David Brin - Uplift 7 - Temptation

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Temptation
by
David Brin
Introduction
Some people say you can't have everything. For instance, if a story offers
action, it must lack philosophy. If it involves science, character must suffer.
This has especially been said about one of the core types of science fiction,
the genre sometimes called space opera. Is it possible to depict grand
adventures and heroic struggles cascading across lavish future settings-
complete with exploding planets and vivid special effects-while still coming up
with something worth calling a novel?
I'm one of those who believe it's worth a try-and have attempted it in the
Uplift novels, which are set several hundred years into a dangerous future, in
a cosmos that poor humans barely comprehend.
I begin with the plausible notion that people may start genetically altering
dolphins and chimpanzees, giving those bright animals the final boost they
need to become our peers and partners. In my debut work, Sundiver, \
depicted all three of Earth's sapient races discovering that an ancient and
powerful interstellar civilization has been doing the same thing for a very long
time. Following an ancient prescription, each starfaring clan in the Civilization
of Five Galaxies looks for promising newcomers to "uplift." In return for this
favor, the new client species owes its patrons an interval of service, then
starts looking for someone else to receive the gift of intelligence.
This benign pattern conceals a series of ominous secrets which get peeled
away in subsequent stories. Startide Rising and The Uplift War-both winners
of the Hugo Award for best novel-depict shock waves rocking Galactic society
when a humble earthship, Streaker, staffed by a hundred neo-dolphins and a
few humans-uncovers clues to a billion-year-old conspiracy.
My goal has been to stock the series with elements that science-fiction
lovers enjoy-for instance, there's not just one way to surpass the Einsteinian
limitation on faster-than-light travel, but half a dozen. I use five galaxies as the
stage for the series, with more waiting in the wings. The cast of characters-
dolphins, chimps, and aliens-has been chosen to offer a wide range of
sympathetic moments and, I hope, memorable ideas.
After a hiatus of several years while I worked on other projects, I returned
to this broad canvas with the new Uplift Storm trilogy, consisting of three
connected novels, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, and Heaven's Reach.
These works continue exploring the adventures and trials of the Streaker
crew, but also delve into a unique, multiracial society on Jijo, a world in
isolated Galaxy Four that was declared "fallow," or off-limits to sapient beings
in order to let its biosphere recover. Despite this well-intended law, a series of
sneakships have come to the forbidden world, bringing illegal colonists from
half a dozen races, each with desperate reasons to flee growing danger back
home. After initial struggles and misunderstandings, the Six Races of Jijo-
including exiled humans-made peace, joining to create a decent shared
culture, sharing their beloved world while hiding from the cosmos . . . until one
day all their troubles came crashing from the sky.
A Time of Changes has commenced, rocking the complacent Civilization
of Five Galaxies. Nobody is safe, and nothing is certain anymore. Not history,
law, biology, or even trusty physics.
Something is happening to the universe, and all bets about our destiny are
off.In this new story, "Temptation," I peel back yet another layer in the
unfolding saga, and show a small group of fugitive dolphins learning how
perilous it can be to be offered exactly what you always wished for.
MAKANEE
Jijo's ocean stroked her flank like a mother's nuzzling touch, or a lover's caress.
Though it seemed a bit disloyal, Makanee felt this alien ocean had a silkier texture
and finer taste than the waters of Earth, the homeworld she had not seen in years.
With gentle beats of their powerful flukes, she and her companion kept easy pace
beside a tremendous throng of fishlike creatures-red-finned, with violet gills and long
translucent tails that glittered in the slanted sunlight like plasma sparks behind a
starship. The school seemed to stretch forever, grazing on drifting clouds of plankton,
moving in unison through coastal shallows like the undulating body of a vast
complacent serpent.
The creatures were beautiful . . . and delicious. Makanee performed an agile twist
of her sleek gray body, lunging to snatch one from the teeming mass, provoking only
a slight ripple from its nearest neighbors. Her casual style of predation must be new to
Jijo, for the beasts seemed quite oblivious to the dolphins. The rubbery flesh tasted
like exotic mackerel.
"I can't help feeling guilty," she commented in Underwater Anglic, a language of
clicks and squeals that was well-suited to a liquid realm where sound ruled over light.
Her companion rolled alongside the school, belly up, with ventral fins waving
languidly as he grabbed one of the local fish for himself.
"Why guilty?" Brookida asked, while the victim writhed between his narrow jaws.
