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 Streaker’s 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.
* If (crackle) midshipmen
Stuck together
Who could stop us?
* And of midshipmen
Who can fly
Like Calafians?
“Akki!” Toshio hurried over to kneel in front of the comm.
* Right again,
Diving partner—
* Remember how we’d
Once hunt lobster?
“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?”
* Necessity
Is someone’s (crackle) mother—
* I send this via
Close nerve socket—
* Anxious, I seek
soft High Patron—
* Urgently
To pass (crackle) warning—
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?”
* Urgently
To pass on warning—
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.
T
he 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” is what once was—
A remnant that’s called memory …
* In it lie the “causes”—
Of what now is.”
* “Future” is what will be—
Envisioned, seldom seen …
* In it lie “results”—
Of what now is.
* “Present” is that narrowness—
Passing, always flickering …
* Proof of the “joke”—
Of “what now is”
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.
* In the depths—
With itching blowmouth
* I tread in wait—
At duty’s calling
* As the cycloid—
Rolls in …
“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.
* You, too—
Diving/flying partner *
“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.
* Makanee—
Patient healer
* Sends me out—
With danger warning
* Soundless, flukeless
Lies Creideiki
* Streaker’s fortunes
Strangely waning
* And the taste—
Of atavism
* Fouls the waters—
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.