David Brin - Uplift 2 - Startide Rising

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Startide Rising

David Brin

1983

Prologue

FROM THE JOURNAL OF GILLIAN BASKIN

Streaker is limping like a dog on three legs.

We took a chancy jump through overdrive yesterday, a step ahead of the

Galactics who are chasing us. The one probability coil that had survived the

Morgran battle groaned and complained, but finally delivered us here, to the

shallow gravity well of a small population-11 dwarf star named Kthsemenee.

The Library lists one habitable world in orbit, the planet Kithrup.

When I say "habitable," it's with charity. Tom, Hikahi, and I spent hours with

the captain, looking for alternatives. In the end, Creideiki decided to bring

us here.

As a physician, I dread landing on a planet as insidiously dangerous as this

one, but Kithrup is a water world, and our mostly-dolphin crew needs water to

be able to move about and repair the ship. Kithrup is rich in heavy metals,

and should have the raw materials we need.

It also has the virtue of being seldom visited. The Library says it's been

fallow for a very long time. Maybe the Galactics won't think to look for us

here.

I said as much to Tom last night, as he and I held hands and watched the

planet's disc grow larger in one of the lounge ports. It's a deceptively

lovely blue globe, swathed in bands of white clouds. The night side was lit in

patches by dimly glowing volcanoes and flickering lightning.

I told Tom that I was sure no one would follow us here-pronouncing the

prediction confidently, and fooling nobody. Tom smiled and said nothing,

humoring my bout of wishful thinking.

They'll look here, of course. There were only a few interspatial paths

Streaker could have taken without using a transfer point. The only question

is, can we get our repairs finished in time, and get away from here before the

Galactics come for us?

Tom and I had a few hours to ourselves, our first in days. We went back to our

cabin and made love.

While he sleeps, I'm making this entry. I don't know when I'll have another

chance.

Captain Creideiki just called. He wants both of us up on the bridge, I suppose

so the fins can see us and know their human patrons are nearby. Even a

competent dolphin spacer like Creideiki might feel the need from time to time.

If only we humans had that psychological refuge.

Time to put this down and awaken my tired fellow. But first, I want to jot

down what Tom said to me last night, while we watched Kithrup's stormy seas.

He turned to me, smiled that funny way he does when he thinks of something

ironic, and whistled a brief haiku in dolphin- Trinary.

* The stars shake with storms

* The waters below roll thunder

* Still, are we wet, love?

I had to laugh. Sometimes I think Tom is half dolphin.

PART ONE

Buoyancy

All your better deeds

shall be

in water writ..."

-FRANCIS BEAUMONT and JOHN FLETCHER

Toshio

Fins had been making wisecracks about human beings for thousands of years.

They had always found men terribly funny. The fact that humanity had meddled

with their genes and taught them engineering hadn't done much to change their

attitude.

Fins were still smart-alecks.

Toshio watched the small instrument panel of his seasled, pretending to check

the depth gauge. The sled thrummed along at a constant ten meters below the

surface. There were no adjustments to be made, yet he concentrated on the

panel as Keepiru swam up alongside undoubtedly to start another round of

teasing.

"Little Hands, whistle!" The sleek, gray cetacean did a barrel roll to

Toshio's right, then drew nearer to eye the boy casually. "Whistle us a tune

about shipsss and space and going home!"

Keepiru's voice, echoing from a complex set of chambers under his skull,

rumbled like the groaning of a bassoon. He could just as well have imitated an

oboe, or a tenor sax.

"Well, Little Hands? Where is your sssong?"

Keepiru was making sure the rest of the party could hear. The other fins swam

quietly, but Toshio could tell they were listening. He was glad that Hikahi,

the leader of the expedition, was far ahead, scouting. It would be far worse

if she were here and ordered Keepiru to leave him alone. Nothing Keepiru said

could match the shame of being protected like a helpless child.

Keepiru rolled lazily, belly up, next to the boy's sled, kicking slow fluke

strokes to stay easily abreast of Toshio's machine. In the crystal-clear water

of Kithrup, everything seemed strangely refracted. The coral-like peaks of the

metalmounds shimmered as though mountains seen through the haze of along

valley. Drifting yellow tendrils of dangle-weed hung from the surface.

Keepiru's gray skin had a phosphorescent sheen, and the needle-sharp teeth in

his long, narrow, vee mouth shone with a teasing cruelty that had to be

magnified . . . if not by the water, then by Toshio's own imagination.

How could a fin be so mean?

"Won't you sing for us, Little Hands? Sing us a song that will buy us all

fish-brew when we finally get off this sssocalled planet and find a friendly

port! Whistle to make the Dreamers dream of land!"