Its soft struggle did not interfere with his train of word-glyphs, since a dolphin's
mouth plays no role in generating sound. Instead a rapid series of ratcheting sonar
impulses emanated from his brow. "Are you ashamed because you live? Because it
feels good to be outside again, with a warm sea rubbing your skin and the crash of
waves singing in your dreams? Do you miss the stale water and moldy air aboard
ship? Or the dead echoes of your cramped stateroom?"
"Don't be absurd," she snapped back. After three years confined aboard the Terran
survey vessel, Streaker, Makanee had felt as cramped as an overdue fetus, straining at
the womb. Release from that purgatory was like being born anew.
"It's just that we're enjoying a tropical paradise while our crew-mates-"
"-must continue tearing across the cosmos in foul discomfort, chased by vile
enemies, facing death at every turn. Yes, I know."
Brookida let out an expressive sigh. The elderly geophysicist switched languages,
to one more suited for poignant irony.
* Winter's tempest spends
* All its force against the reef,
* Sparing the lagoon.*
The Trinary haiku was expressive and wry. At the same time though, Makanee
could not help making a physician's diagnosis. She found her old friend's sonic
patterns rife with undertones of Primal- the natural cetacean demi-language used by
wild Tursiops truncatus dolphins back on Earth-a dialect that members of the modern
amicus breed were supposed to avoid, lest their minds succumb to tempting ancient
ways. Mental styles that lured with rhythms of animal-like purity.
She found it worrisome to hear Primal from Brookida, one of her few companions
with an intact psyche. Most of the other dolphins on Jijo suffered to some degree from
stress-atavism. Having lost the cognitive focus needed by engineers and starfarers,
they could no longer help Streaker in its desperate flight across five galaxies. Planting
this small colony on Jijo had seemed a logical solution, leaving the regressed ones for
Makanee to care for in this gentle place, while their shipmates sped on to new crises
elsewhere.
She could hear them now, browsing along the same fishy swarm just a hundred
meters off. Thirty neo-dolphins who had once graduated from prestigious universities.
Specialists chosen for an elite expedition-now reduced to splashing and squalling,
with little on their minds but food, sex, and music. Their primitive calls no longer
embarrassed Makanee. After everything her colleagues had gone through since
departing Terra-on a routine one-year survey voyage that instead stretched into a
hellish three-it was surprising they had any sanity left at all.
Such suffering would wear down a human, or even a tymbrimi. But our race is
just a few centuries old. Neo-dolphins have barely started the long Road of Uplift.
Our grip on sapience is still slippery. And now another trail beckons us.
After debarking with her patients, Makanee had learned about the local religion of
the Six Races who already secretly settled this isolated world, a creed centered on the
Path of Redemption-a belief that salvation could be found in blissful ignorance and
nonsapience.
It was harder than it sounded. Among the "sooner" races who had come to this
world illegally, seeking refuge in simplicity, only one had succeeded so far, and
Makanee doubted that the human settlers would ever reclaim true animal innocence,
no matter how hard they tried. Unlike species who were uplifted, humans had earned
their intelligence the hard way on Old Earth, seizing each new talent or insight at
frightful cost over the course of a thousand harsh millennia. They might become
ignorant and primitive-but never simple. Never innocent.
We neo-dolphins will find it easy, however. We've only been tool-users for such a
short time-a boon from our human patrons that we never sought. It's simple to give up
something you received without struggle. Especially when the alternative-the Whale
Dream- calls seductively, each time you sleep.
An alluring sanctuary. The sweet trap of timelessness.
From clackety sonar emanations, she sensed her assistants-a pair of fully
conscious volunteers-keeping herd on the reverted ones, making sure the group stayed
together. Things seemed pleasant here, but no one knew for sure what dangers lurked
in Jijo's wide sea.
We already have three wanderers out there somewhere. Poor little Peepoe and
her two wretched kidnappers. I promised Kaa we'd send out search parties to rescue
her. But how? Zhaki and Mopol have a huge head start, and half a planet to hide in.
Tkett's out there looking for her right now, and we'll start expanding the search as
soon as the patients are settled and safe. But they could be on the other side of Jijo by
now. Our only real hope is for Peepoe to escape that pair of dolts somehow and get
close enough to call for help.
It was time for Makanee and Brookida to head back and take their own turn
shepherding the happy-innocent patients. Yet, she felt reluctant. Nervous.
Something in the water rolled through her mouth with a faint metallic tang, tasting
like expectancy.
Makanee swung her sound-sensitive jaw around, seeking clues. At last she found
a distant tremor. A faintly familiar resonance, coming from the west.
Brookida hadn't noticed yet.
