David Brin: Startide Rising

But he couldn't escape a vague unease over sinking… as if it would harm him any to sink in oxywater… as if millions of other dolphins hadn't slept this way all their lives.

Disconcerting was his spacer's habit of looking up. The ceiling bulkhead was inches away from the tip of his dorsal fin. Even when he closed his eyes, sonar told him of the nearness of enclosure. He could no more sleep without sending out echolocation clicks than a chimp could nap without scratching himself.

Creideiki snorted. Beach himself if he'd let a shipboard requirement give him insomnia! He blew emphatically and began to count sonar clicks. He started with a tenor rhythm, then slowly built a fugue as he added deeper elements to the sleep-song.

Echoes spread from his brow and diffracted about the small chamber. The notes drifted over one another, overlapping softly in faint whines and basso growls. They created a sonic structure, a template of otherness. The right combinations, he knew, would make the walls themselves seem to disappear.

Deliberately, he peeled away the duty-rigor of Keneenk — welcoming a small, trusted portion of the Whale Dream.

The desk, the cabinets, the walls, were covered under false sonic shadows. His chant began to open on its own accord a rich and very physical poetry of crafted reflections.

Floating things seemed to drift past, tiny tail-flicks of schools of dream creatures. The echoes opened up space around him, as if the waters went on forever.

Soon he felt a presence nearby, congealing gradually out of reflections of sound.

She formed slowly next to him as his engineer's consciousness let go… the shadow of a goddess. Then Nukapai floated beside him… a ghost of ripples, ribbed by motes of sound. The black sleekness of her body passed back into the darkness, unhindered by a bulkhead that seemed no longer there.

Vision faded. The waters darkened all around Creideiki, and Nukapai became more than just a shadow, a passive recipient of his song. Her needle teeth shone, and she sang his own sounds back to him.

A type of bliss settled over him as his heartbeat slowed. Creideiki slept next to the gentle dream-goddess. She chided him only teasingly for being an engineer, and for dreaming her in the rigid, focused verse of Trinary rather than the chaotic Primal of his ancestors.

She welcomed him to the Threshold Sea, where Trinary sufficed, where he felt only faintly the raging of the Whale Dream and the ancient gods who dwelt there. It was as much of that ocean as an engineer's mind could accept.

How rigid the Trinary verse sometimes seemed! The patterns of overlapping tones and symbols were almost human precise… almost human-narrow.

He had been brought up to think those terms compliments. Parts of his own brain had been gene-designed along human lines. But now and then chaotic sound-images slipped in, teasing him with a hint of ancient singing.

Nukapai clicked sympathetically. She smiled…

No! She did no such land-ape thing! Of cetaceans, only the neo-dolphin "smiled" with their mouths.

Nukapai did something else. She stroked against his side, gentlest of goddesses, and told him,

The tension of several weeks at last broke, and he slept. Creideiki's breath gathered in glistening condensation on the ceiling bulkhead. The breeze from a nearby air duct brushed the droplets, which shuddered, then fell on the water like gentle rain.

When the image of Ignacio Metz formed a meter to his right, Creideiki was slow to become aware of it.

"Captain…" the image said. "I'm calling from the bridge. I am afraid the Galactics have found us here sooner than we expected…"

Creideiki ignored the little voice that tried to call him back to deeds and battles. He lingered in a waving forest of kelp fronds, listening to long night sounds. Finally, it was Nukapai herself who nudged him from his dream. Fading beside him, she gently reminded,

Nukapai alone could speak Primal to Creideiki with impunity. He could no more ignore the dream-goddess than his own conscience. One eye at last focused on the hologram of the insistent human, and the words penetrated.

"Thank you, Doctor Metz," he sighed. "Tell Takkata-Jim I'll be right-t there. And please page Tom Orley. I'd like to see him on the bridge. Creideiki out."

He inhaled deeply for a few moments, letting the room come back into shape around him. Then he twisted and dove to retrieve his harness.

A tall, dark-haired man swung one-handed from the leg of a bed, a bed that was bolted to the floor in an upside-down room. The floor slanted over his head. His left foot rested precariously on the bottom of a drawer pulled from one of the inverted wall cabinets.

At the sudden yellow flash of the alert light, Tom Orley whirled and grabbed at his holster with his free hand. His needler was half-drawn before he recognized the source of the disturbance. He cursed slowly and re-holstered the weapon. Now what was the emergency? He could think of a dozen possibilities, offhand, and here he was, hanging by one arm in the most awkward part of the ship!

"I initiate contact, Thomas Orley."

The voice seemed to come from above his right ear. Tom changed his grip on the bed leg to turn around. An abstract three-dimensional pattern swirled a meter away from his face, like multicolored motes caught in a dust devil.

"I suppose you would like to know of the cause of the alarm. Is this correct?"

"You're damned right I do!" he snapped. "Are we under attack?"

"No." The colored images shifted. "This ship is not yet assailed, but Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim has announced an alert. At least five intruder fleets are now in the neighborhood of Kithrup. These squadrons appear now to be in combat not far from the planet."

Orley sighed. "So much for quick repairs and a getaway." He hadn't thought it likely that their hunters would let them escape again. The damaged Streaker had left a noisy trail behind her when she slipped away from the confusion of the ambush at Morgran.

Tom had been helping the crew in the engine room repair Streaker's stasis generator. They had just finished the part calling for detailed hand-eye work, and the moment had come to steal away to the deserted section of the dry-wheel where the Niss computer had been hidden.

The dry-wheel was a band of workrooms and cabins that spun freely when the ship was in space, providing pseudogravity for the humans aboard. Now it was still. This section of upside-down corridors and cabins was abandoned in the inconvenient gravity of the planet.

The privacy suited Tom, though the topsy-turvy arrangement was irksome.

"You weren't to announce yourself unless I switched you on manually," he said. "You were to wait for my thumbprint and voice i.d. before letting on you were anything but a standard comm."