Far Horizons Read online

  “We still have patrons,” she pointed out. “There are humans living right here on Jijo.”

  “Humans, yes. But uneducated, lacking the scientific skills to continue guiding us. So our only remaining option must be—”

  He stopped, having at last picked up that rising sound from the west. Makanee recognized the unique hum of a speed sled.

  “It is Tkett,” she said. “Returning from his scouting trip. Let’s go hear what he found out.”

  Thrashing her flukes, Makanee jetted to the surface, spuming the moist, stale air from her lungs and drawing in a deep breath of sweet oxygen. Then she spun about and kicked off toward the engine noise, with Brookida following close behind.

  In their wake, the school of grazing fishoids barely rippled in its endless, sinuous dance, darting in and out of luminous shoals, feeding on whatever the good sea pressed toward them.

  The archaeologist had his own form of mental illness—wishful thinking.

  Tkett had been ordered to stay behind and help Makanee with the reverted ones, partly because his skills weren’t needed in Streaker’s continuing desperate flight across the known universe. In compensation for that bitter exile, he had grown obsessed with studying the Great Midden, that deep underwater trash heap where Jijo’s ancient occupants had dumped nearly every sapient-made object when this planet was abandoned by starfaring culture, half a million years ago.

  “I’ll have a wonderful report to submit when we get back to Earth,” he rationalized, in apparent confidence that all their troubles would pass, and eventually he would make it home to publish his results. It was a special kind of derangement, without featuring any sign of stress-atavism or reversion. Tkett still spoke Anglic perfectly. His work was flawless and his demeanor cheerful. He was pleasant, functional, and mad as a hatter.

  Makanee met the sled a kilometer west of the pod, where Tkett pulled up short in order not to disturb the patients. “Did you find any traces of Peepoe?” she asked when he cut the engine.

  Tkett was a wonderfully handsome specimen of Tursiops amicus, with speckled mottling along his sleek gray flanks. The permanent dolphin-smile presented twin rows of perfectly white, conical teeth. While still nestled on the sled’s control platform, Tkett shook his sleek gray head left and right.

  “Alas, no. I went about two hundred klicks, following those faint traces we picked up on deep-range sonar. But it grew clear that the source wasn’t Zhaki’s sled.”

  Makanee grunted disappointment. “Then what was it?” Unlike the clamorous sea of Earth, this fallow planet wasn’t supposed to have motor noises permeating its thermal-acoustic layers.

  “At first I started imagining all sorts of unlikely things, like sea monsters, or Jophur submarines,” Tkett answered. “Then the truth hit me.”

  Brookida nodded nervously, venting bubbles from his blowhole. “Yessssss?”

  “It must be a starship. An ancient, piece-of-trash wreck, barely puttering along—”

  “Of course!” Makanee thrashed her tail. “Some of the decoys didn’t make it into space.”

  Tkett murmured ruefully over how obvious it now seemed. When Streaker made its getaway attempt, abandoning Makanee and her charges on this world, the earthship fled concealed in a swarm of ancient relics that dolphin engineers had resurrected from trash heaps on the ocean floor. Though Jijo’s surface now was a fallow realm of savage tribes, the deep underwater canyons still held thousands of battered, abandoned spacecraft and other debris from when this section of Galaxy Four had been a center of civilization and commerce. Several dozen of those derelicts had been reactivated in order to confuse Streaker’s foe—a fearsome Jophur battleship—but some of the hulks must have failed to haul their bulk out of the sea when the time came. Those failures were doomed to drift aimlessly underwater until their engines gave out and they tumbled once more to the murky depths.

  As for the rest, there had been no word whether Streaker’s ploy succeeded beyond luring the awful dreadnought away toward deep space. At least Jijo seemed a friendlier place without it. For now.

  “We should have expected this,” the archaeologist continued. “When I got away from the shoreline surf noise, I thought I could detect at least three of the hulks, bumping around out there almost randomly. It seems kind of sad, when you think about it. Ancient ships, not worth salvaging when the Buyur abandoned Jijo, waiting in an icy, watery tomb for just one last chance to climb back out to space. Only these couldn’t make it. They’re stranded here.”