"Well," he commented, "it won't be long till we are truly part of this world, I
suppose. A few generations from now, none of our descendants will be using Anglic,
or any Galactic language. We'll be guileless innocents once more, ripe for readoption
and a second chance at uplift. I wonder what our new patrons will be like."
Makanee's friend was goading her gently with the bittersweet destiny anticipated
for this colony, on a world that seemed made for cetaceans. A world whose comfort
was the surest way to clinch a rapid devolution of their disciplined minds. Without
constant challenges, the Whale Dream would surely reclaim them. Brookida seemed
to accept the notion with an ease that disturbed Makanee.
"We still have patrons," she pointed out. "There are humans living right here on
Jijo."
"Humans, yes. But uneducated, lacking the scientific skills to continue guiding us.
So our only remaining option must be-"
He stopped, having at last picked up that rising sound from the west. Makanee
recognized the unique hum of a speed sled.
"It is Tkett," she said. "Returning from his scouting trip. Let's go hear what he
found out."
Thrashing her flukes, Makanee jetted to the surface, spuming the moist, stale air
from her lungs and drawing in a deep breath of sweet oxygen. Then she spun about
and kicked off toward the engine noise, with Brookida following close behind.
In their wake, the school of grazing fishoids barely rippled in its endless, sinuous
dance, darting in and out of luminous shoals, feeding on whatever the good sea
pressed toward them.
The archaeologist had his own form of mental illness-wishful thinking.
Tkett had been ordered to stay behind and help Makanee with the reverted ones,
partly because his skills weren't needed in Streaker's continuing desperate flight
across the known universe. In compensation for that bitter exile, he had grown
obsessed with studying the Great Midden, that deep underwater trash heap where
Jijo's ancient occupants had dumped nearly every sapient-made object when this
planet was abandoned by starfaring culture, half a million years ago. "I'll have a
wonderful report to submit when we get back to Earth," he rationalized, in apparent
confidence that all their troubles would pass, and eventually he would make it home
to publish his results. It was a special kind of derangement, without featuring any sign
of stress-atavism or reversion. Tkett still spoke Anglic perfectly. His work was
flawless and his demeanor cheerful. He was pleasant, functional, and mad as a hatter.
Makanee met the sled a kilometer west of the pod, where Tkett pulled up short in
order not to disturb the patients. "Did you find any traces of Peepoe?" she asked when
he cut the engine.
Tkett was a wonderfully handsome specimen of Tursiops amicus, with speckled
mottling along his sleek gray flanks. The permanent dolphin-smile presented twin
rows of perfectly white, conical teeth. While still nestled on the sled's control
platform, Tkett shook his sleek gray head left and right.
"Alas, no. I went about two hundred klicks, following those faint traces we picked
up on deep-range sonar. But it grew clear that the source wasn't Zhaki's sled."
Makanee grunted disappointment. "Then what was it?" Unlike the clamorous sea
of Earth, this fallow planet wasn't supposed to have motor noises permeating its
thermal-acoustic layers.
"At first I started imagining all sorts of unlikely things, like sea monsters, or
Jophur submarines," Tkett answered. "Then the truth hit me."
Brookida nodded nervously, venting bubbles from his blowhole. "Yessssss?"
"It must be a starship. An ancient, piece-of-trash wreck, barely puttering along-"
"Of course!" Makanee thrashed her tail. "Some of the decoys didn't make it into
space."
Tkett murmured ruefully over how obvious it now seemed. When Streaker made
its getaway attempt, abandoning Makanee and her charges on this world, the
earthship fled concealed in a swarm of ancient relics that dolphin engineers had
resurrected from trash heaps on the ocean floor. Though Jijo's surface now was a
fallow realm of savage tribes, the deep underwater canyons still held thousands of
battered, abandoned spacecraft and other debris from when this section of Galaxy
Four had been a center of civilization and commerce. Several dozen of those derelicts
had been reactivated in order to confuse Streaker's foe-a fearsome Jophur battleship-
but some of the hulks must have failed to haul their bulk out of the sea when the time
came. Those failures were doomed to drift aimlessly underwater until their engines
gave out and they tumbled once more to the murky depths.
As for the rest, there had been no word whether Streaker'?, ploy succeeded
beyond luring the awful dreadnought away toward deep space. At least Jijo seemed a
friendlier place without it. For now.
"We should have expected this," the archaeologist continued. "When I got away
from the shoreline surf noise, I thought I could detect at least three of the hulks,
bumping around out there almost randomly. It seems kind of sad, when you think
about it. Ancient ships, not worth salvaging when the Buyur abandoned Jijo, waiting
in an icy, watery tomb for just one last chance to climb back out to space. Only these
couldn't make it. They're stranded here."
