Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

There were no lights in the village and, except for a dog barking somewhere, no sounds either. Lawrence and Madelaine were out on deck.

“Madelaine!” I called softly.

“Amtor! The doctor has been showing me the star he says is Altair. I’ve been wondering…” She explained her difficulty to me.

“I don’t think reaching out for Altair will be difficult,” I answered. “It’s one of the stars we sea people navigate by, and we are always aware of where it is. Let me do the reaching out, Sosa. Abandon your mind to me.”

“All right. The doctor thinks I should lie down on the settee in the cabin. Will the reaching out be like Udra?”

I saw she was a little nervous. “It will be like Udra at first,” I told her. “Later—I don’t know. We can’t tell until we try.”

The Splits went into the cabin. I floated in the water near the jetty, Ivry on one side of me and Pettrus on the other, and tried to get into the Udra-state. Moonlight and I had been in psychic contact a number of times before, of course, and she was not unused to Udra, either; but we both felt that this time was going to be different in its nature from anything before. For one thing, we must try for a more intimate psychic union than any we had had earlier; and then, we had never tried to reach such a target together. Splits say that light from Altair must travel for almost sixteen years to reach our earth.

My mind touched Madelaine’s. Men and dolphins are of one stock, but by now the gulf between us is enormous. It is a constant miracle that we can communicate at all. Our sensory equipment is not identical: we sea people have a pressure sense and a navigational sense that seems to have no human analogue; and human color vision is so much better than ours as to be almost a separate sense, though we can see farther into the ultraviolet and infrared regions than Splits can. And there is a constant, basic difference caused by the human possession of hands.

This gulf between Madelaine and me, this sensory and mental difference, meant that in our knowledge of each other there would be places where we could only be conscious of a terrifying, incomprehensible void. And yet our minds must join, and join very closely, if we were to reach out for Altair.

Time passed. The edges of Sosa’s mind and mine, despite our mutual fear, began to overlap. We were getting closer and closer. And then, like a diamond blade cutting into my brain, I got a violent psychic shock.

It was different from, and worse than, the shock I had had in Sausalito when I was in the Udra-state and the dolphins near Hawaii were killed. Ivry and Pettrus say I gave a scream, so high-pitched that they could hardly hear it They were thoroughly alarmed.

My first thought was that Dr. Lawrence had taken advantage of Sosa’s being in a trance state to attack her with his hunting knife. It was the kind of idea Ivry would have had, but I had it.

What had really happened was something different. Madelaine, in the Naomi ’s cabin, was breathing quietly, her eyes closed, when Lawrence saw, or thought he saw, two fine greyish threads rising into the air from her breasts. The threads joined together about a foot above her chest and curled away in a thicker strand into the darkness of the ceiling.

This was not very different from the kind of thing Lawrence had often encountered in his study of the literature of spiritualism, but he was startled to see it actually happen. He took the girl’s pulse—it was very slow and weak—and then put a thermometer in her arm pit. She had felt cold to his touch, and when he read the thermometer, the mercury was so low that he decided he had better try to get her back to normal consciousness at once. It was this abrupt withdrawal of Sosa from her psychic contact with me that had shocked me so.

I soon realized that Moonlight was alive and conscious, but I wanted to know what had happened. I called softly until Dr. Lawrence came out on deck. He explained what had happened, and added, “Tomorrow I’ll get some sort of heater from the village—a charcoal brazier, if they don’t have any better means of warming themselves—and we’ll try again. Madelaine has to be kept warmer during the reaching-out ramp than I realized.”

Ivry said, “We want to see Moonlight.”

“She’s still weak—”

“You can carry her, can’t you?” Ivry was getting excited. “Bring her out on the deck!”

Lawrence shrugged. In a minute he came back carrying Madelaine in his arms. She was a small light girl, but he was a small man; he was panting when he put her down.

“I’m all right,” she told us. “The doctor was right to rouse me when he did, but it must have been horrid for you, Amtor.”

She had answered my not quite conscious fear that Lawrence had roused her when he did to damage us both. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said, not much liking the idea.

She was silent for a perceptible length of time before she said, “Yes.”

Early next morning Lawrence went shopping in the village and came back with a brazier, a basket of charcoal, and a machine-made serape. “Half the population was following me,” he told Madelaine as he put his purchases away. “They watched every move I made. I never was more stared at in my life.”

“Why do you think that was?” the girl asked from the settee. She was still lying down; Lawrence insisted on her getting as much rest as she could.

“I don’t know enough Spanish to be sure, but I gather they’re puzzled why anybody should stay in Bahia what’s-its-name any longer than he has to. They think something funny is going on, and they’re curious. I hope their curiosity gets satisfied before tonight.”

Madelaine was twisting her fingers together nervously. “Doctor,” she said, “I’m—I’m afraid.”

“Afraid? You mean, of this reaching-out-to-Altair stuff?”

“Yes.”

He sat down on the cabin floor facing her, in a languid pose. It was odd, Madelaine said later, to observe how this avowal of fear on her part had returned him to his role of psychotherapist, and her self to the place of his patient.

“Afraid,” he said thoughtfully. “What does it seem to you that you’re afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Of nothing. I mean, of nothingness.”

“Can you pinpoint your fear a little more exactly?”

“I’ll try. I’m afraid of getting so far away from my body. It’s such a long way to Altair!” She tried to laugh.

“It sounds as if you were afraid of dying,” Lawrence offered.

“I don’t think it’s that. I mean, you’re a doctor. You’d keep me from dying, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d certainly try to. I doubt there’s really much danger of your dying.”

She sighed. Before she could say anything more, they both heard footsteps on the jetty. Somebody peeked in at the cabin window and then, when they looked up, quickly withdrew.

“Peeping Tom,” Lawrence said. “—If you don’t think you’re afraid of dying, what do you think it is?”

“It frightens me to think of what I’m afraid of.”

“We get this sort of thing in therapy all the time,” he observed. “If we had plenty of time to put in on it, I could probably get you over being frightened to think of the cause of your fear. As it is, I recommend that you endure being frightened, and try to tell me what frightens you.”

“All right. I’m afraid of being all alone in the abyss of space.”

“Um. Will you be all alone? I thought Amtor would be with you.”

“Amtor!” Her face relaxed a little. “Yes, but that’s not enough. Perhaps the abyss in him is what I’m afraid of. I’m not sure. It seemed like that, last night.

“After all, Doctor, nobody has ever done anything like this before. It’s natural I should be afraid.”