Above the tiny whine of his air-recycler, Toshio's ears buzzed with

embarrassment. At any moment, he was sure, Keepiru would stop calling him

Little Hands and start using the new nickname he had chosen: "Great Dreamer."

It was bad enough to be taunted for having made the mistake of whistling when

accompanying an exploration crew of fins-they had greeted his absentminded

melody with razzberries and chittering derision-but to be mockingly addressed

by a title almost always reserved for great musicians or humpback whales . . .

it was almost more than he could bear.

"I don't feel like singing right now, Keepiru. Why don't you go bother

somebody else?" Toshio felt a small sense of victory in managing to keep a

quaver out of his voice.

To Toshio's relief, Keepiru merely squeaked something high and fast in gutter

Trinary, almost Primal Delphin-that in itself a form of insult. Then the

dolphin arched and shot away to surface for air.

The water on all sides was bright and blue. Shimmering Kithrupan fish flicked

past with scaled backs that faceted the light like drifting, frosted leaves.

All around were the various colors and textures of metal. The morning sunshine

penetrated the clear, steady sea to glimmer off the peculiar life forms of

this strange and inevitably deadly world.

Toshio had no eye for the beauty of Kithrup's waters. Hating the planet, the

crippled ship that had brought him here, and the fins who were his fellow

castaways, he drifted into a poignantly satisfying rehearsal of the scathing

retorts he should have said to Keepiru.

"If you're so good, Keepiru, why don't you whistle us up some vanadium!" Or,

"I see no point in wasting a human song on a dolphin audience, Keepiru."

In his imagination the remarks were satisfyingly effective. In the real world,

Toshio knew, he could never say anything like that.

First of all, it was the cetacean, not the anthropoid, whose vocalizings were

legal tender in a quarter of the spaceports in the galaxy. And while it was

the mournful ballads of the larger cousins, the whales, that brought the real

prices, Keepiru's kin could buy intoxicants on any of a dozen worlds merely by

exercising their lungs.

Anyway, it would be a terrible mistake to try to pull human rank on any of the

crew of the Streaker. Old Hannes Suessi, one of the other six humans aboard,

had warned him about that just after they had left Neptune, at the beginning

of the voyage.

"Try it and see what happens," the mechanic had suggested. "They'll laugh so

hard, and so will I, if I have the good luck to be there when you do. Likely

as not, one of them will take a nip at you for good measure! If there's

anything fins don't respect, it's a human who never earned the right, putting

on patron airs."

"But the Protocols. . ." Toshio had started to protest.

"Protocols my left eye! Those rules were set up so humans and chimps and fins

will act in just the right way when Galactics are around. If the Streak gets

stopped by a Soro patrol, or has to ask a Pilan Librarian for data somewhere,

then Dr. Metz or Mr. Orley-or even you or I-might have to pretend we're in

charge . . . because none of those stuffedshirt Eatees would give the time of

day to a race as young as fins are. But the rest of the time we take our

orders from Captain Creideiki.

"Hell, that'd be hard enough-taking brown from a Soro and pretending you like

it because the damned ET is nice enough to admit that humans, at least, are a

bit above the level of fruit flies. Can you imagine how hard it would be if we

actually had to run this ship? What if we had tried to make dolphins into a

nice, well-behaved, slavey client race? Would you have liked that?"

At the time Toshio had shaken his head vigorously. The idea of treating fins

as clients were usually treated in the galaxy was repulsive. His best friend,

Akki, was a fin.

Yet, there were moments like the present, when Toshio wished there were

compensations for being the only human boy on a starship crewed mostly by

adult dolphins.

A starship which wasn't going anywhere at the moment, Toshio reminded himself.

The acute resentment of Keepiru's goading was replaced by the more persistent,

hollow worry that he might never leave the water world of Kithrup and see

home.

* Slow your travel-boy sled-rider

* Exploring pod-does gather hither

* Hikahi comes-we wait here for her

Toshio looked up. Brookida, the elderly dolphin metallurgist, had come up

alongside on the left. Toshio whistled a reply in Trinary.

* Hikahi conies--my sled is stopping

He eased the sled's throttle back.

On his sonar screen Toshio saw tiny echoes converging from the sides and far

ahead. The scouts were returning. He looked up and saw Hist-t and Keepiru

playing at the surface.

Brookida switched to Anglic. Though somewhat shrill and stuttered, it was

still better than Toshio's Trinary. Dolphins, after all, had been modified by

generations of genetic engineering to take up human styles, not the other way

around.

