David Brin: Startide Rising

* Flame-fluked I — Hikahi call you *

* Dorsal listening — ventral doing *

* Laugh at my word — but first obey them *

* Gather at the sled — and listen! *

Hikahi and Ssattatta circled the rest of the party once, then came to rest in front of the assembled expedition.

Among mankind's gifts to the neo-dolphin had been an expanded repertoire of facial expression. A mere five hundred years of genetic engineering could not do for the porpoise what a million years of evolution had done for man. Fins still expressed most of their feelings in sound and motion. But they were no longer frozen in what humans had taken (in some degree of truth) to be a grin of perpetual amusement. Fins were capable now of looking worried. Toshio might have chosen Hikahi's present expression as a classic example of dolphin chagrin.

"Phip-pit has disappeared," Hikahi announced.

"I heard him cry out, over to the south of me, then nothing. He was searching for Ssassia, who disappeared earlier in the same direction. We will forego mapping and metals search to go and find them. All will be issued weaponss."

There was a general sussuration of discontent. It meant the fins would have to put on the harnesses they had only just had the pleasure of removing, on leaving the ship. Still, even Keepiru recognized this was urgent business.

Toshio was briefly busy dropping harnesses into the water. They were supposed to spread naturally into a shape suitable for a dolphin to slip into easily, but inevitably one or two fins needed help fitting his harness to the small nerve amplifier socket each had just above his left eye.

Toshio finished the job quickly, with the unconscious ease of long practice. He was worried about Ssassia, a gentle fin who had always been kind and soft-spoken to him.

"Hikahi," he said as the leader swam past, "do you want me to call the ship?"

The small gray Tursiops female rose up to face Toshio. "Negative, Ladder-runner. We obey orders. Spy-sats may be high already. Set your speed sled to return on auto if we fail to survive what is in the sssoutheast."

"But no one's seen any big animals…"

"Thatt is only one possibility. I want word to get back whatever our doom… should even rescue fever strike us all."

Toshio felt cold at the mention of "rescue fever." He had heard of it, of course. It was something he had no desire at all to witness.

They set out to the southeast in skirmish formation. The fins took turns gliding along the surface, then diving to swim alongside Toshio. The ocean bottom was like an endless series of snake tracks — pitted by strange pock-holes like deep craters, darkly ominous. In the valleys Toshio could usually see bottom, a hundred meters or so below, gloomy with dark blue tendrils.

The long ridges were topped at intervals by the shining metal-mounds, like hulking castles of shimmering, spongy armor. Many were covered with thick, ivy-like growths in which Kithrupan fishes nested and bred. One metal-mound appeared to be teetering on the edge of a precipice — the cavern dug by its own tall drill-tree, ready to swallow the entire fortress when the undermining was done.

The sled's engine hummed hypnotically. Keeping track of his instruments was too simple a task to keep Toshio's mind busy. Without really wishing to, he found himself thinking. Remembering.

A simple adventure, that's what it had seemed when they had asked him to come along on the space voyage. He had already taken the jumpers' Oath, so they knew he was ready to leave his past behind. And they needed a midshipman to help with hand-eye work on the new dolphin ship.

Streaker was a small exploratory vessel of unique design. There weren't many finned, oxygen-breathing races flying ships in interstellar space. Those few used artificial gravity for convenience, and leased members of some client species to act as crafters and handmen.

But the first dolphin-crewed starship had to be different. It was designed around a principle which had guided Earthlings for two centuries: "Whenever possible, keep it simple. Avoid using the science of the Galactics when you don't understand it."

Two hundred and fifty years after contact with Galactic civilization, mankind was still struggling to catch up. The Galactic species which had been using the aeons-old Library since before the first mammals appeared on Earth — adding to that universal compendium of knowledge with glacial slowness had seemed almost god-like to the primitive Earthmen in their early, lumbering slowships. Earth had a branch Library, now, supposedly giving her access to all of the wisdom accumulated over Galactic history. But only in recent years had it proven to be much more a help than a confusing hindrance.

Streaker, with its complex arrangements of centrifugally held pools and weightless workshops, must have seemed incredibly archaic to the aliens who had looked it over just before launch. Still, to Earth's neo-dolphin communities, she was an object of great pride.

After her shakedown cruise, Streaker stopped at the small human-dolphin colony of Calafia to pick up a few of the best graduates of its tiny academy. It was to be Toshio's first, and possibly last, visit to old Earth.

"Old Earth" was still home to ninety percent of humanity, not to mention the other terrestrial sapient races. Galactic tourists still thronged in to gawk at the home of the enfants terribles who had caused such a stir in a few brief centuries. They were open in their wagering over how long Mankind would survive without the protection of a patron.

All species had patrons, of course. Nobody reached spacefaring intelligence without the intervention of another spacefaring race. Had not men done this for chimps and dolphins? All the way back to the time of the Progenitors, the mythical first race, every species that spoke and flew spaceships had been raised up by a predecessor. No species still survived from that distant era, but the civilization the Progenitors established, with its all-encompassing Library, went on.

Of the fate of the Progenitors themselves there were many legends and even violently contradicting religions.

Toshio wondered, as just about everyone had for three hundred years, what the patrons of Man might have been like. If they ever existed. Might they even be one of the species of fanatics that had ambushed the unsuspecting Streaker, and even now sought her out like hounds after a fox?

It wasn't a pleasant line of thought, considering what the Streaker had discovered.

The Terragens Council sent her out to join a scattered fleet of exploration vessels, checking the veracity of the Library. So far only a few minor gaps had been found in its thoroughness. Here a star misplaced. There a species miscatalogued. It was like finding that someone had written a list describing every grain of sand on a beach. You could never check the complete list in a thousand lifetimes of a race, but you could take a random sampling.

Streaker had been poking through a small gravitational tide pool, fifty thousand parsecs off the galactic plane, when she found the Fleet.

Toshio sighed at the unfairness of it. One hundred and fifty dolphins, seven humans, and a chimpanzee; how could we have known what we found?

Why did we have to find it?

Fifty thousand ships, each the size of a moon. That's what they found. The dolphins had been thrilled by their discovery — the biggest Derelict Fleet ever encountered, apparently incredibly ancient. Captain Creideiki had psicast to Earth for instructions.

Dammit! Why did he call Earth? Couldn't the report have waited until we'd gone home? Why let the whole eavesdropping galaxy know you'd found a Sargasso of ancient hulks in the middle of nowhere?

The Terragens Council had answered in code.

"Go into hiding. Await orders. Do not reply."