Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

“Of course. I feel it, too. The halves are made whole with them.”

“That’s because you remember the covenant,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?” Sven asked.

“It’s a little difficult to explain. I—excuse me a moment, please.” I had perceived that a fish, large and meaty, was swimming along unconcernedly a few feet away from me.

I was after it in a flash. It took alarm, but of course I was much faster than it, and I caught it with no difficulty at all.

Where there is one fish there are apt to be others, so I gave half my catch to Djuna and the other half to Ivry, and went after another for myself. They were good fish, with plenty of firm fat meat, and we all felt better after the snack.

“When you say you ‘saw a picture’, what do you mean?” Sven was saying when I began listening again. “Do you see a real picture of something happening?”

“No. Not exactly. Sometimes it’s just words. When Amtor was trying to get in touch with me, I heard words. But when I saw the mine exploding, I did see a picture. It was a picture on a black background, with the detail done in faint glowing lines, something like a photographic negative.”

“Do you think the mine and the metal drums really looked like the picture you saw?”

“No, they wouldn’t have been luminous. I don’t suppose there was any light at all at that depth.

“You sound like Dr. Lawrence, Sven. He always wants to know how it is when I see things.”

Sven laughed. “Did you have foreknowledge of it? You were sure we’d need you when we exploded the mine.”

“I guess so. I’m not trying to be mysterious, Sven. I really don’t know.”

“How do you feel about the quake? The dolphins seem sure there’s going to be one.”

“Oh, something is going to happen. I feel anxious a bout it. I said I was happy, but there’s a cloud of fear. Trouble is coming.”

“And after the trouble?” Sven pressed her.

“I can’t see that far. But we’re with the sea people. I feel happy now.”

“I wonder what time it is,” Sven said.

“About ten,” I told him. “We can tell from the tide.”

“Out at sea like this?” he said.

“Oh, yes-s-s. The stars help us, too.”

Now that we had eaten and rested, we were swimming faster. Madelaine looked up at the sky. “Look, the pointers of the Dipper are pointing straight down at Polaris. How odd that such an insignificant star should be the pivot of our heavens.”

“I’ve heard it’s a compound star,” Sven answered.

“Is it? That must be Vega, coming up in the northeast, but I don’t see Altair. It must be too early for it yet.” She yawned and shivered.

“Would you like my jacket, Maddy?” Sven said.

“No, thank you. Being cold helps me to stay awake.”

About ten-thirty I took Sven on my back to let Djuna rest. He made the transfer awkwardly, and I realized that his joints were stiff with cold.

Time passed. A little after eleven, Djuna said, “Do you Splits feel any difference in the water on your legs?”

“No,” Madelaine answered, “but my legs are so cold I doubt I could feel anything. How about you, Sven?”

“I don’t notice anything. Is it—?”

“Yes-s,” Djuna answered. “There’s been an earthquake shock.”

Madelaine let out her breath. “I think we’ve all been waiting for it. Now it’s come. Will there be more shocks?”

I “Of course. A lot of pressure had built up in the earth.” “I’m sorry we had to do it,” Madelaine said soberly, “but I don’t regret having done it. How about Noonday Rock? Will the quake be felt there?”

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “It’s not on the San Andreas Rift. There might be heavy waves sweeping over the Rock. Don’t worry about Dr. Lawrence, Moonlight. If there is any danger, one of our people will have taken the doctor on his back and gone out to open sea with him.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about him.” She laughed. “The doctor impresses me as a person who would always take good care of himself.”

From then on, as we swam up the coast, there was a quake every few minutes, and we reported each of them to our passengers. Out at sea as we were, the only gross sign of the series of earthquakes was the choppy surface of the water, but it must have been a night of increasing terror on land.

About three a drizzling rain began to fall, and Sven made Madelaine, who was shivering violently, take his windbreaker. A little later the moon rose, and the light was a comfort to all of us.

“I wonder if the concrete walls around the training pools have broken yet?” Madelaine said. “And if they have, did the sea people all manage to get out? You know the spiritual, Sven, about how ‘Joshua fit de battle of Jericho’? We started an earthquake. Did ‘de walls come a-tumblin’ down’?”

“We ought to know pretty soon,” Sven said.

The east began to lighten. The sun was about half above the horizon when we saw, coming across the water toward us from the north, a marvelous sight.

It was a flotilla of sea people, more than two hundred of them, and though they were coming very fast, they hardly seemed to move in the water so much as in the air. They leapt and tumbled, they turned head over tail in their exuberance, they seemed to frolic in the air like birds, free creatures in their free element. The light glinted from their glistening bodies. The surface of the water seemed to laugh.

“What is it?” Madelaine cried. She was leaning forward eagerly, shading her eyes from the rising sun with one hand. “Amtor, Amtor! Is it what I think?”

“Yes,” I told her. I was so excited I could hardly talk. It was a real effort for me to force my speech into the slow tempo and low pitch of human communication. “They’re free. I think they’re all free, all the dolphins that were in DRAT training centers. They’re saying that the walls broke and crumbled, the walls fell into bits all along the coast. They swam away unhindered. They’re free.”

The fleet of dolphins was all about us now. I recognized many friends and kinsmen, and among them one who was not a kinsman and who was dearer to me than any friend could be—Blitta, my mate, who had been shut up in a DRAT station for more than two years. Even now, I feel much emotion at her name.

“It worked, then,” Madelaine said. Her voice was full of astonished fruition. “I didn’t really think it would. You stole the mine, Sven, Amtor dropped it, and now the sea people are free.”

She drew a deep breath. “Whatever happens, we can always remember this, the morning when the air seemed full of joy like the sound of singing voices. The morning when the sea people were set free.”

The sun was well up now, golden among clouds in the east. The first shock of delight had abated a little, and we began to swim northward more soberly. Sven looked around at the dolphins in the water.

“Isn’t that you, Pettrus?” he said. “What happened on Noonday Rock when the quakes came? Where is Doctor Lawrence?”

“Lawrence is all right,” Pettrus answered. “There were only two little shocks on the Rock, but there were a lot of waves. One big one swept almost over the Rock.

“When we knew the waves were coming, I had the doctor get on my back and I swam well out to sea with him. He stayed on my back for several hours. He never let go of his briefcase the whole time.” Pettrus made the grunting noise that indicates amusement with us.

“When the dolphins from the DRAT pens began to arrive on the Rock—oh, we were so excited!—he suggested that we should all go to meet you. I asked him to come with us, but he said he’d had enough of sitting on a dolphin’s back with his legs in the water. He said to leave him on the Rock.