"Vonda N. McIntyre-The End's Beginning" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

The End's Beginning
by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1978 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Through long captivity, I learned to mimic the humans' speech, but not to understand the thoughts
behind it. How could anyone learn to understand the ways of those who spend their lives seeking such
desperate independence? Though they have forced me to be like them, still I cannot understand. I would
have to be mad to desire such solitude, and I am not yet mad.
They have made me mute and almost blind. They left me my eyes, but eyes are less than useless in this
cold dark heavy sea. I still can taste and smell. Many different particles drift among the gentle salt flavors
that encircle evolution: sharp diatoms, bright edible crustacean sparks (so welcome after many seasons
obscured by battered chunks of fish-flesh sharp with ice), the bitter taint of the water that seeps from the
humans' land (in the sea the great ones sing fading songs that tell of unfouled oceans, but the great ones
are dying, murdered; their songs will die with them and no one will remember the taste of clean sea), and
the gritty sediment washed toward me from a wide rain-swollen river. The sediment is what blinds my
sight. The men have muted my voice so I cannot call for help, and thus they have almost blinded my
ears.
No longer can I sing against the tides. The men attached a machine to me that emits an ugly squeak.
Though the metallic sound mixes and melds erratically with the din that fills the ocean, it is sufficient for
navigation (they tested this quite carefully). But the beauty is gone from my home. Even the stones are
opaque.
I break the surface to breathe. It is dark, and the water sparkles in the moonlight. I slow to look
around, for it has been a long time since I have seen the ocean or the sky. I rest with my back and eyes
above the warm caressing water. But soon the men realize I have stopped, and they send a signal that
forces me onward. I cannot resist it. I do not even have the satisfaction of trying, failing, to overcome
pain. There is no pain, only compulsion as inescapable as the glass and concrete walls that held me
prisoner.
While I was going nearly mad from solitude, I dreamed of being freed and swimming out into the wide
sweet ocean. My mate would come with our people, and we would sing and leap and copulate and
rejoice in my freedom. But I cannot call, I cannot sing. There is no freedom or rejoicing.
And my mate will never find me, but will wait and search in vain near the human-built where they
imprisoned me. No one could know that the men put wet smelly things all around me (I thought they
were trying to cover my skin as they cover their own) and put me in a box and put the box in one of their
metal creatures. (The humans have a terrible need to put things inside things, to overcome the inevitable
randomness of life. People know better.) The metal creature rose up in the air and took me from the
Middle Ocean to the Wide Ocean, and that is where I am now, swimming along the sun's track to reach
the Sunset Land. When I reach it, I will die.
My body has stopped aching from the way the men cut it. I am healed, but I still can feel the scar. The
heavy weight of metal inside me disturbs my balance. They do not understand how much it hurts that I
can no longer play. I cannot sing, I cannot leap. The men must have no art at all.
I hear the faint pulses of a whale's song, nearly obliterated by the harsh scream and chatter of the
men's water machines. This song is fading and distorted; it has carried perhaps halfway across the Wide
Ocean. It is useless for information, but it is an illusion of companionship. For the next few hours,
whenever the cacophony becomes too painful or the single sound of my navigation devices bores me to