"You've found no t-traces of the needed substances, Toshio?" Brookida asked.

Toshio glanced at the molecular sieve. "No, sir. Nothing so far. This water is

almost unbelievably pure, considering the metal content of the planet's crust.

There are hardly any heavy metal salts at all."

And nothing on the long ssscan?"

"No resonance effects on any of the bands I've been checking, though the noise

level is awfully high. I'm not sure I'd even be able to pick out monopole-

saturated nickel, let alone the other stuff we're looking for. It's like

trying to find that needle in a haystack."

It was a paradox. The planet had metals in superabundance. That was one reason

Captain Creideiki had chosen this world as a refuge. Yet the water was

relatively pure . . . pure enough to allow the dolphins to swim freely,

although some complained of itching, and each would need chelating treatments

when he got back to the ship.

The explanation lay all around them, in the plants and fishes.

Calcium did not make up the bones of Kithrupan life forms. Other metals did.

The water was strained and sieved clean by biological filters. As a result,

the sea shone all around with the bright colors of metal and oxides of metal.

The gleaming dorsal spines of living fish-the silvery seedpods of underwater

plants-all contrasted with the more mundane green of chlorophyllic leaves and

fronds.

Dominating the scenery were the metal-mounds, giant, spongy islands shaped by

millions of generations of coral-like creatures, whose metallo-organic

exoskeletons accumulated into huge, flat-topped mountains rising a few meters

above the mean water mark.

Atop the islands the drill-trees grew, sending their metalripped roots through

each mound to harvest organics and silicates from below. The trees laid a non-

metallic layer on top and created a cavity underneath the metal mound. It was

a strange pattern. Streaker's onboard Library had offered no explanation.

Toshio's instruments had detected clumps of pure tin, mounds of chromium fish

eggs, coral colonies built from a variety of bronze, but so far no convenient,

easily gathered piles of vanadium. No lumps of the special variety of nickel

they sought.

What they needed was a miracle-one which would enable a crew of dolphins, with

the aid of seven humans and a chimpanzee, to repair their ship and get the

hell out of this part of the galaxy before their pursuers caught up with them.

At best, they had a few weeks to get away. The alternative was capture by any

of a dozen not-entirely-rational ET races. At worst it could mean interstellar

war on a scale not seen in a million years.

It all made Toshio feel small, helpless, and very young.

Toshio could hear, faintly, the high-pitched sonar echoes of the returning

scouts. Each distant squeak had its tiny, colored counterpoint on his scanner

screen.

Then two gray forms appeared from the east, diving at last into the gathering

above, cavorting, playfully leaping and biting.

Finally one of the dolphins arched and dove straight down toward Toshio.

"Hikahi's coming and wants the sssled topside," Keepiru chattered quickly,

slurring the words almost into indecipherability. "Try not to get lost on the

way up-p-p-p...

Toshio grimaced as he vented ballast. Keepiru didn't have to make his contempt

so obvious. Even speaking Anglic normally, fins usually sounded as if they

were giving the listener a long series of razzberries.

The sled rose in a cloud of tiny bubbles. When he reached the surface, water

drained along the sides of the sled in long, gurgling rivulets. Toshio locked

the throttle and rolled over to undo his faceplate.

The sudden silence was a relief. The whine of the sled, the pings of the

sonar, and the squeaks of the fins all vanished. The fresh breeze swept past

his damp, straight, black hair and cooled the hot feeling in his ears. It

carried the scents of an alien planet-the pungence of secondary growth on an

older island, the heavy, oily odor of a drill-tree in its peak of activity.

And overlying everything was the slight tang of metal.

It shouldn't harm them, they'd said back at the ship least of all Toshio in

his waterproof suit. Chelating would remove all of the heavy elements one

might reasonably expect to absorb on a scouting trip . . . though no one knew

for sure what other hazards this world might offer.

But if they were forced to stay for months? Years?

In that case the medical facilities of the Streaker would not be able to deal

with the slow accumulation of metals. In time they would start to pray for the

Jophur, or Thennanin, or Soro ships to come and take them away for

interrogation or worse simply to get of a beautiful planet that was slowly

killing them.

It wasn't a pleasant thought to dwell on. Toshio was glad when Brookida

drifted alongside the sled.

"Why did Hikahi have me come up to the surface?" he asked the elderly dolphin.

"I thought I was to stay out of sight below in case there were already spy-

sats overhead."

Brookida sighed. "I suppose she thinkss you need a break. Besides, who could

spot as small a machine as the ssled, with so much metal around?"

