"Brin, David - Uplift 02 - Startide Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

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-II 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 FLETCH

1 ::: 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 metal-mounds 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 Dolphin -- 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 comes -- 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 off 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 dolphin 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-sats 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 ..."

"Thatt 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 track 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 slowness had 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 Dolphin, which showed the fin's distress. Toshio smiled.

The sled hummed cooperatively as the mound loomed like a mountain on his right. Toshio banked and grabbed at the nearest flash of green. There was a satisfying snapping sensation as his sample came free in his hand. No fin could do that! He flexed his fingers appreciatively, then twisted about to stuff the clump into a collection sack.

Toshio looked up and saw that the green mass, instead of receding, was closer than ever. Keepiru's squawling was louder.

Crybaby! Toshio thought. So I let the controls drift for a second. So what? I'll be back in your damned convoy before you finish making up a cuss-poem.

He steepened his leftward bank and simultaneously set his bow planes to rise. In a moment he realized it was a tactical mistake. For it slowed him down just enough for the cluster of pursuing tendrils to reach his sled.

There must have been larger sea creatures on Kithrup than the party had seen so far, for the tentacles that fell about Toshio were obviously meant to catch big prey.

"Oh, Koino-Anti! Now I've done it!" He pushed the throttle over to maximum and braced for the expected surge of power.

Power came ... but not acceleration. The sled groaned, stretching the long, ropy strands. But forward movement was lost. Then the engine died. Toshio felt a slithery presence across his legs, then another. The tendrils began to tighten and pull.

Gasping, he managed to twist around onto his back, and groped for the knife sheathed at his thigh. The tendrils were sinuous and knotty. The knots clung to whatever they touched, and when one brushed against the back of Toshio's exposed left hand the boy cried out from the searing pain of contact.

The fins were crying out to each other, and there were sounds of vigorous movement not far away. But other than a brief hope that nobody else was caught, Toshio had little time to think of anything but the fight at hand.

The knife came free, gleaming like hope. And hope brought hope as two small strands parted under his slashing attack. Another, larger, one, took several seconds to saw through. It was replaced almost instantly by two more.

Then he saw the place to which he was being drawn.

A deep gash split the side of the metal-mound. Inside, a writhing mass of filaments awaited. Deep within, a dozen meters farther up, something sleek and gray lay already enmeshed in a forest of deceptively languid foliage.

Toshio felt open-mouthed steam fill his facemask. The reflection of his own eyes, dilated and stricken, was superimposed on the motionless figure of Ssassia. Gentle as her life had been, though not her death, the tide rocked her.

With a cry, Toshio resumed hacking. He wanted to call out to Hikahi-to let the party leader know of Ssassia's fate -- but all that came out was a roar of loathing of the Kithrupan creeper. Leaves and fronds flew off through the churning water as he sliced out his hatred, but to little good, as the tendrils fell more numerous about him to draw him toward the gash.

* Ladder climber -- Sharp-eyed rhymer *

* Call a fix -- for seeking finders *

* Trill sonar -- through the leaf blinders *

Hikahi calling.

Above the churning of his struggle and the hoarseness of his breath, Toshio could hear the combat sounds of dolphin teamwork. Quick trills of Trinary, unslowed for human ears except for that one brief command, and the whining of their harnesses.

"Here! Here I am!" He slashed at a leafy vine that threatened his air hose, barely missing the hose itself. He licked his lips and tried to whistle in Trinary.

* Holding off -- the sea-squid's beak *

* Suckers tight -- and outlook bleak *

* Havoc done -- on Ssassia wreaked! *

Lousy form and rhythm, but the fins would hear it better than they would a shout in Anglic. After only forty generations of sapience, they still thought better in an emergency when using whistle rhyme.

Toshio could hear the sounds of combat coming closer. But, as if hurried by the threat, the tentacles began drawing him back more rapidly, toward the gash. Suddenly a suckercovered strand wrapped itself around his right arm. Before he could shift his grip, one of the burning knots reached his hand. He screamed and tore the tendril away, but the knife was lost into the darkness.

Other filaments were falling all about him. At that moment Toshio became distantly aware that someone was talking to him slowly, and in Anglic!

" ... says there are ships out there! Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim wants to know why Hikahi hasn't sent a monopulse confirmation ..."

It was Akki's voice, calling from the ship! Toshio couldn't answer his friend. The switch for the sled radio was out of reach, and he was a bit preoccupied.

"Don't respond to this message," Akki went on obligingly. Toshio moaned at the irony as he tried to pry a tendril off his facemask without doing further insult to his hands. "Just transmit a monopulse and come on back-k, all of you. We think there's a space battle going on over Kithrup. Probably those crazy ETs followed us here and are fighting over the right to capture us, just like at Morgran.

"Gotta c-close up, now. Radio silence. Get back as soon as you can. Akki out."

Toshio felt a tendril seize hold of his air hose. A solid grip, this time.

"Sure, Akki, old friend," he grunted as he pulled at it. "I'll be going home just as soon as the universe lets me."

The air hose was crimped shut, and there was nothing he could do. Fog filled his facemask. As he felt himself blacking out, Toshio thought he saw the rescue party arrive, but he couldn't be sure if it was real or a hallucination. He wouldn't have expected Keepiru to lead the charge, for instance, or for that fin to have such a ferocious demeanor, heedless of the burning suckers.

In the end, he decided it was a dream. The laser flashes were too bright, the saser tones too clear. And the party came toward him with pennants waving in their wake like the cavalry that five centuries of Anglic-speaking man had come to associate with the image of rescue.

2 ::: Galactics

On a ship in the center of a feet of ships, a phase of denial was passing.

Giant cruisers spilled out of a rent in space, to fall toward the pinpoint brilliance of a non-descript reddish sun. One by one, they tumbled from the luminous tear. With them came diffracted starlight from their point of departure, hundreds of parsecs away.

There were rules that should have prevented it. The tunnel was an unnatural way to pass from place to place. It took a strong will to deny nature and call into being such an opening in space.

The Episiarch, in its outraged rejection of What Is, had created the passage for its Tandu masters. The opening was held by the adamant power of its ego -- by its refusal to concede anything at all to Reality.

When the last ship was through, the Episiarch was purposely distracted, and the hole collapsed with soundless violence. In moments, only instruments could tell that it had ever been. The affront to physics was erased.

The Episiarch had brought the Tandu armada to the target star well ahead of the other fleets, those who would challenge the Tandu for the right to capture the Earth ship. The Tandu sent impulses of praise to the Episiarch's pleasure centers. It howled and waved its great furry head in gratitude.

To the Tandu, an obscure and dangerous form of travel had once again proved worth the risks. It was good to arrive on the battlefield before the enemy. The added moments would give them a tactical edge.

The Episiarch only wanted things to deny. Its task now finished, it was returned to its chamber of delusions, to alter an endless chain of surrogate realities until its outrage was needed by the Masters once again. Its shaggy, amorphous shape rolled free of the sensory web, and it shambled off, escorted by wary guardians.

When the way was clear, the Acceptor entered, and climbed on spindly legs to its place within the web.

For a long moment it appraised Reality, embracing it. The Acceptor probed and touched and caressed this new region of space with its farflung senses. It gave out a crooning cry of pleasure.

"Such leakage!" the Acceptor joyously announced. "I had heard the hunted were sloppy sophonts, but they leak even as they scan for danger! They have hidden on the second planet. Only slowly do the edges of their psychic shields congeal to hide from me their exact location. Who were their masters, to teach these dolphins so well to be prey?"

"Their masters are the humans, themselves unfinished," the Leading Stalker of the Tandu replied. Its voice was a rhythmic pattern of rapid clicks and pops from the ratchet joints of its mantis-legs. "The Earthlings are tainted by wrong belief, and by the shame of their own abandonment. The noise of three centuries shall be quieted when they are eaten. Then our hunter's joy will be as yours is, when you witness a new place or thing."

"Such joy," the Acceptor agreed.

"Now stir to get details," the Stalker commanded. "Soon we do battle with heretics. I must tell your fellow clients their tasks."

The Acceptor turned in the web as the Stalker left, and opened its feelings to this new patch of reality. Everything was good. It passed on reports of what it saw, and the Masters moved the ships in response, but with the larger part of its mind it appreciated ... it accepted ... the tiny red sun, each of its small planets, the delicious expectancy of a place soon to become a battlefield.

Soon it felt the other war fleets enter the system, each in its own peculiar way. Each took a slightly inferior position, forced by the early arrival of the Tandu.

The Acceptor sensed the lusts of warrior clients and the cool calculations of calmer elders. It caressed the slickness of mind shields rigidly held against it, and wondered what went on within them. It appreciated the openness of other combatants, who disdainfully cast their thoughts outward, daring the listener to gather in their broadcast contempt.

It swept up savage contemplations of the Acceptor's own annihilation, as the great fleets plunged toward each other and bright explosions began to flash.

The Acceptor took it all in joyfully. How could anyone feel otherwise, when the universe held such wonders?

3 ::: Takkata-Jim

High in the port quarter of Streaker's spherical control room, a psi operator thrashed in her harness. Her flukes made a turmoil of the water, and she cried out in Trinary.

* The inky, eight-armed, squid-heads find us! *

* Ripping pods of them do battle! *

The operator's report confirmed the discovery made by the neutrino detector only minutes before. It was a litany of bad news, related in trance-verse.

* They scream and lust --

     To win and capture ... *

From another station came a calmer bulletin in dolphin accented Anglic.

"We're getting heavy graviton traffic, Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim. Gravitational disturbances confirm a major battle is forming up not far from the planet-t."

The executive officer of the Streaker listened to the report quietly, letting himself drift sideways slightly in the circulating currents of the command center. A stream of bubbles emerged from his blowhole as he inhaled some of the special fluid that filled the ship's bridge.

"Acknowledged," he said at last. Underwater, his voice was a muted buzz. The consonants came out slurred. "How far away is the nearest contact?"

"Five AU, sssir. They couldn't get here for at leasst an hour, even if they came hell-bent."

"Hmmm. Very well, then. Remain in condition yellow. Continue your observationsss, Akeakemai."

The vice-captain was unusually large for a neo-fin, thickbodied and muscular where most of the others were sleek and narrow. His uneven gray coloring and jagged teeth were marks of the Stenos sub-racial line, setting him and a number of others aboard apart from the Tursiops majority.

The human next to Takkata-Jim was impassive as the bad news came. It only confirmed what he had already feared.

"We had better inform the captain, then," Ignacio Metz said. The words were amplified by his facemask into the fizzing water. Bubbles floated away from the tall human's sparse gray hair.

"I warned Creideiki this would happen if we tried eluding the Galactics. I only hope he decides to be reasonable, now that escape's become impossible."

Takkata-Jim opened and closed his foodmouth diagonally, an emphatic nod.

"Yesss, Doctor Metz. Now even Creideiki must recognize that you were right. We're cornered now, and the captain will have no choice but to listen to you."

Metz nodded, gratified. "What about Hikahi's team? Have they been told?"

"I've already ordered the prospecting party back. Even the sled might be too much of a risssk. If the Eatees are already in orbit they might have means to detect it." "Extraterrestrials ..." Metz corrected, automatically professorial. "The term 'Eatee' is hardly polite."

Takkata-Jim kept an impassive face. He was in command of the ship and its crew while the captain was off watch. Yet the human treated him like a fresh-weaned pupil. It was quite irritating, but Takkata-Jim was careful never to let Metz know how much it bothered him. "Yes, Dr. Metz," he said.

The man went on. "Hikahi's party should never have left the ship. I warned Tom Orley that something like this might happen. Young Toshio's out there ... and all those crewfen, out of contact with us for so long. It would be terrible if anything happened to them!"

Takkata-Jim felt he knew what was really on Metz's mind. The human was probably thinking about how terrible it would be if any of Streakers crew got themselves killed away from his sight ... out where he was unable to judge how they behaved for his behavioral and genetic studies. "If only Creideiki had listened to you, sssir," he repeated. "You always have so much to say."

It was a little chancy, but if the human ever saw through Takkata-Jim's respectful mask to the core of sarcasm, he never gave it away.

"Well, it's nice of you to say so, Takkata-Jim. And very perceptive. I know you have many things to do now, so I'll find a free comm line and awaken Creideiki for you. I'll break the news gently that our pursuers have followed us to Kithrup."

Takkata-Jim gave the human a deferential nod from high body stance. "That-t is kind of you, Doctor Metz. You do me a favor."

Metz patted the lieutenant on his rough flank, as if to reassure him. Takkata-Jim bore the patronizing gesture with outward calm, and watched as the human turned to swim away.

The bridge was a fluid-filled sphere which bulged slightly from the bow of the cylindrical ship. The main ports of the command center looked out into a murky scene of ocean ridges, sediment, and drifting sea creatures.

The crew's web-lined work stations were illuminated by small spotlights. Most of the chamber lay in quiet shadows, as the elite bridge personnel carried out their tasks quickly and almost silently. The only sounds, other than the swish and fizz of recycling oxywater, were the intermittent click of sonar pulses and terse, professional comments from one operator to another.

Give Creideiki his due, Takkata-Jim told himself. He has crafted a finely tuned machine in this bridge crew.

Of course, dolphins were less consistent than humans. You couldn't tell in advance what might cause a neo-fin to start unraveling until you saw him perform under stress. This bridge crew performed as well as any he had ever seen, but would it be enough?

If they had overlooked a single radiation or psi leak, the ETs would be down on them quicker than orcas upon harbor seals.

The fins out there in the prospecting team were safer than their comrades aboard ship, Takkata-Jim thought somewhat bitterly. Metz was a fool to worry about them. They were probably having a wonderful time!

Takkata-Jim tried to recall swimming free in an ocean, without a harness, and breathing natural air. He tried to recall diving in deep water, the deep water of the Stenos, where the big-mouthed, smart-aleck, shore-hugging Tursiops were rare as dugongs.

"Akki," he called to the E. L. E radio operator, the young dolphin midshipman from Calafia. "Have you received confirmation from Hikahi? Did she get the recall?"

The colonial was a small Tursiops variant of yellowish-gray coloration. Akki replied with some hesitation. He still wasn't used to breathing and speaking in oxywater. It required a very odd dialect of Underwater Anglic.

"I'm ... sh-sorry, Vice-Captain, but there's no reply. I checked for a monopulse on all ... ch-channels. There's been nothing."

Takkata-Jim tossed his head in irritation. Hikahi might have decided that even a monopulse reply would be too much risk. Still, confirmation would have taken from his back an unpleasant decision.

"Mm-m-m, sir?" Akki tipped his head down and lowered his tail in respect.

"Yess?"

"Ah ... shouldn't we repeat the message? There's a chance they were distracted and missed it the firsh ... first time ..."

Like all dolphins from the colony planet Calafia, Akki was proud of his cultured Anglic. It apparently bothered him to have trouble with such simple sentences.

That suited the vice-captain fine. If there was one Anglic word that translated perfectly into Trinary, it was "smartass." Takkata-Jim didn't care for smartass midshipmen.

"No, comm-operator. We have our orders. If the captain wants to try again when he gets here, he's welcome. Meantime, attend your possst."

"Heth ... er, aye aye, shir." The young dolphin spun about to return to his station, where he could breathe from an airdome instead of gulping water like a fish. There he could speak like a normal person while he awaited word from his closest friend, the human middie out in the wide, alien ocean.

Takkata-Jim wished the captain would come soon. The control room felt closed and dead. Breathing the fizzing, gas-charged oxywater always left him tired at the end of his shift. It never seemed to provide enough oxygen. His supplementary gill-lungs itched with the irritation of defied instinct, and the pills -- the ones that forced extra oxygen into his system through his intestines -- always gave him heartburn.

Once again he caught sight of Ignacio Metz. The whitehaired scientist clutched a stanchion, with his head thrust under a comm airdome to call Creideiki. When he finished he would probably want to hang around. The man was always hovering nearby, watching ... always making him feel he was being tested.

"I need a human ally," Takkata-Jim reminded himself. Dolphins were in command of Streaker, but the crew seemed to obey an officer more rapidly if he appeared to have the confidence of one of the patron race. Creideiki had Tom Orley. Hikahi had Gillian Baskin. Brookida's human companion was the engineer, Suessi.

Metz would have to be Takkata-Jim's human. Fortunately, the man could be manipulated.

The reports on the space battle were coming in faster on the data displays. It seemed to be turning into a real conflagration over the planet. At least five big fleets were involved.

Takkata-Jim resisted the sudden urge to turn and bite something, to lash out hard with his flukes. What he wanted was something to fight! Something palpable, instead of this hanging pall of dread!

After weeks of fleeing, Streaker was trapped at last. What new trick would Creideiki and Orley come up with to get them away this time?

What if they failed to come up with a plan? Or worse, what if they contrived some squid-brained scheme that could only get them all killed? What would he do then?

Takkata-Jim mulled over the problem to keep his mind busy while he waited for the captain to come and relieve him.

4 ::: Creideiki

It had been his first really restful sleep in weeks. Naturally, it had to be interrupted.

Creideiki was used to taking his rest in zero gee, suspended in moist air. But as long as they were in hiding, anti-gravity beds were banned, and sleeping in liquid was the only other way for a dolphin.

He had tried for a week to breathe oxywater all through his rest period. The results had been nightmares and exhausting dreams of suffocation.

The ship's surgeon, Makanee, had suggested he try sleeping in the old-fashioned way, drifting at the surface of a pool of water.

Creideiki decided to try Makanee's alternative. He made sure that there was a big air-gap at the top of his state-room. Then he verified three times that the redundant oxygen alarms were all in perfect order. Finally, he shrugged out of his harness, turned off the lights, rose to the surface and expelled the oxywater in his gill-lung.

That part was a relief. Still, at first he just lay at the air-gap near the overhead, his mind racing and his skin itching for the touch of his tool harness. It was an irrational itch, he knew. Pre-spaceflight humans, in their primitive, neurotic societies, must have felt the same way about nudity.

Poor Homo sapiens! Mankind's histories showed such suffering during those awkward millennia of adolescence before Contact, when they were ignorant and cut off from Galactic society.

Meanwhile, Creideiki thought, dolphins had been in almost a state of grace, drifting in their corner of the Whale Dream. When men finally achieved a type of adulthood, and started lifting the higher creatures of Earth to join them, dolphins of the amicus strain moved fairly easily from one honorable condition to another.

We have our own problems, he reminded himself. He badly wanted to scratch the base of his amplifier socket, but there was no way to reach it without his harness.

He floated at the surface, in the dark, awaiting sleep. It was sort of restful, tiny wavelets lapping against the smooth skin above his eyes. And real air was definitely more relaxing to breathe than oxywater.

But he couldn't escape a vague unease over sinking ... as if it would harm him any to sink in oxywater ... as if millions of other dolphins hadn't slept this way all their lives.

Disconcerting was his spacer's habit of looking up. The ceiling bulkhead was inches away from the tip of his dorsal fin. Even when he closed his eyes, sonar told him of the nearness of enclosure. He could no more sleep without sending out echolocation clicks than a chimp could nap without scratching himself.

Creideiki snorted. Beach himself if he'd let a shipboard requirement give him insomnia! He blew emphatically and began to count sonar clicks. He started with a tenor rhythm, then slowly built a fugue as he added deeper elements to the sleep-song.

Echoes spread from his brow and diffracted about the small chamber. The notes drifted over one another, overlapping softly in faint whines and basso growls. They created a sonic structure, a template of otherness. The right combinations, he knew, would make the walls themselves seem to disappear.

Deliberately, he peeled away the duty-rigor of Keneenk -- welcoming a small, trusted portion of the Whale Dream.

* When the patterns --

     In the cycloid

* Call in whispers --

     Soft remembered

* Murmuring of --

     Songs of dawning

* And of the Moon --

     The sea-tide's darling

* Then the patterns --

     In the cycloid

* Call in whispers --

     Soft remembered ... *

The desk, the cabinets, the walls, were covered under false sonic shadows. His chant began to open on its own accord a rich and very physical poetry of crafted reflections.

Floating things seemed to drift past, tiny tail-flicks of schools of dream creatures. The echoes opened up space around him, as if the waters went on forever.

* And the Dream Sea,

     Everlasting

* Calls in whispers

     Soft remembered ... *

Soon he felt a presence nearby, congealing gradually out of reflections of sound.

She formed slowly next to him as his engineer's consciousness let go ... the shadow of a goddess. Then Nukapai floated beside him ... a ghost of ripples, ribbed by motes of sound. The black sleekness of her body passed back into the darkness, unhindered by a bulkhead that seemed no longer there.

Vision faded. The waters darkened all around Creideiki, and Nukapai became more than just a shadow, a passive recipient of his song. Her needle teeth shone, and she sang his own sounds back to him.

* With the closeness --

     Of the waters

* In an endless --

     Layer of Dreaming

* As the humpback --

     Older sibling

* Sings songs to the --

     Serious fishes

* Here you find me --

     Wandering brother

* Even in this --

     Human rhythm

* Where the humans

     And other walkers

* Give mirth to ---

     The stars themselves ... *

A type of bliss settled over him as his heartbeat slowed. Creideiki slept next to the gentle dream-goddess. She chided him only teasingly for being an engineer, and for dreaming her in the rigid, focused verse of Trinary rather than the chaotic Primal of his ancestors.

She welcomed him to the Threshold Sea, where Trinary sufficed, where he felt only faintly the raging of the Whale Dream and the ancient gods who dwelt there. It was as much of that ocean as an engineer's mind could accept.

How rigid the Trinary verse sometimes seemed! The patterns of overlapping tones and symbols were almost human precise ... almost human-narrow.

He had been brought up to think those terms compliments. Parts of his own brain had been gene-designed along human lines. But now and then chaotic sound-images slipped in, teasing him with a hint of ancient singing.

Nukapai clicked sympathetically. She smiled ...

No! She did no such land-ape thing! Of cetaceans, only the neo-dolphin "smiled" with their mouths.

Nukapai did something else. She stroked against his side, gentlest of goddesses, and told him,

* Be now at peace *

* It is That is ... *

* And engineers *

* Far from the ocean *

* Can hear it still *

The tension of several weeks at last broke, and he slept. Creideiki's breath gathered in glistening condensation on the ceiling bulkhead. The breeze from a nearby air duct brushed the droplets, which shuddered, then fell on the water like gentle rain.

When the image of Ignacio Metz formed a meter to his right, Creideiki was slow to become aware of it.

"Captain ..." the image said. "I'm calling from the bridge. I am afraid the Galactics have found us here sooner than we expected ..."

Creideiki ignored the little voice that tried to call him back to deeds and battles. He lingered in a waving forest of kelp fronds, listening to long night sounds. Finally, it was Nukapai herself who nudged him from his dream. Fading beside him, she gently reminded,

# Duty, duty -- honor is, is --

     Honor, Creideiki -- alertly

# Shared, is -- Honor #

Nukapai alone could speak Primal to Creideiki with impunity. He could no more ignore the dream-goddess than his own conscience. One eye at last focused on the hologram of the insistent human, and the words penetrated.

"Thank you, Doctor Metz," he sighed. "Tell Takkata-Jim I'll be right-t there. And please page Tom Orley. I'd like to see him on the bridge. Creideiki out."

He inhaled deeply for a few moments, letting the room come back into shape around him. Then he twisted and dove to retrieve his harness.

5 ::: Tom Orley

A tall, dark-haired man swung one-handed from the leg of a bed, a bed that was bolted to the floor in an upside-down room. The floor slanted over his head. His left foot rested precariously on the bottom of a drawer pulled from one of the inverted wall cabinets.

At the sudden yellow flash of the alert light, Tom Orley whirled and grabbed at his holster with his free hand. His needler was half-drawn before he recognized the source of the disturbance. He cursed slowly and re-holstered the weapon. Now what was the emergency? He could think of a dozen possibilities, offhand, and here he was, hanging by one arm in the most awkward part of the ship!

"I initiate contact, Thomas Orley."

The voice seemed to come from above his right ear. Tom changed his grip on the bed leg to turn around. An abstract three-dimensional pattern swirled a meter away from his face, like multicolored motes caught in a dust devil.

"I suppose you would like to know of the cause of the alarm. Is this correct?"

"You're damned right I do!" he snapped. `Are we under attack?"

"No." The colored images shifted. "This ship is not yet assailed, but Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim has announced an alert. At least five intruder fleets are now in the neighborhood of Kithrup. These squadrons appear now to be in combat not far from the planet."

Orley sighed. "So much for quick repairs and a getaway." He hadn't thought it likely that their hunters would let them escape again. The damaged Streaker had left a noisy trail behind her when she slipped away from the confusion of the ambush at Morgran.

Tom had been helping the crew in the engine room repair Streaker's stasis generator. They had just finished the part calling for detailed hand-eye work, and the moment had come to steal away to the deserted section of the dry-wheel where the Niss computer had been hidden.

The dry-wheel was a band of workrooms and cabins that spun freely when the ship was in space, providing pseudogravity for the humans aboard. Now it was still. This section of upside-down corridors and cabins was abandoned in the inconvenient gravity of the planet.

The privacy suited Tom, though the topsy-turvy arrangement was irksome.

"You weren't to announce yourself unless I switched you on manually," he said. "You were to wait for my thumbprint and voice i.d. before letting on you were anything but a standard comm."

The swirling patterns took on a cubist style. The machine's voice sounded unperturbed. "Under the circumstances, I took the liberty. If I erred, I am prepared to accept discipline up to level three. Punishment of a higher order will be considered unjustified and be rejected with prejudice."

Tom allowed himself an ironic smile. The machine would run him in circles if he let it, and he would gain nothing by asserting his titular mastery over it. The Tymbrimi spy who had lent the Niss to him had made it clear that the machine's usefulness was partly based upon its flexibility and initiative, however irritating it became.

