Startide Rising (22 page)

Creideiki’s thoughts were far away when he finally felt Hikahi drift away. But then she was back, rubbing gently against his side, and then nibbling tenderly with sharp, small teeth.

Almost against his will, at first, Creideiki felt his enthusiasm begin to return. He rolled over to his side and let out a long sigh of bubbles as her nuzzling became more provocative.

The water began to taste happier then, as Hikahi crooned a familiar song, taken from one of the oldest of Primal signals. It seemed to say, amongst other things, “Life goes on.”

T
he night was quiet.

Kithrup’s many small moons stirred low tides against the metal cliffs a hundred meters away. The ever-present winds, driven without brake across the planet ocean, tugged at the trees and ruled the foliage.

Still, compared to what they had known for months, the silence was heavy. There were none of the ubiquitous machine sounds which had followed them everywhere from Earth, the unceasing whirrs and clicks of mechanical function, or the occasional smoking crackle of failure.

The squeaking, groaning drone of dolphin conversation was gone, too. Even Keepiru and Sah’ot were absent. At night the two dolphins accompanied the Kithrup aboriginals in their nocturnal sea hunt.

The surface of the metal-mound was almost too quiet. The few sounds seemed to carry forever. The sea, the distant rumble of a faraway volcano …

There was a gentle moan in the night, followed by a very quiet gasping cry.

“They’re at it again,” Dennie sighed, not particularly caring if Toshio heard her.

The sounds came from the clearing at the southern point of the island. The third and fourth humans on the island had tried to find their privacy as far from the abo village and the tunnel pool as possible. Dennie wished they could have gone even farther away.

There was laughter, faint but clear.

“I’ve never heard anything like it,” she sighed.

Toshio blushed and fed another stick to the fire. The couple in the next clearing deserved their privacy. He considered pointing this out to Dennie.

“I swear, they’re like minks!” Dennie said, intending to sound sardonic and mock-envious. But it came out just a little bitter.

Toshio noticed. Against his better judgment, he said, “Dennie, we all know that humans are among the sexual athletes of the galaxy, though some of our clients give us a run for it.”

Toshio poked a stick into the fire. That had been a pretty brash thing to say. He felt a trifle emboldened by the night, and the desire to break the tension by the fire.

“What do you mean by that?” Dennie looked at him sharply.

Toshio played with the stick. “We-ell, there’s a line in an old play, … ‘Why, your dolphin was not lustier!’ Shakespeare wasn’t the first to compare the two horniest of the brainy mammals y’know; I don’t suppose anyone’s come up with a scale to measure it, but I’d have to wonder if it weren’t a prerequisite for intelligence.

“Of course, that’s only one of the possibilities. If you take what the Galactics say about uplift into account…”

He rambled on, slowly drawing away from incitement, noticing how Dennie came this close to blowing her cool, before she turned and looked away.

He’d done it! He had played a round and won it! It was a minor victory in a game he had wondered if he would ever get to play.

The art of teasing had always been a one-sided affair to Toshio, and he’d always had the short end. To get the best of an attractive older woman by dint of clever conversation and character insight was a coup.

He didn’t think he was being cruel, though a genteel cruelty did seem to be part of the game. All he knew for certain was that this was one way to get Dennie Sudman to treat him less like a child. If some of the easy mutual liking they’d had before had to suffer for it, that was too bad.

Much as he didn’t care for Sah’ot, Toshio was glad the fin had provided the lever he needed to pry a chink 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 damned 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,” Toshio 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. Toshio 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.

Toshio 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 breasts. 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 shivers 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 hoarsely. 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 sparse 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.

“
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
…

A
ll 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.

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 damned 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 “fingers” 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 outswim any of the “amicus” breed almost any time.