Toshio shrugged. "Well, it was nice of Hikahi, anyway. I did need the rest."

Brookida rose up in the water, balancing upon a series of churning tail-

strokes. "I hear Hikahi," he announced. "And here she isss."

Two dolphins came in fast from the north, one light gray in appearance, the

other dark and mottled. Through his headphones Toshio could hear the voice of

the party leader.

* Flame-fluked I-Hikahi call you

* Dorsal listening-ventral doing

* Laugh at my word-but first obey them

* Gather at the sled-and listen!

Hikahi and Ssattatta circled the rest of the party once, then came to rest in

front of the assembled expedition.

Among mankind's gifts to the neo-dolphin had been an expanded repertoire of

facial expression. A mere five hundred years of genetic engineering could not

do for the porpoise what a million years of evolution had done for man. Fins

still expressed most of their feelings in sound and motion. But they were no

longer frozen in what humans had taken (in some degree of truth) to be a grin

of perpetual amusement. Fins were capable now of looking worried. Toshio might

have chosen Hikahi's present expression as a classic example of delphin

chagrin.

"Phip-pit has disappeared," Hikahi announced.

" I heard him cry out, over to the south of me, then nothing. He was searching

for Ssassia, who disappeared earlier in the same direction. We will forego

mapping and metals search to go and find them. All will be issued weaponss."

There was a general sussuration of discontent. It meant the fins would have to

put on the harnesses they had only just had the pleasure of removing, on

leaving the ship. Still, even Keepiru recognized this was urgent business.

Toshio was briefly busy dropping harnesses into the water. They were supposed

to spread naturally into a shape suitable for a dolphin to slip into easily,

but inevitably one or two fins needed help fitting his harness to the small

nerve amplifier socket each had just above his left eye.

Toshio finished the job quickly, with the unconscious ease of long practice.

He was worried about Ssassia, a gentle fin who had always been kind and soft-

spoken to him.

"Hikahi," he said as the leader swam past, "do you want me to call the ship?"

The small gray Tursiops female rose up to face Toshio. "Negative, Ladder-

runner. We obey orders. Spy-Bats may be high already. Set your speed sled to

return on auto if we fail to survive what is in the sssoutheast."

"But no one's seen any big animals..."

"That-t is only one possibility. I want word to get back whatever our doom . .

. should even rescue fever strike us all."

Toshio felt cold at the mention of "rescue fever." He had heard of it, of

course. It was something he had no desire at all to witness.

They set out to the southeast in skirmish formation. The fins took turns

gliding along the surface, then diving to swim alongside Toshio. The ocean

bottom was like an endless series of snake tracks-pitted by strange pock-holes

like deep craters, darkly ominous. In the valleys Toshio could usually see

bottom, a hundred meters or so below, gloomy with dark blue tendrils.

The long ridges were topped at intervals by the shining metal-mounds, like

hulking castles of shimmering, spongy armor. Many were covered with thick,

ivy-like growths in which Kithrupan fishes nested and bred. One metal-mound

appeared to be teetering on the edge of a precipice the cavern dug by its own

tall drill-tree, ready to swallow the entire fortress when the undermining was

done.

The sled's engine hummed hypnotically. Keeping tract: of his instruments was

too simple a task to keep Toshio's mind busy. Without really wishing to, he

found himself thinking. Remembering.

A simple adventure, that's what it had seemed when they had asked him to come

along on the space voyage. He had already taken the jumpers' Oath, so they

knew he was ready to leave his past behind. And they needed a midshipman to

help with hand-eye work on the new dolphin ship.

Streaker was a small exploratory vessel of unique design. There weren't many

finned, oxygen-breathing races flying ships in interstellar space. Those few

used artificial gravity for convenience, and leased members of some client

species to act as crafters and handmen.

But the first dolphin-crewed starship had to be different. It was designed

around a principle which had guided Earthlings for two centuries: "Whenever

possible, keep it simple. Avoid using the science of the Galactics when you

don't understand it."

Two hundred and fifty years after contact with Galactic civilization, mankind

was still struggling to catch up. The

Galactic species which had been using the aeons-old Library since before the

first mammals appeared on Earth-adding to that universal compendium of

knowledge with glacial slownesshad seemed almost god-like to the primitive

Earthmen in their early, lumbering slowships. Earth had a branch Library, now,

supposedly giving her access to all of the wisdom accumulated over Galactic

history. But only in recent years had it proven to be much more a help than a

confusing hindrance.

Streaker, with its complex arrangements of centrifugally held pools and

weightless workshops, must have seemed incredibly archaic to the aliens who

had looked it over just before launch. Still, to Earth's neo-dolphin

communities, she was an object of great pride.