"I'll take the level of your error under advisement," he told the Niss. "Now, what can you tell me about the present situation?"

"A vague question. I can access the ship's battle computers for you. But that might entail an element of risk."

"No, you'd better not do that quite yet." If the Niss tried to inveigle the battle computer during an alert, Creideiki's bridge crew might notice. Tom assumed Creideiki knew about the presence of the Niss aboard his ship, just as the captain knew that Gillian Baskin had her own secret project. But the dolphin commander kept quiet about it, leaving the two of them to their work.

"All right, then. Can you patch me through to Gillian?"

The holo danced with blue specks. "She is alone in her office. I am placing the call."

The motes suddenly faded. They were replaced by the image of a blonde woman in her early thirties. She looked puzzled briefly, then her face brightened with a brilliant smile. She laughed.

"Ali, you're visiting your mechanical friend, I see. Tell me, Tom, what does a sarcastic alien machine have that I don't have? You've never gone head over heels so literally for me."

"Very funny." Still, her attitude relieved his anxiety over the alert. He had been afraid they would be in combat almost immediately. In a week or so, Streaker might be able to make a good accounting of herself before being destroyed or captured. Right now, she had all the punch of a drugged rabbit.

"I take it the Galactics aren't landing yet."

Gillian shook her head. "No, though Makanee and I are standing by in the infirmary just in case. Bridge crew says at least three fleets have popped into space nearby. They immediately started having it out, just like at Morgran. We can only hope they'll annihilate each other."

"Not much hope of that, I'm afraid."

"Well, you're the tactician of the family. Still, it might be weeks before there is a victor to come down after us. There will be deals and last-minute alliances. Well have time to think of something."

Tom wished he could share her optimism. As the family tactician, it was his job to "think of something."

"Well, if the situation's not urgent ..."

"I don't think it is. You can spend a little while longer with your roomie there -- my electronic rival. I'll get even by getting intimate with Herbie."

Tom could only shake his head and let her have her joke. Herbie was a cadaver -- their one tangible prize from the derelict fleet. Gillian had determined that the alien corpse was over two billion years old. The ship's mini-Library seemed to have seizures every time they asked what race it had once belonged to.

"All right, then. Tell Creideiki I'll be right down, okay?"

"Sure, Tom. They're waking him now. I'll tell him I last saw you hanging around somewhere." She gave him a wink and switched off:

Tom watched the place where her image had been, and once again wondered what he had done to deserve a woman like her.

"Out of curiosity, Thomas Orley, I am interested in some of the undertones of this last conversation. Am I right in assuming that some of these mild insults Dr. Baskin conveyed fell into the category of affectionate teasing? My Tymbrimi builders are telempathic, of course, but they, also, seem to indulge in this pastime. Is it part of a mating process? Or is it a friendship test of some sort?"

`A little of both, I guess. Do the Tymbrimi really do the same sort of ..." Tom shook himself. "Never mind about that! My arms are getting tired and I've got to get below quickly. Have you anything else to report?"

"Not of major significance to your survival or mission."

"I take it, then, that you haven't managed to coax the ship's mini-Library to deliver anything on Herbie or the derelict fleet."

The holo flowed into sharp geometries. "That is the main problem, isn't it? Dr. Baskin asked me the same question when she last checked in on me, thirteen hours ago."

"And did you give her any more direct an answer than you're giving me?"

"Finding ways to bypass the access programming on this ship's mini-Library is the reason I was put aboard in the first place. I would tell you if I had succeeded." The machine's disembodied voice was dry enough to desiccate melons. "The Tymbrimi have long suspected that the Library Institute is less than neutral -- that the branch Libraries sold by them are programmed to be deficient in very subtle ways, to put troublesome races at a disadvantage.

"The Tymbrimi have been working on this problem since days when your ancestors wore animal skins, Thomas Orley. It was never expected we would achieve anything more on this trip than a gathering of a few shards of new data, and perhaps elimination of a few minor barriers."

Orley understood how the long-lived machine could take such a patient perspective. Still, he found he resented it. It would be nice to think something had come of all the grief Streaker and her crew had fallen into. "After all the surprises we've encountered, this voyage must have served up more than just a few new bits for you to crunch," he suggested.

"The propensity of Earthlings to get into trouble, and to learn thereby, was the reason my owners agreed to this mad venture in the first place -- although no one ever expected such a chain of unusual calamities as have befallen this ship. Your talents were under-rated."

There was no way to answer that. Tom's arms had begun to hurt. "Well, I'd better get back. In an emergency I'll contact you via ship's comm."

"Of course."

Orley let go and landed in a crouch by the closed doorway, a rectangle high on one steeply sloping wall.

"Dr. Baskin has just passed on word to me that Takkata-Jim has ordered the survey party to return to the ship," the Niss spoke abruptly. "She thought you would want to know"

Orley cursed. Metz might have had a hand in that. How were they to repair the ship if the crew weren't allowed to go looking for the raw materials they needed? Creideiki's strongest reason for coming to Kithrup had been the abundance of pre-refined metals in an oceanic environment accessible to dolphins. If Hikahi's prospectors were called back the danger had to be severe ... or someone was panicking.

Tom turned to go, but paused and looked up. "Niss, we must know what it is the Galactics think we found."

The sparkles were muted. " I have done a thorough search of the open files in this ship's onboard micro-branch Library for any record that might shed light on the mystery of the derelict fleet, Thomas Orley. Aside from a few vague similarities between the patterns we saw on those gigantic hulls and some ancient cult symbols, I can find no support for a hypothesis that the ships we found are in any way connected to the fabled Progenitors."

"But you found nothing to contradict it, either?"

"Correct. The derelicts might or might not be linked with the one legend which binds all oxygen-breathing races in the five galaxies."

"It could be we found huge bits of flotsam of almost no historical significance, then."

"True. At the other extreme, you may have made the biggest archaeological and religious find of the age. The mere possibility helps to explain the battle that is shaping up in this solar system. The refusal of the ship's mini-Library to give more details is indicative of how many of the Galactic cultures feel about events so long ago. So long as this ship is the sole repository of information about the derelict fleet, the survey vessel Streaker remains a great prize, valued by every brand of fanatic."

Orley had hoped the Niss would find evidence to make their discovery innocuous. Such proof might have been used to get the ETs to leave them alone. But if the derelict fleet was really as important as it seemed, Streaker would have to find a way to get the information to Earth, and let wiser heads figure out what to do with it.

"You just keep contemplating, then," he told the Niss. "Meanwhile I'll do my best to see that the Galactics stay off our backs. Now, can you tell me ..."

"Of course I can," the Niss interrupted again. "The corridor outside is clear. Don't you think I would let you know if anyone were outside?"

Tom shook his head, certain the machine had been programmed to do this now and again. It would be typical of the Tymbrimi. Earth's greatest allies were also practical jokers. When a dozen other calamitous priorities had been settled, he intended taking a monkey wrench to the machine, and explaining the mess to his Tymbrimi friends as "an unfortunate accident."

As the door panel slipped aside, Tom grabbed the rim and swung out to drop onto the dim hallway ceiling below. The door hummed shut automatically. Red alert lights flashed at intervals down the gently curved corridor.

All right, he thought. Our hopes for a quick getaway are dashed, but I've already thought out some contingency plans.

A few he had discussed with the captain. One or two he had kept to himself.

I'll have to set a few into motion, he thought, knowing from experience that chance diverts all schemes. As likely as not, it will be something totally unexpected that turns up to offer us our last real hope.

6 ::: Galactics

The first phase of the fight was a free-for-all. A score of warring factions scratched and probed at each other, exploring for weaknesses. Already a number of wrecks drifted in orbit torn and twisted and ominously luminous. Glowing clouds of plasma spread along the path of battle, and jagged metal fragments sparkled as they tumbled.

In her flagship, a leathery queen looked upon viewscreens that showed her the battlefield. She lay on a broad, soft cushion and stroked the brown scales of her belly in contemplation.

The displays that rimmed Krat's settee showed many dangers. One panel was an overlay of curling lines, indicating zones of anomalous probability. Others pointed out where the slough from psychic weapons was still dangerous.

Clusters of lights were the other fleets, now regrouping as the first phase drew to a close. Fighting still raged on the fringes.

Krat lounged on a cushion of vletoor skin. She shifted her weight to ease the pressure in her third abdomen. Battle hormones always accelerated the quickening within her. It was an inconvenience which, in ancient days, had forced her female ancestors to stay in the nest, leaving to stupid males the fighting.

No longer, though.

A small, bird-like creature approached her side. Krat took a ling-plum from the tray it proffered. She bit it and savored the juices that ran over her tongue and down her whiskers. The little Forski put down the tray and began to sing a crooning ballad about the joys of battle.

The avian Forski had been uplifted to full sapiency, of course. It would have been against the Code of Uplift to do less with a client race. But while they could talk, and even fly spacecraft in. a pinch, independent ambition had been bred out of them. They were too useful as domestics and entertainers to be fated anything but specialization. Adaptability might interfere with their graceful and intelligent performance of those functions.

One of her smaller screens suddenly went dark. A destroyer in the Soro rearguard had been destroyed. Krat hardly noticed. The consolidation had been inexpensive so far.

The command room was divided into pie sections. From the center, Krat could look into every baffled unit from her couch of command. Her crew bustled about, each a member of a Soro client race, each hurrying to do her will in its own sub-specialty.

From the sectors for navigation, combat, and detection, there was a quieting of the hectic battle pace at last. In planning, though, she saw increased activity as the staff evaluated developments, including the new alliance between the Abdicator and Transcendor forces.

A Paha sub-officer poked its head out of detection sector. Under hooded eyes, Krat watched it dash to a food station, snatch a steaming mug of amoklah, and hurry back to its post.

The Paha race had been allowed more racial diversity than the Forski, to enhance their value as ritual warriors. It left them less tractable than suited her, but it was a price one paid for good fighters. Krat decided to ignore the incident. She listened to the little Forski sing of the coming victory -- of the glory that would be Krat's when she captured the Earthlings, and finally squeezed their secrets out of them.

Klaxons shrieked. The Forski leapt into the air in alarm and fled to its cubbyhole. Suddenly there were running Paha everywhere.

"Tandu raider!" the tactical officer shouted. "Ships two through twelve, it has appeared in your midst! Take evasive maneuvers! Quickly!"

The flagship bucked as it, too, went into a wild turn to avoid a spread of missiles. Krat's screens showed a pulsing, danger-blue dot -- the daring Tandu cruiser that had popped into being within her fleet -- which was even now pouring fire into the Soro ships!

Curse their damnable probability drives! Krat knew that nobody else could move about as quickly as the Tandu, because no other species was willing to take such chances!

Krat's mating claw throbbed in irritation. Her Soro ships were so busy avoiding missiles, nobody was firing back!

"Fools!" Krat hissed into her communicator. "Ships six and ten, hold your ground and concentrate your fire on the obscenity!"

Then, before her words reached her sub-captains, before any Soro even fired back, the terrible Tandu ship began to dissolve on its own! One moment it was there, ferocious and deadly, ranging in on a numerous but helpless foe. The next instant the spindly destroyer was surrounded by a coruscating, discolored halo of sparks. Its shield folded, and the cruiser fell into itself like a collapsing tower of sticks.

With a brilliant flash, the Tandu vanished, leaving a cloud of ugly vapor behind. Through her own ship's shields, Krat could feel an awful psychic roar.

We were lucky, Krat realized as the psi-noise slowly faded. It was not without reason that other races avoided the Tandus' methods. But if that ship had lasted a few moments longer ...

No harm was done, and Krat noted that her crew had all done their jobs. Some of them were slow, however, and these must be punished ....

She beckoned the chief tactician, a tall, burly Paha. The warrior stepped toward her. He tried to maintain a proud bearing, but his drooping cilia told that he knew what to expect. Krat rumbled deep in her throat.

She started to speak, but in the emotion of the moment, the Soro commander felt a churning pressure within. Krat grunted and writhed, and the Paha officer fled as she panted on the vletoor cushion. Finally she howled and found relief. After a moment, she bent forward to retrieve the egg she had laid.

She picked it up, punishments and battles temporarily banished from her mind. In an instinct that predated her species uplift by the timid Hul, two million years before, she responded to the smell of pheromones and licked the birthing slime from the tiny air-cracks which seamed the leathery surface of the egg.

Krat licked it a few extra times for pleasure. She rocked the egg slowly in an ancient, untampered reflex of motherhood.

7 ::: Toshio

There was a ship involved, of course. All of his dreams since the age of nine had dealt with ships. Ships, at first, of plasteel and jubber, sailing the straits and archipelagos of Calafia, and later ships of space. Toshio had dreamt of ships of every variety, including those of the powerful Galactic patron races, which he had hoped one day to see.

Now he dreamt of a dinghy.

The tiny human-dolphin colony of his homeworld had sent him out with Akki riding on the outrigger, his Calafian Academy button shining brightly under Alph's sunshine. It started out a balmy day.

Only soon the weather darkened, and all around became the same color as the water. The sea grew bilious, then black, then changed to vacuum, and suddenly there were stars everywhere.

He worried about air. Neither he nor Akki had suits. It was hard, trying to breathe vacuum!

He was about to turn for home when he saw them chasing him. Galactics, with heads of every shape and color, long, sinuous arms, or tiny, grasping claws, or worse -- were rowing toward him steadily. The sleek prows of their boats were as lambent as the starlight.

"What do you want?" he cried out as he paddled hard to get away. (Hadn't the boat started out with a motor?)

"Who is your master?!" They shouted in a thousand different tongues. "Is that He beside you?"

"Akki's a fin! Fins are our clients! We uplifted them and set them free!"

"Then they are free," the Galactics replied, drawing closer. "But who uplifted you? Who set you free?"

"I don't know!" he screamed. "Maybe we did it ourselves!" He stroked harder as the Galactics laughed. He struggled to breathe the hard vacuum. "Leave me alone! Let me go home!"

Suddenly the Fleet loomed ahead. The ships seemed bigger than moons -- bigger than stars. They were dark and silent, and their aspect seemed to daunt even the Galactics.

Then the foremost of the ancient globes began to open. Toshio realized, then, that Akki was gone. His boat was gone. The ETs were gone.

He wanted to scream, but air was very dear.

A piercing whistle brought him around in a painful, disorienting instant. He sat up suddenly and felt the sled bounce unhappily with the motion. While his eyes made a blurred jumble of the horizon, a stiff breeze blew against his face. The tang of Kithrup greeted his nostrils.

"About time, Ladder-runner. You gave us quite a scare."

Toshio wavered, then saw Hikahi floating nearby, inspecting him with one eye.

"Are you okay, little Sharp-Eyes?"

"Um ... yes. I think so."

"Then you had better get to work on your hose. We had to nip it to give you air."

Toshio felt the knife-edged cut. He noticed that both hands were neatly bandaged.

"Was anyone else hurt?" he asked as he felt through his thigh pocket for his repair kit.

"A few minor burns. We enjoyed the fight, after learning you were all right-t. Thank you for telling us about Ssassia. We'd never have looked there had you not been caught and then told us what you found.

"They are cutting her loose now"

Toshio knew he should be grateful to Hikahi for putting the misadventure in that light. By rights he should be getting a tongue-lashing for rashly leaving formation, and almost losing his life.

But Toshio felt too lost to allow himself even gratitude to the dolphin lieutenant. "I suppose they haven't found Phip-pit?"

"Of him there's been no sign."

The slow rotation of Kithrup had taken the sun past what would look like four o'clock, Earth time. Low clouds were gathering on the eastern horizon. There was a choppiness to the water that had been absent before.

"There may be a small squall later," Hikahi said. "It may be unwise to use Earth instincts on another world, but I think we have nothing to fear ...."

Toshio looked up. There was something to the south ... He squinted.

There it was again, a flash, and then another. Two tiny bursts of light followed in quick succession, almost invisible against the sea glare.

"How long has that been going on?" he gestured toward the southern sky.

"What do you mean, Toshio?"

"That flashing. Is it lightning?"

The fin's eyes widened and her mouth curled slightly. Hikahi's flukes churned and she rose up in the water to turn first one eye, then the other, toward the south.

"I detect nothing, Sharp-Eyes. Tell me what you see."

"Multicolored flashes. Bursts of light. Lots of ..." Toshio stopped wrapping his air hose. He stared for a moment, trying to remember.

"Hikahi," he said slowly. "I think Akkia called me during the fight with the weed. Did you get anything over your set?"

"No I didn't, Toshio. But remember, we fins aren't yet so good at abstract thought while fighting. T-try to recall what he said, please."

Toshio touched his forehead. The encounter with the weed wasn't something he wanted to think about, right now. It all blended in with his nightmare, a jumbling of colors and noises and confusion.

"I think ... I think he said something about wanting us to keep radio silence and come home ... something about a space battle going on?"

Hikahi let out a whistling moan and flipped out of the water in a backward dive. She was back immediately, tail churning.

* Close-up

     Lock-up

* Go the other way -- than up!

Sloppy Trinary There were nuances in Primal Dolphin which Toshio, of couse, couldn't understand. But they sent a thrill down his spine. Hikahi was the last fin he would ever have expected to slip into Primal. As he finished wrapping his air hose, he realized with chagrin what his failure to tell Hikahi earlier might have cost them all.

He slapped his faceplate shut and flopped over to press the buoyancy valve on the sled, checking simultaneously the telltales on his helmet rim. He ran through the pre-dive checklist with a rapidity only a fourth-generation Calafian colonist could have achieved.

The bow of the sled was sinking quickly as the sea erupted to his right. Seven dolphins breached in a spume of water and exhaled breath.

"S-s-sassia's tied to your stern, Toshio. Can you shake your leg?" Keepiru urged. "Now is no time to dawdle making up t-t-tunes!"

Toshio grimaced. How could Keepiru have fought so hard earlier to save the life of someone he ridiculed so?

He remembered the way Keepiru had torn into the weed, the desperate look in his eye, and the glow it had taken when he saw it. Yet now he was cruel and taunting as ever.

A sharp blast of light flashed in the east, searing the sky all around them. The fins squealed almost as one, and immediately dove -- all except Keepiru, who stayed beside Toshio-as the eastern cloudline spat fire into the afternoon sky.

The sled finally sank, but in the last instant Toshio and Keepiru saw a hurtling battle of giants.

A huge, arrowhead-shaped space vessel plummeted down on them, pitted and fiery. Wind-swept trailers of purple smoke boiled out of great gashes in its sides, to be flung back into the needle-narrow shock front of its supersonic flight. The shock wave warped even the shimmer of the great ship's defensive shields, shells of gravity and plasma that sparkled with unhealthful overload.

Two grapnel-shaped destroyers dogged it no more than four ship lengths behind. Beams of accelerated anti-matter flashed from each of the trefoils, hitting their mark twice in terrible explosions.

Toshio was five meters below the surface when the sonic boom hit. It slammed the sled over, and kept it tumbling amid a roar that sounded like a house caving in. The water was a churning maelstrom of bubbles and bodies.

As he struggled with the sled, Toshio thanked Infinity he hadn't been at the surface to hear the battle passing by. At Morgran they had seen ships die. But never this close.

The noise finally settled down to a long, loud growling. Toshio got the sled righted at last.

Ssassia's sad corpse still lay tied to the rear end of the sled. The other fins, too scared or prudent to go above, began taking turns at the small airdomes that lined the bottom rim of the sled. It was Toshio's job to keep the sled still. It wasn't easy in the churning water, but he did it without a thought.

They were near the sloping western edge of a huge, grayish metal-mound. Sea-plants grew at intervals along its side. They looked nothing like the strangle weed, but that was no guarantee.

More and more, Toshio was coming to dislike being here. He wished he was home, where the dangers were simple, and easily handled -- kelp Wingers and island turtles and the like -- and where there were no ETs.

"Are you all right?" Hikahi asked as she came by. The dolphin lieutenant radiated calm.

"I'm fine," he grumped. "It's a good thing I didn't wait any longer to tell you about Akki's message, though. You have every reason to be mad at me."

"Don't be silly. Now we head back. Brookida is fatigued, so I've lashed him under an airdome. You will forge ahead with the scouts. We'll follow. Now t-take off!"

"Aye, sir." Toshio took his bearings and pushed the throttle. The thrusters hummed as the sled accelerated. Several of the stronger swimmers maintained pace alongside, as the mound slowly receded on the right.

It had taken them five minutes or so to get started. They were barely under way before the tsunami hit.

It was not a huge wave, merely the first of a series of ripples spreading from a point where a pebble had plunked into the sea. The pebble happened to be a space ship half a kilometer long. It had plunked, at supersonic speed, a mere fifty kilometers away.

The wave jerked the sled upward and sideways, almost shaking the boy off. A cloud of sea debris, torn-up plants, and dead and living fish whirled about him like clods in a cyclone. The roar was deafening.

Toshio clutched the controls desperately. Somehow, against incredible momentum, he managed slowly to drive the prow of the sled up and away from the wave front. Just in time, he thrust out of the curling, downward circulation and sent the tiny craft flying along the direction the current wanted to go. Eastward.

An ash-gray form speared past him on his left. In a flash he recognized Keepiru, struggling to keep control in the churning waters. The fin squeaked something indecipherable in Trinary, then was gone.

Some instinct guided Toshio, or perhaps it was the sonar screen, now a mess of jumbled snow, but still bearing the faint, fading traces of the terrain map it had shown only moments before. Toshio forced the sled to bear to the left as hard as possible.

The emergency-power roar of the engines changed to a scream as he suddenly slewed hard to port in desperation. The huge, dark bulk of a metal-mound loomed ahead! Already he could feel undertow as the wave began to form breakers to his right, curling as the cycloid rode up the sloping shore of the island.

Toshio wanted to cry out, but the struggle took all of his breath. He clenched his teeth and counted as the terrible seconds passed.

The sled drove past the cliff-like northern shore amid a cloud of bubbles. Though he was still underwater, he could look downward a dozen meters to his right, and see the lower beach plants of the island. He was riding in the center of a tall mound of water.

Then he was past! The sea opened up and one of the deep oceanic rills lay beneath him, dark and seemingly bottomless. Toshio slammed the bow planes forward and vented his tanks. The sled plummeted faster than he had ever dived before.

His stern pulled forward precariously. Toshio passed clouds of falling debris. The darkness and cold came up at him, and he sought the chill as a refuge.

The valley sloped below him as he brought the sled to a quiet depth. He could sense the tsunami rolling by above him. The sea plants all around waved in an obviously unaccustomed manner. A slow rain of falling rubbish drifted down on all sides, but at least the water wasn't trying to beat him to death anymore. Toshio flattened out his dive and headed toward the valley center, away from everything. Then he let himself sag in an agony of bruised muscles and adrenalin reaction.

He blessed the tiny, man-designed symbiotes that were right now scavenging his blood of excess nitrogen, preventing narcosis raptures at this depth.

Toshio cranked the engines down to one-quarter, and they sighed, sounding almost relieved. The lamps on the sled's display were mostly green, surprisingly, after the treatment the sled had received.

One of the telltales caught his eye -- it indicated an airdome in operation. Suddenly Toshio noticed a faint, singing sound; it was a whistling of patience and reverence.

* The Ocean is as is as is --

     the endless sigh of dreaming --

* Of other seas that are that are --

     and others in them, dreaming -- *

Toshio reached out and snapped on the hydrophones.

"Brookida! Are you okay! Is your air all right?"

There was a sigh, tremulous and tired.

"Fleet-t-t Fingers, hello. Thank you for saving my life. You flew as truly as any Tursiops."

"That ship we saw must have crashed! If that's what it was you can bet there will be aftershocks! Maybe we'd better stay down here a while. I'll turn on the sonar so others can find us and come for air while the waves pass." He flicked a switch, and immediately a low series of clicks emanated into the surrounding water. Brookida groaned.

"They will not come, Toshio. Can't you hear them? They won't answer your call."

Toshio frowned. "They have to! Hikahi will know about the aftershocks. They're probably looking for us right now! Maybe I'd better head back ...." He moved to turn the sled and blow ballast. Brookida had started him worrying.

"Don't go, Toshio! It will do no good for you to die as well! Wait until the waves pass-s-s! You must live to tell Creideiki!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Listen, Sharp-Eyes. Listen!"

Toshio shook his head, then swore and pulled back on the throttle until the engine died. He turned up the gain on the hydrophones.

"Do you hear?" Brookida asked.

Toshio cocked his head and listened. The sea was a mess of intonation. The roar of the departing wave dopplered down as he lay there. Schools of fish made panicky noises. All around came the reports of rockslides and surf pounding on the islands.

Then he heard it. The shrill repetitive squeals of Primal Dolphin. No modern dolphin spoke it when fully in command of his faculties.

That, in itself, was bad news.

One of the cries was clear. He could easily make out the basic distress call. It was the earliest Dolphin signal human scientists had understood.

But the other noise ... at least three voices were involved in that one. It was a strange sound, very poignant and very wrong!

"It isss rescue fever," Brookida groaned. "Hikahi is beached and injured. She might have stopped this, but she is delirious and now adds to the problem!"

"Hikahi ..."

"Like Creideiki, she is an adept of Keneenk ... the study of logical discipline. She would have been able to force the others to ignore the cries of those washed ashore, to make them dive to safety for a t-time."

"Don't they realize there will be aftershocks?"

"Shockss hardly matter, Sharp-Eyes!" Brookida cried. "They may beach themselves without assist! You are Calafian. How can you not know this about usss? I thrash here to go and die answering that call!"