  “Like us,” Makanee murmured.

  Tkett seemed not to hear.

  “In fact, I’d like to go back out there and try to catch up with one of the derelicts.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Tkett’s smile was still charming and infectious…which made it seem even crazier, under these circumstances.

  “I’d like to use it as a scientific instrument,” the big neo-dolphin said.

  Makanee felt utterly confirmed in her diagnosis.

  PEEPOE

  Captivity wasn’t as bad as she had feared.

  It was worse.

  Among natural, presapient dolphins on Earth, small groups of young males would sometimes conspire to isolate a fertile female from the rest of the pod, herding her away for private copulation—especially if she was about to enter heat. By working together, they might monopolize her matings and guarantee their own reproductive success, even if she clearly preferred a local alpha-ranked male instead. That ancient behavior pattern persisted in the wild because, while native Tursiops had both traditions and a kind of feral honor, they could not quite grasp or carry out the concept of law—a code that all must live by, because the entire community has a memory transcending any individual.

  But modern, uplifted amicus dolphins did have law! And when young hoodlums occasionally let instinct prevail and tried that sort of thing back home, the word for it was rape. Punishment was harsh. As with human sexual predators, just one of the likely outcomes was permanent sterilization.

  Such penalties worked. After three centuries, some of the less desirable primal behaviors were becoming rare. Yet, uplifted neo-dolphins were still a young race. Great stress could yank old ways back to the fore, from time to time.

  And we Streakers have sure been under stress.

  Unlike some devolved crewmates, whose grip on modernity and rational thought had snapped under relentless pressure, Zhaki and Mopol suffered only partial atavism. They could still talk and run complex equipment, but they were no longer the polite, almost shy junior ratings she had met when Streaker first set out from Earth under Captain Creideiki, before the whole cosmos seemed to implode all around the dolphin crew.

  In abstract, she understood the terrible strain that had put them in this state. Perhaps, if she were offered a chance to kill Zhaki and Mopol, Peepoe might call that punishment a bit too severe.

  On the other fin, sterilization was much too good for them.

  Despite sharing the same culture, and a common ancestry as Earth mammals, dolphins and humans looked at many things differently. Peepoe felt more annoyed at being kidnapped than violated. More pissed off than traumatized. She wasn’t able to stymie their lust completely, but with various tricks—playing on their mutual jealousy and feigning illness as often as she could—Peepoe staved off unwelcome attentions for long stretches.

  But if I find out they murdered Kaa, I’ll have their entrails for lunch.

  Days passed and her impatience grew. Peepoe’s real time limit was fast approaching. My contraception implant will expire. Zhaki and his pal have fantasies about populating Jijo with their descendants, but I like this planet far too much to curse it that way.

  She vowed to make a break for it. But how?

  Sometimes she would swim to a channel between the two remote islands where her kidnappers had brought her, and drift languidly, listening. Once, Peepoe thought she made out something faintly familiar—a clicking murmur, like a distant crowd of dolphins. But it passed, and she dismisse
d it as wishful thinking. Zhaki and Mopol had driven the sled at top speed for days on end with her strapped to the back, before they halted by this strange archipelago and removed her sonar-proof blindfold. She had no idea how to find her way back to the old coastline where Makanee’s group had settled.

  When I do escape these two idiots, I may be consigning myself to a solitary existence for the rest of my days.

  Oh well, you wanted the life of an explorer. There could be worse fates than swimming all the way around this beautiful world, eating exotic fish when you’re hungry, riding strange tides and listening to rhythms no dolphin ever heard before.

  The fantasy had a poignant beauty—though ultimately, it made her lonely and sad.

  The ocean echoed with anger, engines, and strange noise.