After her shakedown cruise, Streaker stopped at the small human-dolphin colony

of Calafia to pick up a few of the best graduates of its tiny academy. It was

to be Toshio's first, and possibly last, visit to old Earth.

"Old Earth" was still home to ninety percent of humanity, not to mention the

other terrestrial sapient races. Galactic tourists still thronged in to gawk

at the home of the enfants terribles who had caused such a stir in a few brief

centuries. They were open in their wagering over how long Mankind would

survive without the protection of a patron.

All species had patrons, of course. Nobody reached spacefaring intelligence

without the intervention of another spacefaring race. Had not men done this

for chimps and dolphins? All the way back to the time of the Progenitors, the

mythical first race, every species that spoke and flew spaceships had been

raised up by a predecessor. No species still survived from that distant era,

but the civilization the Progenitors established, with its all-encompassing

Library, went on.

Of the fate of the Progenitors themselves there were many legends and even

violently contradicting religions.

Toshio wondered, as just about everyone had for three hundred years, what the

patrons of Man might have been like. If they ever existed. Might they even be

one of the species of fanatics that had ambushed the unsuspecting Streaker,

and even now sought her out like hounds after a fox?

It wasn't a pleasant line of thought, considering what the Streaker had

discovered.

The Terragens Council sent her out to join a scattered fleet of exploration

vessels, checking the veracity of the Library. So far only a few minor gaps

had been found in its thoroughness. Here a star misplaced. There a species

miscatalogued. It was like finding that someone had written a list describing

every grain of sand on a beach. You could never check the complete list in a

thousand lifetimes of a race, but you could take a random sampling.

Streaker had been poking through a small gravitational tide pool, fifty

thousand parsecs off the galactic plane, when she found the Fleet.

Toshio sighed at the unfairness of it. One hundred and fifty dolphins, seven

humans, and a chimpanzee; how could we have known what we found?

Why did we have to find it?

Fifty thousand ships, each the size of a moon. That's what they found. The

dolphins had been thrilled by their discovery-the biggest Derelict Fleet ever

encountered, apparently incredibly ancient. Captain Creideiki had psicast to

Earth for instructions.

Dammit! Why did he call Earth? Couldn't the report have waited until we'd gone

home? Why let the whole eavesdropping galaxy know you'd found a Sargasso of

ancient hulks in the middle of nowhere?

The Terragens Council had answered in code.

"Go into hiding. Await orders. Do not reply."

Creideiki obeyed, of course. But not before half the patron-lines in the

galaxy had sent out their warships to find Streaker.

Toshio blinked.

Something. A resonance echo at last? Yes, the magnetic ore detector showed a

faint echo toward the south. He concentrated on the receiver, relieved at last

to have something to do. Self-pity was becoming a bore.

Yes. It would have to be a pretty fair deposit. Should he tell Hikahi?

Naturally, the search for the missing crewfen came first, but . . .

A shadow fell across him. The party was skirting the edge of a massive metal-

mound. The copper-colored mass was covered with thick tendrils of some green

hanging growth.

"Don't go too close, Little Hands," Keepiru whistled from Toshio's left. Only

Keepiru and the sled were this close to the mound. The other fins were giving

it a wide berth.

"We know nothing of this flora," Keepiru continued. "And it'ss near here that

Phip-pit was lost. You should stay safe within our convoy." Keepiru rolled

lazily past Toshio, keeping up with languid fluke strokes. The neatly folded

arms of his harness gleamed a coppery reflection from the metal-mound.

"Then it's all the more important to get samples, isn't it?" Toshio replied in

irritation. "It's what we're out here for, anyway!" Without giving Keepiru

time to react, Toshio banked the sled toward the shadowy mass of the mound.

Toshio dove into a region of darkness as the island blocked off the afternoon

sunlight. A drifting school of silverbacked fish seemed to explode away from

him as he drove at an angle along the thick, fibrous weed.

Keepiru squeaked in startlement behind him, an oath in Primal Delphin, which

showed the fin's distress. Toshio smiled.

The sled hummed cooperatively as the mound loomed like a mountain on his

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StartideRisingDavidBrin1983PrologueFROMTHEJOURNALOFGILLIANBASKINStreakerislimpinglikeadogonthreelegs.Wetookachancyjumpthroughoverdriveyesterday,astepaheadoftheGalacticswhoarechasingus.TheoneprobabilitycoilthathadsurvivedtheMorgranbattlegroanedandcomplained,butfinallydeliveredushere,totheshallowgravi...

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