Toshio groaned. Of course he knew about rescue fever, in which panic and fear washed aside the veneer of civilization, leaving a cetacean with only one thought -- to save his comrades, whatever the personal risk. Every few years the tragedy struck even the highly advanced fins of Calafia. Akki had told him, once, that sometimes the sea itself seemed to be calling for help. Some humans claimed to have felt it, too -- particularly those who took dolphin RNA in the rites of the Dreamer Cult.

Once upon a time the Tursiops, or bottlenose dolphin, had been about the least likely cetacean to beach himself. But genetic engineering had upset the balance somewhere. As the genes of other species were spliced onto the basic Tursiops model, a few things had been thrown out of kilter. For three generations human geneticists had been working on the problem. But for now the fins swam along a knife edge, where irrationality was a perpetual danger.

Toshio bit his lip. "They have their harnesses," he said uncertainly.

"One can hope. But is it likely they'll use them properly when they are even now speaking P-primal?"

Toshio struck the sled with his balled fist. Already his hand was growing numb from the chill. "I'm going up," he announced.

"No! You must not! You must guard your safet-ty!"

Toshio ground his teeth. Always mothering me. Mothering or teasing. The fns treat me like a child, and I'm sick of it!

He set the throttle to one-quarter and pulled up on the bow planes. "I'm going to unlash you, Brookida. Can you swim okay?"

"Yesss. But-t ..."

Toshio looked at his sonar. A fuzzy line was forming in the west.

"Can you swim!" he demanded.

"Yesss. I can swim well enough. But don't cut me loose near the rescue fever! Don't you risk the aftershocksss!"

"I see one coming now. They'll be several minutes apart and weakening with time. I'll fix it so we rise just after this one passes. Then you've got to get going back to the ship! Tell them what's happened and get help."

"That's what you should do, Toshio."

"Never mind that! Will you do as I ask? Or do I have to leave you lashed up!"

There was an almost unnoticeable pause, but Brookida's voice changed. "I shall do exactly as you say Toshio. I'll bring help."

Toshio checked his trim, then he slipped over the side, holding onto the rim stanchions with one hand. Brookida looked at him through the transparent shell of the airdome. The tough bubble membrane surrounded the dolphin's head. Toshio tore loose the lashings holding Brookida in place. "You're going to have to take a breather with you, you know."

Brookida sighed as Toshio pulled a lever by the airdome. A small hose descended, one end covering Brookida's blowhole. Like a snake, ten feet of hose wrapped around Brookida's torso. Breathers were uncomfortable, and hindered speech. But by wearing one Brookida would not have to come up for air. The breather would help the old metallurgist ignore the cries in the water -- a constant, uncomfortable reminder of his membership in a technological culture.

Toshio left Brookida tied in place by a single lashing. He pulled himself back onto the upper surface just as the first aftershock rolled overhead.

The sled bucked, but he was prepared this time. They were deep, and the wave passed with surprising quickness.

"Okay, here goes." He pushed the throttle forward to max and blew ballast.

Soon the metal island appeared on his left. The screams of his comrades became distinctly louder over the sonar set. The distress call was now pre-eminent over the rescue fever response.

Toshio steered past the mound to the north. He wanted to give Brookida a big head start.

Just then, however, a sleek gray figure shot past Toshio, just overhead. He recognized it at once, and where it was headed.

He cut the last lashing. "Get moving, Brookida! If you come back anywhere near this island again I'll rip off your harness and bite your tail in half!"

He didn't bother looking back as Brookida dropped away and the sled turned sharply. He kicked in emergency power to try to catch up with Keepiru. The fastest swimmer in the Streak's crew was heading directly for the western beach. His cries were pure Primal Dolphin.

"Damn you, Keepiru. Stop!"

The sled sped quickly, just under the water's surface. The afternoon had aged, and there was a reddish tinge to the clouds, but Toshio could clearly see Keepiru leaping from wavelet to wavelet up ahead. He appeared indifferent to Toshio's calls as he neared the island where his comrades lay beached and delirious.

Toshio felt helpless. Another aftershock was due in three minutes. If it didn't beach the dolphin, Keepiru's own efforts probably would. Keepiru came from Atlast, a new and rather rustic colony world. It was doubtful he had learned the tools of mental discipline studied by Creideiki and Hikahi.

"Stop! If we time it right we can work as a team! We can avoid the aftershocks! Will you let me catch up?" he screamed. But it was no use. The fin had too much of a head start. The futile chase frustrated Toshio. How could he have lived and worked with dolphins all his life and known them so poorly? To think the Terragens Council had chosen him for this tour because of his experience with fins! Hah!

Toshio had always taken a lot of kidding from fins. They kidded all human children, while protecting them ferociously. But on signing aboard Streaker, Toshio had expected to be treated as an adult and officer. Sure, there'd be a little repartee, as he'd seen between man and fin back home, but mutual respect, as well. It hadn't worked out that way.

Keepiru had been the worst, starting right off with heavy sarcasm and never letting up.

So why am I trying to save him?

He remembered the fierce courage Keepiru had shown in saving him from the weed. There was no rescue fever then. The fin had been in full control over his harness.

So, he thinks of me as a child, Toshio realized bitterly. No wonder he doesn't hear me now.

Still, it offered a way. Toshio bit his lip, wishing vainly for an alternative. To save Keepiru's life he would have to humiliate himself utterly. It wasn't an easy thing to decide to do, his pride had taken such a beating.

With a savage curse, he pulled back on the throttle and set the bow planes to descend. He turned up the hydrophones to maximum, swallowed, then cried out in pidgin Trinary.

* Child drowning -- child in danger! *

* Child drowning -- child's distress *

* Human child -- in need of savior *

* Human child -- come do your best! *

He repeated the call over and over, whistling through lips dry with shame. The nursery rhyme was taught to all the children of Calafia. Any kid past the age of nine who used it usually pleaded for transfer to another island to escape the subsequent razzing. There were more dignified ways an adult called for help.

None of which Keepiru had heard!

Ears burning, he repeated the call.

Not all Calafian kids did well with the fins, of course. Only a quarter of the planet's human population worked closely with the sea. But those adults were the ones who had learned the best ways to deal with dolphins. Toshio had always assumed he'd be one of them.

Now that was all over. If he got back to Streaker he'd have to hide in his cabin ... for at least the few days or weeks it took for the victors of the battle over Kithrup to come down and claim them all.

On his sonar screen, another fuzzy line of static was approaching from the west. Toshio let the sled slip a little deeper. Not that he cared. He continued to whistle, but he felt like crying.

# where -- where -- where child is -- where child is? where #

Primal Dolphin! Nearby! Almost, Toshio forgot his shame. He fingered a rope left over from Brookida's lashings, and kept whistling.

A streak of gray twilight flashed past him. Toshio gathered his knees under him and took the rope in both hands. He knew Keepiru would circle below and come up the other side. When he saw the first hint of gray hurtling upward, Toshio launched himself from the sled.

The bullet-like body of the dolphin twisted in an abrupt, panicky attempt to avoid collision. Toshio cried out as the cetacean's tail struck him in the chest. But it was a cry more of glee than pain. He had timed it right!

As Keepiru twisted around again, Toshio flung himself backward, allowing the fin to pass between himself and the rope. He clamped his feet around the dolphin's slick tail and pulled the rope with all the will of a garroter.

"Got you!" he cried.

At that instant the aftershock hit.

The cycloid clutched and pulled at him. Bits of flotsam struck him as the suction tossed his body about in apparent alliance with the mad, bucking dolphin.

This time Toshio felt no fear of the wave. He was filled with a fierce battle lust. Adrenalin seared through him like a hot flux. It pleased him to save Keepiru's life by physically punishing him for weeks of humiliation.

The dolphin writhed in panic. As the shock rolled past them, Keepiru cried out the basic call for air. Desperately, the fin drove for the surface.

They breached, and Toshio just missed getting blasted by the spume from Keepiru's blowhole. Keepiru commenced a series of leaps, gyrating to shake loose of his unwelcome rider.

Each time they went underwater Toshio tried to call out.

"You're sentient," he gasped. "Damn you, Keepiru ... you're ... you're a starship pilot!"

He knew he should be doing his coaxing in Trinary, but it was no use even trying, when he could barely hold on for dear life.

"You pea-brained ... phallic symbol!" he screamed as the water slammed against him. "You over-rated fish! You're killing me, you goddamed ... The Eatees own Calafia by now because you fins can't hold your tongues! We never should have taken you along into space!"

The words were hateful. Contemptuous. At last Keepiru seemed to have heard. He reared out of the water like an enraged stallion. Toshio felt his grip tear loose, and he was flung away like a rag doll, to hit the sea with a splash.

Only eighteen cases were known, in the forty generations of dolphin uplift, in which a fin had attacked a human with murderous intent. In each case, every fin related to the perpetrator had been sterilized. Still, Toshio expected to be crushed at any instant. He didn't care. He had realized, at last, the cause of his depression. It had come to the surface when he was wrestling with Keepiru.

It hadn't been his ability to go home that had hurt, these last few weeks. It was another fact that he had not allowed himself to think of even once since the battle off Morgran.

The ETs ... the extraterrestrials ... the Galactics of every stripe and philosophy which were chasing Streaker ... would not settle for hunting down the dolphin-crewed ship.

At least one ET race would have seen that the Streak might successfully go into hiding. Or they might imagine, erroneously, that her crew had succeeded in passing the secret of her discovery to Earth. Either way, the logical next step for one of the more amoral or vicious Galactic races would be coercion.

Earth might be able to defend herself. Probably Omnivarium and Hermes, as well. The Tymbrimi would defend the Caanan colonies.

But places like Calafia, or Atlast, must be captured by now. They were hostages, his family and everyone he had known. And Toshio realized that he blamed the fins.

Another aftershock was due any minute now. Toshio didn't care.

Pieces of floating debris drifted all about nearby. Not more than a kilometer away Toshio could see the metal-mound. At least it looked like the same one. He couldn't tell if there were dolphins stranded on the shore or not.

A large piece of flotsam drifted near him. It took him a moment to realize that it was Keepiru.

Toshio treaded water as he opened his faceplate.

"Well," he asked, "are you proud of yourself?"

Keepiru turned slightly to one side, and one dark eye looked up at Toshio. The bulge at the top of the cetacean's head, where human meddling had created a vocal apparatus from the former blowhole, gave out a long, soft, warbling sound.

Toshio couldn't be certain it was just a sigh. It might have been an apology in Primal Dolphin. The possibility alone was enough to make him angry.

"Can that crap! I just want to know one thing. Do I have to send you back to the ship? Or do you think you can stay sentient long enough to help me? Answer in Anglic, and it had better be grammatically correct!"

Keepiru moaned in pure anguish. After a moment of heavy breathing he finally spoke, quite slowly.

"Don't sssend me back. They're still calling for help! I will do what you ask-k-k!"

Toshio hesitated. "All right. Go down after the sled. When you've found it, put on a breather. I don't want you hampered by need for air, and you need a constant reminder with you, too!

"Then bring the sled up near the island, but not too close!"

Keepiru flung his head up in a huge nodding motion. "Yesss!" he cried. Then he flipped and dove into the water. It was just as well Keepiru had left all the thinking to him.

The fin might have balked if he'd caught onto what Toshio had in mind to do next.

A kilometer to the island; there was only one way to get there fast and avoid a scramble up the slanting, abrasive, metal-coral surface. He checked his orientation one more time, then a drop in the water level told him that the wave was coming.

The fourth wave seemed the gentlest by far. He knew the feeling was deceptive. He was in water deep enough so that the swell came at him as a gentle lump in the ocean, rather than a crested breaker. He dove down into the hump and swam against the direction of motion for a time before rising to the surface.

He had to gauge it just right. Swim back too far and he wouldn't reach the island before the following trough arrived and pulled him out to sea again. To remain at the front of the wave would be to body-surf a vicious breaker onto the beach, undertow and all.

It was all happening too fast. He swam hard, but couldn't tell if he had passed the peak of the wave or not. Then a glance told him that it was too late for remedial measures. He flipped around to face the looming, foliage-topped mound.

The breaker started a hundred yards ahead, but the slope rapidly ate away at the wave as bottom dragged the cycloid into a crested monster. The peak moved backward, toward Toshio, even as the wave hurtled upward onto the beach.

The boy braced himself as the crest reached him. He was prepared to look down on a precipice, and then see nothing more.

What he saw was a cataract of white foam as the wave began to die. Toshio cried out to keep his ear channels open, and started swimming furiously to stay atop the churning tide of spume and debris.

Suddenly, there was greenery all around. Trees and shrubs which had withstood the earlier assaults shook under this attack. Some tore loose of their moorings even as Toshio flew past them. Others stood and flailed at him as he hurtled through.

No sharp branch impaled him. No unbreaking vine garroted him as he passed. In a tumbling, tossing confusion he finally came to rest, somehow hugging the trunk of a huge tree, while the wave churned, and finally receded.

Miraculously, he was on his feet, the first man to stand on the soil of Kithrup. Toshio stared dazedly at his surroundings, briefly not believing his survival.

Then he hurriedly opened his faceplate, and became the first man to lose his breakfast on the soil of Kithrup.

8 ::: Galactics

"Slay them!" The Jophur high priest demanded. "Slay the isolated Thennanin battlecruisers on our sixth quadrant!"

The Jophur chief of staff bowed its twelve-ringed trunk before the high priest.

"The Thennanin are our allies-of-the-moment! How can we turn on them without first performing the secret rituals of betrayal? Their ancestors will not be appeased!"

The Jophur high priest expanded its six outer sap-rings. It rose high upon its dais at the rear of the command chamber.

"There is no time to perform the rites! Now, as our alliance finishes sweeping this sector, as our alliance has become the strongest! Now, while this phase of the battle still rages. Now, while the foolish Thennanin have opened up their flanks to us. Now may we harm them greatly!"

The chief of staff pulsed in agitation, its outer sap-rings discoloring with emotion.

"We may change alliances as it suits us, agreed. We may betray our allies, agreed. We may do anything to win the prize agreed. But we may not do so without performing the rituals! The rituals are what make us the appropriate vessels for the will of the ancients! You would bring us down to the level of the heretics!"

The dais shook with the high priest's anger.

"My rings decide! My rings are those of priesthood! My rings ..."

The oration-peak of the pyramidal high priest erupted in a geyser of hot, multi-hued sap. The explosion spewed sticky amber liquor across the bridge of the Jophur flagship.

"Continue fighting." The chief of staff waved the crew back to work with its sidearm. "Call the Quartermaster of Religiosity. Have it send up rings to make up a new priest. Continue fighting while we prepare to perform the rituals of betrayal:

The chief of staff bowed to the staring section chiefs. "We shall appease the ancestors of the Thennanin before we turn on them.

"But remember to make certain the Thennanin themselves do not sense our intentions!"

9 ::: From The Journal of Gillian Baskin

It's been some time since I've been able to make an entry in this personal log. Since the Shallow Cluster it seems we've constantly been in frantic motion ... making the discovery of the millennia, getting ambushed at Morgran, and fighting for our lives from then on. I hardly ever see Tom any more. He's always down in the engine or weapons pods. I'm either here in the lab or helping out in sick bay.

Ship's surgeon Makanee has a mouthful of problems. Fen have always had a talent for hypochondria. A fifth of the crew shows up every sick call with psychosomatic complaints. You can't just tell them it's all in their heads, so we stroke them and tell them what brave fellows they are, and that everything's going to be all right.

I think if it weren't for the captain, half of this crew would be hysterical by now. To many of them he seems almost like a hero out of the Whale Dream. Creideiki moves about the ship, watching the repairs and giving little lessons in Keneenk logic. The fen seem to buck up whenever he's nearby.

Still, reports keep coming in about the space battle. Instead of tapering off, it's only getting thicker and heavier!

And we're all getting more than a little worried about Hikahi's party.

Gillian put down her stylus. From the small circle of her desk lamp, the rest of the laboratory appeared dark and gloomy. The only other light came from the far end of the room. Silhouetted against the spots was a vaguely humanoid shape, a mysterious shadow, lying on a stasis table.

"Hikahi," she sighed. "Where in Ifni's name are you?"

That Hikahi's survey party hadn't even sent back a monopulse confirmation of the recall order was now of great concern. Streaker couldn't afford to lose those crewfen. For all of his frequent unreliability outside the bridge, Keepiru was their best pilot. Even Toshio Iwashika had a lot of promise.

But most of all, the loss of Hikahi would hurt. Without her, how could Creideiki manage?

Hikahi was Gillian's best dolphin friend, at least as close to her as Tom was to Creideiki or Tsh't. Gillian wondered why Takkata-Jim had been appointed vice-captain instead of Hikahi. It made no sense. She could only imagine that politics was behind it. Takkata-Jim was a Stenos. Perhaps Ignacio Metz had had a hand in choosing the complement for this mission. Metz was a passionate advocate of certain dolphin racial types back on Earth.

Gillian didn't write these thoughts down. They were idle speculations, and she didn't have time for speculation.

Anyway, it's time I got back to Herbie.

She closed her journal and got up to walk over to the stasis table, where a dry, dessicated figure floated in a heavily shielded field of suspended time.

The ancient cadaver grinned back at her through the glass.

It wasn't human. There hadn't even been multi-cellular creatures on Earth when this thing had lived and breathed and flown spaceships. Yet it looked eerily humanoid. It had straight arms and legs, and a very man-like head and neck. Its jaw and eye orbits were strange-looking, but its skull still had a very man-like grin.

How old are you, Herbie? she asked in her thoughts. One billion years? Two?

How is it your fleet of ancient hulks waited undiscovered by Galactic civilization for so long, waited until we came along ... a bunch of wolfling humans and newly uplifted dolphins? Why were we the ones to find you?

And why did one litle hologram of you, beamed home to Earth, make half the patron-lines in the galaxy go crazy?

Streaker's micro-Library was no help. It refused to recognize Herbie at all. Maybe it was holding back. Or perhaps it was simply too small an archive to remember an obscure race so long extinct.

Tom had asked the Niss machine look into it. So far the sarcastic Tymbrimi artifact had been unable to cozen out an answer.

Meanwhile, between sick bay and her other duties, Gillian had to find a few hours a day to examine this relict non-destructively, and maybe figure out what was stirring up the Eatees so. If she didn't do it, no one would.

Somehow she would make it until tonight.

Poor Tom, Gillian thought, smiling. He'll be coming back from his engines, wiped out, and I'll be feeling amorous. It's a damned good thing he's a sport.

She picked up a pion microprobe.

Okay Herbie, let's see if we can find out what kind of a brain you had.

10 ::: Metz

"I'm sorry, Dr. Metz. The captain is with Thomasss Orley in the weapons section. If there's anything I can do ...?"

As usual, Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim was unfailingly polite. His Anglic, diction, even while breathing oxywater, was almost perfect. Ignacio Metz couldn't help smiling in approval. He had a particular interest in Takkata-Jim.

"No, Vice-Captain. I just stopped by the bridge to see if the survey party had reported in.

"They haven't. We can only wait."

Metz tsked. He had already concluded that Hikahi's party was destroyed.

"Ah, well. I don't suppose there has been any offer of negotiations by the Galactics yet?"

Takkata-Jim shook his large, mottled-gray head left to right.

"Regrettably, no sir. They appear to be more interested in slaughtering each other. Every few hours, it seems, yet another battle fleet enters Kthsemenee's system to join in the free-for-all. It may be a while before anyone initiates diplomacy"

Dr. Metz frowned at the illogic of it. If the Galactics were rational, they'd let Streaker hand her discovery over to the Library Institute and have done with it! Then everyone would share equally!

But Galactic civilization was unified more in the breach than in fact. And too many angry species had big ships and guns.

Here we are, he thought, in the middle, with something they all want.

It can't just be that giant fleet of ancient ships. Something more must have set them off. Gillian Baskin and Tom Orley picked something up out there in the Shallow Cluster. I wonder what it was.

"Will you be wanting me to join you for dinner this evening, Dr. Metz?"

Metz blinked. What day was it? Ah, yes. Wednesday. "Of course, Vice-Captain. Your company and conversation would be appreciated, as usual. Shall we say sixish?"

"Perhapsss nineteen-hundred hours would be better, sir. I get off duty then."

"Very well. Until then."

Takkata-Jim nodded. He turned and swam back to his duty station.

Metz watched the fin appreciatively.

He's the best of my Stenos, Metz thought. He doesn't know I'm his godfather ... his gene-father -- But I am proud nonetheless.

All the dolphins aboard were of Tursiops amicus stock. But some had genetic grafts from Stenos bredanensis, the deep-water dolphin that had always been the closest to the bottlenose in intelligence.

Wild bredanensis had a reputation for insatiable curiosity and reckless disregard for danger. Metz had led the efort to have DNA from that species added to the neo-fin gene pool. On Earth many of the new Stenos had turned out very well, showing streaks of initiative and individual brilliance.

But a reputation for harsh temperament had lately caused some resentment in Earth's coastal communities. He had worked hard to convince the Council that it would be an important gesture to appoint a few Stenos to positions of responsibility on the first dolphin-crewed starship.

Takkata-Jim was his proof. Coldly logical, primly correct, the fin used Anglic almost to the exclusion of Trinary, and seemed impervious to the Whale Dream that so enthralled older models like Creideiki. Takkata-Jim was the most manlike dolphin Metz had ever met.

He watched the vice-captain manage the bridge crew, with none of the little Keneenk parables Creideiki was always inserting, but rather with Anglic precision and brevity. Never a word wasted.

Yes, he thought. This one is going to get a good report when we get home.

"Doctor Metssss?"

Metz turned, and recoiled at the size of the dolphin that had silently come up beside him. "Wha ... ? Oh. K'tha-Jon. You startled me. What can I do for you?"

A truly large dolphin grinned at him. His blunt mouth, his counter-shaded body and bulging eyes, would have told Metz everything about him ... if he hadn't already known.

Feresa attenuata, the human savored the thought. So beautiful and savage. My most secret project, and nobody, not even you, K'tha-Jon, knows that you are more than just another Stenos.

"Forgive the interruption, Dr. Metsss, but the chimp scientist Charlesss Dart-t has asked to speak with you. I think the little ape wantsss to bitch to somebody again."

Metz frowned. K'tha-Jon was only a bosun, and not expected to be as refined as Takkata-Jim. Still, there were limits, even considering the giant's hidden background.

I will have to talk to this fellow, he reminded himself. This kind of attitude will never do.

"Please inform Dr. Dart that I'm on my way," he told the fin. "I'm finished here for now"

11 ::: Creideiki & Orley

"So we're armed again," Creideiki sighed. `After a fashion."

Thomas Orley looked up from the newly repaired missile tubes and nodded. "It's about as good as we're going to get, Creideiki. We weren't expecting any trouble when we popped out into a battle at the Morgran transfer point. We were lucky to get away with as little damage as we took."

Creideiki agreed.

"Just ssso," he sighed moodily. "If only I had reacted faster."

Orley noticed his friend's mood. He pursed his lips and whistled. His breather mask amplified a faint sound-shadow picture. The little echo danced and hopped like a mad elf from corner to corner in the oxywater-filled chamber. Workers in the weapons pod lifted their narrow, sound-sensitive jaws to follow the skipping sonar image as it scampered unseen, chittering in mock sympathy.

* When one commands,

     One is envied by people --

          But, oh! the demands! *

The sound-wraith vanished, but laughter remained. The crew of the weapons pod spluttered and squawled.

Creideiki let the mirth settle. Then, from his brow came a pattern of chamber-filling clicks that merged to mimic the sounds of thunderclouds gathering. In the closed room those present heard raindrops blown before the wind. Tom closed his eyes to let the sound-image of a sea squall close over him.

* They stand in my road,

     The mad, ancient, nasty things

          Tell them "move, or else!" *

Orley bowed his head, acknowledging defeat. No one had ever beaten Creideiki at Trinary haiku. The admiring sighs of the fen only confirmed this.

Nothing had changed, of course. As Orley and Creideiki turned to leave the weapons pod, they knew that defiance alone would not get this crew through the crisis. There had to be hope, as well.

Hope was scarce. Tom knew that Creideiki was desperately worried about Hikahi, though he hid it well.

When they were out of earshot, the captain asked, "Has Gillian made any progressss studying that thing we found ... the cause of all this trouble?"

Tom shook his head. " I haven't spent more than an hour with her in two days, so I don't know. Last I checked, the ship's micro-Library still claims nothing like Herbie ever existed."

Creideiki sighed. "It would have been nice to know what the Galacticsss think we found. Ah, well ..."

They were stopped by a sudden whistle behind them. Tsh't, the ship's fourth officer, flew into the hallway in a cloud of bubbles.

"Creideiki! Tom! Sonar reports a dolphin at long range, far to the eassst, but apparently swimming this way at high speed!"

Creideiki and Orley looked at each other. Then Tom nodded at the captain's unspoken command.

"Can I take Tsh't and twenty fen?"

"Yesss. Get a team ready. But don't leave until we find out who this is. You may want to take more than twenty. Or it may be hopelesss to go at all."

Tom saw pain in the captain's eye. The next hour or so of waiting would be hard.

Orley motioned for Lieutenant Tsh't to follow him, then he turned to swim at top speed down the flooded corridor toward the outlock.

12 ::: Galactics

Feeling the joy of patronhood and command, the Soro, Krat, watched the creatures, the Gello, the Paha, the Pila, her creatures, as they guided the Soro, fleet toward battle once more.

"Mistress," the Gello detection officer announced. "We are approaching the water world at one-quarter of light speed per your instructions."

Krat acknowledged with a bare flick of her tongue, but secretly she was happy. Her egg was healthy. When they won here she would be due to go home and mate once more. And the crew of her flagship was working together like a finely tuned machine.