  Of course it was all a matter of perspective. On noisy Earth, this would have seemed eerily quiet. Terran seas buzzed with a cacophony of traffic, much of it caused by her own kind as neo-dolphins gradually took over managing seventy percent of the home planet’s surface. In mining the depths, or tending fisheries, or caring for those sacredly complex simpletons called whales, more and more responsibilities fell to uplifted ’fins using boats, subs, and other equipment. Despite continuing efforts to reduce the racket, home was still a raucous place.

  In comparison, Jijo appeared as silent as a nursery. Natural sound-carrying thermal layers reported waves crashing on distant shorelines and intermittent groaning as minor quakes rattled the ocean floor. A myriad buzzes, clicks, and whistles came from Jijo’s own subsurface fauna—fishy creatures that evolved here, or were introduced by colonizing leaseholders like the Buyur, long ago. Some distant rumbles even hinted at large entities, moving slowly, languidly across the deep…perhaps pondering long, slow thoughts.

  As days stretched to weeks, Peepoe learned to distinguish Jijo’s organic rhythms…punctuated by a grating din whenever one of the boys took the sled for a joy ride, stampeding schools of fish, or careening along with the load indicator showing red. At this rate the machine wouldn’t stand up much longer, though Peepoe kept hoping one of them would break his fool neck first.

  With or without the sled, Zhaki and Mopol could track her down if she just swam away. Even when they left piles of dead fish to ferment atop some floating reeds, and got drunk on the foul carcasses, the two never let their guard down long enough to let her steal the sled. It seemed that one or the other was always sprawled across the saddle. Since dolphins only sleep one brain hemisphere at a time, it was impossible to take them completely by surprise.

  Then, after two months of captivity, she detected signs of something drawing near.

  Peepoe had been diving in deeper water for a tasty kind of local soft-shell crab when she first heard it. Her two captors were having fun a kilometer away, driving their speedster in tightening circles around a panicked school of bright silvery fishoids. But when she dived through a thermal boundary layer, separating warm water above from cool saltier liquid below—the sled’s racket abruptly diminished.

  Blessed silence was one added benefit of this culinary exploit. Peepoe had been doing a lot of diving lately.

  This time, however, the transition did more than spare her the sled’s noise for a brief time. It also brought forth a new sound. A distant rumble, channeled by the shilly stratum. With growing excitement, Peepoe recognized the murmur of an engine! Yet the rhythms struck her as unlike any she had heard on Earth or elsewhere.

  Puzzled, she kicked swiftly to the surface, filled her lungs with fresh air, and dived back down to listen again.

  This deep current offers an excellent sonic grove, she realized, focusing sound rather than diffusing it. Keeping the vibrations well confined. Even the sled’s sensors may not pick it up for quite a while.

  Unfortunately, that also meant she couldn’t tell how far away the source was.

  If I had a breather unit…if it weren’t necessary to keep surfacing for air…I could swim a great distance masked by this thermal barrier. Otherwise, it seems hopeless. They can use the sled’s monitors on long-range scan to detect me when I broach and exhale.

  Peepoe listened for a while longer, and decided.

  I think it’s getting closer…but slowly. The source must still be far away. If I made a dash now, I won’t get far before they catch me.

  And yet, she daren’t risk Mopol and Zhaki picking up the new sound. If she must wait, it meant keeping them distracted till the time was right.

  There was just one way to accomplish that.

  Peepoe grimaced. Rising toward the surface, she expressed disgust with a vulgar Trinary demi-haiku.

  * May sun roast your backs,

  * And hard sand scrape your bottoms,

  * Till you itch madly.…

  *…as if with a good case of the clap! *

  MAKANEE

  She sent a command over her neural link, ordering the tools of her harness to fold away into streamlined recesses, signaling that the inspection visit was over.

  The chief of the kiqui, a little male with purple gill-fringes surrounding a squat head, let himself drift a meter or so under the water’s surface, spreading all four webbed hands in a gesture of benediction and thanks. Then he thrashed around to lead his folk away, back toward the nearby island where they made their home. Makanee felt satisfaction as she watched the small formation of kicking amphibians, clutching their stone-tipped spears.

