Roger Zelazny - My Name is Legion

I had a hunch that if I asked him anything else I just might ruin our beautiful rapport. So I ate up, drank up, paid up, and left.

I followed the stream out to the open water again and ran south along the coast. Deems had said it was about four miles that way, figuring from the restaurant, and that it was a long, low building right on the water. All right. I hoped she had returned for that trip Don had mentioned. The worst she could do was tell me to go away. But she knew an awful lot that might be worth hearing. She knew the area and she knew dolphins. I wanted her opinion, if she had one.

There was still a lot of daylight left in the sky, though the air seemed to have cooled a bit, when I spotted a small cove at about the proper distance, throttled down, and swung toward it. Yes, there was the place, partway back and to the left, built against a steep rise and sporting a front deck that projected out over the water. Several boats, one of them a sailboat, rode at rest at its side, sheltered by the long, white curve of a breakwater.

I headed in, continuing to slow, and made my way around the inward point of the breakwall. I saw her sitting on the pier, and she saw me and reached for something. Then she was lost to sight above me as I pulled into the lee of the structure. I killed my engine and tied up to the handiest piling, wondering each moment whether she would appear the next, boathook in hand, ready to repel invaders.

This did not happen, though, so I climbed out and onto a ramplike staging that led me topside. She was just finishing adjusting a long, flaring skirt, which must have been what she had been reaching after. She wore a bikini top, and she was seated on the deck itself, near to the edge, legs tucked out of sight beneath the green, white and blue print material. Her hair was long and very black, her eyes dark and large. Her features were regular, with a definite Oriental cast to them, of the sort I find exceedingly attractive. I paused at the top of the ramp, feeling immediately uncomfortable as I met her gaze.

My name is Madison, James Madison, I said. I work out at Station One. I'm new there. May I come up for a minute?

You already have, she said. Then she smiled, a tentative thing. But you can come the rest of the way over and have your minute.

So I did, and as I advanced she kept staring at me. It made me acutely self-conscious, a condition I thought I had mastered shortly after puberty, and as I was about to look away, she said, Martha Millay, just to make it a full introduction, and she smiled again.

I've admired your work for a long while, I said, although that is only part of the reason I came by. I hoped you could help me to feel safer in my own work.

The killings, she said.

Yes, Exactly ... Your opinion. I'd like it.

All right. You can have it, she said. But I was on Martinique at the time the killings occurred, and my intelligence comes only from the news reports and one phone conversation with a friend at the IDS. On the basis of years of acquaintanceship, years spent photographing them, playing with them, knowing them, loving them, I do not believe it possible that a dolphin would kill a human being. The notion runs contrary to all my experience. For some peculiar reason, perhaps some delphinic concept as to the brotherhood of self-conscious intelligence, we seem to be quite important to them, so important that I even believe one of them might rather die himself than see one of us killed.

So you would rule out even a self-defense killing by a dolphin?

I think so, she said, although I have no facts to point at here. However, what is more important, in terms of your real question, is that they struck me as very undolphinlike killings.

How so?

I don't see a dolphin as using his teeth in the way that was described. The way a dolphin is designed, his rostrum, or beak, contains a hundred teeth, and there are eighty-eight in his lower jaw. But if he gets into a fight with, say, a shark or a whale, he does not use them for purposes of biting or slashing. He locks them together, which provides a very rigid structure, and uses his lower jaw, which is considerably undershot, for purposes of ramming his opponent. The anterior of the skull is quite thick and the skull itself sufficiently large to absorb enormous shocks from blows administered in this fashion, and they are tremendous blows, for dolphins have very powerful neck muscles. They are quite capable of killing sharks by battering them to death. So even granting for the sake of argument that a dolphin might have done such a thing, he would not have bitten his victims. He would have bludgeoned them.

So why didn't someone from the dolphin institute come out and say that?

She sighed.

They did. The news media didn't even use the statement they gave them. Apparently nobody thought it an important enough story to warrant any sort of followup.

She finally took her eyes off me and stared out over the water.

Then, I believe their indifference to the damage caused by running only the one story is more contemptible even than actual malice, she finally said.

Acquitted for a moment by her gaze, I lowered myself to sit on the edge of the pier, my feet hanging down over the side. It had been an added discomfort to stand, staring down at her. I joined her in looking out across her harbor.

Cigarette? I said.

I don't smoke.

Mind if I do?

Go ahead.

I lit one, drew on it, thought a moment, then asked, Any idea as to how the deaths might have occurred?

It could have been a shark.

But there hasn't been a shark in the area for years. The 'walls' ...

She laughed.

There are any number of ways a shark could have gotten in, she said. A shift on the bottom, opening a tunnel or crevice beneath the 'wall.' A temporary short circuit in one of the projectors that didn't get noticed, or a continuing one, with a short somewhere in the monitoring system. For that matter, the frequencies used in the 'wall' are supposed to be extremely distressing to many varieties of marine life, but not necessarily fatal. While a shark would normally seek to avoid the 'wall', one could have been driven, forced through by some disturbance, and then found itself trapped inside,

That's a thought, I said. Yes ... Thank you. You didn't disappoint me.

I would have thought that I had.

Why?

All that I have done is try to vindicate the dolphins and show that there is possibly a shark inside. You said that you wanted me to tell you something that would make you feel safer in your work.

I felt uncomfortable again. I had the sudden, irrational feeling that she somehow knew all about me and was playing games at that moment.

You said that you are familiar with my work, she said suddenly. Does that include the two picture books on dolphins?

Yes. I enjoyed your text, too.

There wasn't that much of it, she said, and it has been several years now. Perhaps it was too whimsical. It has been a long while since I've looked at the things I said ...

I thought them admirably suited to the subject, little Zen-like aphorisms for each photograph.

Can you recall any?

Yes, I said, one suddenly coming to me, I remember the shot of the leaping dolphin, where you caught his shadow over the water and had for a caption, 'In the absence of reflection, what gods ... '

She chuckled briefly.

For a long while I thought that that one was perhaps too cute. Later, though, as I got to know my subject better, I decided that it was not.

I have often wondered as to what sort of religion or religious feelings they might possess, I said. It has been a common element among all the tribes of man. It would seem that something along these lines appears whenever a certain level of intelligence is achieved, for purposes of dealing with those things that are still beyond its grasp. I am curious as to the forms it might take among dolphins, but quite intrigued by the notion. You say you have some ideas on it?