"The fleet is one paktaar ahead of timetable, mistress," the detection officer announced.

Of all the client species owing allegiance to the Soro, the Gello were special to Krat. They were her own species' first clients, uplifted by the Soro long ago. The Gello had in their turn become patrons as well, and brought two more client races into the clan. They had made the Soro proud. The chain of uplift went on.

Deep in the past had been the Progenitors, who began Galactic Law. Since then, race had aided race to sentience, taking indentured service as payment.

Many millions of years ago, the ancient Luber had uplifted the Puber or so the Library said. The Luber were now long extinct. The Puber still existed, somewhere, though now degenerate and decadent.

Before their decadence, though, the Puber raised up the Hui, who in turn made clients of Krat's stone-chopping, Soro ancestors. Shortly thereafter, the Hui retired to their homeworld to become philosophers.

Now the Soro themselves had many clients. Their most successful upspring were the Gello, the Paha, and the Pila.

Krat could hear the high voice of the Pila tactician Cubber-cabub, haranguing its subordinates in planning section. It was insisting they strive harder to coax the information she had requested from the shipboard mini-Library. Cubber-cabub sounded frightened. Good. It would try harder if it feared her.

Alone of those aboard, the Pila were mammals, short bipeds from a high-gravity world. They had become a powerful race in many Galaxy-wide bureaucratic organizations, including the important Library Institute. The Pila had raised clients of their own, bringing credit to the clan.

Still, it was too bad the Pila were no longer indentured clients. It would have been nice to meddle with their genes again. The furry little sophonts shed, and had a bothersome odor.

No client race was perfect. Only two hundred years ago, the Pila had been thoroughly embarrassed by the humans of Earth. The affair had been difficult and expensive to cover up. Krat did not know all of the facts, but it had something to do with the Earthlings' sun. Since that time, the Pila had hated humans passionately.

Krat's mating claw throbbed as she thought of Earthlings. In only three hundred of their years they had become almost as great a nuisance as the sanctimonious Kanten, or the devil-trickster Tymbrimi!

The Soro race patiently awaited the right opportunity to erase the blot on their clan honor. Fortunately, the humans were almost pathetically ignorant and vulnerable. Perhaps the chance had already come!

How delicious it would be to have Homo sapiens assigned to the Soro as indentured foster clients. It could happen! Then what changes could be made! How humans could be molded!

Krat looked at her crew and wished she were free to meddle, to alter, to shape at will even these adult species. So much could be done with them! But that would require changing the rules.

If the upstart water-mammals from Earth had discovered what she thought they had, then the rules might be changed ... if the Progenitors had, indeed, come back. How ironic that the newest spacefaring race should discover this derelict fleet! She almost forgave them for existing, for giving those humans the status of patrons.

"Mistress!" the tall Gello announced. "The Jophur-Thennanin alliance has broken up. They are fighting amongst themselves. This means they are no longer pre-eminent!"

"Maintain vigilance." Krat sighed. The Gello shouldn't make a big deal out of one little act of treachery. It was not unusual. Alliances would form and dissolve until one force emerged supreme. She intended that that force be Soro. When the battle was won she would collect the prize.

The dolphins must be here! When she won this battle, she would pry the handless ones out from their underwater sanctuary and make them tell all!

With a languid wave of her left paw, she summoned the Pil Librarian from his niche.

"Look into the data on these water creatures we pursue," she told it. "I want to know more about their habits, what they like and dislike. It is said their bonds to their human patrons are weak and corruptible. Give me a lever to pervert these ... dolphins."

Cubber-cabub bowed and withdrew into the Library section, the sector with the rayed spiral glyph above its opening.

Krat felt destiny all around her. This place in space was a fulcrum of power. She didn't need instruments to tell her that.

"I will have them! The rules will be changed!"

13 ::: Toshio

Toshio found Ssattatta by the bole of the giant drill-tree. The fin had been thrown against the monstrous plant and crushed. Her harness was a jumble of broken pieces.

Toshio stumbled through the ruined undergrowth whistling a Trinary call when he felt able. Mostly he tried very hard to stay on his feet. He hadn't walked much since leaving Earth. Bruises and nausea didn't help much, either.

He found K'Hith lying on a soft bed of grass-like growth. His harness was intact, but the dolphin planetologist had already bled to death from three deep gashes in his belly. Toshio made a mental note of the spot and moved on.

Closer to the shore he found Satima. The little female was bleeding and hysterical, but alive. Toshio bound her wounds with fleshfoam and repair tape. Then he took the manipulator arms of her harness and used a large rock to pound them into the loam. It was the best he could do to bind her to the ground before the fifth wave hit.

It was more a flooding than a wave. Toshio clung to a tree as it flowed past, tugging at him and rising almost to his neck.

As soon as the wave began to recede, he let go and floundered over to Satima. He groped until he found the catch on her harness, then released her to float in the growing backtow. He pushed hard to join the flood and keep from being left behind.

He was struggling to shove her around a clump of shrubs, against the growing pull of the backwash, when a swift motion in a tree overhead caught his eye. The movement didn't fit into the overall pattern of swaying subsidence. He looked up, and met the gaze of a pair of small, black eyes.

There was little time for more than a startled double take before the tide pulled him and Satima straight through the obstruction and into a small, recently made marsh. Toshio was suddenly too busy to look anywhere but straight ahead.

He had to pull Satima down the last few yards of slippery sea-plant, taking care not to reopen her wounds. In the last few minutes it had seemed she was more lucid. Her Dolphin squeakings were starting to take on form and sound like Trinary words.

A whistle brought Toshio's head up. Keepiru was only forty meters offshore, driving the sled toward him. The fin had on a breather, but he could still signal.

"Satima!" Toshio shouted to the wounded dolphin. "Go to the sled! Go to Keepiru!"

"Lash her to an airdome!" he called to Keepiru. `And keep your eye on that sonar screen! Get back out there when you see a wave coming!"

Keepiru tossed his head. As soon as Satima was a hundred feet out he used the sled to herd her toward deeper water.

Five accounted for. That left Hist-t and Hikahi.

Toshio climbed back up the sea-plant and stumbled into the undergrowth once again. The territory of his mind seemed as torn up and desolated as the island he trod upon. He had seen too many corpses for one day -- too many dead friends.

He realized now that he had been unfair to the fins all along.

It had been unjust to blame them for teasing him. They couldn't help the way they were built. All of man's genetic meddling notwithstanding, dolphins had been dealing with humanity on a level of good-natured derision since the first person paddled a log canoe out to sea. That pathetic image had been enough to set a pattern that uplift could only alter, not eliminate.

And why eliminate it? Toshio now saw that those humans he had known on Calafia, who worked best with dolphins, had had a special type of personality, generally featuring a mixture of a thick skin, firmness, and a willing sense of humor. No one worked for long with fins who hadn't earned their respect.

He hurried over to a gray form that lay in the underbrush. But no. It was Ssattatta again. She had been moved by the last wave. Toshio stumbled on.

Dolphins were quite well aware of what Mankind had done for them. Uplift was a painful process. But none of them would go back to the Whale Dream if they could help it.

The fins knew, as well, that the loose codes that ruled behavior among the Galactic races, rules established in the Library for aeons, would have let humanity demand a hundred thousand years of servitude from its clients. Men had collectively shuddered at the thought. Homo sapiens himself was barely that age. If Mankind did have a patron out there -- one strong enough to lay claim to the title -- that species wasn't going to pick up Tursiops amicus as an added bonus.

There wasn't a fin alive who wasn't aware of Earth's attitude. There were dolphins on the Terragens Council, as well as chimpanzees.

Toshio knew at last how he had hurt Keepiru with his words during their struggle at sea. Most of all he regretted the remark about Calafia. Keepiru would willingly die a thousand times to save the humans of Toshio's homeworld.

Toshio's tongue would fall off before he said such things again. Ever.

He staggered into a clearing. There, in a shallow pool, lay a Tursiops dolphin.

"Hikahi!"

The fin was scratched and battered. Tiny bloody tracks lay along her sides. But she was awake. And as Toshio started forward she called out.

"Stay there, Sharp-Eyes! Don't-t move! We have company here!"

Toshio stopped in his tracks. Hikahi's command was specific. Yet the need to go to her was urgent. The dolphin's scratches did not look pleasant. If there were slivers of metal lodged under the skin they had to be removed soon, before blood poisoning set in. And it wasn't going to be easy getting Hikahi out to sea.

"Hikahi, there'll be another wave soon. It may reach this high. We've got to be ready for it!"

"Stay, Toshio. The wave will not reach here. Besides, look around. See how much more important this isss!"

For the first time, Toshio really noticed the clearing. The pool was set near one side, with scratch marks all around, indicating that it had been recently dug. Then he saw that the manipulator arms from Hikahi's harness were missing.

Then who ... ? Toshio's perception shifted. He saw twisted debris at the far end of the clearing, scattered through the undergrowth, and recognized the fragments of a ruined, shattered village.

In the chronic shimmering of a Kithrupan forest he saw the fragments of rude, torn, woven nets, scattered pieces of wrecked thatching, and bits of sharp metal crudely bound to wooden staves.

In the tree branches he saw fleet little movements. Then, one by one, small, splayed, web-fingered hands appeared -- followed by slowly peeking, shining black eyes that peered back at him from under low, greenish brows.

"Abos!" he whispered. "I saw one earlier, then forgot completely! They look pre-sentient!"

"Yesss," Hikahi sighed. "And this makes secrecy even more vital than ever. Quickly Sharp-Eyes! Tell me what has happened!"

Toshio related only what he had done since the first wave struck, leaving out only the details of his battle with Keepiru. It was hard to concentrate, with the eyes in the trees first staring down at him, then skittishly darting under cover whenever he glanced their way. He barely finished his story as the last wave arrived.

The breakers could be seen driving up the sloping shore with a loud roar and a white foaming. But clearly Hikahi was right. The water wouldn't rise this high.

"Toshio!" Hikahi whistled. "You've done very well. You may have saved these little people, as well as ourselves. Brookida will succeed. He will bring help.

"So saving me is not that important. You must do as I say! Have Keepiru dive at once! He must stay out of sight and remain quiet as possible as he searches for bodies and debris. You must bury Ssattatta and K'Hith and gather the fragments of their harnesses. When help comes we must be able to move quickly!"

"Are you sure you'll be all right? Your wounds ..."

"I'll be fine! My friends keep me wet-t. The trees overhang to keep me hidden. Watch the skies, Sharp-Eyes! Don't be seen! When you're finished I hope to have coaxed our friends here into trusting you."

She sounded tired. Toshio was torn. Finally, he sighed and turned back to the forest. He forced himself to run through the broken foliage, following the receding waters to the shore.

Keepiru was just emerging as he arrived. The fin had removed his breather and wore an airdome instead. He reported finding the body of Phip-pit, the dolphin supposed lost earlier to the killer weed. The sucker-bruised body must have been torn loose during the tsunami.

"Any sign of Hist-t?" Toshio called.

Keepiru answered negative. Toshio passed on Hikahi's command and watched as the sled sank below again.

For a moment he stood there, then, looking out over the west.

Kithrup's reddish sun was setting. A few stars poked rays through the scattered clouds overhead. In the east the clouds were beginning to look ominous. There would be rain during the night. Toshio decided against taking off his drysuit, though he compromised by pulling the rubberized headpiece off. The breeze was chilling, but a huge relief.

He glanced to the south. If the battle in space continued, Toshio saw no sign of it. Kithrup's rotation had taken them past the shining globe of plasma and debris that must be drifting out there now.

Toshio lacked the will to shake his fist, but he grimaced toward the southern sky, hoping the Galactics had wiped each other out.

It wasn't likely. There would be victors. And someday soon they would be down here looking for dolphins and men.

Toshio pulled his shoulders back, in spite of his fatigue, and walked with deliberateness toward the forest, and the protecting, overhanging trees.

They found the young man and the dolphin shortly after landing. The two were huddled together under a crude shelter which dripped warm rain in long rivulets. Lightning flashes drowned out the muffled yellow light from the lamps the rescuers brought. In the first flash, Thomas Orley thought he saw a half-dozen small squat figures clustered around the Earthling and the Calafian. But by the time he and his partner had shoved through the undergrowth for a better view, the animals -- or whatever they were-were gone.

His first fear that they had been carrion-eaters disappeared

when he saw Toshio move. Still, he kept his right hand on the butt of his needler and held up the lantern to let Hannes Suessi pass underneath. He looked carefully around the clearing, taking in the smells and the sounds of the living surface of the metal-mound, memorizing details.

"Are they all right?" he asked after a few seconds.

"Shh, It's okay Toshio. It's just me, Hannes," he heard the engineer mutter. The fellow sounded downright maternal. "Yes, Mr. Orley." Suessi called back, "They're both awake, but not in much shape for talking."

Thomas Orley took in the clearing once more, then moved over to set the lamp down beside Suessi. "This lightning would cover anything," he said. "I'm going to call up the mechanicals so we can get these two out of here as quickly as possible." He touched a button on the rim of his faceplate and whistled quickly in perfect Trinary. The message lasted six seconds. It was said that Thomas Orley could actually speak Primal Dolphin, though no human had ever witnessed it.

"They'll be here in a few minutes. They have to cover their tracks." He squatted down next to Toshio, who was sitting up now that Suessi had moved over to Hikahi.

"Hello, Mr. Orley," the boy said. "I'm sorry we dragged you away from your work."

"That's all right, son. I've been wanting to have a look around up here, anyway. This gave the captain a good excuse to send me. After we get you started back toward the ship, Hannes and Tsh't and I will be going on to look over that ship that crashed.

"Now, do you think you can lead us to Ssattatta and K'Hith? We want to comb this island clean before the storm passes."

Toshio nodded. "Yes, sir. I should be able to stumble around that long. I don't suppose anyone's found Hist-t?"

"No. We're worried about that, but nowhere near as worried as we were when Brookida got back. Keepiru's told us most of the story. That fin thinks rather highly of you, you know. You did quite a job here."

Toshio turned away, as if ashamed to receive the praise.

Orley looked at him curiously. He had never given much thought to the middie before. During the first part of the voyage, the youth had seemed bright, but a bit irresponsible. Later, after they found the derelict fleet, he had begun to

turn morose, as their chances of ever going home diminished. Now there was this new note. It was too soon to tell what the long-term effects would be, but this had obviously been a rite of passage for Toshio.

Humming sounds drifted up from the beach. Soon two spider-like mechanicals strode into view, a hammocked and harnessed dolphin piloting each of them.

Toshio sighed a little raggedly as Orley helped him up. Then the older man stooped to pick up an object from the ground. He hefted it in his left hand.

"A scraper, isn't it? Made from bits of metal fish spine glued to a wood handle ..."

"I guess so."

"Do they have much of a language yet?"

"No, sir; well, the rudiments. They seem to be stabilized. Strict hunter-gatherers. Hikahi guesses they've been stuck for half a million years."

Orley nodded. This native species looked ripe, at first glance. A pre-sentient race at just the right stage for uplift. It was a miracle some Galactic patron line hadn't snapped them up already, for client status and an aeon of servitude.

Now the men and fen of Streaker had still another obligation, and secrecy was more important than ever.

He put the artifact in his pocket, then laid his hand on Toshio's shoulder.

"Well, you can tell us all about it back on the ship, son. In the meantime, you have some pondering to do."

"Sir?" Toshio looked up in confusion.

"Well, it isn't everybody who gets to name a future space-faring race. You know, the fen will be expecting you to make up a song about it."

Toshio looked at the older man, uncertain if he was joking. But Thomas Orley had on his usual enigmatic expression.

Orley glanced up at the rain clouds, As the mechanicals moved in to claim Hikahi, he stepped back and smiled at the curtain which, temporarily, hung across the theater of the sky.

PART TWO

Currents

"For the sky and the sea,

And the sea and the sky,

Lay like a load on my weary eye,

And the dead lay at my feet."

-S. T. COLERIDGE

14 ::: Dennie

Charles Dart pulled away from the polarization microscope and growled an oath. In a habit he had spent half his life trying to break, he absently laid his forearms over his head and tugged on his hairy ears. It was a simian contortion no one else aboard ship could easily duplicate. Had he noticed he was doing it, he would have quit instantly.

Of a crew of one hundred and fifty only eight aboard the Streaker even had arms ... or external ears. One of these shared the drylab with him.

Commenting on Charles Dart's body behaviors did not occur to Dennie Sudman. She had long ceased to notice such things as his loose, rolling gait, his shrieking chimpanzee laughter, or the fur that nearly covered his body.

"What is it?" she asked. "Are you still having trouble with those core samples?"

Charlie nodded absently, staring at the screen. "Yeah."

His voice was low and scratchy. At his best, Charles Dart sounded like a man speaking with gravel in his throat. Sometimes, when he had something complicated to say, he unconsciously moved his hands in the sign language of his youth.

"I can't make any sense out of these isotope concentrations," he growled. `And there are minerals in all the wrong places ... siderophiles without metals, complex crystals at a depth where there shouldn't be such complexity ... Captain Creideiki's silly restrictions are crippling my work! I wish he'd let me do some seismic scans and deep radar." He swiveled about in his seat to look at Dennie earnestly, as if hoping she would concur.

Dennie's smile was broad under high cheekbones. Her almond eyes narrowed in amusement.

"Sure, Charlie. Why not? Here we are in a crippled ship, hidden under an ocean on a deadly world, with fleets from a dozen arrogant and powerful patron-lines fighting over the right to capture us, and you want to start setting off explosions and casting gravity beams around. Wonderful idea!

"Say! I've got an even better one! Why don't we just take out a large sign and wave it at the sky, something that says `Yoohoo, beasties! Come and eat us!' Hmmm?"

Charlie cast a sidelong look at her, one of his rare, unhinged, lopsided grins. "Oh, they wouldn't have to be big gravity scans. And I'd only need a few teeny, tiny explosions for seismography. The ETs wouldn't notice those, you think?"

Dennie laughed. What Charlie wanted was to make the planet ring like a bell, so he could trace the patterns of seismic waves in the interior. Teeny tiny explosions, indeed! More likely detonations in the kiloton range! Sometimes Charlie seemed so single-minded a planetologist that it bothered Dennie. This time, however, he was obviously having some fun at his own expense.

He laughed as well, letting out brief whoops that echoed off the stark, white walls of the dry lab. He thumped the table beside him.

Grinning, Dennie filled a zip case with papers. "You know, Charlie, there are volcanoes going off all the time, a few degrees away from here. If you're lucky, one might start right near us."

Charlie looked hopeful. "Gee, you think so?"

"Sure. And if the ETs start bombing the planet to get at us, you'll have plenty of data from all the near misses. That is, if they don't bomb so hard as to make geophysical analyses of Kithrup moot. I envy you your potential silver lining. In the meantime, I intend to forget about it, and my own frustrating research, and go get some lunch. Coming?"

"Naw. Thanks, though. I brought my own. I think I'll stay and work for a while."

"Suit yourself. Still, you might try to see more of the ship, other than your quarters and this lab."

"I talk to Metz and Brookida all the time on screen. I don't need to wander around gawking at this Rube Goldberg contraption that can't even fly any more."

"And besides ..." she prompted.

Charlie grinned. "And besides, I hate getting wet. I still think you humans should have worked on dogs second, after casting your spells on us Pan types. Dolphins are all right  --  some of my best friends are fins. But they were a funny bunch to try to make into a space-traveling race!"

He shook his head with an expression of sad wisdom. Obviously he thought the whole uplift process on Earth would have been better handled had his people been in charge.

"Well, they're superb space pilots, for one thing," Dennie suggested. "Look at how hot a star jockey Keepiru is."

"Yeah, and look at what a jerk-off that fin can be when he's not piloting. Honestly, Dennie, this trip has made me wonder if fins are really ready for spaceflight. Have you seen how some of 'em have been acting since we got into trouble? All the pressure is making some of 'em unravel, especially some of Metz's big Stenos."

"You're not being very charitable," Dennie chided. "Nobody ever expected this mission to be so stressful. I think most of the fen are doing marvelously. Look at how Creideiki slipped us away from that trap at Morgran."

Charlie shook his head. "I dunno. I still wish there were more men and chimps aboard."

One century, that's how much longer than dolphins chimps had been a recognized space-faring species. Dennie figured a million years from now they would still hold a patronizing attitude toward fins.

"Well, if you're not coming, I'm off," Dennie said. She took her notecase and touched the palm-plate by the door. "See you, Charlie."

The chimp called after her, before the door hissed shut behind her.

"Oh, by the way! If you run into Tkaat or Sah'ot, have em call me, eh? I'm thinking these subduction anomalies may be paleotechnic! An archaeologist may be interested!"

Dennie let the door close without answering. If she didn't acknowledge Charlie's request, she could feign ignorance later. There was no way she would go out of her way to speak to Sah'ot, whatever the significance of Charlie's find!

Avoiding that particular dolphin was already taking up too much of her time.

The dry sections of the starship Streaker were extensive, though they served only eight members of the crew. The one hundred and thirty dolphins -- down by thirty-two since they had left Earth -- could only visit the dry-wheel by riding a mechanical walker or "spider."

There were some rooms that should not be flooded with hyper-oxygenated water, nor be left to the gravity fluctuations of the central shaft when the ship was in space. There were stores that had to be kept dry, and machine shops that performed hot processing under gravity. And there were the living quarters for men and chimp.

Dennie stopped at an intersection. She looked down the hallway where most of the humans had their cabins and thought about knocking on the door two cabins down. If Tom Orley were in, this could be the time to ask his advice about a problem that was growing daily more irksome, the way to handle Sah'ot's unusual ... "attentions."

There were few people better qualified to advise her on non-human behavior than Thomas Orley. His official title was Alien Technologies Consultant, but it was clear he was also out here as a psychologist, to help Dr. Metz and Dr. Baskin evaluate the performance of an integrated dolphin crew. He knew cetaceans, and might be able to tell her what Sah'ot wanted from her.

Tom would know what to do, but ...

Her habitual indecision reasserted itself. There were plenty of reasons not to bother Tom right now, like the fact that he was spending every waking moment trying to find a way to save all of their lives. Of course, the same could be said of most of the crew, but experience and reputation suggested that Orley just might be able to come up with a way to get Streaker and her crew away from Kithrup before the ETs captured her.

Dennie sighed. Another reason to put it off was pure embarrassment. It wasn't easy for a young fem to ask personal advice of a mel as worldly as Thomas Orley. Particularly when the subject was how to cope with the advances of an amorous porpoise.

However kind Tom would be, he would also be forced to laugh -- or obviously bite back laughter. The situation, Dennie admitted, would have to seem funny, to anyone but the object of the seduction.

Dennie quickened her pace up the gently curved corridor toward the lift. Why did I ever want to go into space, anyway? she asked herself. Sure, it was an opportunity to advance my career. And my personal life was in a shambles anyway, on Earth. But now where am I? My analysis of Kithrupan biology is getting nowhere. There are thousands of bug-eyed monsters circling over the planet slathering to come down and get me, and a horny dolphin's harassing me with suggestions that would make Catherine the Great blush.

It wasn't fair, of course, but when had life ever been fair?

Streaker had been built from a modified Snark hunterclass exploration vessel. Few Snarks were still in service. As Terrans became more comfortable with the refined technologies of the Library, they learned to combine the old and new  --  ancient Galactic designs and indigenous Terran technologies. This process had been in a particularly awkward phase when the Snarks were built.

The ship was a bulb-ended cylinder with jutting, crane-like reality flanges in five bands of five along her hull. In space the flanges anchored her to a protecting sphere of stasis. Now they served as landing legs as the wounded Streaker lay on her side in a muddy canyon, eighty meters below the surface of an alien sea.

Between the third and fourth rings of flanges, the hull bulged outward slightly for the dry-wheel. In free space the wheel rotated, providing a primitive form of artificial gravity. Humans and their clients had learned how to generate gravity fields, but almost every Earth ship still possessed a centrifugal wheel. Some saw it as a trademark, advertising what some friendly species had recommended Terrans keep quiet, that the three races of Sol were different from any others in space ... the "orphans" of Earth.

Streaker's wheel held room for up to forty humans, though right now there were only seven and one chimpanzee. It also held recreation facilities for the dolphin crew, pools for leaping and splashing and sexual play during off-duty hours.

But on a planet's surface the wheel could not turn. Most of its rooms were tilted and inaccessible. And the great central bay of the ship was filled with water.

Dennie rode a lift up one of the spokes connecting the dry-wheel to the ship's rigid spine. The spine supported Streaker's open interior. Dennie stepped from the elevator into a hexagonal hallway with doors and access panels at all angles, until she reached the main bay lock, fifty meters forward of the wheel spokes.

In weightlessness she would have glided rather than walked down the long passage. Gravity made the corridor eerily unfamiliar.

In the bay-lock, a wall of transparent cabinets held spacesuits and diving gear. Dennie chose a bikini from her locker, and a facemask and flippers. Under "normal" circumstances she would have donned coveralls, a small jet belt, and possibly a pair of broad armwings. She could have leapt into the central bay and flown the humid air to any place she wanted, providing she was careful of the rotating spokes of the dry-wheel.

Now, of course, the spokes were still, and the central bay contained something more humid than air.

She quickly stripped and stepped into the swimsuit. Then she stopped in front of a mirror and tugged at the strings until the bikini was comfortable. Dennie knew she was attractively built. At least the mels she knew had told her so often enough. Still, slightly broad shoulders gave her an excuse for the self-reproach she always seemed to be looking for.

She tested the mirror with a smile. The image was instantly transformed. Strong white teeth brilliantly balanced her dark brown eyes.