"Like us," Makanee murmured.
Tkett seemed not to hear.
"In fact, I'd like to go back out there and try to catch up with one of the derelicts."
"Whatever for?"
Tkett's smile was still charming and infectious . . . which made it seem even
crazier, under these circumstances.
"I'd like to use it as a scientific instrument," the big neo-dolphin said.
Makanee felt utterly confirmed in her diagnosis.
PEEPOE
Captivity wasn't as bad as she had feared.
It was worse.
Among natural, presapient dolphins on Earth, small groups of young males would
sometimes conspire to isolate a fertile female from the rest of the pod, herding her
away for private copulation-especially if she was about to enter heat. By working
together, they might monopolize her matings and guarantee their own reproductive
success, even if she clearly preferred a local alpha-ranked male instead. That ancient
behavior pattern persisted in the wild because, while native Tursiops had both
traditions and a kind of feral honor, they could not quite grasp or carry out the
concept of law-a code that all must live by, because the entire community has a
memory transcending any individual.
But modern, uplifted amicus dolphins did have law! And when young hoodlums
occasionally let instinct prevail and tried that sort of thing back home, the word for it
was rape. Punishment was harsh. As with human sexual predators, just one of the
likely outcomes was permanent sterilization.
Such penalties worked. After three centuries, some of the less desirable primal
behaviors were becoming rare. Yet, uplifted neo-dolphins were still a young race.
Great stress could yank old ways back to the fore, from time to time.
And we Streakers have sure been under stress.
Unlike some devolved crewmates, whose grip on modernity and rational thought
had snapped under relentless pressure, Zhaki and Mopol suffered only partial atavism.
They could still talk and run complex equipment, but they were no longer the polite,
almost shy junior ratings she had met when Streaker first set out from Earth under
Captain Creideiki, before the whole cosmos seemed to implode all around the dolphin
crew.
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.
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.
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 only sleep one brain hemisphere at a time, it was impossible to
take them completely by surprise.
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
shilly 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 grove, 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.
/ think it's getting closer . . . but slowly. The source must still be far away. If I
made 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 till 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 presapient 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 telly.
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
overhunting 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 thingslfishes/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 in 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. Sometimes 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. lt 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 modem 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 midmorning 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 penguinlike seabirds, 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.
So, while the island was still above the horizon behind her, Peepoe stopped
slinking along silently below and instead began her dash for freedom in earnest-
racing toward the sun with an endless series of powerful back archings and fluke-
strokes, going deep only occasionally to check her bearings against the far-off
droning sound.
It felt exhilarating to slice through the wavetops, flexing her body for all it was
worth. Peepoe remembered the last time she had raced along this way-with Kaa by
her side-when Jijo's waters had seemed warm, sweet, and filled with possibilities.
Although she kept low-frequency sonar clickings to a minimum, she did allow
herself some short-range bursts, checking ahead for obstacles and toying with the
surrounding water, bouncing reflections off patches of sun-driven convection, letting
echoes wrap themselves around her like rippling memories. Peepoe's sonic
transmissions remained soft and close-no louder than the vibrations given off by her
kicking tail-but the patterns grew more complex as her mind settled into the rhythms
of movement. Before long, returning wavelets of her own sound meshed with those of
current and tide, overlapping to make phantom sonar images.
Most of these were vague shapes, like the sort that one felt swarming at the edges
of a dream. But in time several fell together, merging into something larger. The
composite echo seemed to bend and thrust when she did-as if a spectral companion
now swam nearby, where her squinting eye saw only sunbeams in an empty sea.
Kaa, she thought, recognizing a certain unique zest whenever the wraith's bottle
nose flicked through the waves.
Among dolphins, you did not have to die in order to come back as a ghost . . .
though it helped. Sometimes the only thing required was vividness of spirit-and Kaa
surely was, or had been, vivid.
Or perhaps the nearby sound-effigy fruited solely from Peepoe's eager
imagination.
In fact, dolphin logic perceived no contradiction between those two explanations.
Kaa's essence might really be there-and not be---at the same time. Whether real or
mirage, she was glad to have her lover back where he belonged-by her side.
I've missed you, she thought.
Anglic wasn't a good language for phantoms. No human grammar was. Perhaps
that explained why the poor bipeds so seldom communed with their beloved lost.
Peepoe's visitor answered in a more ambiguous, innately delphin style.
摘要：

TemptationbyDavidBrinIntroductionSomepeoplesayyoucan'thaveeverything.Forinstance,ifastoryoffersactio...

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