-hopped, churning his tail to rise up and look about the poolside clearing. He wondered who had come out from Streaker.

The thick brush parted to the south and two men, one female and one male, approached.

Gillian Baskin knelt by the poolside and whistled a Trinary welcome.

Constant Keepiru Solid as surf rock Orca-defier Chameleon Sah'ot Ever adaptable Ever so man-like Under dark squalls I'd Recognize you two ...