She let it lapse. Dimples made her look younger, an effect to be avoided at all cost. She sighed and carefully pushed her jet black hair into a rubber diving cap.

Well, let's get this over with.

She checked the seals on her notecase and entered the lock. When she closed the inner hatch, fizzing saline water began flooding into the chamber from vents around the floor.

Dennie avoided looking down. She fumbled with her Batteau breather mask, making it snug over her face. The transparent membrane felt tough, but it passed air in and out freely as she took rapid, deep breaths. Numerous flexible plates around its rim would help pull enough air from supercharged oxywater. At the corners of her vision, the mask was equipped with small sonar displays, which were supposed to help make up for a human's substantial deafness underwater.

Warm bubbling wetness climbed her legs. Dennie readjusted her facemask several times. Her elbow pressed the notecase close against her side. When the fluid had almost reached her shoulders, she immersed her head and breathed hard with her eyes closed.

The mask worked. Of course, it always did. It felt like inhaling in a thick ocean mist, but there was enough air. A bit sheepish over her fearful little ritual, she stood up straight and waited for the water to rise over her head.

At last the door opened, and Dennie swam out into a large chamber where spiders, "walkers," and other dolphin gear lay neatly folded in recesses. Tucked into orderly shelves were racks of the small water jetpacks that the dolphins used to move about in the ship in weightlessness. The jets made amazing acrobatics possible in free fall, but on a planet, with most of the ship flooded, they were useless.

Usually one or two fen were in this outer dressing room, wriggling into or out of equipment. Puzzled by the emptiness, Dennie swam to the opening at the far end of the chamber and looked out into the central bay.

The great cylinder was only twenty meters across. The vista wasn't as impressive as the view from the hub of one of the space cities of Sol's asteroid belts. Still, whenever she entered the central bay, her first impression was one of vast and busy space. Long radial shafts stretched out from spine to cylinder wall, holding the ship rigid and carrying power to the stasis flanges. Between these columns were dolphin work areas, arrayed on supports of resilient mesh.

Dolphins, even the Tursiops amicus, didn't like being cooped up any more than they had to be. In space, the crew worked in the weightless openness of the central bay, jetting about in humid air. But Creideiki had to land his damaged ship in an ocean. And this meant he had also had to flood the ship in order to enable his workers to reach their instruments.

The bay shimmered with a barely suppressed effervescence. Here and there tiny streams of bubbles rose toward the curving ceiling. The waters of Kithrup were carefully filtered, solvents added, and oxygen forced in to make oxywater. Neo-dolphins had been gene-crafted to be able to breathe it, though they didn't enjoy it much.

Dennie looked around, puzzled. Where was everyone?

Motion caught her eye. Above the five-meter span of the central spine, two dolphins and two humans swam rapidly toward the ship's bow. "Hey!" she shouted. "Wait for me!"

The facemask was supposed to focus and amplify the sound of her voice, but to Dennie it sounded as if the water swallowed her words.

The fen stopped at once. In unison they swooped about toward her. The two humans swam on for a few moments, then paused and looked about, moving their arms slowly. When they caught sight of Dennie, one of them waved.

"Hurry up, honored biologissst!" A large, charcoal-gray dolphin in heavy work harness swooped past Dennie. The other one circled about impatiently.

Dennie swam as hard as she could. "What's going on? Is the space battle over? Has someone found us?"

A stocky black man grinned as she approached. The other human, a tall, stately, blonde woman, impatiently turned to go as soon as Dennie had caught up.

"Now, wouldn't we have heard alarms, then, if there'd been ETs cumin'?" The black man kidded her as they swam above the spine. Why Emerson D'Anite, with his dark coloration, chose at times to affect a burr was a secret which Dennie had yet to pry out of him.

She was relieved to hear they weren't under attack, but if the Galactics weren't coming to get them yet, what was all the fuss?

"The prospecting party!" The fate of the lost patrol had completely slipped her mind, so caught up had she been in her own problems. "Gillian, have they come back? Have Toshio and Hikahi returned?"

The older woman swam with a reaching, long-limbed grace that Dennie envied. Her low, alto voice somehow carried well through the water. Her expression was grim.

"Yes Dennie, they're back. But at least four of them are dead."

Dennie gasped. She had to make an effort to keep up. "Dead? How ... ? Who ... ?"

Gillian Baskin didn't slacken her pace. She answered over her shoulder. "We aren't sure how ... . When Brookida made it back, he mentioned Phip-pit and Ssassia ... and told the rescue party they'd probably find others beached or killed."

"Brookida ... ?"

Emerson jogged her with his elbow. "And where have you been? It was announced when he got in, hours ago. Mr. Orley took old Hannes and twenty crewfen to find Hikahi and the others."

"I ... I must have been asleep at the time." Dennie contemplated slowly taking apart a certain chimpanzee. Why didn't Charlie tell me when I came in for work? It probably slipped his mind entirely. One of these days that chimp's monomania will cause somebody to strangle him!

Dr. Baskin had already pulled ahead with the two dolphins. She was almost as fast a swimmer as Tom Orley, and none of the other five humans aboard could keep up with her when she hurried.

Dennie turned to D'Anite. "Tell me about it!"

Emerson quickly summarized the story Brookida had told -- of a killer weed, of a burning, falling star cruiser, and of the savage waves that followed its crash, setting off the desperate cycle of rescue fever.

Dennie was stunned by the story, especially young Toshio's role. That didn't sound like Toshio Iwashika at all. He had been the one person aboard Streaker who seemed younger and lonelier than she. She liked the middie, of course, and hoped he hadn't lost his life trying to be a hero.

Emerson then told her the most recent rumors -- about an island rescue during a midnight storm, and aboriginal tool users.

This time Dennie stopped in midstroke. "Abos? You're sure? Native pre-sentients?" She tread water, staring at the black engineer.

They now were only ten meters from a great open hatch at the bow end of the central bay. Through it came a cacophony of high squeakings and chitterings.

Emerson shrugged. The action shook a coating of bubbles from his shoulders and the rim-plates of his facemask. "Dennie, why don't we go in and find out? So far all we have is gossip. They must be through decontamination by now"

From ahead there came a sudden, high-pitched whine of engines; then three white power sleds sped from the outlock hatch, single-file. They veered, one by one, around Dennie and D'Anite before either of them could move, leaving fizzing trails of supercritical bubbles in their wakes.

Strapped to the back of each, under a plastic shell, was an injured dolphin. Two of them had dreadful gashes in their flanks, crudely bandaged. Dennie blinked in surprise when she saw that one of them was Hikahi, Streakers third officer.

The ambulance sleds banked under the central spine and headed for an opening in the inner wall of the great cylinder. On the last sled, clutching a handrail, the dusky blonde who had accompanied them here allowed herself to be dragged along. With her free hand she pressed a diagnostic monitor to the flank of one of the wounded dolphins.

"No wonder Gillian was in such a hurry. It was stupid of me to slow her down."

"Oh, don't worry about it." Emerson held her arm. "The injuries didn't look like the kind you'd need a human surgeon for. Makanee and the autodocs can handle almost anything, you know"

"Still, there may be biochemical damage ... poisons ... I might be of use."

She turned to go, but the engineer's hand held her.

"You'll be called if it's anything Makanee or feMister Baskin can't handle. And I don't think you'll want to miss out on news that bears on your specialty."

Dennie looked after the ambulances, then nodded. Emerson was right. If she was needed, an intercom call would reach her anywhere, and a sled would arrive to fetch her faster than she could swim. They swam toward the buzzing of excited cetaceans in the outlock bay, and entered the forward chamber amid a swirl of swooping gray forms and a ferment of flying bubbles.

The forward outlock at Streakers bow was the ship's main link with the outside. The cylindrical wall was covered by storage cells, holding spiders, sleds, and other gear for crew who might leave the ship on errands. The bow had three great airlocks.

Port and starboard, the spacious chamber was taken up by the skiff and the longboat. The nose of each small spaceship almost touched the iris that would let it outside, into vacuum, air, or water, as needed.

The stern of the skiff stopped short of the rear bulkhead of the twenty-meter outlock, but the aft end of the larger longboat disappeared into a sleeve that extended into the maze of rooms and passages in Streakers thick cylindrical shell.

Overhead, a third berthing port lay empty. The captain's gig had been lost to a strange accident weeks before, along with ten crew members, at the region Creideiki had named the Shallow Cluster. Its loss, in the course of investigating the derelict fleet, was a topic seldom brought up in conversation.

Dennie gripped D'Anite's arm as another sled passed by more slowly than the white ambulances of sick bay. Sealed green bags were tied to its back. A bottle-like narrowness at one end of each, and a flat flaring at the other, revealed their contents.

There's no smaller bag, Dennie thought. Does that mean Toshio's alive then? Then she saw, by the decontamination lock, a young drysuited human in a crowd of dolphins.

"There's Toshio!" she cried, a little surprised at the intensity of her relief. She forced herself to speak in a calm tone. "Is that Keepiru next to him?" She pointed.

D'Anite nodded. "Yeah. They seem all right. By my count I guess that means Hist't hitched a sky-current. That's a rotten shame. We got along." Emerson's affected burr was completely gone as he mourned the loss of a friend.

He peered through the crowd. "Can you think of an official enough reason for us to shove in there? Most of the fen would get out of our way out of habit. But Creideiki's something else. He'll chew our asses off, patrons or no, if he thinks were hanging around useless and getting in the way."

Dennie had been thinking about just that. "Leave it to me." She led him into the jostling crowd, touching flipper and fluke to pry a passage through the press. Most of the fen moved to one side on catching a glimpse of the two humans.

Dennie looked about the squeaking, clicking mob. Shouldn't Tom Orley be here? she thought. He and Hannes and Tsh't were in on the rescue, weren't they? So why don't I see him anywhere? I've got to talk to him sometime soon!

Toshio looked like a very tired young man. Just out of decon, he slowly peeled off his drysuit as he spoke with Creideiki. Soon he floated naked but for a facemask. Dabs of synthetic skin coated his hands and throat and face. Keepiru drifted nearby. The exhausted dolphin wore a breather, probably under physician's orders.

Suddenly the spectators blocking Dennie's view began to spin about and dart away in all directions.

* ... bands of idle gawkers --

     cease their vain eavesdropping!

* Lest the nets of Iki find them --

     for their lack of work and purpose!

The sudden cetacean dispersal buffeted Dennie and Emerson; in moments the crowd had thinned.

"Do not-t make me repeat myself!" Creideiki reiterated. His voice pursued the fleeing spacers. "All is done in here. Think clear thoughts and do your jobs!"

A dozen fen remained near the captain and Toshio: outlock personnel and the captain's aides. Creideiki turned to Toshio. "Go on then, little shark-biter, finish your story"

The boy blushed, nonplussed by the honorific. He forced his heavy eyelids open and tried to maintain a semblance of standard posture in the drifting current.

"Uh, I think that's about it, sir. I've told you everything Mr. Orley and Tsh't told me about their plans. If the ET wreck looks usable, they'll send a sled back with a report. If not, they'll return with whatever they've salvaged as quickly as possible."

Creideiki made small slow circles with his lower jaw. "A hazardousss gamble," he commented. "They'll not reach the hulk for a day, at least. More days, still, will pass without contact ..."

Bubbles rose from his blowmouth.

"Very well, then. You shall rest, then join me for supper. I'm afraid your reward for saving Hikahi for us, and possibly all of our lives as well, shall be an interrogation the likes of which you might not even receive from our enemies."

Toshio smiled tiredly.

"I understand, sir. I'll happily let you wring me of information, just so long as I can eat first ... and get dry for a while!"

"Done. Until then!" The captain nodded and turned to go.

Dennie was about to shout to Creideiki when someone else called out first.

"Captain, please! May I have a word?"

The voice was musical. The speaker was a large male dolphin with the mottled gray coloration of one of the Stenos sub-breeds. He wore a civilian harness, without the bulky racks or heavy manipulator arms carried by the regular crew.

Dennie felt a strong urge to hide behind Emerson D'Anite. She hadn't noticed Sah'ot in the crowd until he spoke.

"Before you go, sir," the dolphin fluted. His tone of voice was quite casual. "I must asssk you for permission to go to that island where Hikahi was stranded."

With a tail-flick Creideiki arched over bottom side up to regard the speaker. He addressed the fin skeptically. "Talker-to-races, this is not a fishbrew bar, this island, where poetry can buy back an error. Why venture now courage you never before displayed?"

Sah'ot lay still for a moment. In spite of her dislike of the civilian specialist, Dennie felt sympathy rise within her. Sah'ot's behavior at the derelict fleet, in refusing to go along with the doomed survey party, had not been admirable. He had acted like a prima-donna.

But he had been proven right. The captain's gig and ten fine crew members had been lost, along with Streakers former second in command.

All the sacrifice had gained them was a three-meter-long tube of some strange metal, thoroughly pitted by ages of micrometeorite impacts. It had been recovered personally by Thomas Orley. Gillian Baskin had taken over the sealed relic, and to Dennie's knowledge nobody else had seen it since. It hardly seemed worth the loss they had suffered.

"Captain," Sah'ot addressed Creideiki, "I believe that there is a matter that even Thomas Orley could not have had time to cover in detail. He has gone on to investigate the wrecked warship, but the island still does concern us."

No fair! Dennie had been ready to do this! It was to be an act of professionalism -- of assertion, to speak out and demand ....

"Honestly Captain," Sah'ot went on, "after our duty to escape this trap, and to serve the clan of Earth species, what is the most important responsibility that has fallen upon uss?"

Creideiki looked torn. He obviously wanted to chew Sah'ot's dorsal fin for baiting him like this. Also, obviously, Sah'ot had hit him with a double harpoon ... mentioning the word "duty," and lacing it into a riddle. The captain thrashed his tail, giving out a low series of broad-band sonar clicks, like a watch ticking. His eyes were recessed and dark.

Dennie couldn't wait for the captain to figure the puzzle, or slap Sah'ot into a cell.

"The abos!" she shouted.

Creideiki turned and regarded her. Dennie blushed as she felt his field of analytic sound sweep over her. She knew the waves penetrated her very viscera, telling everything down to what she had had for breakfast. Creideiki frightened her. She felt very far from being patron to the powerful and involute mind behind that broad forehead.

The captain suddenly whirled about and swam to Toshio. "You still have those artifactsss that Thomas Orley selected, young hunter?"

"Yes, sir, I ..."

"You will please lend them to Biologist Sudman and Race Speaker Sah'ot before you retire. When you've rested, collect them again, along with the specialists' recommendations. I will examine them myself during supper."

Toshio nodded. The captain flipped to face Dennie.

"Before I give permission, you must have a plan. You'll get little material assistance from me, and you will be recalled at any sign of danger. Can you accept these conditions?"

"Y yes ... we'll need a monofilament cable to the ship, for a computer link, and ..."

"Talk this over with Keepiru, before he rests. He must help you come up with something militarily acceptable."

"Keepiru? But I thought ..." Dennie looked at the younger dolphin, and quickly bit back the tactlessness she had been about to utter. Silently wearing his breather, the pilot seemed unhappier than ever.

"I have my reasons, femsir. As a pilot, he is of little use while we are immobile. I can spare him from the work here, to be your field liaison ... if I agree to your plan."

The captain's attention made Keepiru hunch slightly and look away. Toshio put a hand on Keepiru's sleek back. That, too, was a change. The two had never struck Dennie as fast friends before.

Creideiki's teeth shone in the bright lights of the bay.

"Is there more comment-t?"

Everyone was silent.

Creideiki thrashed his tail, then whistled the phrase of command termination. He arched and sped away with rapid, powerful strokes. His aides followed in his wake.

Keepiru watched until his captain passed out of sight. Then he addressed Dennie and Sah'ot.

* At your service, you will find me --

     In my quarters, floating, breathing --

* After seeing Toshio resting. ... *

Toshio smiled when Dennie gave him a brief hug. Then he turned to swim away, arm over Keepiru's back, keeping to the fin's slow pace.

Just then one of the intrahull lift tubes opened and a blue and yellow shape bulleted out of the tube. A joyful racket filled the chamber as the ship's other midshipman speared past Keepiru and the boy, then zoomed around them in ever-tightening circles, chattering excitedly.

"Do you really think Toshio's going to get any sleep?" Emerson asked.

"Not if Akki makes him tell the entire story before he has supper with the captain." Dennie envied Akki and Toshio their fellowship, as constant and intense as any star. She watched the boy laughing as he fended off his friend until they disappeared into the tube.

"Well, sister," Emerson D'Anite grinned at Dennie. "It appears you have a science command. My congratulations."

"Nothing's decided yet," she answered. "Besides, Keepiru will be in charge."

"Keepiru will have military command. That part confuses me a bit. I don't know where Creideiki's aiming, assigning Keepiru that job after the way I hear he behaved out there. My guess is it's his way of getting the poor dollie out of his hai ... hide."

Dennie had to agree, though she thought it a bit cruel.

She suddenly felt a smooth, flat touch on the inner part of her left thigh. She yelped and whirled around with her hand at her throat; then sighed when she saw that it was the neo-dolphin anthropologist, Sah'ot, who had slipped in his left pectoral fin to goose her. The Stenos gave her an uneven grin. His rough teeth shone brightly.

Dennie's heart pounded. "Shark-breath! Doggerel-rhymer! Go make love to an unwashed specimen bottle!" Her voice cracked.

Sah'ot reared back, his eyes momentarily white-rimmed in surprise. Apparently he hadn't expected Dennie to be so high-strung.

"Aw, Dennie," Sah'ot sighed. "I was jussst trying to thank you for interceding with Creideiki. Obviously your charms are more persuasive to him than any arguments I might raise. Sorry if I sstartled you."

Dennie sniffed at Sah'ot's double-edged apology. Still, her reaction might have been overdrawn. Her pulse slowly settled. "Oh ... never mind. Just don't you sneak up on me like that!"

Without even turning around, she could feel Emerson D'Anite grinning behind his hand. Males, she thought. Do they ever grow up?

"Um, Dennie?" Sah'ot's voice crooned like a string trio. "There is one small matter we have to discuss, if we are going to be going on this expedition to the island together. Will you be churlish and let Creideiki choose the science commander on the basis of prejudice? Or will you give me a chance? Maybe we can wrestle for it-t-t?"

D'Anite started coughing. He turned the other way and cleared his throat.

Dennie blushed. "We'll let the captain decide what's best. Besides ... I'm not sure both of us should go. Charlie told me his analysis of the planetary crust samples may be of interest to you ... there are traces of paleotechnology in recent layers. You ought to go see him right away."

Sah'ot's eyelids narrowed. "That isss interesting. I'd thought this planet was fallow far longer than would allow paleotech-ch remnants."

But he dashed Dennie's hopes. "Alasss. Digging for long-toasted garbage of past Kithrupan civilizations cannot be half as important as making contact with pre-sentients and establishing a proper patron claim for you humans. We fins might have new client cousins before even neo-dogs are finished! Heaven help the poor creatures if the Tandu or Soro or similar ilk collect them!

"Besides," he soothed, "this is a chance for us to get to know each other better ... and exchange professional information, of course."

Emerson D'Anite had to cough again.

"I've left the repairs for too long already, kids," he said. His burr was back in force. "I think I'll be gettin' on back to my engines, and let you two discuss your plans."

D'Anite's grin was barely suppressed. Dennie swore eventual revenge. "Emerson!" she hissed.

"Yes, lass?" He looked back at her innocently.

She glared, "Oh ... I'll bet you haven't a drop of Celtic blood in your body!"

The dark engineer smiled at her. "Why, bairn, didn' ya know? All Scots are engineers, and all engineers are Scots." He waved and swam off before Dennie could think of a reply. Trapped, she cursed, by a cliche!

When D'Anite was out of earshot Sah'ot sidled close to Dennie. "Shall we start planning our expedition?" His blowmouth was near her ear.

Dennie started. Suddenly she noticed that everyone had gone. Dennie's heart beat faster, and her facemask seemed not to be giving her enough air.

"Not here we won't!" She spun away and began swimming. "Let's go to the wardroom. There are plotting boards ... and airdomes! A man can breathe there!"

Sah'ot kept pace with her, uncomfortably close.

"Aw, Dennie ..." he said, but he didn't press. Instead, he began to sing a low, atonal, hybrid melody in a complex and obscure dialect of Trinary.

Against her will, Dennie found herself drawn into the song. It was strange, and eerily beautiful, and it took her several minutes to realize that it was also dirty as hell.

15 ::: Stenos

Moki, Sreekah-pol, and Hakukka-jo spent their latest off-duty period as they had spent every one for weeks, complaining.

"He was down in my section again, t-today," Sreekah-pol griped, "sticking his jaw into everybody's work-k. Thinks he's ssso-o-o discreet, but he fills the sound-scape with his Keneenk-k echoes!"

Moki nodded. There wasn't any doubt who "he" was.

* Crying--Crooning

     Talk, talk rhythms

* My group wags tails

     To his Logic Logic! *

Hakukka-jo winced. Moki seldom spoke Anglic anymore, and his Trinary had a little too much Primal in it to be decent.

But Sreekah-pol obviously thought Moki's point valid. "All the Tursiopsss worship Creideiki. They imitate him and try to act like Keneenk-k adeptsss! Even half of our Stenos seem just as swallowed by his spell!"

"Well, if he can get-t us out of here alive, I will forgive even his nosy inspections," Hakkuka-jo suggested.

Moki tossed his head.

* Alive! Alive!

     To deep, rich waters!

* Follow, Follow

     A rough-toothed leader! *

"Will you make quiet-t-t?" Hakukka-jo swung about quickly to listen to the echoes in the rest area. A few crewfen were gathered by the food machines. They gave no sign of having heard. "Heed your scatter! You're already in trouble without clicking mutiny talk! I hear Doctor Metz has gone to Takkata-Jim to ask about you!"

Moki smirked defiantly. Sreekah-pol agreed with Moki's unspoken comment. "Metz won't do nothing," Sreekah said. "It'sss common knowledge half the Stenos aboard were chosen by him. We're his babiesss," Sreekah-pol crooned. "With Orley and Tsh't gone, and Hikahi in sick bay, the only's we gotta watch out for is the chief smartass himself,"

Hakkuka-jo looked about wildly. "You too? Look-k, will you be quiet? There comes K'tha-Jon!"

The other two turned the way he indicated. They saw a huge neo-fin swim out of a hull lift and head their way. Dolphins half his size got out of the giant's way quickly.

"So what-t-t? He is of us!" Sreekah-pol said uncertainly.

"He's also a bosun!" Hakkuka jo answered hotly.

"He hates Tursiopsss smartasses, too!" Moki cut in in Anglic.

"Maybe, but if so he keeps it to himself! He knows how humans feel about racism!"

Moki looked away. The dark mottled dolphin was like a lot of fins in holding the patron race in a sort of superstitious dread. He countered weakly in Trinary.

* Ask the black men --

     The brown and yellow men

* Ask the whales --

     About human racism! *

"That was a long time ago!" Hakkuka-jo snapped, somewhat shocked. "And humans had no patrons to guide them!"

"Jussst ssso ..." Sreekah-pol said, but his agreement sounded unsure.

They all shut up as K'tha-Jon approached. Hakkuka-jo felt a recurring chill on contemplating the bosun.

K'tha-Jon was a giant, surpassing three meters in length with a girth that two men couldn't span with their arms. His bottle nose was blunt, and, unlike the other so-called Stenos aboard, his coloring was not mottled but deeply countershaded. Rumor had it K'tha-Jon was another of Dr. Metz's "special" cases.

The giant swam up nearby and exhaled a loud spurt of bubbles. His open jaws displayed a fearful array of rough teeth. The others almost unconsciously adapted a submissive posture, eyes averted, foodmouths closed.

"I hear there's been more fighting ..." K'tha-Jon rumbled in deep Underwater Anglic. "Fortunately, I was able to bribe senior bosun S'thata with a rare sensie tape, and he agreed not to report it to the captain. I'll expect the cost of the tape to be covered by somebody, with interest-t ... ."

Moki seemed about to speak, but K'tha-Jon cut him off.

"No excuses! Your temper is a burden I can do without. S'thata would have been right to challenge you for biting him from behind like that-t!"

* Dare him! Dare him!

     Tursiops coward!

* Dare him ...

Moki barely blatted out the beginning before being slammed amidships by a blow from K'tha-Jon's mighty flukes.

He slewed several meters through the water before coming to rest, whistling in pain. K'tha-Jon came close and murmured softly.

"YOU are Tursiops! That is the name of our entire, Library-registered species! Tursiopsss amicusss ... `friendly bottlenose'! Ask Dr. Metz if you don't believe me! Embarrass the rest of uss aboard who have Stenos grafts in our genes  --  Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim and myself, for instance -- by acting like an animal, and I will show you how to be a friendly bottlenose! I'll use your gutssss for hawsers!"

Mold trembled and turned away, jaw closed tightly.

K'tha-Jon swept the cowering fin with a contemptuous spray of sonar, then turned to regard the others. Hakkuka-jo and Sreekah-pol looked idly at the bright, decorative garibaldi and angel fish which were allowed to swim unmolested throughout the central bay. Hakkuka-jo whistled softly.

"Break is almost over," the bosun snapped. "Back to work-k. And save your hatred for your private time!" K'tha-Jon turned about and sped away, the turbulence from his flukes almost toppling the others.

Hakukka-jo watched him go, then whistled a long, low sigh.

That should do it, K'tha-Jon thought as he hurried off to duties in the cargo section. Moki, especially, would be quiet for a while. He had better be.

If there was anything he and Takkata-Jim did not need, it was a spate of racist innuendo and suspicion. Nothing would unite the humans in alienation like that sort of thing.

