Margaret St. Clair: The Dolphins of Altair

The three human beings who helped us came to Noonday Rock by different ways. Madelaine came because we called her; Sven came because he could not help hearing the voice of our distress. But Dr. Lawrence was moved by nothing but his own curiosity, his unquenched thirst for marvels. We would never have pitched on him as an ally, and yet he was more crucial to what happened than any of the others. It was he who suggested— But I had better introduce myself. I am Amtor, a dolphin historian. I took an active part in most of what I am about to describe, and what I did not witness myself. I learned of from the actors. This is a reliable account of what happened when the world, as Madelaine put it—Madelaine always had a gift of words—when the world stood at the hinge of time.

For tens of thousands of years we had not concerned ourselves with the land people. What the Splits, as we called them, did to each other was none of our business. We helped them when we could; we took no part in their quarrels. Then they beg an to invade what was ours by the terms of the covenant—the sea.

The pollution of the waters was what affected us first. The fish on which we depended for food began to diminish, and our females gave birth to children who were more or less seriously deformed. I myself am one of those whose deformity was not so serious that it interfered with their survival—I have a rudimentary hand growing on the left side of my chest, but it does not interfere badly with my speed in swimming, though it tends to unbalance me.

The contamination of our environment was bad enough, but we might have been able to adapt ourselves to it in time, if it had grown no worse. But then the Splits, particularly those who lived along the edge of the North American continent, began to capture us in numbers. They tested us for intelligence, and those who were recalcitrant, or whom they considered stupid, they killed. They used our flesh for food for their pets. The dolphins who were not killed were trained, by means of electrodes inserted in their brains, in tasks the Splits thought would be militarily useful to them. At the time Madelaine came to Noonday Rock, almost three hundred of our people were penned up, undergoing training, in the three big Naval Research Stations along the Pacific coast.

We realized we were in danger. The covenant was being broken. We began to look about for allies.

The first we got was Madelaine. Her full name was Madelaine Paxton. She worked as a secretary at the Naval Research Station at Half Moon Bay. And that was all she knew about herself.

I mean that she could remember nothing of her past. Her present consciousness of herself had come to her one afternoon in March, about halfway through a letter she had been typing. What she had been doing before that—w ho her friends were, where she was living, where she had gone to school, even of how old she was—of none of these things had she any idea.

She was badly frightened. She hunted through the handbag that was lying on the desk where she was sitting. She found a couple of bills and a receipt from a dentist, neither of which meant anything to her, but the driver’s license she found in the wallet was more helpful.

From it she learned that she was twenty-three years old, unmarried, and living at an address in San Francisco. The license described her as ash blonde, with gray eyes, and the photograph on the license agreed with the description. Madelaine looked at the picture but felt no sense of identity with it.

At five o’clock one of the other secretaries, whose name seemed to be Frances, came up to remind her that she, Frances, was driving the car back to the city today. Frances added that they could wait for Eleanor at the car.

The three girls got in the Peugeot. Frances and Eleanor talked a good deal on the drive to San Francisco, and Madelaine listened avidly to their chatter, trying to fill in her background for herself. Once Frances said, “What’s the matter, Maddy? Cat got your tongue?” and Madelaine answered that she was just tired.

When they let her out in front of her apartment, Frances said, “Don’t forget, Maddy, you’re picking me up tomorrow at the corner of Geary and Judah,” and Madelaine, after asking, “At what time, exactly?” said that she wouldn’t forget.

Madelaine got through the next two days without making any bad mistakes. The other girls in the secretary pool kidded her about her absentmindedness, and told her she must be in love. She might have got used to her situation—once or twice she seemed to be remembering things, and this encouraged her—except that she began to hear voices. (They were, of course, the voices of our distress. We dolphins have a certain psychic reach that we can exert, if we choose; and we were, as I said, looking about for allies.) The voices were too much for Madelaine’s equanimity. She looked up the name of the station’s staff psychologist in the Employee’s Handbook—her fingers were shaking so much she could hardly turn the pages—and made an appointment for herself with him.

Dr. Lawrence was the staff psychologist. He was a shortish man with a handsome, inexpressive face and languid dark eyes. Ordinarily Madelaine would have had trouble in confiding in him, but she was too frightened to be cautious. She poured out her symptoms in a rush, weeping and trembling and twisting her fingers as she sat opposite Dr. Lawrence in a brown armchair.

“What do the voices say?” Lawrence asked when she seemed to have finished.

“Just words. ‘Help,’ and ‘They’re hurting us,’ and sometimes, ‘the covenant’.’”

“Urn. Well, of course, it’s always possible that you really are picking up somebody’s thinking. But I can see it would be disconcerting.

“As to the amnesia, that’s usually the result of an acute conflict. I imagine we can uncover what it is. Would you like me to see you on Mondays, at eight in the morning? We can see if a little therapy helps you.”

Madelaine, a little calmer now, blew her nose and told Lawrence yes, she’d be glad to see him on Mondays.

She met with him twice. Lawrence had looked up her record in personnel, and tried to prod her memory with facts from it, but it did no good. On the third Monday morning she woke early, before her alarm clock could go off.

She had been having a whale dream. She lay flat on her back, remembering it.

She had been standing on an islet in the midst of roaring water. She had not known what time of day it was. The yellowish air was full of spray, and the wind drove salt in her mouth. Even in her dream she could taste the salt. She had felt a desolate surprise at being where she was. In this waste of driven waters, was she expected to live?

Then the dream changed. She stood knee-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep in the tingling waters, while the sweet sea beasts crowded around her. Her hands were under her breasts, supporting them, and there were rainbows around her nipples. Her breasts were the bridge between worlds.

Worlds upon worlds. Her breasts spanned them; she was the nursing mother of the archangelic whales. Glory, said her dream, glory, glory, glory to Madelaine, the mother of all the whales. She had waked from her dream with the word “glory” ringing in her ears like the noise of a vast bell.

What an odd dream! She must be sure to tell it to Dr. Lawrence when she saw him this morning.

Madelaine was abruptly seized with a feeling of urgency. She jumped out of bed, bathed quickly, and hurried into her clothes. The thought of food repelled her. She would leave early, while the highway was still uncrowded, and perhaps, if she were lucky, Dr. Lawrence would be in his office when she got there. For today was surely the day when she would remember, when she would realize who she was and what she was hunting for.