  Who would have thought that we dolphins, youngest registered sapient race in the Civilization of Five Galaxies, would become patrons ourselves, just a few centuries after humans started uplifting us.

  The kiqui were doing pretty well on Jijo, all considered. Soon after being released onto a coral atoll, not far offshore, they started having babies.

  Under normal conditions, some elder race would find an excuse to take the kiqui away from dolphins, fostering such a promising presapient species into one of the rich, ancient family lines that ruled oxygen-breathing civilization in the Five Galaxies. But here on Jijo things were different. They were cut off from starfaring culture, a vast bewildering society of complex rituals and obligations that made the ancient Chinese Imperial court seem like a toddler’s sandbox, by comparison. There were advantages and disadvantages to being a castaway from all that.

  On the one hand, Makanee would no longer have to endure the constant tension of running away from huge oppressive battlefleets or aliens whose grudges went beyond earthling comprehension.

  On the other hand, there would be no more performances of symphony, or opera, or bubble-dance for her to attend.

  Never again must she endure disparaging sneers from exalted patron-level beings, who considered dolphins little more than bright beasts.

  Nor would she spend another lazy Sunday in her snug apartment in cosmopolitan Melbourne-Under, with multicolored fish cruising the coral garden just outside her window while she munched salmon patties and watched an all-dolphin cast perform Twelfth Night on the telly.

  Makanee was marooned, and would likely remain so for the rest of her life, caring for two small groups of sea-based colonists, hoping they could remain hidden from trouble until a new era came. An age when both might resume the path of uplift.

  Assuming some metal nutrient supplements could be arranged, the kiqui had apparently transplanted well. Of course, they must be taught tribal taboos against overhunting any one species of local fauna, so their presence would not become a curse on this world. But the clever little amphibians already showed some understanding, expressing the concept in their own, emphatic demi-speech.

  ## Rare is precious! ##

  ## Not eat-or-hurt rare/precious things/fishes/beasts! ##

  ## Only eat/hunt many-of-a-kind! ##

  She felt a personal stake in this. Two years ago, when Streaker was about to depart poisonous Kithrup, masked inside the hulk of a crashed Thennanin warship, Makanee had taken it upon herself to beckon a passing tribe of kiqui with some of their own recorded calls, attracting the curious group into
Streaker’s main airlock just before the surrounding water boiled with exhaust from revving engines. What then seemed an act of simple pity turned into a kind of love affair, as the friendly little amphibians became favorites of the crew. Perhaps now their race might flourish in a kinder place than unhappy Kithrup. It felt good to know Streaker had accomplished at least one good thing out of its poignant, tragic mission.

  As for dolphins, how could anyone doubt their welcome in Jijo’s warm sea? Once you learned which fishoids were edible and which to avoid, life became a matter of snatching whatever you wanted to eat, then splashing and lolling about. True, she missed her holoson unit, with its booming renditions of whale chants and baroque chorales. But here she could take pleasure in listening to an ocean whose sonic purity was almost as fine as its vibrant texture.

  Almost…

  Reacting to a faint sensation, Makanee swung her sound-sensitive jaw around, casting right and left.

  There! She heard it again. A distant rumbling that might have escaped notice amid the underwater cacophony on Earth. But here it seemed to stand out from the normal swish of current and tide.

  Her patients—the several dozen dolphins whose stress-atavism had reduced them to infantile innocence—called such infrequent noises boojums. Or else they used a worried upward trill in Primal Delphin—one that stood for strange monsters of the deep. Sometimes the far-off grumbles did seem to hint at some huge, living entity, rumbling with basso-profundo pride, complacently assured that it owned the entire vast sea. Or else it might be just frustrated engine noise from some remnant derelict machine, wandering aimlessly in the ocean’s immensity.

  Leaving the kiqui atoll behind, Makanee swam back toward the underwater dome where she and Brookida, plus a few still-sapient nurses, maintained a small base to keep watch over their charges. It would be good to get out of the weather for a while. Last night she had roughed it, keeping an eye on her patients during a rain squall. An unpleasant, wearying experience.