Margaret St. Clair - The Dolphins of Altair

The pressure increased. Painful as it was, we hesitated an instant longer. But we were committed, and the love between the woman and the dolphin was perfectly real. The union could, and must, be made.

We dared it. It gave immediate relief from the pressure, but we had barely enough time to realize that our minds were truly joined before the whirling began. We went whirling over and over like a patchwork pinwheel, a hand-standing harlequin, a gaudy double tumbler. There was something joyous in our intoxicated mental motion, and if I was a tumbler doing cartwheels, Madelaine was a dolphin leaping in the sun. Actually, we both were each other.

The giddy whirling stopped. No time to waste. The duad of Sosa and Amtor must reach out. It knew its goal.

It must have been about this time that Lawrence, in the well-heated little cabin, took Madelaine’s body temperature. It was below normal, but not dangerously so, and he felt that the “reaching-out-to-Altair bit” could be allowed to go on. Ivry and Pettrus, who floated beside me during the whole experiment, said that my breathing had become noticeably slow.

To “reach out” meant that the Sosa-Amtor duad had to extricate itself from the grip, of which people are ordinarily quite unconscious, of all the billions of minds on our one earth. Usually dolphins and men are stuck in a sort of psychic glue. That is what the duad now experienced.

We churned helplessly in the grip of this mental adhesive until we—the duad—realized it must draw in on itself, become hard and smooth and small. It must encapsulate itself, like a seed. Then it would be out, and free.

I don’t know why this was easy, but it was. As soon as we thought of it, it happened. The duad was on its way.

It takes light almost sixteen years to reach the earth from Altair, The duad would have been there instantly, without regard for the distance—space is nothing—but there were interstellar magnetic fields in the way. I do not mean to give the impression that there was any visual awareness of this. That was not how the duad knew of the existence of the fields. But our progress was slowed.

Slowed and stopped. This was the isolation Sosa and I had feared, the terrible gulf of outer space. We were mere points, the duad was one point. But its duality comforted itself.

The fields must be overleaped somehow. Here, I think, the duad drew without knowing it on the same force that powers the ahln. But here it was volitional and personal.

Other stars’ clutched at us. The duad might, even now, have been deflected. But our old home star was reaching out its hands to help; there are billions of minds on that sun’s planet. They are different from the minds of dolphins or men, of course. The million years between have made much difference. But the Sosa-Amtor duad could not only communicate with the minds of Altair’s planet, it was also expected there and welcome. Those minds had had something to do with Madelaine before, when she slept so long.

Now those minds impressed our single consciousness as a wavering, patterned brightness. It seemed to advance and withdraw continually. When Madelaine and I discussed this later, we agreed that the minds of Altair’s planet had been afraid of distressing their duad visitor, and that they had hidden from it something of what they were, under this image of fire.

What were the people of that planet like physically? (They weren’t, of course, disembodied intelligences.) Here Madelaine and I disagree, she thinking them to be like Splits, and I like the sea people. Perhaps some day we shall really find out.

At any rate, the duad could communicate with them. They knew why it had come. There was no need to argue or beg. Someone—they—many people—the wavering brightness—told the duad what it wanted to know: the secret of powering the ahln.

It was simple, a thing to be learned instantly and remembered easily. And now that it was learned, the Sosa-Amtor duad wanted to get back. Bodies cannot last long without their psychic tenants; our bodies, back on earth, drew us powerfully. And earth herself, with all the kindred minds, called like a familiar voice.

Once more the duad had to overleap the magnetic fields. It must make haste. But the way back was easier. Earth pulled her exiles as the planet of Altair had not.

Sosa’s mind and mine fell away from each other suddenly. The duad was two separate beings now. The strange identity was over. We were back on earth.

Madelaine stirred on the little couch in the Naomi ’s cabin, and then sat up. She was shivering violently. Lawrence, who was hovering over her, was rubbing her arms and hands. “Did you do it?” he asked eagerly. “Your heart was so slow I was afraid you weren’t all right.”

She yawned and smoothed her hair. “Yes, we’ve been there,” she answered soberly. “We got what we went for. It’s easy to use. It frightens me that they trusted us with it.

“We learned other things too, I think. There may be at least one useful side product. But the chief thing is, we know how to power the ahln.”

The contractions of the synthi-womb had begun. My patient, Sven Erickson, was dimly visible through its clouded plastic walls, lying curled up naked in the fetal position. His respiration, somewhat depressed by drugs, was cared for by an oxygen-poor mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and an array of tubes and pumps handled the excretory and nutritive phases of his metabolism. He had been in the synthi-womb for almost two weeks now. It was time for him to be born.

I didn’t know too much about Erickson’s history. I had heard that he had been picked up on one of the Farallons, in the company of a group of spies and saboteurs, and had been brought to headquarters for questioning. They had interrogated him for several days under the influence of sodium pentathol, but his answers had been so contradictory and confused that it had been decided to attempt a more fundamental treatment. At this point he had been handed over to me, and I was now at my usual job of monitoring the process of artificial birth.

It had been found that a preliminary processing by drugs, followed by a simulation of human fetal growth and birth, was extraordinarily effective in making possible a radical change of personality in patients subjected to it. People who had been through it were like young babies, but young babies who were exceptionally apt and teachable. They learned to walk in ten days, they learned to talk in two weeks. And they could be made into whatever the processes wanted, broadly speaking. I suppose, though I don’t know for certain, that my superiors were going to condition Erickson to act as a spy, a perfectly docile and committed spy, on the faction with which he had been connected formerly.

I looked at the gauges. Erickson’s pulse, respiration and temperature were normal for the stage of intrauterine development he was currently at. The contractions were coming about every twenty minutes. It was time to step them up a bit.

My hand went out to the dial that controlled the frequency of the synthi-womb’s contractions. And somehow—I don’t understand what happened, even now—my fingers turned the valve that determined the oxygen-content of the air my patient was breathing as he floated in the simulated amniotic fluid. It was as if some other will than my own had taken charge of my hand.

Oh, dear. This would never do. Too much oxygen at this stage would make Erickson restless and promote premature cerebral activity. He wasn’t sup posed to have any real consciousness of his surroundings until after he had been born.

Hastily I turned the valve back to normal, but I felt shaken. Slowly and carefully I reached out to the contraction dial and moved it forward. The frequency of the con tractions increased.