And catch the attention of Creideiki, too. Takkata-Jim insists we give the captain one more chance to come up with a plan to get us home alive.

All right, then, I can wait.

But what if he doesn't? What if he keeps asking for sacrifice from a crew that never volunteered to be heroes?

In that case, someone would have to be able to present the crew with an alternative to follow. Takkata-Jim was still reluctant, but that might not last.

If the time did come, they would need human support, and Moki's kind of interracial bullying could wreck the chances of that. K'tha-Jon intended to ride close herd on that Stenos, to keep him nice and docile.

Even if it was nice, from time to time, to chew the tail of some bloody, shore-hugging, sanctimonious, smartass Tursiops!

16 ::: Galactics

-- Rejoice -- crooned the fourth Brother of the Ebony Shadows. Rejoice that the fifth moon of the small dusty planet has been conquered! --

The Brothers of the Night had fought bitterly for this fulcrum of power, from which they would soon project irresistible might and sweep the skies of heretics and blasphemers. This moon would guarantee that the prize would be theirs, and theirs alone!

None of the other moons in the Kthsemenee system had the one attribute this one possessed: a core of almost one percent unobtainium. Already thirty of the Brothers' ships had landed, to begin construction of the Weapon.

The Library, as always, had been the key. Many cycles ago the fourth Brother of the Ebony Shadows had come across an obscure reference to a device once used in a war between two races now long extinct. It had taken him half of his lifespan to hunt down the details, for the Library was a labyrinth. But now would come his payment!

-- Rejoice! -- The cry resounded. It was a paean of triumph meant to be heard, and indeed a few of the other combatants began to notice that something curious was going on over in a corner of Kthsemenee's system. While the fiercest battles raged around the strategic gas-giant world, and Kithrup itself, some enemies had begun to send scouts this way to see what the Brothers of the Night were up to.

-- Let them come and look! Can it matter? --

A ship of the Soro had been watching them for some time. Could it have divined their purpose?

-- Never! The citation was too obscure! Our new weapon has sat unnoticed too long in the dusty archives. They will first understand when this moon begins to vibrate on the fifteenth probability band sending out waves of uncertainty that will tear their battle fleets apart! Then their shipboard Libraries will undoubtedly remember, but too late! --

The Brother of the Ebony Shadows watched from space as the resonator neared completion, watched as the grounded ships fed their combined energies to the resonator. From a thousand units out he could feel the wave build ....

-- What are they doing? What are the Progenitor-scorned Soro doing? --

instruments showed that the Brothers of the Night were not alone on the fifteenth band! From the Soro ship came a small tone, a variation of the beat emanating from the small moon. An echo.

The fifteenth band began to beat. It was impossible, but it resonated along with the Soro rhythm!

The Brothers on the ground tried to damp the runaway signal, but it was already too late! The small moon shook, and finally crumbled. Great shards of rock tumbled apart, crushing the little ships in their way.

-- How could they have known? How could they ... ? --

Then the Brother of the Ebony Shadows understood. Long ago, when he had begun his search for a new weapon, there had been a helpful Librarian ... a Pilan. The Pilan had always been there with the useful suggestion, with the helpful reference. The Brother had thought nothing of it. Librarians were supposed to be helpful, and neutral, whatever their backgrounds.

-- But the Pil are clients to the Soro -- The Brother realized  --  Krat knew all along --

He gave the order sending his remaining forces into hiding.  -- This is only a setback. We shall yet be the ones to capture the Earthlings! --

Behind the fleeing remnants, the small moon continued to dissolve.

17 ::: Tom Orley

Hannes Suessi lay prone on the heavy work sled next to Thomas Orley. The gaunt, balding artificer gestured at the wreck before them.

"It's a Thennanin ship," the chief engineer said. "It's pretty badly crumpled, but there's no doubt. See? There are no objectivity anchors, only stasis projectors on the main flanges. The Thennanin are terrified of reality alteration. This ship was never designed to use a probability drive. Definitely, it's Thennanin, or a Thennanin client or ally."

The dolphins circled slowly nearby, taking turns at the airdomes underneath the sled, emitting excited sonar clicks as they eyed the gigantic crushed arrowhead below them.

"I think you're right, Hannes," Tom said. "It's a behemoth."

That the ship was still in one piece was amazing. In its Mach five meeting with the ocean, it had caromed off at least two small sub-surface islands -- leaving substantial dents in them -- and plowed a deep gouge in the ocean floor before

finally catching up against a furrow of pelagic mud, just before it would have smashed into a sheer scarp. The cliff face looked crumbly and precarious. Another substantial jolt would surely cause a collapse, burying the wreck completely.

Orley knew that it was the quality of the Thennanin stasis shields that had made such a performance possible. Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable -- and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

It was difficult to assess the damage yet. Down here the illumination from the surface was blue-tinged and dim. The fen wouldn't turn on the arc lights they had strung up until Tsh't said it was safe. Fortunately, the wreck was in water shallow enough to visit, yet deep enough to shield them from spy eyes overhead.

A pink-bellied bottlenose dolphin swam up next to the sled. She worked her foodmouth in a thoughtful circular motion.

"It's really amazing, isn't it, Tom?" she asked. "It should be in a jillion piecesss."

This deep, there was an odd clarity to the fin's voice. Bursts of air from her blowmouth and sonar clicks joined in a complex manner to make speech an intricate juggling of bodily functions. To a landlubber human, a neo-dolphin speaking underwater sounded more like an avant-garde orchestra tuning up, than someone speaking a derivative of the English language.

"Do you think we can make any use of it-t?" The dolphin officer asked.

Orley looked again at the ship. There was a good chance that in the confusion of battle none of those contending over Kithrup had bothered to note where this sparrow had fallen. He already had a few tentative ideas, one or two of which might just be bold and unexpected -- and idiotic-enough to work.

"Let's give it a look," he nodded. "I suggest we split into three teams. Team one heads for any center of emissions, particularly probability, psi, or neutrino radiation, and disables the source. They should also watch out for survivors, though that seems a bit unlikely."

Suessi snorted as he looked at the pounded wreck. Orley went on.

"Team two concentrates on harvesting. Hannes should lead that one, along with Ti-tcha. They'll look for monopoles and refined metals that Streaker might be able to use. With luck, they might find some replacements for those coils we need.

"With your permission, Tsh't, I'll take team three. I want to look over the structural integrity of that ship, and survey the topography of the surrounding area."

Tsh't did a jaw clap of agreement. "Your logic is good, Tom. That is what we'll do. I'll leave Lucky Kaa with the other sled, on alert. The ressst shall join their teams at once."

Orley grabbed Tsh't's dorsal fin as she was about to whistle the command. "Oh, we'd better go with breathers all around, hadn't we? Trinary may not be efficient, but I'd rather put off complex conversations in Anglic than have to risk everybody shuttling back and forth for air, and maybe someone getting hurt."

Tsh't grimaced, but gave the command. The party was composed of disciplined fen -- the pick of Streaker's crew -- so the gathering at the sled was occasion merely for low-pitched grousing and indignant bubbles as each dolphin was fitted with his wraparound hose of air.

Tom had heard of prototype breathers that would give a fin a streamlined air supply without hindering his speechmouth. If ever he found the time, he might try to rig some up himself. Speaking Trinary posed no real difficulty for him, but he knew from experience that the fen would have problems conveying technical information in anything but Anglic.

Old Hannes was already grumbling. He helped pass out the breathers with ill-disguised reluctance. The chief artificer was conversant in Trinary, of course, but he found the threelevel logic difficult. To cap things off he was a lousy poet. He obviously didn't look forward to trying to discuss technical matters in whistle rhyme.

They had their work cut out for them. Several of the picked petty officers and crew that had accompanied them on the rescue effort had gone back to the ship, escorting Toshio and Hikahi and the other victims of the stranding waves. Only a short score of fen remained in the party. Should anything dangerous come up they would have to take care of it themselves. No help from Streaker could arrive in time to do any good.

It would have been nice to have Gillian here, Tom mused. Not that inspecting alien cruisers was her area of expertise, but she knew fins, and could handle herself if things got sticky.

But she had work of her own aboard Streaker, trying to solve the puzzle of a billion-year-old mummy that should never have existed in the first place. And in an emergency she was the only other person aboard Streaker, barring, possibly Creideiki himself, who knew about the Niss machine, or its potential value if given access to the right data.

Tom smiled as he caught himself rationalizing again.

Okay, so there are good and logical reasons why the two of us can't be together right now. Take it for what it's worth. Do a good job here, and maybe you can be back to her in a few days.

There had never been any question, from the moment they had met as adolescents, that he and she would make a pair. He sometimes wondered if their planners had known in advance, in choosing gametes from selected married couples, that two of the growing zygotes would later fit together so perfectly -- -down to the simple telempathy they sometimes shared.

Probably it was a happy accident. Human genetic planning was very limited, by law and custom. Accident or no, Tom was grateful. In his missions for the Terragens Council he had learned that the universe was dangerous and filled with disillusionment. Too few sophonts -- even those equipped for it -- ever got enough love.

As soon as the breathers had been distributed Tom used the sled's speaker to amplify his voice. "Now remember, everybody; though all Galactic technologies are based on the Library, that collection of wisdom is so huge that almost any type of machine might be inside that hull. Treat everything like it's booby-trapped until you've identified it and rendered it harmless.

"The first goal of Team One, after silencing the wreck, is to find the main battle computers. There may be a record of the initial stages of the fight above. That information might be invaluable to the captain.

"And would you all keep an eye out for the Library glyph? If you find that symbol anywhere, please note its location and pass word to me. I'd like to see what kind of micro-branch they were carrying."

He nodded to Tsh't. "Is that all right with you, Lieutenant?"

Streaker's fourth officer clapped jaw and nodded. Orley's politeness was appreciated, but she was likelier to bite off her own tail than overrule any suggestion he made. Streaker was the first large expedition ever commanded and operated by dolphins. It had been clear from the beginning that certain humans were along whose advice bore the patina of patronomy.

She called out in Trinary.

* Team One, with me --

     To diffract above, listening

* Team Two, with Suessi --

     To taste for treasure

* Team Three, with Orley --

     To aid him scheming

* Drop nothing of Earth here --

     To betray our visit

* Clean it up after --

     If you must shit

* Think before acting --

     In tropic-clear logic

* Now Streakers, with stillness --

     Away! *

In precise order three formations peeled off, one group embellishing with a synchronized barrel roll as they passed Orley's sled. In obedience to Tsh't's orders, the only sound was the rapid clicking of cetacean sonar.

Orley rode the sled until he was within forty meters of the hulk. Then he patted Hannes on the back and rolled off to the side.

What a beautiful find the ship was! Orley used a hot-torch spectrograph to get a quick analysis of the metal at the edges of a gaping tear in the vessel's side. When he determined the ratios of various beta-decay products he whistled, causing the fen nearby to turn and look at him curiously. He had to make assumptions about the original alloy and the rate of exposure to neutrinos since the metal was forged, but reasonable guesses indicated that the ship had been fabricated at least thirty million years ago!

Tom shook his head. A fact like that made one realize how far Mankind had to go to catch up with the Galactics.

We like to think of the races using the Library as being in a rut, uncreative and unadaptable, Orley thought.

That appeared to be largely true. Very often the Galactic races seemed stodgy and unimaginative. But ...

He looked at the dark, hulking battleship, and wondered.

Legend had it that the Progenitors had called for a perpetual search for knowledge before they departed for parts unknown, aeons ago. But, in practice, most species looked to the Library and only the Library for knowledge. Its store grew only slowly.

What was the point of researching what must have been discovered a thousand times over by those who came before?

It was simple, for instance, to choose advanced spaceship designs from Library archives and follow them blindly, understanding only a small fraction of what was built. Earth had a few such ships, and they were marvels.

The Terragens Council, which handled relations between the races of Earth and the Galactic community, once almost succumbed to that tempting logic. Many humans urged co-opting of Galactic models that older races had themselves co-opted from ancient designs. They cited the example of Japan, which in the nineteenth century had faced a similar problem -- how to survive amongst nations immeasurably more powerful than itself. Meiji Japan had concentrated all its energy on learning to imitate its neighbors, and succeeded in becoming just like them, in the end.

The majority on the Terragens Council, including nearly all of the cetacean members, disagreed. They considered the Library a honey pot -- tempting, and possibly nourishing, but also a terrible trap.

They feared the "Golden Age" syndrome ... the temptation to "look backward" -- to find wisdom in the oldest, dustiest texts, instead of the latest journal.

Except for a few races, such as the Kanten and Tymbrimi, the Galactic community as a whole seemed stuck in that kind of a mentality. The Library was their first and last recourse for every problem. The fact that the ancient records almost always contained something useful didn't make that approach any less repugnant to many of the wolflings of Earth, including Tom, Gillian, and their mentor, old Jacob Demwa.

Coming out of a tradition of bootstrap technology, Earth's leaders were convinced there were things to be gained from innovation, even this late in Galactic history. At least it felt better to believe that. To a wolfling race, pride was an important thing.

Orphans often have little else.

But here was evidence of the power of the Golden Age approach. Everything about this ship spoke silkily of refinement. Even in wreckage, it was beautifully simple in its construction, while indulgent and ornate in its embellishments. The eye saw no welds. Bracings and struts were always integral to some other purpose. Here one supported a stasis flange, while apparently also serving as a baffled radiator for excess probability. Orley thought he could detect other overlaps, subtleties that could only have come with aeons of slow improvement on an ancient design.

He was struck by a decadence in the pattern, an ostentation that he found arrogant and bizarre beyond mere alienness.

One of Tom's main assignments aboard Streaker had been evaluation of alien devices -- particularly the military variety. This wasn't the best the Galactics had, yet it made him feel like an ancient New Guinea headhunter, proud of his new muzzle-loading musket, but painfully aware of the fact of machine guns.

He looked up. His team was gathering. He chinned his hydrophone switch.

"Everybody about done? All right, then. Subteam two, head off and see if that canyon goes all the way through the ridge. It'd cut twenty klicks of the route from here to Streaker."

He heard a whistle of assent from Karacha Jeff, leader of subteam two. Good. That fin was reliable.

"Be careful," he added as they swam off. Then he motioned for the others to follow him into the wreck through the seared, curled rent in its hull.

They entered darkened corridors of eerily familiar design. Everywhere were signs of the commonality of Galactic culture, superimposed with the idiosyncrasies of a peculiar alien race. The lighting panels were identical to those on ships of a hundred species but the spaces in between were garishly decorated with Thennanin hieroglyphs.

Orley eidetically examined it all. But always he looked out for one thing, a symbol that could be found everywhere in the Five Linked Galaxies -- a rayed spiral.

They'll tell me when they find it, he reminded himself. The fins know I'm interested.

I do hope, though, they don't suspect just how badly I want to see that glyph.

18 ::: Gillian

"Aw, why should I? Huh? You aren't being very cooperative with me! All I want is to talk to Brookida for just a minute. It's not as if I was asking a lot!"

Gillian Baskin felt tired and irritable. The holo image of the chimpanzee planetologist Charles Dart glared out at her. It would be easy to become scathing and force Charlie to retreat. But then he would probably complain to Ignacio Metz, and Metz would lecture her about "bullying people just because they are clients."

Crap. Gillian wouldn't take from a human being what she had put up with from this self-important little neo-chimp!

She brushed aside a strand of dark blonde hair that had fallen over her eyes. "Charlie, for the last time, Brookida is sleeping. He has received your message, and will call you when Makanee says he's had enough rest. In the meantime, all I want from you is a listing of isotope abundances for the trans-ferric elements here on Kithrup. We've just finished more than four hours surgery on Satima, and we need that data to design a chelating sequence for her. I want to get every microgram of heavy metal out of her body as soon as possible.

"Now, if that's too much to ask, if you're too overworked studying little geological puzzles, I'll just call the captain or Takkata-Jim, and ask them to assign somebody to go down and help you!"

The chimp scientist grimaced. His lips curled back to display an array of large, yellowed, buck teeth. At the moment, in spite of the enlarged globe of his cranium, his outthrust jaw, and his opposable thumbs, he looked more like an angry ape than a sapient scientist.

"Oh, all right!" His hands fluttered and emotion made him stammer. "B-But this is important! Understand? I think Kithrup was inhabited by technological sophonts as recently as thirty thousand years ago! Yet the Galactic Migration Institutes had this planet posted as fallow and untouchable for the last hundred million!"

Gillian suppressed an urge to say, "So what?" There had been more defunct and forgotten species in the history of the Five Galaxies than even the Library could count.

Charlie must have read her expression. "It's illegal!" he shouted. His coarse voice cracked. "If it's true, the Institute of M-migration should be told! They might even be grateful enough to help get those crazy religious n-n-nuts overhead to let us alone!"

Gillian lifted an eyebrow in surprise. What was this? Charles Dart pondering implications beyond his own work? Even he, then, must think from time to time about survival. His argument about the laws of migration were naive, considering how often the codes were twisted and perverted by the more powerful clans. But he deserved some credit.

"OK. That's a good point Charlie," she nodded. "I'm having dinner with the captain later. I'll mention it to him then. I'll also ask Makanee if she'll let Brookida out a little early. Good enough?"

Charlie looked at her with suspicion. Then, unable to maintain so subtle and intermediate an expression for long, he let a broad grin spread.

"Good enough!" he rumbled. "And you'll have that fax in your hands within four minutes! I leave you in good health."

"Health," Gillian replied softly, as the holo faded.

She spent a long moment staring at the blank comm screen. With her elbows on the desk, her face settled down upon the palms of her hands.

Ifni! I should have been able to handle an angry chimp better than that. What's the matter with me?

Gillian gently rubbed her eyes. Well, I've been up for twenty-six hours, for one thing.

A long and unproductive argument about semantics with Tom's damned, sarcastic Niss machine hadn't helped at all, when all she had wanted from the thing was its assistance on a few obscure Library references. It knew she needed help to crack the mystery of Herbie, the ancient cadaver that lay under glass in her private lab. But it kept changing the subject, asking her opinion on various irrelevant issues such as human sexual mores. By the time the session was through, Gillian was ready to disassemble the nasty thing with her bare hands.

But Tom would probably disapprove, so she deferred.

She had been about to go to bed when the emergency call came from the outlock. Soon she was busy helping Makanee and the autodocs treat the survivors of the survey party. Worry about Hikahi and Satima drove all thought of sleep from her mind until that was done.

Now that they seemed to be out of danger, Gillian could no longer use adrenalin reaction to hold of that empty feeling that seeped in around the edges of a very rough day.

It's not a time to enjoy being alone, she thought. She lifted her head and looked at her own reflection in the blank comm screen. Her eyes were reddened. From overwork, certainly, but also from worry.

Gillian knew well enough how to cope, but coping was a sterile solution. Instinct demanded warmth, someone to hold close and satisfy that physical longing.

She wondered if Tom felt the same way at this moment. Oh, of course he did; with the crude telempathic link they sometimes shared, Gillian felt she knew him pretty well. They were of a type, the two of them.

Only sometimes it seemed to Gillian that the planners had been more successful with him than they had been with her. Everyone seemed to think of her as superbly competent, but they were all just a little bit in awe of Thomas Orley.

And at times like the present, when eidetic recall seemed more a curse than a blessing, Gillian wondered if she really was as neurosis-free as the manufacturer's warranty promised.

The fax printer on her desk extruded a hardcopy message.  It was the isotope distribution profile promised by Charlie  -- a minute ahead of schedule, she noted. Gillian scanned the columns. Good. There was little variation from the millennia- old Library report on Kithrup. Not that she had expected any, but one always checked.

A brief appendix at the bottom warned that these profiles were only valid in the surface crust and upper asthenosphere regions, and were invalid any more than two kilometers below the surface.

Gillian smiled. Someday Charlie's compulsiveness might save them all.

She stepped from her office onto a parapet above a large open chamber. Water filled the central part of the room up to two meters below the parapet. Bulky machines stuck out above the water. The upper half of the chamber, including Gillian's office, was inaccessible to dolphins unless they came riding a walker or spider.

Gillian didn't bother with the folded facemask at her belt. She looked below, then dove, plunging between two rows of dark autodocs. The large, oblong glassite containers were silent and empty.

All the waterways of sick bay were shallow to allow open breathing and dry surgery. She swam with long, strong strokes, gripped the corner of one machine to make a turn, and passed through a stripdoor into the trauma unit.

She surfaced, open-mouthed, for air, bobbed for a moment, then swam over to a wall of thick leaded glass. Two bandaged dolphins floated in a heavily shielded gravity tank.

One occupant, connected to a maze of tubing, had the dull-eyed look of heavy sedation. The other whistled cheerfully as Gillian approached.

"I greet you, Life-Cleaner! Your potions scour my veins, but it's this taste of weightlessness which liftsss my spacer's heart. Thank you!"

"You're welcome Hikahi." Gillian treaded water easily, not bothering with the curb and rail near the gravity tank. "Just don't get too used to the comfort. I'm afraid Makanee and I are going to kick you out soon, as penalty for having such an iron constitution."

"As opposed to one of bismuth or c-c-cadmium?" Hikahi spluttered a razzberry-like chuckle.

Gillian laughed. "Indeed. And being healthy will be your tough luck. We'll have you out of here, breathing bubbles and standing on your tail for the captain in no time."

Hikahi gave her small neo-fin smile. "You're certain this isn't too risky, turning on thisss gravity tank? I wouldn't want Satima and me to be responsible for giving the show away."

"Relax, fem-fin." Gillian shook her head. "We triple-checked. The leak-detection buoys aren't picking up a thing. Enjoy it and don't worry.

"Oh, and I hear the captain may be sending a small team back to your island to examine those pre-sentients you found. I figured you'd be interested. It's a sign he's not worried about Galactics in the short term. The space battle may last a long time, and we might be able to hide indefinitely."

"An indefinite stay on Kithrup's not my idea of paradise!" Hikahi opened her mouth in a grin of irony. "If that's meant as cheery news, please warn me when your message is depressing!"

Gillian laughed. "I will. Now you get some sleep. Shall I turn down the light?"

"Yess, please. And Gillian, thanks for the news. I do think it's very important we do something about the abos. I hope the expedition is a success.

"Tell Creideiki I'll be back on duty before he can open a can of tuna."

"I will. Pleasant dreams, dear." Gillian touched the dimmer switch and the lights gradually faded. Hikahi blinked several times, apparently settling into a seaman's nap.

Gillian headed for the outer clinic, where Makanee would be dealing with a line of complaining crewfen at sick call. Gillian would show the physician Charlie's isotope profiles and then go back to her own lab to work for a while longer.

Sleep called to her, but she knew it would be a long time coming. In this mood that had come upon her she felt reluctant.

Logic was the blessing and the curse of her upbringing.  She knew that Tom was where he was supposed to be -- out pursuing ways to save them all. He knew it as well. His departure had been hasty and necessary, and there simply hadn't been time to seek her out to say good-bye.

Gillian was aware of all of these considerations. She repeated them to herself as she swam. But they only seemed to disconnect the larger from the smaller of her problems, and rob of poignant consolation the unattractiveness of her empty bed.

19 ::: Creideiki

"Keneenk is a study of relationships," he told his audience. "That part comes from our dolphin heritage. Keneenk is also a study of strict comparisons. This second part we learn from our human patrons. Keneenk is a synthesis of two world-views, much as we ourselves are."

About thirty neo-dolphins floated across from him, bubbles rising slowly from their blowmouths, intermittent unconscious sonar clicks their only sound.

Since there were no humans present, Creideiki did not have to use the crisp consonants and long vowels of standard Anglic. But, transcribed onto paper, his words would have pleased any English grammarian.

"Consider reflections from the surface of the ocean, where the air meets the water," he suggested to his pupils. "What do the reflections tell us?"

He saw puzzled expressions.

"Reflections from which side of the water, you wonder? Do I speak of the reflections felt from below the interface or from above?

"Moreover, do I mean reflections of sound, or of light?"

He turned to one of the attentive dolphins. "Wattaceti, imagine yourself one of our ancestors. Which combination would occur to you?"

The engine room tech blinked. "Sound images, Captain. A pre-sentient dolphin would have thought of sound reflections in the water, bouncing against the surface from below"

The tech sounded tired, but Wattaceti still attended these sessions, in a fervent desire for self-improvement. It was for the morale of fen like Wattaceti that the busy captain made time to continue them.

Creideiki nodded. "Quite right. Now, what would be the first type of reflection thought of by a human?"

"The image of light from above," the mess chief, S'tat, answered promptly.

"Most probably, though we all know that even some of the `big-ears' can eventually learn to hear."

There was a general skree of laughter at the harmless little put-down of the patron race. The laughter was a measure of crew morale, and he weighed it as he might test the mass of a fuel cell by hefting it between his jaws.

Creideiki noticed for the first time that Takkata-Jim and K'tha-Jon had swum up to join the group. Creideiki quashed a momentary concern. Takkata-Jim would have signaled if something had come up. He seemed to be here simply to listen.

If this was a sign the vice-captain was ending his long, unexplained sulk, Creideiki was glad. He had kept Takkata-Jim aboard, instead of sending him out to accompany Orley and the rescue party, because he wanted to keep his exec under his scrutiny. He had reluctantly begun to think that the time might have come to make some changes in the chain of command.

He waited for the snickering to die down. "Consider, now. How are a human's thoughts about these reflections from the surface of the water similar to our own?"

The students assumed expressions of concentration. This would be the next-to-last problem. With so much repair work to oversee, Creideiki had been tempted to cancel the sessions altogether. But so many in the crew wanted desperately to learn Keneenk.

At the beginning of the voyage almost all the fen had participated in the lectures, games, and athletic competitions that helped stave off spaceflight ennui. But since the frightening episode at the Shallow Cluster, when a dozen crewfen had been lost exploring the terrifying derelict fleet, some had begun to detach themselves from the community of the ship, to associate with their own little groups. Some even began exhibiting a strange atavism -- increasing difficulty with Anglic and the sort of concentrated thought needed by a spacer.

Creideiki had been forced to juggle schedules to find replacements. He had given Takkata-Jim the task of finding jobs for the reverted ones. The task seemed to suit the vice-captain. With the aid of bosun K'tha-Jon he seemed to have found useful work for even the worst stricken.

Creideiki carefully listened to the swish of flukes, the uncomfortable gurgling of gill-lungs, the rhythm of heartbeats. Takkata-Jim and K'tha-Jon floated quietly, apparently attentive. But Creideiki sensed in each of them an underlying tension.

Creideiki shivered. There had come a suddenly vivid mental image of the vice-captain's shrewd, sullen eye, and the bosun's great, sharp teeth. He suppressed it, chiding himself for having an overactive imagination. There was no logical reason to fear either of those two!

"We are contemplating reflections from an interface between air and water." He hurriedly resumed his lecture. "Both humans and dolphins envision a barrier when they consider such a surface. On the other side is a realm that is only faintly apparent until the barrier is crossed. Yet the modern human, with his tools, does not fear the water side, as he once did. The neo-fin, with his tools, can live and work in the air, and look down without discomfort.

"Consider how your own thoughts stretched out when I asked my original question. The idea of sound reflecting from below came to mind first. Our ancestors would have complacently stopped with that first generalization, but you did not stop there. You did not generalize without considering further alternatives. This is a common hallmark of planning creatures. For us it is a new thing."

The timer on Creideiki's harness chimed. It was growing late. Tired as he was, he still had a meeting to attend, and he wanted to stop at the bridge to find out if there had been any word from Orley.

"How does a cetacean, whose heritage, whose very brain is built on intuitive thinking, learn to analyze a complex problem, piece by piece? Sometimes the key to an answer is found in the way you formulate the question. I'll leave you all today with an exercise for your idle moments.

"Try to state the problem of reflections from the surface of water in Trinary ... in a way that demands not a single answer, or a three-level opposition, but a plain listing of the reflections that are possible."

He saw several of the fen frown uncomfortably.

The captain smiled reassuringly. " I know it sounds difficult, and I will not ask you to recite today. But just to show you it can be done, accept the echo of this dream."

* A layer divides

     sky-star -- Sea-star

* What comes to us

     At a narrow angle?

* The huntsqueaking starcatching octopus

     Reflects!

* The night-calling, star following tern

     Reflects!

* The star-twinkle in my lover's eye

     Reflects!

* The sun, soundless, roaring showoff --

     Reflects! *

Creideiki was adequately rewarded by the wide-eyed appreciation of his audience. As he turned to go, he noticed that even Takkata-Jim was shaking his head slowly, as if considering a thought that had never occurred to him before.

After the meeting broke up, K'tha-Jon persisted in his argument.

"You sssaw? You heard him, Takkata-Jim?"

"I saw and heard, Bosun. And, as usual, I was impressed. Creideiki is a geniusss. So what is it you wanted to point out to me?"

K'tha-Jon clapped his jaw, not the most polite gesture to make before a superior officer.

"He sayss nothing about the Galacticss! Nothing about the siege! Nothing at all about plans to get us away from here! Or, barring that, to fight-t!

"And meanwhile he ignores the growing split amongst the crew!"

Takkata-Jim let out a line of bubbles. "A split you have busily been encouraging, K'tha-Jon. No, don't bother protesting your innocence. You've been subtle, and I know you've been doing it to build a power base for me. So I look away.

"But don't be sure Creideiki will always be too busy to notice! When he does notice, K'tha-Jon, watch your tail! For I won't have known a thing about your little tricks!"

K'tha-Jon blew quiet bubbles, not bothering to reply.

"As for Creideiki's plans, we'll see. We'll see if he's willing to listen to Dr. Metz and myself, or if he persisssts in this dream of carting his secrets back to Earth unopened."

Takkata-Jim saw the giant Stenos was about to interrupt.

"Yesss, I know you think we should consider a third option, don't you? You'd like to see us head out and take on all the Galactics single-handed, wouldn't you, K'tha-Jon?"

The huge dolphin didn't answer, but his eyes gleamed back at the vice-captain.

Are you my Boswell, my Seaton, my Igor or my Iago? Takkata-Jim thought silently at the giant mutant. You serve me now, but in the long run, am I using you, or are you using

20 ::: Galactics

Battle screamed all around the flotilla of tiny Xappish warships.

"We have just lost the X'ktau and the X'klennu! That means almost a third of the Xappish armed might is gone!"

The elder Xappish lieutenant sighed. "So? Young one, tell me news, not things I already know."

"Our Xatinni patrons spend their clients like reaction gas, and commit their own forces miserly. Notice how they hang back, ready to flee if the battle gets too furious! Yet we they send into danger!"

"That is ever their way," the other agreed.

"But if the Xappish fleet is destroyed here, in this futile fray, who will protect our three tiny worlds, and enforce our rights?"

"Is that not what we have patrons for?" The older lieutenant knew he was being ironic. He adjusted the screens to resist a sudden psionic attack, without even changing his tone of voice.

His junior did not dignify the reply with a comment. He grumbled instead. "What did these Earthlings ever do to us, anyway? In what way do they threaten our patrons?"

A searing blast from a Tandu battle-cruiser just missed the left wing of the small Xappish scout. The junior lieutenant sent the ship into a wild evasive maneuver. The senior lieutenant replied to the question as if nothing at all had happened.

"I take it you don't believe the story that the Progenitors have returned?"

The other only snorted, while adjusting his torpedo sights.

"Aptly put. I, too, think this is merely part of a program to destroy the Earthlings. The senior patron races see the Terrans as a threat. They are wolflings, and therefore dangerous. They preach revolutionary uplift practices ... more dangerous still. They are allies of the Tymbrimi, an insult beyond forbearance. And they proselytize -- an unforgivable offense."

The scoutship shuddered as the torpedo leapt toward the Tandu destroyer. Their tiny craft accelerated mightily to get away.

"Well I think we should listen to the Earthlings," the junior lieutenant shouted. "If all the client races in the galaxy rebelled at once ..."

"It has already happened," the elder interrupted. "Study the Library records. Six times in Galactic history. And twice successfully."

"No! What happened?"

"What do you think happened? The clients went on to become patrons of newer species, and treated them just the same as ever!"

"I do not believe it! I cannot believe it!"

The elder lieutenant sighed. "Look it up."

"I shall!"

But he never did. An undetected improbability mine lay across their path. The tiny scout departed the galaxy in a manner that was picturesque, if ultimately lethal.

21 ::: Dennie and Toshio

Dennie checked the charges one more time. It was dark and crowded in the close passage of the drill-tree root. Her helmet's beam cast stark shadows through the thick maze of rootlets.

She called upward. "Are you almost finished, Toshio?"

He was planting his explosives in the upper section, near the surface of the metal-mound.

"Yeah, Dennie. If you're done, go back down now. I'll join you in a minute."

She couldn't even see his flippered feet above her. His voice was distorted in the narrow, water-filled thicket. It was a relief to be allowed to leave.

She picked her way downward carefully, fighting back waves of claustrophobia. This was no job Dennie would ever have chosen. But it had to be done, and the two dolphins were by nature unqualified.

Halfway down, she snagged herself on a strand of creeper. It didn't let go when she tugged. Thrashing only entangled her further, and she vividly recalled Toshio's story of the killer weed. Panic almost closed in, but she forced herself to stop kicking, to take a deep breath and study the snare.

It was just a dead vine wrapped around one leg. The strand parted easily under her knife. She continued her descent more cautiously and escaped at last into the grotto beneath the metal-mound.

Keepiru and Sah'ot waited below. Hose-like breathers covered their blowmouths and wrapped around their torsos. The headlights of the two sleds diffracted through thousands of tiny threads that seemed to fill the chamber in a drifting fog. A dim light filtered into the grotto from the cave mouth through which they had entered.

* Echoes sounding, in this rock-cage

     Will not be those of happy fishing *

Dennie looked at Sah'ot, unsure she had understood the poet's fancy Trinary.

"Oh! Yes. When Toshio sets the fuses, we'd better get outside. The explosion will reverberate in this chamber. I don't suppose that would be healthful."

Keepiru nodded in agreement. The expedition's military commander had been mostly silent all the way here from the ship.

Dennie looked around the underwater cavity. The coral-like, microscopic scavengers had built their castle on the rich silicate rocks of an ocean hillock. The structure had grown slowly, but when the mound finally breached the ocean surface toplife became possible. Among the vegetation which had sprouted was the drill-tree.

That plant somehow pierced the mound's metal core and penetrated to the organically useful layer beneath the island. Minerals were drawn up and deposited above. A cavity grew below, which would eventually accept the metal-mound into the crust again.

Something struck the ecologist in Dennie as odd about this arrangement. The tiny micro-branch Library aboard Streaker hadn't mentioned the metal-mounds at all, which was curious.

It was hard to believe the drill-tree could evolve into its niche in a gradual way, as most species did. For the tree to succeed was an all-or-nothing proposition, requiring great power and perseverance. How did it get that way? Dennie wondered.

And what happened to the mounds after they fell into the cavities the drill-trees prepared for them? She had seen some pits which had swallowed their mounds. Their depths were cloudy and obscure, and apparently far deeper than she would have expected.

She shone her beam on the bottom of the mound. The reflections were really quite startling. Dennie had expected something ragged and irregular, not a field of bright concave pits on the shining metal underside.

She swam to one of the larger depressions, bringing up her camera. Charlie Dart would like to get pictures and samples from this trip. She knew better than to expect thanks. More likely each tantalizing photo or rock would send him into exasperated sighs over her failure to follow up obvious leads.

Deep within one of the pits something moved, a twisting and slow turning. Dennie re-oriented her beam and peered closer. It was a root of some sort. She watched several of the tiny drifting threads fly within reach of the hanging tendril, to be caught and drawn within. She grabbed at a few for her sample bag.

"Let's go, Dennie!" She heard Toshio call. There was a thrumming sound as a sled moved just beneath her. "Come on! We've only got five minutes till they blow!"

"Okay, okay," she said. "Give me a minute." Professional curiosity momentarily overwhelmed other thoughts. Dennie could think of no reason why a living thing should burrow into the lightless underside of a mass of almost pure metal. She reached far into the pit and grabbed the twisting tendril root, then braced herself against the bulk of the mound and pulled hard.

At first the springy root was adamant, and seemed even to pull back. The possibility that she had trapped herself vividly occurred to Dennie.

The root tore free suddenly. Dennie glimpsed a shinyhard tip as she stuffed the specimen into a sample bag. She flipped and kicked away from metal surface.

Keepiru looked at her reproachfully as she grabbed the sled. He gunned the machine toward the cave entrance and out into the daylight, where Toshio and Sah'ot waited. Moments later a loud concussion sent booming echoes through the shallows.

They waited an hour, then re-entered the grotto.

The charges had shattered the drill-tree trunk where it pierced the bottom side of the metal-mound. The severed shaft canted at an angle below, continuing down into murky depths. Bits of debris still fell from the opening in the mound's bottom. The chamber below the island was thick with swirling shreds of vegetation.

They approached the opening cautiously. "I'd better check it out with a robot first," Toshio said. "There may be unstable chunks left in the shaft."

* I will do this -- ladder runner

* Robots heed my -- close nerve socket *

Toshio nodded. "Yeah, you're right. You do it, Keepiru." The pilot, with his direct machine-nerve interface, would be able to control the probe better than Toshio could. Of the humans aboard, only Emerson D'Anite and Thomas Orley had such cyborg links. It would be a long time before most humans could deal with the side effects of socket implantation as well as dolphins, who had needed the interface far more and had been bred for it.

Under Keepiru's direction, a small probe detached itself from the rear of the sled. It jetted of toward the hole and disappeared within.

Toshio had never expected to be sent right back out again with Keepiru -- to a site where, in his opinion, neither of them had behaved particularly well. The importance of their mission, to serve and protect two important scientists, confused him even further. Why didn't Creideiki assign someone else? Someone more reliable?

Of course, the captain might have ordered all four of them out of the ship to get them out of his way. But that didn't seem to fit either.

Toshio decided not to try to pierce Creideiki's logic. Inscrutability seemed to be at the heart of it. Perhaps that was what it was to be a captain. Toshio only knew that he and Keepiru were both determined to do a good job on this mission.

As a midshipman he officially outranked Keepiru. But tradition made warrant officers and pilots masters of middies unless otherwise decided by higher authority. Toshio would be assisting Dennie and Sah'ot in their studies. On security matters, Keepiru was in charge.

Toshio was still surprised to find that others stopped and listened when he made suggestions; his opinions had been routinely solicited. That alone would take some getting used to.

The screen showed a picture sent back by the robot -- a hollow cylindrical excavation through the foamy metal. Broken stumps were all that remained of the anchor bearings that had held the drill-tree shaft in place. Bits of debris drifted down past the camera as they watched.

As the robot rose, the light from above slowly grew brighter through a thin haze of bubbles.

"Think it's wide enough to pass a sled?" Toshio asked. Keepiru whistled that the passage looked navigable.

The robot surfaced into a pool several meters wide. Its camera panned the rim, transmitting images of blue sky and thick green foliage. The high trunk of the drill-tree had crashed into the forest. The slope of the pool made it hard to see the damage this had done, but Toshio was sure it hadn't fallen in the direction of the abo village.

They had worried that blasting a way to the interior of the island might panic the hunter-gatherers. They took the risk anyway, because routinely trying to scale the treacherous island walls in the open surf would have been dangerous, and a foolish exposure to Galactic spy satellites. The apparently random falling of a tree on an island would hardly be noted by anyone watching from above.

"Uh oh." Toshio pointed.

Dennie moved closer to look at the screen. "What is it, Tosh? Is there a problem?"

Keepiru stopped the camera as it was about to finish its scan. "There," Toshio said. "That jagged crop of coral is hanging over the pool. It looks about to fall."

"Well can you have the robot wedge something under to prevent it?"

"I don't know. What do you think, Keepiru?"

* Some scheme may work --

     If fate buys it

* We'll make a gamble --

     And simply try it

Keepiru eyed his twin screens and concentrated. Toshio knew the pilot was listening to a complex pattern of sound-images, transmitted over his neural link. Under Keepiru's command the robot moved to the edge of the pool. Its claw arms grabbed the spongy metal of the rim to pull forward. There was a small rain of pebbles as it brought its treads to bear.

"Watch out!" Toshio called.

The jagged rock tipped forward. The camera showed it tottering ominously. Dennie cringed back from the screen. Then the rock toppled over and crashed into the robot.

There followed a swirl of spinning images. Dennie continued watching the screen, but Toshio and Keepiru shifted their gaze to the bottom of the shaft. Suddenly a rain of objects fell from the gap, tumbling into the darkness below. The debris sparkled in the sled's beams as it dropped into the abyss.

After a long silence Keepiru spoke.

* The probe is down there -- lungs unbreathing

* I was spared -- the cutoff false-death

* It still whistles -- stranded echoes *

Keepiru meant that the probe still sent him messages from whatever murky ledge had finally stopped it. Its tiny brain and transmitter hadn't been destroyed, and Keepiru had not suffered the jolt that a sudden cutoff could send to a connected nervous system.

But the robot's flotation tanks had been ruined. It was down there for good.

* That must be -- the last obstruction

* I shall go then --

     carefully,

          testing --

* Dennie, take the sled -- and watch me! *

Before Keepiru or Toshio could stop him, Sah'ot was off his sled and away. He fluked mightily and disappeared into the shaft. Keepiru and Toshio looked at each other, sharing a malign thought about crazy civilians.

At least, Toshio thought, he could have taken a camera with him! But then, if Sah'ot had waited, Toshio would have had a chance to insist on the dubious privilege of scouting the passage.

He looked at Dennie. She watched the robot probe screen, as if it might deliver some token about what was happening to Sah'ot. She had to be reminded, before she swam over and took control of the other sled.

Toshio had always thought of Dennie Sudman as one more adult scientist, friendly but enigmatic. Now he saw that she was not an awful lot more mature than he. And while she had the honor and status of a full professional, she lacked the eclecticism his officer training was giving him. She would never encounter the range of people, things, and situations he would, in the course of his career.

He looked again to the shaft entrance. Keepiru blew nervous bubbles. They would have to decide soon what to do if Sah'ot did not reappear.

Sah'ot was obviously a genetic experiment, in which the gene-crafters were pushing a set of traits toward a calculated optimum. If judged successful, the traits would be grafted back into the main pool of the neo-dolphin species. The process imitated, on a vastly quicker scale, the segregation and mixing that worked in nature.

Such experiments sometimes resulted in things not planned, though.

Toshio wasn't sure he trusted Sah'ot. The fin's obscurity wasn't like the inscrutability of Creideiki- -- deep and thoughtful. It grated, like the dissembling of some humans he had known.

Also, there was this sexual game between Sah'ot and Dennie. Not that he was a prude. Such hobbies weren't exactly forbidden, but they had been known to cause problems.

Apparently Dennie wasn't even aware of the subtle ways in which she was encouraging Sah'ot. Toshio wondered if he had the nerve to tell her -- or if it was any of his business.

Another tense minute passed. Then, just as Toshio was about to go himself, Sah'ot shot down out of the shaft and swooped toward them.

* The way is clear --

     I'll lead you airward! *

Keepiru jetted his sled over to the dolphin anthropologist, and squawked something pitched so high that Toshio couldn't quite catch it, even with his Calafian sensitivity.

Sah'ot's mouth twisted and closed into a reluctant attitude of submission. Still, there was something defiant in his eye. He cast a look at Dennie, even as he rolled over to offer one of his ventral fins to Keepiru's mouth.

The pilot took a token nip, then turned back to the others.

* The way is clear --

     I do believe him

* Now let us go --

     and drop these breathers

* To talk like Earthmen --

     about our work

* And to meet our future --

     pilot brothers *

The sled moved under the drill-tree shaft, then rose in a cloud of bubbles. The others followed.

22 ::: Creideiki

The briefing had gone on far too long.

Creideiki regretted ever letting Charles Dart attend via holoscreen. The chimp planetologist would certainly have been less long-winded if he were here in the fizzing oxywater of the central bay, wet and wearing a facemask.

Dart lounged in his own laboratory, projecting his image to the conference area in Streaker's cylindrical bay. He seemed oblivious to the chafing of his listeners. Breathing oxywater in front of a console for two hours was highly uncomfortable to a neo-fin.

"Naturally, Captain," the chimp's scratchy baritone projected into the water. "When you chose to land us near a major tectonic boundary, I approved wholeheartedly. Nowhere else could I have had access to so much information in one spot. Still, I think I've made a convincing case for six or seven more sampling sites distributed about Kithrup, to verify some of the extremely interesting discoveries we've made here."

Creideiki was mildly surprised at the use of the first person plural. It was the first modest thing Charlie had said.

He glanced at Brookida, floating nearby. The metallurgist had been working with Charles Dart, his skills not currently required by the repair team. He had been largely silent for the last hour, letting the chimp pour out a tide of technical jargon which had left Creideiki dizzy.

What's the matter with Brookida? Does he think a captain under siege has nothing better to do?

Hikahi, recently released from sick bay, rolled over on her back, breathing the fizzing, oxygenated fluid and keeping one eye to the hologram of the chimpanzee.

She shouldn't do that, Creideiki thought. I'm having enough trouble concentrating as it is.

A lengthy, constricting meeting always did this to Creideiki. He felt a stirring of blood in and around his penile sheath. What he wanted to do was swim over to Hikahi and bite her softly in numerous places, up and down her flanks.

Kinky, yes, especially in public, but at least he was honest with himself.

"Planetologist Dart," he sighed. "I am trying very hard to understand what you claim to have discovered. The part about various crystalline and isotopic anomalies below the crust of Kithrup I think I follow. As for the subduction layer ..."

"A subduction zone is a boundary of two crustal plates, where one slips below its neighbor," Charlie interrupted.

Creideiki wished he could let down his dignity to curse at the chimp. "I do know that much planetology, Dr. Dart." He spoke carefully. "And I'm glad our being near one of these plate boundaries has been useful to you. However, you mussst understand that our choice of a landing site was based on matters tactical. We want both the metals and the camouflage offered by the `coral' mounds. We landed here in order to hide, and to repair our ship. With hostile cruisers overhead, I can't think of permitting expeditions to other parts of the globe. In fact, I must refuse your request for further drilling at this location. The risk is too great, now that the Galactics have arrived."

The chimp frowned. His hands began to flutter. Before he found the words, Creideiki cut him off:

"Besides, what does the ship's micro-branch say about Kithrup? Doesn't the Library contribute anything on these problems you face?"

"The Library!" Dart snorted. "That pack of lies! That friggin' morass of misinformation!" Charlie's voice dropped into a growl. "It has nothin' on the anomalies! It doesn't even mention the metal-mounds! The last survey was done over four hundred million years ago, when the planet was put on reserve status for the Karrank% ... ."

Charlie became so strangled around the extended glottal stop that he started to choke. He went bug-eyed and pounded himself on the chest, coughing.

Creideiki turned to Brookida. "Is this true? Is the Library so deficient in regard to this planet?"

"Yess-s," Brookida nodded slowly. "Four hundred epochs is a long time. When a planet is placed on reserve it's usually either to let it lie fallow while new species evolve to a level of pre-sentience ripe for uplift, or to provide a quiet place of decline for an ancient race that has entered senescence. Planets are placed off limits either to become nurseries or old age homes.

"Both seem to have occurred on Kithrup-p. We have discovered a ripe pre-sentient race which has apparently risen since the last Library update here. Also, the ... Karrank-k% ..." Brookida, too, had trouble with the name. " ... were granted the planet as a peaceful place to die, which they apparently have done. There seem to be no Karrank%-% ... anymore."

"But four hundred epochs without a re-survey?" It was difficult to imagine.

"Yes, a planet is usually re-licensed by the Institute of Migration long before that. Still, Kithrup is such a strange world ... few species would choose to live here. Also, good access routes are scarce. This region of space is gravitationally very shallow. It'sss one reason we came here."

Charles Dart was still catching his breath. He drank from a tall glass of water. During the respite, Creideiki lay still, thinking. Despite Brookida's points, would Kithrup really have been left fallow for so long, in an overcrowded galaxy where every piece of real estate was desired?

The Institute of Migration was the only one of the loose Galactic bureaucracies whose power and influence rivaled even that of the Library Institute. By tradition, all patron-lines obeyed its codes of ecosphere management; to do otherwise courted galaxy-wide disaster. The potential of lesser species to one day become clients, then patrons in their own time, made for a powerful galaxy-wide ecological conservatism.

Most Galactics were willing to overlook humanity's pre-Contact record. The slaughter of the mammoth, the giant ground sloth, and the manatee were forgiven in light of Mankind's "orphan" status. The real blame was laid on Homo sapiens' supposed patron -- the mysterious undiscovered race that all said must have left man's uplift half-unfinished, thousands of years ago.

Dolphins knew how close the cetaceans themselves had come to extinction at the hands of human beings, but they never mentioned it outside Earth. For well or ill, their fate was now linked to Mankind's.

Earth was humanity's until the race moved on or died out. Man's ten colony worlds were licensed for smaller periods, based on complex eco-management plans. The shortest lease was a mere six thousand years. At the end of that time, the colonists of Atlast had to depart, leaving the planet fallow once again.

"Four hundred million years," Creideiki mulled. "That seems an unusually long time with no re-survey of this world."

"I agree!" Charlie Dart shouted, now fully recovered from his fit.

"And what if I told you there's signs Kithrup was occupied by a machine civilization as recently as thirty thousand years ago? Without any entry in the Library at all?"

Hikahi rolled over closer. "You think-k these crustal anomalies of yours may be the garbage of an interloper civilization, Dr. Dart?"

"Yes!" he cried. "Exactly! Good guess!

"You all know many eco-sensitive races will only build major facilities along a planet's plate boundaries. That way, when the planet is later declared fallow, all traces of habitation will be sucked down into the mantle and disappear. Some think that's why there are no signs of previous occupancy on Earth."

Hikahi nodded. "And if some species settled here illegally ... ?"

"They'd build at a plate boundary! The Library surveys planets at multi-epoch intervals. The evidence of the incursion would be sucked underground by then!" The chimp looked eagerly from the holo display.

Creideiki had trouble taking it all very seriously. Charlie made it sound like a whodunit! Only in this case the culprits were civilizations, the clues whole cities, and the rug under which the evidence was being swept was a planet's crust! It was the perfect crime! After all, the cop on the corner only swings by every few million years, and is late, at that.

Creideiki realized every metaphor he had just used was a human one. Well, that was to be expected. There were times, such as spacewarp-piloting, when cetacean analogies were more useful. But when thinking about the crazy politics of the Galactics, it helped to have watched a lot of old human movie thrillers, and read volumes of crazy human history.

Now Brookida and Dart were arguing some technical point ... and all Creideiki could think of was the taste of the water near Hikahi. He badly wanted to ask her if the flavor meant what he thought it meant. Was it a perfume she had put on, or was it natural pheromone?

With some difficulty, he forced himself back to the subject at hand.

Charlie's and Brookida's discovery, under normal circumstances, would be exciting.

But this has no bearing on escape for my ship and crew, nor getting our data back to the Terragens Council. Even the mission I sent Keepiru and Toshio on, to help appraise the native pre-sentients, is more urgent than hunting arcane clues in ancient alien rocks.

"Excuse me, Captain. I'm sorry I'm late. I've been listening quietly for a while, though."

Creideiki turned to see Dr. Ignacio Metz drift up alongside. The gangling, gray-haired psychologist treaded water slowly, casually compensating for a small negative buoyancy. A slight pot belly distended the neat fit of his slick brown drysuit.

Brookida and Dart argued on, now about rates of heating by radioactives, gravity, and meteoritic impact. Hikahi, apparently, found it all fascinating.

"You're welcome even late, Dr. Metz. I'm glad you could make it."

Creideiki was amazed he hadn't heard the man approach. Metz normally made a racket you could hear halfway across the bay. He sometimes radiated a two kilohertz hum from his right ear. It was barely detectable now, but at times it was quite annoying. How could the man have worked with fins for so long and never had the problem corrected?

Now I'm beginning to sound like Charlie Dart! He chided himself. Don't be peevish, Creideiki!

He whistled a stanza which echoed only within his own skull.

* Those who live

          All vibrate,

     * All,

* And aid the world's

Singing *

"Captain, I actually came out here for another reason, but Dart's and Brookida's discovery may bear on what I have to say. Can we talk in private?"

Creideiki became expressionless. He had to get some rest and exercise soon. Overwork was wearing him down, and Streaker could ill-afford that.

But this human had to be treated carefully. Metz could not command him, aboard Streaker or anywhere, but he had power, power of a particularly potent kind. Creideiki knew that his own right of reproduction was guaranteed, no matter how this mission ended. Still Metz's evaluation would carry weight. Every dolphin aboard behaved as "sentiently" as he could around him. Even the captain.

Perhaps that's why I've put off a confrontation, Creideiki thought. Soon though, he would force Dr. Metz to answer some questions regarding certain members of Streaker's crew.

"Very well, Doctor," he answered. "Allow me a moment. I think I'm finished here."

Hikahi swam close at a nod from Creideiki. She grinned and flicked her pectorals at Metz.

"Hikahi, please finish up here for me. Don't let them go more than another ten minutes before summing up their proposalsss. I'll meet you in an hour in recreation pool 3-A to hear your recommendations."

She answered as he had addressed her, in rapid, highly inflected Underwater Anglic. "Aye aye, Captain. Will there be anything else?"

Damn! Creideiki knew Hikahi's sonar showed her everything about his sexual agitation. It was easy to tell with a male. He would have to do an explicit sonic scan of her innards to gain the same information about her, and that would not be polite.

Things must have been so much simpler in the old times!

Well, he would find out her frame of mind in an hour. One of the privileges of captaincy was to order a recreation pool cleared. There had better not be an emergency between now and then!

"No, nothing else for now, Hikahi. Carry on."

She saluted snappily with an arm of her harness.

Brookida and Charlie were still arguing as Creideiki turned back to Metz. "Will it be private enough if we take the long way to the bridge, Doctor? I'd like to check with Takkata-Jim before going on to other duties."

"That'll be fine, Captain. What I have to say won't take long."

Creideiki kept his face impassive. Was Metz smiling at something in particular? Was the man amused at something he had seen or heard?

"I am ssstill confused by the pattern of volcanoes up and down the three-thousand-kilometer zone where these two plates meet," Brookida said. He spoke slowly, partly for Charlie's benefit and partly because it was hard to argue in oxywater. There never seemed to be enough air.

"If you look at the sssurvey charts we made from orbit, you see that vulcanism is dispersed sparsely elsewhere on the planet. But here the volcanoes are very frequent, and all about the same small size."

Charlie shrugged. "I don't see how that relates at all, old man. I think it's just a great big coincidence."

"But isn't this also the only area where the metal-mounds are found?" Hikahi suggested suddenly. "I'm no expert, but a spacer learns to be suspicious of twin coincidences."

Charlie opened and closed his mouth, as if he were about to speak, then thought better of it. At last he said, "That's very good. Yes! Brookida, you think these coral critters may need some nutrient that only this one type of volcano provides?"

"Possssibly. Our exobiology expert is Dennie Sudman. She's now at one of the islands, investigating the aboriginals."

"She must get samples for us!" Charlie rubbed his hands together. "Do you think it'd be too much to ask her to take a side trip to a volcano? Not too far away, of course, after what Creideiki just said. Just a little, teeny one."

Hikahi let out a short whistling laugh. The fellow had chutzpah! Still, his enthusiasm was infectious, a wonderful distraction from worry. If only she could afford to hide away from the dangerous universe in abstractions, like Charlie Dart did.

"And a temperature probe!" Charlie cried. "Surely Dennie'd do that much for me, after all I've done for her!"

Creideiki cruised in a wide spiral around the swimming human, stretching his muscles as he arched and twisted.

By neural command he flexed his harness's major manipulators, like a human stretching his arms. "Very well, Doctor. What can I do for you?"

Metz swam a slow kick-stroke. He regarded Creideiki amiably. "Captain, I believe it's time to re-think our strategy a bit. Matters have changed since we came to Kithrup. We need a new approach."

"Could you be specific?"

"Certainly. As you recall, we fled from the transfer point at Morgran because we didn't wish to be crushed in a seven-way ambush. You were quick to realize that even if we surrendered to one party, this would only result in all sides ganging up on our captors, inevitably leading to our destruction. I was slow to understand your logic at the time. Now I applaud it. Of course, your tactical maneuvers were brilliant."

"Thank you, Dr. Metz. Of course, you leave out another reason for our flight. We are under orders from the Terragens Council to bring our data directly to them, without leaks along the way. Our capture would certainly be a 'leak,' wouldn't you say?"

"Certainly!" Metz agreed. "And so the situation remained when we fled to Kithrup, a move which I now consider inspired. To my way of thinking, it was just bad luck this hiding place didn't work as planned."

Creideiki refrained from pointing out that they were still concealed on this hiding place. Surrounded, but not yet in anyone's net. "Go on," he suggested.

"Well, so long as there was the possibility we could avoid capture altogether, your strategy of flight was good. However things have changed. The chance of escape is now next to nil. Kithrup remains useful as a refuge from the chaos of battle, but it can't hide us for long once there is a final victor overhead."

"You're suggesting we can't hope to avoid eventual capture?"

"Exactly. I think we should consider our priorities, and plan for unpleasant contingencies."

"What priorities do you consider important?" Creideiki already knew the answer to expect.

"Why, the survival of this ship and crew, of course! And the data for evaluating the performance of both! After all, what was our main purpose out here. Hmm?" Metz stopped swimming and treaded water, regarding Creideiki like a teacher quizzing a pupil.

Creideiki could list a half-dozen tasks that had been set for Streaker, from Library veracity checks, to establishing contact with potential allies, to Thomas Orley's military intelligence work.

Those tasks were important. But the primary purpose of this mission was to evaluate the performance of a dolphin-crewed and dolphin-commanded spacecraft. Streaker and her complement were the experiment.

But everything had changed since they had found the derelict fleet! He couldn't operate under the priorities he had been given at the beginning of the cruise. How could he explain that to a man like Metz?

Judgment, Creideiki mused, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason .... Sometimes he thought that the Bard must have been half dolphin, himself.

"I understand your point, Dr. Metz. But I don't see how it calls for a change in strategy. We still face destruction should we poke our beaks above the Kithrup's sea."

"Only if we do so before there's a winner overhead! Certainly, we shouldn't expose ourselves until the crossfire is over.  However, we are in a position to negotiate, once there is a victor! And if we negotiate cleverly we may win success for this mission!"

Creideiki resumed his slow spiral, forcing the geneticist to swim again toward the bridge lock.

"Can you suggest what we might have to offer in negotiation, Dr. Metz?"

Metz smiled. "For one thing, we have the information Brookida and Charles Dart have literally dug up. The Institutes reward those who report ecological crimes. Most of the factions fighting over us are traditionalist conservatives of one stripe or another and would appreciate our discovery"

Creideiki refrained from expressing in razzberries his contempt for the man's naivete. "Go on, Doctor," he said levelly. "What-t else have we to offer?"

"Well, Captain, there's also the honor of our mission. Even if our captors decided to hold onto Streaker for a while, they'd certainly be sympathetic to our purpose. Teaching clients to use spaceships is one of the basic tasks of uplift. Surely they'd let us send a few men and fen home with our behavior-evaluation data, so progress toward future dolphin-crewed ships can continue. For them to do otherwise would be like a stranger interfering in the development of a child because of an argument with its parent!"

And how many human children were tortured and killed because of the sins of their parents, back in your own Dark Ages? Creideiki wanted to ask who would be the emissary to carry the uplift data back to Earth, while Streaker was held captive.

"Dr. Metz, I think you underestimate the fanaticism of those involved. But is there more?"

"Of course. I saved the most important for last." Metz touched Creideiki's flank for emphasis. "We must consider, Captain, giving the Galactics what they want."

Creideiki had expected it. "You think we should give them the location of the derelict fleet."

"Yes, and whatever souvenirs or data we picked up there."

Creideiki wore his poker face. How much does he know about Gillian's "Herbie," he wondered. Great Dreamer! But that cadaver's caused problems!

"You'll recall, Captain, the one brief message we got from Earth ordered us to go into hiding and keep our data secret, if possible! They also said we should use our own best judgment!

"Will our silence really delay the rediscovery of that Sargasso of lost ships for long, now that it's known to exist? No doubt half the patron-lines in the Five Galaxies have swarms of scouts out now, trying to duplicate our discovery. They already know to look in a poorly linked, dim globular cluster. It's only a matter of time until they stumble across the right gravitational tide pool, in the right cluster."

Creideiki thought that debatable. Galactics didn't often think like the Earthborn, and wouldn't conduct a search in the same way. Witness how long the fleet had lain undiscovered. Still, Metz was probably right in the long run.

"In that case, Doctor, why don't we simply broadcast the location to the Library? It'll be public knowledge, and no longer our affair. Surely this important discovery should be investigated by a licensed team from the Institutesss?" Creideiki was sarcastic, but he realized, as Metz smiled patronizingly, that the human took him seriously.

"You are being naive, Captain. The fanatics overhead care little about loose Galactic codes when they believe the millennium is at hand! If everyone knows where the derelict fleet is, the battleground will simply move out there! Those ancient ships will be destroyed in a crossfire, no matter how powerful that weird protective field that surrounds them. And the Galactics will still strive to capture us, in case we lied!"

They had arrived at the bridge lock. Creideiki paused there. "So it would be better if only one of the contesting groups got the data, and proceeded to investigate the fleet alone?"

"Yes! After all, what is that bunch of floating hulks to us? Just a dangerous place where we lost a scoutboat and a dozen fine crewfen. We're not ancestor-worshipers like those ET fanatics fighting over us, and we don't give a damn except intellectually whether the derelict fleet is a remnant from the days of Progenitors, or even the returning Progenitors themselves! It sure isn't worth dying over. If we've learned one thing in the last two hundred years, it's that a little clan of newcomers like us Earthfolk has got to duck out of the way when big boys like the Soro and Gubru get something up their snoots!"

Dr. Metz's silvery hair waved as he bobbed his head for emphasis. A fizzing halo of effervescence collected amongst the strands.

Creideiki didn't want to go back to respecting Ignacio Metz, but when the man became passionate enough to drop his stuffy facade, he became almost likable.

Unfortunately, Metz was fundamentally wrong.

Creideiki's harness clock chimed. Creideiki realized with a start how late it had become.

"You make an interesting argument, Doctor Metz. I don't have time to go into it any further, right now. But nothing will be decided until a full staff review by the ship's council. Does that sound fair?"

"Yes, I think so, although ..."

"And, speaking of the battle over Kithrup, I must go now and see what Takkata-Jim has to say." He hadn't intended to spend so much time with Metz. He did not plan to miss his long-delayed exercise period.

Metz seemed unwilling to let go. "Ah. Your mention of Takkata-Jim reminds me of something else I wanted to bring up, Captain. I'm concerned about feelings of social isolation expressed by some of the crewfen who happen to come from various experimental sub-breeds. They complain of ostracism, and seem to be under discipline a disproportionate amount of the time."

"You're referring to some of the Stenos, I assume."

Metz looked uncomfortable. "A colloquial term that seems to have caught on, although all neo-fen are taxonomically Tursiops amicus ...."

"I have my jaws on the situation, Dr. Metz," Creideiki no longer cared if he interrupted the mel. "Subtle group dynamics are involved, and I am applying what I believe are effective techniques to maintain crew solidarity."

Only about a dozen of the Stenos showed disaffection. Creideiki suspected an infection of stress atavism, a decay of sapiency under fear and pressure. The supposed expert, Dr. Metz, seemed to think the majority of Streaker's crew was practicing racial discrimination.

"Are you implying that Takkata-Jim is also having problems?" Creideiki asked.

"Certainly not! He's a most impressive officer. Mention of his name reminded me because ..." Metz paused.

Because he's a Stenos, Creideiki finished for him silently. Shall I tell Metz that I'm considering moving Hikahi into the vice-captaincy? For all of Takkata-Jim's skill, his moody isolation is becoming a drag on crew morale. I cannot have that in my pod-second.

Creideiki sorely missed Lieutenant Yachapa-Jean, who had died back at the Shallow Cluster.

"Dr. Metz, since you bring up the subject, I have noticed discrepancies between the pre-launch psycho-biological profiles of certain members of the crew and their subsequent performance, even before we discovered the derelict fleet. I'm not a cetapsychologist, per se, but in certain cases I am convinced that the fen did not belong on this ship in the first place. Have you a comment?"

Metz's face was blank. "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about, Captain."

Creideiki's harness whirred as one arm snaked out to scratch an itch above his right eye. "I have little to go on, but soon I think I'll want to invoke command privilege and look over your notes. Strictly informally, of course. Please prepare them for ..."

A chime interrupted Creideiki. It came from the comm link on his harness. "Yess, speak!" he commanded. He listened for a few moments to a buzzing voice on his neural tap.

"Hold everything," he replied. "I'll be right up. Creideiki out."

He focused a burst of sonar at the sensitive plate by the door lock. The hatch hummed open.

"That was the bridge," he told Metz. "A scout has returned with a report from Tsh't and Thomas Orley. I'm needed, but we will discuss these matters again, sssoon, Doctor."

With two powerful fluke strokes Creideiki was through the lock doors and on his way to the bridge.

Ignacio Metz watched the captain go.

Creideiki suspects, he thought. He suspects my special studies. I'll have to do something. But what?

These conditions of siege-pressure were providing fantastic data, especially on the dolphins Metz had inveigled into Streaker's complement. But now things were starting to come apart. Some of his subjects were showing stress symptoms he had never expected.

Now, in addition to worry about ET fanatics, he had to handle Creideiki's suspicions. It wouldn't be easy to put him off track. Metz appreciated genius when he saw it, especially in an uplifted dolphin.

If only he were one of mine, he thought of Creideiki. If only I could take credit for that one.

23 ::: Gillian

The ships lay in space like serried rows of scattered beads, dimly reflecting the faint glow of the Milky Way. The nearest stars were the dim reddish oldsters of a small globular cluster, patient and barren remnants from the first epoch of star formation -- devoid of planets or metals.

Gillian contemplated the photograph, one of six that Streaker had innocently transmitted home from what had seemed an obscure and uninteresting gravitational tide pool, far off the beaten path.

An eerie, silent armada, unresponsive to their every query; the Earthlings hadn't known what to make of it. The fleet of ghost ships had no place in the ordered structure of the Five Galaxies.

How long had they gone unnoticed?

Gillian put the holo aside and picked up another. It showed a close-up of one of the giant derelict ships. Huge as a moon, pitted and ancient, it shimmered inside a faint lambence -- a preservative field of unguessable properties. The aura had defied analysis. They could only tell that it was an intense probability field of unusual nature.

In attempting to dock with one ghost ship, at the outer reaches of the field, the crew of Streaker's gig somehow touched off a chain reaction. Brilliant lightning flashed between the ancient behemoth and the little scoutboat. Lieutenant Yachapa-Jean had reported that all the dolphins were experiencing intense visions and hallucinations. She tried to disengage, but in her disorientation she set off her stasis screens inside the strange field. The resultant explosion tore apart both the tiny Earthship and the giant derelict.

Gillian put down the photo and looked across the lab. Herbie still lay enmeshed in his web of stasis, a silhouette untold hundreds of million years -- billions of years old.

After the disaster, Tom Orley had gone out all alone and brought the mysterious relic back in secret through one of Streaker's side locks.

A prize of great cost, Gillian thought as she contemplated the cadaver. We paid well for you, Herb. If only I could figure out what we bought.

Herb was an enigma worthy of concerted research by the great Institutes, not one solitary woman on a besieged starship far from home.

It was frustrating, but someone had to make this effort. Somebody had to try to understand why they had been turned into hunted animals. With Tom gone, and Creideiki busy keeping the ship and crew functioning, the task was hers. If she didn't do it, it wouldn't be done.

Slowly, she was learning a thing or two about Herbie ... enough to confirm that the corpse was very old, that it had the skeletal structure of a planet-walker, and that the ship's micro-Library still claimed that nothing like it had ever existed.

She put her feet up onto the desk and pulled another photo from the stack. It clearly showed, through that shimmering probability field, a row of symbols etched into the side of a massive hull.

"Open Library," she pronounced. Of the four holo screens on her desk, the one at the far left -- with the rayed spiral glyph above it -- came alight.

"Sargasso file symbols reference search. Open and display changes."

A terse column of text displayed in response against the wall to Gillian's left. The listing was dismayingly brief.

"Sub-persona: Reference Librarian -- query mode," she said. The outline remained projected against the wall. Alongside it a swirling pattern coalesced into the rayed spiral design. A low, calm voice intoned, "Reference Librarian mode, may I help you?"

"Is this all you've been able to come up with, regarding those symbols on the side of that derelict ship?"

"Affirmative," the voice was cool. The inflections were correct, but no attempt had been made to disguise the fact that it came from a minimal persona, a small corner of the shipboard Library program.

"I have searched my records for correlates with these symbols. You are well aware, of course, that I am a very small micro-branch, and that symbols are endlessly mutable in time. The outline gives all possible references I have found within the parameters you set."

Gillian looked at the short list. It was hard to believe. Though incredibly small compared with planetary or sector branches, the ship's Library contained the equivalent of all the books published on Earth until the late twenty-first century. Surely there had to be more correlates than this!

"Ifni!" she sighed. "Something has got half the fanatics in the galaxy stirred up. Maybe it's that picture of Herbie we sent back. Maybe its these symbols. Which was it?"

"I am not equipped to speculate," the program responded.

"The question was rhetorical, and not addressed to you anyway. I see you show a thirty percent correlation of five symbols with religious glyphs of the Abdicator' Alliance. Give me an overview of the Abdicators."

The voice shifted tone. "Cultural summary mode ..."

"Abdicator is a term chosen from Anglic to represent one of the major philosophical groupings in Galactic society.

"The Abdicator belief dates from the fabled Tarseuh episode of the fifteenth aeon, approximately six hundred million years ago, a particularly violent time, when the Galactic Institutes barely survived the ambitions of three powerful patron lines (reference numbers 97AcF109t, 97AcG136t and 97AcG986s).

"Two of these species were amongst the most potent and aggressive military powers in the history of the five linked galaxies. The third species was responsible for the introduction of several new techniques of spacecraft design, including the now standard ..."

The Library waxed into a highly technical discussion of hardware and manufacturing methods. Though interesting, it seemed hardly relevant. With her toe she touched the "skim" button on her console, and the narration leaped ahead ...

" ... The conquerors assumed an appellation which might be translated as `the Lions.' They managed to seize most of the transfer points and centers of power, and all the great Libraries. For twenty million years their grip appeared unassailable. The Lions engaged in unregulated population expansion and colonization, resulting in extinction of eight out of ten pre-client races in the Five Galaxies at the time.

"The Tarseuh helped bring about an end of this tyranny by summoning intervention by six ancient species previously thought to be extinct. These six joined forces with the Tarseuh in a successful counterattack by Galactic culture. Afterward, when the Institutes were re-established, the Tarseuh accompanied the mysterious defenders to an obscure oblivion ..."

Gillian interrupted the flow of words.

"Where did the six species that helped the rebels come from? Did you say they had been extinct?"

The monitor voice returned. "According to records of the time, they had been thought extinct. Do you want reference numbers?"

"No. Proceed."

"Today most sophonts believe the six were racial remnants not yet finished stepping off into a later stage of evolution. Thus the six might not have been extinct per se, but merely grown almost unrecognizable. They were still capable of taking an interest in mundane affairs when matters became sufficiently severe. Do you wish me to refer you to articles on the natural passing modes of species?"

"No. Proceed. What do the Abdicators say took place?"

`Abdicators believe that there are certain ethereal races which deign to take physical form, from time to time, disguised in a seemingly normal pattern of uplift. These `Great Ghosts' are raised up as pre-clients, pass through indenture, and go on to become leading seniors, without ever revealing their true nature. In emergencies, however, these super-species can quickly intervene directly in the affairs of mortals.

`The Progenitors are said to be the earliest, most aloof, and most powerful of these Great Ghosts.

"Naturally, this is profoundly different from the common Progenitor legend, that the Eldest departed the Home Galaxy long ago, promising to return some day ..."

"Stop!" The Library fell silent at once. Gillian frowned as she thought about the phrase "Naturally, this is profoundly different ...

Bull! The Abdicator belief was just a variant of the same basic dogma, differing only slightly from other millennial legends of the "return" of the Progenitors. The controversy reminded her of old-time religious conflicts on Earth, when adherents had performed frantic exegesis over the nature of trinity, or the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin.

This particular frenzy over minor points of doctrine would be almost funny if the battle weren't going on right now, a few thousand kilometers overhead.

She jotted a reminder to try a cross-reference to the Hindu belief in the avatars of deities. The similarity to Abdicator tenets made her wonder why the Library hadn't made the connection, at least as an analogy.

Enough is enough.

"Niss!" she called.

The screen on the far right came alight. An abstract pattern of sparkling motes erupted into a sharply limited zone just above the screen.

"As you know, Gillian Baskin, it is preferable that the Library not know of my existence aboard this ship. I have taken the liberty of screening it so that it cannot observe our conversation. You wish to ask me something?"

"I certainly do. Were you listening to that report just now?"

"I listen to everything this ship's micro-branch does. It is my primary function here. Didn't Thomas Orley ever explain that to you?"

Gillian restrained herself. Her foot was too close to the offending screen. She put it on the floor to remove temptation. "Niss," she asked evenly, "why does the micro-branch Library talk gibberish?"

The Tymbrimi machine sighed anthropomorphically. "Dr. Baskin, virtually every oxygen-breathing race but Mankind has been weaned on a semantic which evolved down scores of patron-client links, all influenced by the Library. The languages of Earth are strange and chaotic by Galactic standards. The problems of converting Galactic archives into your unconventional syntax are enormous."

"I know all that! The ETs wanted us to all learn Galactic Seven at the time of Contact. We told them to take the idea and stick it."

"Graphically put. Instead, humanity applied immense resources to convert Earth's branch Library to use colloquial Anglic, hiring Kanten, Tymbrimi, and others as consultants. But still there are problems, are there not?"

Gillian rubbed her eyes. This was getting them nowhere. Why did Tom imagine this sarcastic machine was useful? Whenever she wanted to get a simple answer, it only asked questions.

"The language problem has been their excuse for over two centuries!" she said. "How much longer will they use it? Since Contact we've been studying language as it hasn't been studied in millions of years! We've tackled the intricacies of `wolfling' tongues like Anglic, English, Japanese, and taught dolphins and chimps to speak. We've even made some progress communicating with those strange creatures, the Solarians of Earth's sun!

"Yet the Library Institute still tells us it's our language that's at fault for all of these lousy correlations, these clumsily translated records! Hell, Tom and I can each speak four or five Galactic tongues. It's not the language difference that's the trouble. There's something queer about the data we've been given!"

The Niss hummed silently for a time. The sparkling motes coalesced and separated like two immiscible fluid merging and falling apart into droplets.

"Dr. Baskin, haven't you just described the major reason for ships such as this one, which roam space hunting discrepancies in the Library's records? And the very purpose of my existence, to attempt to catch the Library in a lie, to try to: find out if the most powerful patron races, as you would say: `stack the deck' against younger sophonts such as Men and Tymbrimi?"

"Then why don't you help me?" Gillian's heart raced She gripped the edge of the desk, and she realized suddenly that the frustration had come close to overcoming her.

"Why am I so fascinated with the human way of looking at things, Dr. Baskin?" the Niss asked. Its voice turned almost sympathetic. "My Tymbrimi masters are unusually crafty. Their adaptability keeps them alive in a dangerous galaxy. Yet they, too, are trapped in the Galactic mode of thinking. You Earthlings, from a fresh perspective, may see what they do not.

"The range of behaviors and beliefs among oxygen-breathers is vast, yet the experience of Man is virtually unique. Carefully uplifted client races never suffer through the errors made by your pre-Contact human nations. These errors have made you different."

That was true enough, Gillian knew. Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women -- foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried.

Illogical and shameful as they seemed in retrospect, those experiences enriched modern Man. Few races had made so many mistakes in so short a time, or tried so many tentative solutions to hopeless problems.

Earthling artists were sought out by many jaded ETs, and paid well to spin tales no Galactic would imagine. The Tymbrimi particularly liked human fantasy novels, with lots of dragons, ogres and magic -- the more the better. They thought them terrifyingly grotesque and vivid.

"I am not discouraged when you grow frustrated with the Library," the Niss said. "I am glad. I learn from your frustration! You question things that all Galactic society takes for granted.